Machu Picch Uncovered (Archeology)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machu_Picchu

Machu Picchu

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Huayna Picchu towers above the ruins of Machu Picchu
State Party	Peru
Type	Mixed
Criteria	i, iii, vii, ix
Reference	274
Region**	Latin America and The Caribbean
Inscription history
Inscription	1983  (Seventh Session)
* Name as inscribed on World Heritage List. ** Region as classified by UNESCO.

Machu Picchu (Quechua: Machu Pikchu, “Old Peak”; pronounced ['mɑ.tʃu 'pik.tʃu]) is a pre-Columbian Inca site located 2,430 metres (8,000 ft) above sea level^[1]. It is situated on a mountain ridge above the Urubamba Valley in Peru, which is 80 kilometres (50 mi) northwest of Cuzco and through which the Urubamba River flows. The river is a partially navigable headwater of the Amazon River. Often referred to as “The Lost City of the Incas”, Machu Picchu is one of the most familiar symbols of the Inca Empire.

The Incas started building it around 1430 AD but was abandoned as an official site for the Inca rulers a hundred years later, at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. Although known locally, it was said^[who?] to have been forgotten for centuries when the site was brought to worldwide attention in 1911 by Hiram Bingham, an American historian. Since then, Machu Picchu has become an important tourist attraction. It has recently come to light that the site may have been discovered and plundered several years previously, in 1867 by a German businessman, Augusto Berns.^[2] In fact, there is substantial evidence that a British missionary, Thomas Payne, and a German engineer, J. M. von Hassel, arrived earlier than Hiram, and maps found by historians show references to Machu Picchu as early as 1874.^[3]

Machu Picchu was declared a Peruvian Historical Sanctuary in 1981 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983. Since it was not plundered by the Spanish when they conquered the Incas, it is especially important as a cultural site and is considered a sacred place.

Machu Picchu was built in the classical Inca style, with polished dry-stone walls. Its primary buildings are the Intihuatana, the Temple of the Sun, and the Room of the Three Windows. These are located in what is known by archaeologists as the Sacred District of Machu Picchu. In September 2007, Peru and Yale University reached an agreement regarding the return of artifacts which Hiram Bingham had removed from Machu Picchu in the early twentieth century.

Contents [hide] 1 History 2 Location 3 Architecture 4 Intihuatana stone 5 Concerns over tourism 6 Controversy with Yale University 7 In media 8 See also 9 Notes 10 References 11 Twin towns 12 External links

[edit] History

Machu Picchu was constructed around 1462, at the height of the Inca Empire. It was abandoned less than 100 years later. It is likely that most of its inhabitants were wiped out by smallpox before the Spanish conquistadores arrived in the area, and there is no record of their having known of the remote city. Hiram Bingham, the credited discoverer of the site, along with several others, originally hypothesized that the citadel was the traditional birthplace of the Inca of the “Virgins of the Suns”.^[4]

Another theory maintains that Machu Picchu was an Inca “llacta”, a settlement built to control the economy of these conquered regions. Yet another asserts that it may have been built as a prison for a select few who had committed heinous crimes against Inca society. Research conducted by scholars, such as John Rowe and Richard Burger, has convinced most archaeologists that rather than a defensive retreat, Machu Picchu was an estate of the Inca emperor, Pachacuti. In addition, Johan Reinhard presented evidence that the site was selected because of its position relative to sacred landscape features—such as its mountains, which are purported to be in alignment with key astronomical events that would have been important to the Incas.

Although the citadel is located only about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Cusco, the Inca capital, it was never found by the Spanish and consequently not plundered and destroyed, as was the case with many other Inca sites. Over the centuries, the surrounding jungle grew over much of the site, and few knew of its existence. On July 24, 1911, Machu Picchu was brought to the attention of scholars by Hiram Bingham, an American historian employed as a lecturer at Yale University. Bingham was led up to Machu Picchu by a local 11 year old Quechua boy named Pablito Alvarez.^[5] Bingham undertook archaeological studies and completed a survey of the area. Bingham coined the name “The Lost City of the Incas”, which was the title of his first book.

