Machu Pictures

Hello again. Is anyone reading the blog at all?

Here is a picture from the next country I visited in South America, Peru. Machu Picchu is very famous of course, and I took rather a lot of photos, as you can imagine, but this is one of the best and is slightly different to the classic view you often see of the site.

Machu Picchu was built as a kind of country palace retreat for one of the Inca, the rulers of a great empire that ruled much of the western part of South America up to the 16th century. It is built high on a mountain with near vertical sides and was constructed with stone from the top of the mountain itself. The road leading up to the site is very winding and steep.

When I got there it was almost impossible to see anything, as the cloud was very low and it was raining. After a couple of hours though it began to clear and I spent another couple of hours just sitting round and looking at the excellent view.

It is of course a very busy place, with over 1,000 tourists a day (about the same number of people as would have lived there). The city was abandoned just before the Spanish conquest (the Spanish never found it) and was overgrown until archaeologists cleared and began to restore it in 1911.