Grand Finale
As the grand finale of our year-long journey, we could hardly have done better than a visit to Machu Picchu. What can I possibly say about this spectacular place without repeating what thousands of other visitors have already said? Beautiful, fascinating, an architectural wonder, blah, blah, blah. I’m not irreverant, but I can’t offer anything original.
However, I thought the resident llamas were a nice touch. Apparently, they were brought to site years ago by a production company that was filming an historical documentary and, when filming was over, they just left them there. They’ve been hanging around mowing the lawns ever since. Just in case one tires of photographically documenting every carved stone in the city, one can focus on these living local icons.
When we started this trip, we thought it would be interesting to have a theme. One of the suggestions was to make it a tour of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. How clever and cultured we would be! However, these are way more numerous than I thought (830 properties) and we seemed to follow that theme without even trying. Towards the end, it was like, “What, this is another World Heritage Site?” I don’t know what the criteria are for earning this designation but its seems that all you have to be is, a) older than 100 years and, b) on a tourist trail.
It turns out that it would’ve been more interesting to have adopted the theme of Seven Wonders, Old and New. Of course, we’d only have been able to visit the supposed locations of six of the Ancient Seven, but the ones that could be considered new would have been reasonably accessible. Indeed, it seems somewhat poignant that Machu Picchu was our final destination as it is in the running for the new “official” list of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. Thus, it prompted the question of how many other Wonders have we visited in the past year; of the twenty contenders, we have explored eight: the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, Hagia Sophia, and the Kremlin & St.Basil’s Cathedral. Only twelve more to go! Our path seems determined.