Bingham had been searching for the city of Vilcapampa, the last Inca refuge and spot of resistance during the Spanish conquest of Peru. In 1911, after years of previous trips and explorations around the zone, he was led to the citadel by Quechuans. These people were living in Machu Picchu, in the original Inca infrastructure. Although most of the original inhabitants had died within a century of the city’s construction, a small number of families survived so by the time the site was ‘discovered’ in 1911, people still were living on the site, and many mummies—mostly of women—were discovered as well. Bingham made several more trips and conducted excavations on the site through 1915, carrying off artifacts. He wrote a number of books and articles about the discovery of Machu Picchu in his lifetime.

Simone Waisbard, a long-time researcher of Cusco, claims that Enrique Palma, Gabino Sánchez, and Agustín Lizárraga left their names engraved on one of the rocks at Machu Picchu on July 14, 1901. This would mean that they ‘discovered’ it long before Bingham did in 1911. Likewise, in 1904, an engineer named Franklin supposedly spotted the ruins from a distant mountain. He told Thomas Payne, an English Christian missionary living in the region, about the site, Payne’s family members claim. They also report that in 1906, Payne and another fellow missionary named Stuart E McNairn (1867–1956) climbed up to the ruins.

The site received significant publicity after the National Geographic Society devoted their entire April 1913 issue to Machu Picchu.

An area of 325.92 square kilometers surrounding Machu Picchu was declared a “Historical Sanctuary” of Peru in 1981. In addition to the ruins, this sanctuary area includes a large portion of adjoining region, rich with flora and fauna.

Machu Picchu was designated as a World Heritage Site in 1983 when it was described as “an absolute masterpiece of architecture and a unique testimony to the Inca civilization”.^[6]

On July 7, 2007, Machu Picchu was voted as one of New Open World Corporation’s New Seven Wonders of the World. The World Monuments Fund placed Machu Picchu on its 2008 Watch List of the 100 Most Endangered Sites in the world because of environmental degradation resulting from the impact of tourism, uncontrolled development in the nearby town of Aguas Calientes that included a poorly sited tram to ease visitor access, and the construction of a bridge across the Vilcanota River that is likely to bring even more tourists to the site in defiance of a court order and government protests against it.

[edit] Location

Machu Picchu is 80 kilometers northwest of Cusco, on the crest of the mountain Machu Picchu, located about 2,350 meters (7,710 feet) above sea level. It is one of the most important archaeological sites in South America and the most visited tourist attraction in Peru.

It is above Urubamba Valley. From atop the cliff of Machu Picchu, there is a vertical rock face of 600 meters rising from the Urubamba River at the foot of the cliff. The location of the city was a military secret, and its deep precipices and mountains provide excellent natural defenses. The Inca Bridge, an Inca rope bridge, across the Urubamba River in the Pongo de Mainique, provided a secret entrance for the Inca army. Another Inca bridge to the west of Machu Picchu, the tree-trunk bridge, at a location where a gap occurs in the cliff that measures 6 metres (20 ft), could be bridged by two tree trunks. If the trees were removed, it would leave a 570 metres (1,900 ft) fall to the base of the cliffs, also discouraging invaders.

The city sits in a saddle between two mountains, with a commanding view down two valleys and a nearly impassable mountain at its back. It has a water supply from springs that cannot be blocked easily, and enough land to grow food for about four times as many people as ever lived there. The hillsides leading to it have been terraced, not only to provide more farmland to grow crops, but to steepen the slopes which invaders would have to ascend. There are two high-altitude routes from Machu Picchu across the mountains back to Cusco, one through the sun gate, and the other across the Inca bridge. Both easily could be blocked if invaders should approach along them. Regardless of its original purpose, it is strategically located and readily defended.

[edit] Architecture

The central buildings of Machu Picchu use the classical Inca architectural style of polished dry-stone walls of regular shape. The Incas were masters of this technique, called ashlar, in which blocks of stone are cut to fit together tightly without mortar. The Incas were among the best stone masons the world has seen, and many junctions in the central city are so perfect that it is said not even a blade of grass fits between the stones.

