Mother / Daughter Trip to Machupicchu

In Sept 2005 my daughter Alice and I took a long overdue mother-daughter trip, to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Inkas. My daughter had reached the age where what I said no longer struck her as the most profound wisdom in the world. In fact, she was bound to roll her eyes so many times per day at my suddenly absurd viewpoints on life, that I wondered why they didn’t just drop out of her head and roll away.

I probably even rationalized that my parenting was special. What daughter would feel the need to rebel against a mother who was as open, friendly, warm, accepting, and all- around wonderful as I was? Hadn’t I read every self-help book on open-minded parenting that existed? Hadn’t I attended obligatory parenting classes where the leader smiled at us the whole time, as if he were constantly amused at our inconsistencies and foibles as parents? So, by rights, I should have expected that my children would not feel the need to rebel against my ever-so –enlightened style of parenting.

Boy, did I ever set myself up.

My daughter had been told over the course of her entire young life that we looked exactly alike. We even won one of those mother daughter look-alike contests we happened to come across on our family travels. If I recall it was at some county fair in Colorado, and the dog vomited all over the back seat of the car after eating too much popcorn, which my kids had surreptitiously been stuffing into his drooling face. But I digress.

So my daughter wouldn’t talk to me the way she used to. Our natural flow together was now as stilted as a circus act. And to make matters worse, she could not have a conversation without spewing sarcasm or breaking into unintelligible Spanish jergas that I knew belittled me, if I only could understand what was actually being said. For example I would hear something about the viejos, (old ones), and know my children were talking about us parents, but have no idea what was being said, except that it couldn’t be too complimentary, especially when it was paired with the word calabaza in the same sentence. (this much I did know: calabaza means pumpkin, and, in Peru, it doubles as an insult, meaning something like “pumpkinhead,” someone whose brains have been scooped away  like the innards of jack o’lanterns on Halloween).

Did I forget to mention that we were living in Peru? We had moved to Cusco several years before, and Machu Picchu was a three-hour train ride from there. So when I was at my wit’s end with Alice’s distance and sarcastic attitude, I suggested that the two of us take a trip to Machu Picchu together.

We boarded the train early in the morning on a Friday. The spectacular views of the Andean countryside outside of our train window were intriguing. I tapped Alice on the shoulder to point out a young boy herding sheep on the hillside of a thatched-roof village. Once I convinced her to stop playing with her I-pod and take a look, I could see she was impressed. There were country folk at work tilling the fields, lambs bleating beside their mothers, and a mist that caressed the hills and inspired a curious sorrow inside me that was like a longing for something I could not name.

My daughter and I arrived in the village of Aguas Calientes, at the foot of Machu Picchu.
We checked into our hotel and went for a soak in the hot springs five minutes walk from town. After pizza at a local restaurant, we tucked in for the night. In the morning we took the bus up to the ruins, a fifteen minute ride that ascends a narrow road. Not for the faint of heart, as looking down below at the Urubamba River can make one giddy.

We entered the citadel, and a profound sense of mystery overcame us, something hard to describe unless you have experienced it. There, laid out before us, was the ancient stone village, its structures seemingly a part of the surrounding woodland. We climbed around the original Inca steps and stooped to crawl into some of the stone houses. A people of long ago, a people we could barely imagine, had made their home here, in the midst of the cloud forest. They had lived, breathed, ate and slept here, worshipped their gods, danced and dreamed in ways that we knew nothing of, yet which had profound meaning for them.

My daughter and I climbed up on a ledge and sat down on the escarpment. We looked across at the Huayna Picchu (Young Man) mountain. Machu Picchu mountain, across from it, is the Old Man. They towered over us, seeming to speak with their solidity and to be alive in ways we didn’t understand, yet could sense. Silence fell. And for a moment in time, a young woman, and a not-yet-vieja woman paused for a brief moment in our struggle to let each other grow.

Laurel Thompson is a writer, mother and the international marketing manager for Kuoda Tours, a Cusco-based travel company that brings families on educational adventures to Peru.