Everyone flocks to the Lost City (and with good reason), but as B&R trip designer Veronika Macas explains, this country is so much more than Machu Picchu. Find out why this is the perfect place to ditch the guidebook and discover the depths of a country that many visit, but few truly see.
Compared to magazine writers, filmmakers have it easy. (Yes, I realize how biased that probably sounds. But let me explain.)
In order to properly capture a region’s essence, writers have to suffer. We slave away in front of our keyboards, desperately clamouring for the right combination of words to describe not just what a place looks like, but how it feels—its vibe, its milieu, its ineffable je ne sais quoi. (To wit: I scoured the thesaurus for 20 minutes before settling on “milieu.”)
Filmmakers, on the other hand, know no such struggles. In order to inform the audience they’re in Paris, Rome, New York or Sydney, all they need to do is drop in a quick establishing shot of the Eiffel Tower, Coliseum, Statue of Liberty or Opera House, respectively. Landmarks of this calibre are so famously unmistakable, they come to not just identify a place, but emblematize it.
For more than a century now, Machu Picchu has been just such an icon. Since Hiram Bingham’s first fateful trip to the Incan site in 1911 – and especially after the publishing of his 1948 memoir The Lost City of the Inca, which propelled his journey into the popular conscience – Machu Picchu has been Peru’s most trafficked attraction.