Some Inca buildings were constructed using mortar, but by Inca standards this was quick, shoddy construction, and was not used in the building of important structures. Peru is a highly seismic land, and mortar-free construction was more earthquake-resistant than using mortar. The stones of the dry-stone walls built by the Incas can move slightly and resettle without the walls collapsing.

Inca walls show numerous design details that also help protect them from collapsing in an earthquake. Doors and windows are trapezoidal and tilt inward from bottom to top; corners usually are rounded; inside corners often incline slightly into the rooms; and “L”-shaped blocks often were used to tie outside corners of the structure together. These walls do not rise straight from bottom to top but are offset slightly from row to row.

The Incas never used the wheel in any practical manner. Its use in toys demonstrates that the principle was well-known to them, although it was not applied in their engineering. The lack of strong draft animals as well as terrain and dense vegetation issues may have rendered it impractical. How they moved and placed enormous blocks of stones remains a mystery, although the general belief is that they used hundreds of men to push the stones up inclined planes. A few of the stones still have knobs on them that could have been used to lever them into position; it is believed that after the stones were placed, the Incas would have sanded the knobs away, but a few were overlooked.

The space is composed of 140 structures or features, including temples, sanctuaries, parks, and residences that include houses with thatched roofs. There are more than one hundred flights of stone steps–often completely carved from a single block of granite–and a great number of water fountains that are interconnected by channels and water-drains perforated in the rock that were designed for the original irrigation system. Evidence has been found to suggest that the irrigation system was used to carry water from a holy spring to each of the houses in turn.
According to archaeologists, the urban sector of Machu Picchu was divided into three great districts: the Sacred District, the Popular District to the south, and the District of the Priests and the Nobility.

Located in the first zone are the primary archaeological treasures: the Intihuatana, the Temple of the Sun and the Room of the Three Windows. These were dedicated to Inti, their sun god and greatest deity. The Popular District, or Residential District, is the place where the lower class people lived. It includes storage buildings and simple houses. In the royalty area, a sector that existed for the nobility, includes a group of houses located in rows over a slope, the residence of the Amautas (wise persons) was characterized by its reddish walls, and the zone of the Ñustas (princesses) had trapezoid-shaped rooms. The Monumental Mausoleum is a carved statue with a vaulted interior and carved drawings. It was used for rites or sacrifices.

As part of their road system, the Inca built a road to the Machu Picchu region. Today, tens of thousands of tourists walk the Inca Trail to visit Machu Picchu each year, acclimatising at Cusco before starting on a two- to four-day journey on foot from the Urubamba valley up through the Andes mountain range to the isolated city..

[edit] Intihuatana stone

The Intihuatana stone is one of many ritual stones in South America. The Spanish did not find Machu Picchu so the Intihuatana Stone was not destroyed as many other ritual stones in Peru were. These stones are arranged to point directly at the sun during the winter solstice. Intihuatana also is called “The Hitching Point of the Sun” because it was believed to hold the sun in its place along its annual path in the sky. At midday on March 21 and September 21, the equinoxes, the sun stands almost above the pillar—casting no shadow at all.^[7] Researchers believe that it was built as an astronomic clock or calendar.

The Intihuatana stone was damaged in September 2000 when a 450 kg (1,000-pound) crane fell onto it, breaking off a piece of stone the size of a ballpoint pen. The crane was being used by a crew hired by J. Walter Thompson advertising agency to film an advertisement for a beer brand. “Machu Picchu is the heart of our archaeological heritage and the Intihuatana is the heart of Machu Picchu. They’ve struck at our most sacred inheritance,” said Federico Kaufmann Doig, a Peruvian archaeologist.^[8]

[edit] Concerns over tourism

Machu Picchu is a UNESCO World Heritage site. As Peru’s most visited tourist attraction and major revenue generator, it is continually threatened by economic and commercial forces. In the late 1990s, the Peruvian government granted concessions to allow the construction of a cable car and development of a luxury hotel, including a tourist complex with boutiques and restaurants. These plans were met with protests from scientists, academics, and the Peruvian public—all worried that the greater numbers of visitors would pose tremendous physical burdens on the ruins.^[9]

