On arrival at Machu Picchu, we are told that this is a sanctuary, a sacred space. We are also provided with a list of prohibited objects and activities: no tripods or selfie sticks; no musical instruments or high heels; no climbing or jumping; no singing or whistling; no dressing up or running. And upon entering, our movement is carefully regulated: we have to follow a pre-established circuit (which we have chosen in advance), without deviation or turning back. Our guides usher us towards the “best” site for a photograph–though we have not chosen the circuit that includes the “classic” postcard shot, we are taken as close as possible, waiting our turn as the group before us get their pictures in. If this is a sanctuary, we are sharing it with the other four thousand tourists who visit each day.

It is hard not to feel a little bit cynical at Machu Picchu: pushed and prodded at all sides, if visitors feel a sense of their own insignificance it is as much because they recognize that they are simply a small part of a constant tourist stream as because they are confronted with a site of sublime awe and wonder. Or rather, perhaps here the tourist sublime makes itself known in the fleets of buses careening up and down the winding road to the citadel, in the lines snaking through the ruins themselves, and in the brutal (and uncharacteristically Peruvian) efficiency of the whole operation. Moreover, there is a sense that the whole of Peru funnels tourists to this end–Lima to Cusco to the Sacred Valley and then the train to Aguas Calientes–only to dump them out the other side, wondering “What next?” Answer: Puno, or perhaps the Colca Canyon; tourism never really stops. But still, augmented by the fact that there is essentially only one way in or out of Machu Picchu, one gets the feeling that this is the end of the line, the culmination of something. But what?

In The Heights of Macchu Picchu, Pablo Neruda claims to have experienced some kind of epiphany here: the realization that behind or beneath the spectacular stonework of the Inca ruins is the back-breaking labour of those who built it, who stand in for all those exploited over the ages up and down the continent; “Stone within stone, and man, where was he? / Air within air, and man, where was he? / Time within time, and man, where was he? [. . .] Let me have back the slave you buried here! / Wrench from these lands the stale bread / of the poor, prove me the tatters / on the serf, point out his window. / Tell me how he slept when alive,” (14). In The Motorcycle Diaries, Che Guevara presents a similar reflection, inflected through a sense of Indigeneity:

“Here we found the pure expression of the most powerful indigenous race in the Americas–untouched by a conquering civilization and full of immensely evocative treasures between its walls. The walls themselves have died from the tedium of having no life between them. The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins for the sake of it; North American tourists, constrained by their practical world view, are able to place those members of the disintegrating tribes they may have seen in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance separating them, since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences.” (111)

Claiming special access to the meaning of the site thanks to his “semi-indigenous spirit,” Guevara inscribes upon it a double resistance to colonialism: Machu Picchu as fortification, untouched armed redoubt against the Spanish; and now its ruins resist also the North American gaze today, providing a lesson that only Latin Americans can read.

I wonder if such epiphanies are available in Machu Picchu today. It’s certainly not possible for visitors to “wander its ruins for the sake of it” as they could in Guevara’s time (and indeed, when I first visited, twenty-five years or so ago). I wonder if our guide had a better idea, when he constantly (and perhaps surprisingly) insisted that Machu Picchu was not such a big deal: the stonework is finer in Cusco, he kept on telling us; there are grander and more significant ruins elsewhere. Maybe these days, Machu Picchu is mostly distraction. Anything it once said, whether to locals or to visitors from South or North America alike, is now irreversibly drowned out or overwhelmed by the tourist sublime. It is the end of the line, but also a dead end. It’s time to look elsewhere.