By Dr. Daniela Ferdico
I have wanted to go to Machu Picchu for as long as I can remember wanting anything.
Not in the vague bucket-list way that people want things they’ve seen on calendars and
screensavers. Something more specific than that…like a pull toward a particular kind of
place that I’ve felt my entire life and never quite been able to explain. Ancient sites built
into landscape rather than placed upon it. Places where human hands shaped stone
and the stone shaped back. The hidden cliff dwellings of the American Southwest.
Petra, carved into rose-red rock in the Jordanian desert. Places that feel less like
monuments and more like the land itself decided to remember something.
The Roman Colosseum has never moved me. I’ve stood inside it and felt almost
nothing. Impressed, certainly, by scale and history, but unmoved at the level where it
matters. I’ve thought about why. I think it’s because the Colosseum sits on top of the
earth, separate from it, a human assertion imposed on landscape. Machu Picchu grows
out of the mountain. The Inca didn’t build there despite the terrain, they built because of
it, with it, in conversation with it. The site and the landscape are the same thing.
I had known this intellectually for years before I went. What I didn’t know was what it
would feel like to be there.
I went with someone. We had, by that point, already parted ways in every way that
mattered; still present to each other logistically, already gone to each other emotionally.
I was, in all the ways that count, alone. That turned out to be exactly right.
The moments that found me at Machu Picchu were not moments anyone could have
shared easily. They were too interior, too quiet, too much mine.
Once at Machu Pichu, among the fog and the one magnificent lone tree, I had a urge to
put my hand on one of the stones. I don’t know why I did it. It wasn’t a conscious
decision but more an instinct, the way you reach out to touch something when words
fail. The stone was warm from the sun, slightly rough under my palm, fitted so precisely
against the stones beside it that the join was almost invisible. The Inca built without
mortar. Every stone held by the weight and shape of the stones around it, each one part
of a system so carefully considered that five centuries of earthquakes have not shaken
it loose.
Standing there with my hand on that wall, I felt something I can only describe as an
overcrowding of time. As though the families who had lived inside these walls — who
had cooked and argued and loved and buried their dead here, who had watched this
same mountain change color at dusk, who had listened to this same wind moving
through the grass; were somehow still present. Not as ghosts, but as weight. As
accumulated human presence embedded in stone, the way trauma embeds itself in the
body, the way certain places simply hold what has happened to them.
I stood there for a long time, allowing time to pass.
The next morning I climbed Huayna Picchu.
If you haven’t been, Huayna Picchu is the dramatic peak that rises behind Machu
Picchu in every photograph you’ve ever seen of the site. Most people don’t climb it. The
ascent is steep and narrow and occasionally terrifying, ancient stone steps worn smooth
by centuries of feet, the drop on either side significant enough to require genuine
concentration. Permits are limited and the reward is not guaranteed.
Bolstered by my recent “overcome your fear moment” of climbing Angel’s landing in
Zion National park, I climbed anyway.
Near the top, the fog moved in the way Andean fog moves: completely and without
warning, the whole world reduced to white. I couldn’t see more than a few feet in any
direction. I sat on the stone and waited, breathing hard from the altitude, not sure
whether the summit would reveal anything at all.
And then it cleared.
Not gradually, but at all at once, the fog simply lifted, the way a held breath releases,
and there below me was Machu Picchu. The whole site, laid out in miniature, impossibly
perfect, the agricultural terraces stepping down the mountainside in geometry so
precise it looked designed by someone who could see from above. Which, I realized, is
exactly what they must have done. The Inca built Machu Picchu as it looks from Huayna
Picchu. They understood the view from up here and they built for it.
I was looking down at something that had been designed to be looked down upon from
exactly where I was standing.
The vertigo of that, both spatial and temporal at once, is not something I have words for
even now. I thought of every Inca who had made this same climb, looked down at this
same sight, felt this same impossible combination of smallness and belonging. I was not
the first person to stand here and feel undone by it. I was part of a line stretching back five hundred years.
That is what certain places do. Not all places. Not the Colosseum, not the places that sit
on top of the earth and declare themselves. The places that grow out of the landscape,
that are made of it and shaped by it, these places have a particular capacity to dissolve
the membrane between now and then, between you and the long human story you are
briefly, improbably part of.
I think about this when I design travel for other people. Not everyone is moved by
ancient stone. Not everyone feels the pull of places built into landscape rather than
upon it. But everyone has their version of this, the category of experience that reaches
them at the level where it matters, below the rational mind, in the part of the self that
knows things before it can say them.
Finding that category for each person is the most important thing I do. The destination is
almost secondary. What matters is the match between who you are and what a place
asks of you.
Machu Picchu asked me to listen. To put my hand on a wall and feel the weight of
everything that had happened there. To climb until the fog cleared and the whole
impossible thing was revealed. I had been waiting to hear that for as long as I could remember.
Dr. Daniela Ferdico is a neuropsychologist and founder of Evocative Travel, a luxury travel practice that designs journeys around the neuroscience of who you are. Every itinerary begins with a conversation.