A growing number of people visit Machu Picchu (400,000 in 2003^[10]). For this reason, there were protests against a plan to build a bridge to the site as well.^[11] A no-fly zone exists above the area.^[12] UNESCO is considering putting Machu Picchu on its list of endangered World Heritage Sites.^[11]

During the 1980s a large rock from Machu Picchu’s central plaza was moved out of its alignment to a different location in order to create a helicopter landing zone. Helicopter landings were forbidden in the 1990s. In 2006 a Cusco-based company, Helicusco, sought to have tourist flights over Machu Picchu, but the decision was quickly overturned.^[13]

[edit] Controversy with Yale University

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In 1912 and 1914-15, Bingham excavated the treasures from Machu Picchu—ceramic vessels, silver statues, jewelry and human bones—and took them from Peru to Yale University in the United States for further study. Yale has retained the artifacts until now. The National Geographic Society, which co-sponsored Bingham’s explorations, has acknowledged that the artifacts were taken on loan and is committed to seeing them returned to Peru.^{[citation needed]}

Eliane Karp, an anthropologist who is the wife of the former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, accused Yale of profiting from Peru’s cultural heritage by claiming title to more than 250 pieces removed from Machu Picchu by Bingham in 1912, which had been on display at Yale’s Peabody Museum ever since. Some of the artifacts Bingham removed were returned to Peru, but Yale kept the rest saying its position was supported by federal case law involving Peruvian antiquities.^[14]

On September 19, 2007, the Courant reported that Peru and Yale had reached an agreement regarding the requested return of the artifacts. The agreement includes sponsorship of a joint traveling exhibition and construction of a new museum and research center in Cusco about which Yale will advise Peruvian officials. Yale acknowledges Peru’s title to all the excavated objects from Machu Picchu, but Yale will share rights with Peru in the research collection, part of which will remain at Yale as an object of continuing study.^[15]

On June 19, 2008, National Geographic Society’s vice-president Terry Garcia was quoted by daily La República. “We were part of this agreement. National Geographic was there, we know what was said, the objects were loaned and should be returned.” In November 2008, the Peruvian government decided to sue Yale after all the negotiations to have the pieces returned failed.

Senegal Proflie (General Travel)

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/senegal

Introducing Senegal

Couched between the arid desert lands in Northern Senegal and lush tropical forests in the south, this country boasts a stunning array of sights, sounds and flavours. The capital Dakar alone hands you the country in a capsule. Perched on the tip of a beach-lined peninsula, this dizzying city is composed elegance and street hustle all rolled into one. The busy streets, vibrant markets and glittering nightlife will easily draw you into their relentless rhythm, but the escape route is always open – be it to the meditative calm of the historical Île de Gorée or the golden sands of Yoff and N’Gor. And if Dakar’s sensory overload really gets too much, architecturally beautiful Saint-Louis, the first French settlement in West Africa, boasts a vibrant urban culture without the inner-city bustle.

Most visitors head to Senegal for its beaches, and for good reason. North and south of Dakar, wide strips of white sand invite swimming and sunbathing, whether in the built-up resort zones, where a lazy day at the beach can be followed by a cocktail trail at night, or in one of the coast’s charming fishing villages, the beaches of which are dotted with hundreds of colourful wooden pirogues. At the deltas of the Casamance and Saloum Rivers, the coastline is broken up into a maze of thick mangroves, tiny creeks, wide lagoons and shimmering plains. A pirogue trip through these striking zones reveals hundreds of bird species, from the gleaming wings of tiny kingfishers to the proud poise of pink flamingos. Whether you want to mingle with the trendsetters of urban Africa, or be alone with your thoughts and the sounds of nature – Senegal is the place to be.

Costa Rica: An Example to Emulate (Opinion)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12friedman.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Liberia, Costa Rica

Sailing down Costa Rica’s Tempisque River on an eco-tour, I watched a crocodile devour a brown bass with one gulp. It took only a few seconds. The croc’s head emerged from the muddy waters near the bank with the footlong fish writhing in its jaws. He crunched it a couple of times with razor-sharp teeth and then, with just the slightest flip of his snout, swallowed the fish whole. Never saw that before.

