Allin Pacha - A good place to be now; a good time to be here

Pacha means place; and it means time. You can't express time without expressing place, and the other way around. If you say "here," you are saying "now." The Inkas were a naturally Einsteinian people.

Simapukiu andenes over the Urubamba river

This is a good time to be here. The ruins aren't ruined yet, the population, both local and touristic, is manageable, and there are many untouched curves and corners to explore.

Stone roof gable of a two-room house that turned up on a trail in my little settlement - thick walls, imposing presence, unanticipated

Machu Picchu is a mess; when I saw it in 2000 you could carry your own pack up the Inca Trail and explore the place to your heart's content from dawn to dark. Now you must by law contract bearers to carry your gear and guides to take you through the ruins, and the guides must follow a specific itinerary and timeline - keep moving, don't dawdle, there are people stacked up behind you. This year June saw around three hundred thousand visitors to Mack Pick. And even fourteen years ago there were few sections of the site that hadn't been airbrushed by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura. I saw pref-fabricated stone gables sitting inside buildings waiting to be glued on top. There is at least one significant structure I suspect they made up out of their inflamed imaginations; I saw Bingham's original photographs and drawings and nothing stood there but traces of foundation.

Original andenes on the town side of the river - walking these I ran into two surprise Inka structures

Here, though, the INC has left a lot of the toured ruins still untouched - I am still trying to learn how to distinguish, but some places are obvious. They cannot yet begin to duplicate the serious imperial stonework. But someday they will.

Between the andenes and the river someone is constructing something along the railroad - now I know where those trucks that are extracting stone from the foot of Apu Pinkuylluna are going with it

In their defense, they are trying to keep the old buildings from falling apart. When they tackle a wall that is in danger of collapse, they number the stones in white, diagram and probably photograph the original, then take the stones down section by section and put them back up in a matrix of argillaceous mud mixed with grass fibers and maybe sometimes animal hairs, as did the Inkas; that clay mud will harden to be waterproof and last for centuries. The modern Peruvians are trying to restore with as much authenticity as they can. Give them that. But when they are finished what you are looking at isn't Inka; it is like Inka.

The Inca Bridge, modern engineering on the massive old Inca pylons, leads to trail to the Simapukiu andenes and the Katchiqhata quarries

I love to gaze at, walk beside, feel, the real stuff; to picture the workers putting one stone on another six hundred years ago. So see the original insect-pocked mud mortar. And I can, it is all over Ollantaytambo. In the last week I have stumbled on three small ruins unexpectedly, old stone houses that don't show up in any published scholarly work (I can't speak to, like, doctoral dissertations), on any tour, on Flickr - beautiful sturdy structures still standing as they did when they were abandoned. 

 View into the hills from the onset of the Simapukiu andenes

Today I walked alongside the andenes (terraces, pata-pata) of Simapukiu on the other side of the Urubamba river - tier after tier of great beetling civil engineering, dark, crumbling, hulking, full of the old Inka voices, you could almost hear them groaning...still farmed, untouched. 

The ramp from the back of Temple Hill to the quarries - often Inka construction can be brooding, overbearing; even without political intent

And you can go up into the tourist ruins - Temple Hill - all by yourself, you don't need a handler with you. You can lie to yourself, you don't need a guide to tell you there are images of llamas and pumas imbedded in the Six Monoliths (there aren't) or that they are made of granite (they're not). You can wander where thou wilt, lonely as a cloud, and as long as you stay inside the strings for your own protection (or the site's) no one will bother you. S70 ($24.40) for two days.

In a narrow neck between the terraces and the river is a small fort controlling access to the bridges, that I noticed for the first time a couple days ago. These stone stairs approach

Soon that will change. But Ollanta, as the locals call this town, isn't as concentrated as Mac, so there will be savory little surprises in the periphery for maybe a couple decades. But the Peruvian economy has been picking up for a while, and there is a lot building going on. It has been hard for an outsider to find a place to rent here for years, and now the landowners are accommodating for that by putting up apartments; I can see the roofs of two new complexes from here, and my current land-people are about to open eight new units just off the plaza. At least six are spoken for.

Try to sneak an army through this pass. One of the few defeats the Conquistadors suffered was their assault on Tambo

So I'm glad to be here now. And it is a good time to visit. The surround is beautiful and the people are good. Greed nibbles at the edges but the center is still soft and chewy.

That chance-enounter house in the country; small, but too well-constructed to be a farmer's cottage; maybe a chunkacamayoc lived here, responsible for ten households, or Pachakcamayoc, for a hundred

And when this place goes, so will go the best antiquities in South America, the Living Inka City. And we'll just have to light out for the territories.