These days, visitors can still see amazing biodiversity all over Costa Rica — more than 25 percent of the country is protected area — thanks to a unique system it set up to preserve its cornucopia of plants and animals. Many countries could learn a lot from this system.

More than any nation I’ve ever visited, Costa Rica is insisting that economic growth and environmentalism work together. It has created a holistic strategy to think about growth, one that demands that everything gets counted. So if a chemical factory sells tons of fertilizer but pollutes a river — or a farm sells bananas but destroys a carbon-absorbing and species-preserving forest — this is not honest growth. You have to pay for using nature. It is called “payment for environmental services” — nobody gets to treat climate, water, coral, fish and forests as free anymore.

The process began in the 1990s when Costa Rica, which sits at the intersection of two continents and two oceans, came to fully appreciate its incredible bounty of biodiversity — and that its economic future lay in protecting it. So it did something no country has ever done: It put energy, environment, mines and water all under one minister.

“In Costa Rica, the minister of environment sets the policy for energy, mines, water and natural resources,” explained Carlos M. Rodríguez, who served in that post from 2002 to 2006. In most countries, he noted, “ministers of environment are marginalized.” They are viewed as people who try to lock things away, not as people who create value. Their job is to fight energy ministers who just want to drill for cheap oil.

But when Costa Rica put one minister in charge of energy and environment, “it created a very different way of thinking about how to solve problems,” said Rodríguez, now a regional vice president for Conservation International. “The environment sector was able to influence the energy choices by saying: ‘Look, if you want cheap energy, the cheapest energy in the long-run is renewable energy. So let’s not think just about the next six months; let’s think out 25 years.’ ”

As a result, Costa Rica hugely invested in hydro-electric power, wind and geo-thermal, and today it gets more than 95 percent of its energy from these renewables. In 1985, it was 50 percent hydro, 50 percent oil. More interesting, Costa Rica discovered its own oil five years ago but decided to ban drilling — so as not to pollute its politics or environment! What country bans oil drilling?

Rodríguez also helped to pioneer the idea that in a country like Costa Rica, dependent on tourism and agriculture, the services provided by ecosystems were important drivers of growth and had to be paid for. Right now, most countries fail to account for the “externalities” of various economic activities. So when a factory, farmer or power plant pollutes the air or the river, destroys a wetland, depletes a fish stock or silts a river — making the water no longer usable — that cost is never added to your electric bill or to the price of your shoes.

Costa Rica took the view that landowners who keep their forests intact and their rivers clean should be paid, because the forests maintained the watersheds and kept the rivers free of silt — and that benefited dam owners, fishermen, farmers and eco-tour companies downstream. The forests also absorbed carbon.

To pay for these environmental services, in 1997 Costa Rica imposed a tax on carbon emissions — 3.5 percent of the market value of fossil fuels — which goes into a national forest fund to pay indigenous communities for protecting the forests around them. And the country imposed a water tax whereby major water users — hydro-electric dams, farmers and drinking water providers — had to pay villagers upstream to keep their rivers pristine. “We now have 7,000 beneficiaries of water and carbon taxes,” said Rodríguez. “It has become a major source of income for poor people. It has also enabled Costa Rica to actually reverse deforestation. We now have twice the amount of forest as 20 years ago.”

As we debate a new energy future, we need to remember that nature provides this incredible range of economic services — from carbon-fixation to water filtration to natural beauty for tourism. If government policies don’t recognize those services and pay the people who sustain nature’s ability to provide them, things go haywire. We end up impoverishing both nature and people. Worse, we start racking up a bill in the form of climate-changing greenhouse gases, petro-dictatorships and bio-diversity loss that gets charged on our kids’ Visa cards to be paid by them later. Well, later is over. Later is when it will be too late.

Costa Rica’s Bounty (General Travel)

http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/travel/22CostaRica.html

THINK of Costa Rica as a Rorschach test for travelers. Outlined on a map, it has no recognizable shape. But enclosed in tropical lines of latitude, with appropriate squiggles for mountains, coasts and interior borders, it’s an inkblot for projecting travel fantasies. Beach lovers trace the craggy coasts and see hammocks swinging in the sunset breeze. The eyes of the nature-minded glaze when they note all the national parks. And adrenaline fanatics fixate on the mountains and rivers.

Costa Rica is tiny, smaller than West Virginia, but huge in versatility, with coasts on two oceans, coral-lined beaches and active volcanoes, luxury resorts and surf camps, roaring streams and rich biodiversity. Planning a trip for myself and my father last November, I set myself a challenge. How many Costa Ricas could we sample in just eight days? I settled on three: the rich primordial forest, the adventurer’s playground and the beachfront paradise. After subtracting travel time within the country, we would have a day and a half to two and a half days at our chosen location for each one, time enough for a taste, at least, of the country’s riches.

Eco-Tourism:
Monteverde

I stared into the dark jungle, hoping to see something staring back. The blackness was not complete; overhead the outlines of banana trees let in a little starlight, and, of course, for walking through the forest at night we all carried flashlights. Like most tourists, I had come to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in hopes of seeing big mammals like jaguars, ocelots or tapirs. I didn’t. Almost no one does. But 10 minutes with a guide on a three-hour walk our first night in the reserve proved that the plants and insects can be just as captivating — and as deadly.

The guide, who introduced himself only as Christian, combined the laid-back attitude of a surfer with the taxonomic command of an evolutionary biologist. He showed us an alligator tree, whose broad, conical spikes were developed to repel the elephant-size sloths that roamed the Americas as recently as 10,000 years ago. He grew animated as he called us over to look at a strangler fig, which begins life as an innocent epiphyte delivered into an unsuspecting tree’s branches by a bird, then grows vines up to the sunlight and down to the ground, eventually enveloping the host tree and strangling it.

In a hole in the dead tree, behind the sinewy crawl of fig roots, Christian shined his light on an orange-kneed tarantula perched at the entrance, waiting for its prey. Why didn’t it hunt out in the open, someone asked? Christian explained that tarantula wasps live in the area, waiting to paralyze a tarantula with their sting, lay eggs inside it and wait as the wasp larvae slowly consume the still-living spider from within. Let’s see an ocelot try that.

Situated in the Tilarán Mountains northwest of San José, Costa Rica’s capital, Monteverde is a Disneyland for eco-tourists. With its verdant cloud forest and 1,000 endemic plant species, Monteverde offers the pilgrimage to nature that many seek from the tropics. Since tourists are unlikely to spot all the wildlife they might wish to, private guides have always operated in the reserve, and in recent years, privately run zoo-like exhibitions have popped up: a bat jungle, a frog pond, a butterfly garden, a serpentarium. Add an organic cheese factory, a fair-trade coffee plantation and a half-dozen high-end hotels that vie to outdo one another with their recycling programs and renewable energy projects, and Monteverde has all senses of the word “green” covered.

Twenty-seven percent of Costa Rica’s land area is devoted to national parks and reserves, one of the highest percentages for any country. Monteverde, which is the primary place marketed to eco-tourists, is between two reserves — Monteverde and Santa Elena — deep in the Costa Rican highlands. It is well developed, with hotels, several restaurants, shops and art galleries. It even has an asphalt road connecting the two reserves and villages between, which is curious since the four-hour drive through farms and orchards to get to the area from San José is rocky and rutted — a result, locals say, of an earlier desire to keep down the number of visitors (now, most would prefer that the government pave the road). It is an oasis of infrastructure amid the rural and the wild.

We stayed at the Hotel Belmar, off the main drag between the town and the Monteverde reserve. Most people make reservations for the various activities through the hotels because guides are recommended. For those with keen wilderness eyes or their own binoculars or both, it is possible to walk through the reserves unguided.

The next day, our only full day in the area, brought sunlight and a decidedly more benign face from nature. Inside the Monteverde reserve, weaving among clusters of people with their own guides and tripod-attached spotting scopes, our tour group passed huge, leafy elephant ear plants and miniature orchids no more than a millimeter or two across. Monkeys howled and birds twittered overhead, and we spotted a sloth sleeping out the day, matted gray fur tucked into a cradle of branches 20 feet up.

The real joy-bringers were the hummingbirds, sporadic companions within the reserve but constant ones just outside it, where sugar-water feeders were set up. The names by themselves were enough to force smiles: green-crowned brilliants, purple-throated mountain-gems, coppery-headed emeralds! The most dramatic were the violet sabrewings with their white tail feathers and iridescent bodies, purple like a royal robe. Around the feeders, the hummingbirds buzzed by our ears like a squadron of propeller planes. No wonder: with only nectar for food and heart rates of as high as around 1,200 beats a minute, these birds live in a nonstop sugar rush.

Looking for animals in a nature preserve is a bit like playing blackjack in a casino: you know the odds are against you, but at least it feels like skill when you win. Not quite sated with birds and bugs and plants, I decided to stack the deck and take a taxi to El Ranario, a private frog pond. But the frogs still required some effort to spot, blending in against the leaves and soil of their somewhat dilapidated cages. The blue jeans frog (red with blue legs) was no larger than a thumbnail, while the bodies of the glass frogs were completely translucent. But by far the best frog to find behind glass was the “chicken-eating frog” — a bull frog the size of a small cat that is said to eat chicks when given the opportunity. Confronted with that monster frog in the jungle at night, armed with only a flashlight, I may well have turned and run.

Adventure Tourism:
Turrialba

“Will there be cliffs we can jump off of?” Jana Hoffman asked our guide, her native Minnesota accent creeping in. We were in a lull on an 18-mile white-water run down the Pacuare River near the town of Turrialba. Ms. Hoffman and her husband, Dan, on their honeymoon, were on the starboard side of the raft. My father and I held the port, paddles at the ready. Rudolfo Camacho (called Chalo), the guide, a burly, mustached man in his 40s, grinned and nodded to Ms. Hoffman.

But we had rapids to navigate first. The one coming up was Class IV: major obstructions, big, unavoidable waves, distinct risk of flipping — in short, fun.

“Forward hard!” Chalo cried. We dug into the foaming water, Chalo in the rear steering us between two huge boulders. The current picked up as the river drove us through the funnel, waves far larger than our dinky craft dragging us up and down, smashing into us sideways. The funnel wound around the boulders, and at the end of it I saw the hole: a deep depression in the river that sucks water down and shoots it back up, creating a permanent huge wave. This one was so tall it blocked our view of the river beyond. We went down hard and then up, up, up, until the raft was almost completely vertical.

But this was routine for Chalo; he needed a little more excitement. Just as we crested the wave he jumped headfirst into the froth. “Whoo!” he cried, shaking his face dry as he surfaced. He climbed back into the raft as the river calmed.

Among the adreno-scenti, Costa Rica is known as one of the best and closest foreign adventure tourism destinations to the United States. The surfing, particularly on the Nicoya Peninsula, is known to be first class. The volcano hiking and Caribbean scuba diving are not far behind. With but two days to sample Costa Rica’s blood-pumping options, I went for the main course: rafting near Turrialba on some of the most scenic whitewater an amateur can access — and some of the most challenging.

For a town so well regarded for its rafting, Turrialba itself has relatively few tourists. That is because it is less than two hours east of San José, and most rafting groups begin and end their day in the city. Turrialba’s mostly bare-bones hotels, hostels and rest houses combined number in the single digits, many fewer than the number of rafting companies that operate in the area. We were staying at the Hotel Interamericano, a colorful but spartan hotel run by an American woman.

Booking a rafting trip in Turrialba is a local affair, in which company owners (some of them expatriate Americans) will come to your hotel common room to discuss the trip in person. Entertainment in the town itself is nonexistent. In the evening, we strolled up to the main square to watch teenage couples canoodling on blue stone benches and old men arguing in pairs as the sounds of evening Mass echoed from the nearby church.

The Pacuare started off difficult enough, but Chalo, who had captained the Costa Rica national rafting team from 1994 to 1998, was almost too good, lulling us into a state of absolute trust with his pinpoint control. Even the cliff jump Ms. Hoffman had requested — 20 feet off a moss-covered boulder into a calm pool — had my heart racing only for a moment.

After a second jump, we drifted in our life vests down a steep vegetation-lined gorge under a rickety wooden bridge as drizzle dimpled the calm water. The narrow patch of sky visible through the moss-covered leaves and branches was gray, but upriver the sun shone bright, misty rays illuminating our passage like some heavenly corridor — wonderful for the aesthetically oriented centers of the brain, but doing nothing for the adrenal glands.

The next day changed all that. We tackled mighty Reventazón, a brown powerhouse of a river. “Today a little more agresivo, yes?” Chalo asked. He explained that the day before, in deference to my father, who is 63, he had been running the “chicken line,” the safest path through the rapids. On this day, my father was staying behind.

The Reventazón has 20 Class IVs back-to-back. Still flush with the previous day’s confidence, we told Chalo to go for it. I was scared from the moment we launched the raft in the middle of a rapid, pulling hard from the start. We took the first waterfall sitting on the floor for ballast but tried to power through others, despite occasionally reaching the paddle over the side and finding only air. Even the Hoffmans, who own and use their own raft in their hometown of Steamboat Springs, Colo., looked nervous.

And then we flipped. It was at a hole like the one we’d seen the day before, but instead of going straight up and over, the raft twisted, upended as easily and callously as a child’s toy in a bathtub. Chalo guided us over to one of the cliffs on the bank as we clung to the raft, the tanklike press of the water trying to rip us away. Chalo had the raft upright again in a matter of moments and in less than 30 seconds had us all back in our spots, dumbstruck. He caught the boat on a rock before the next rapid to let us find our breath. I looked into Dan’s eyes and then Jana’s, as the river roared by the unmoving raft, and they both nodded to me. I informed Chalo of our decision: the chicken line, please.

Luxury Tourism:
Manuel Antonio

After Turrialba, we took an 18-seat propeller plane to the Pacific coast. It was time to sample what legions of visitors come to find in Costa Rica: sun, sand and sybaritic relaxation.

Some of the country’s best beaches are preserved in Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica’s smallest and most popular national park, with about 4,000 acres and 150,000 annual visitors. Twenty-five years ago the area nearby held no more than a few cheap cabanas. Now a luxury infrastructure has grown up. Compared with Mexican resort towns like Cancún or Cabo San Lucas, the area still doesn’t feel overdeveloped. The airport that serves the park, at the town of Quepos, is served by two local airlines that land on an asphalt runway surrounded by jungle. Flying in feels as if you’re heading to a sea of African oil palms, the favored crop of nearby plantations.

The half-hour drive down the coast from the airport to the park is a strip of tourist restaurants, spas and hotels, with a turnoff midway to the high bluff where all the luxury lodgings are. The Hotel Parador, where we stayed, sprawls over the tip of the bluff like a Mediterranean villa and falls toward the high end in the local scale of luxury. In high season, the room prices are $200 to $400.

We arrived on a Sunday to immediate disappointment. It was too late to get to the park that day, and we couldn’t go the next day either: Manuel Antonio is closed on Mondays. The sky was dimming from gathering clouds and a retreating sun as we walked a muddy road to Espadilla Beach, a public beach.

The beach was at the end of a long cove, bounded on one end by a brackish moat formed by the skirmishes of a freshwater stream and the salty tide, and on the other by a long wooded promontory. A brown pelican dived from the steel blue sky into the sea but came up empty. The wind picked up, unheard over the crash of surf but felt in the goose-pimpling of flesh. It seemed idyllic enough.

But then my father and I sat down on a set of beach chairs, and although aside from some surfers we were the only people on the beach, a man scurried over after a couple of minutes and insisted we pay for the seats. It began to rain. The cries of souvenir sellers pierced the air as they covered up their wares, and the black tarp roof of an unappealing beachside restaurant flapped incessantly in the wind. Espadilla was nice, but with so many other coves dotting the shoreline, surely Costa Rica’s famed beachfront could be better.

We lazed away the next morning in our hotel’s infinity pool, counting the languages and accents of the other guests who floated by us. In the afternoon, we walked downhill through the jungle to Biesanz Beach, a tiny cove where igneous boulders the size of small dogs to small trucks break up the waterline. The water itself was a lovely turquoise, as if someone had mixed the blue of the sky and the green of the jungle, and the beach was quiet, with only two other visitors. But the water was still. We craved waves.

Back at the hotel, I went in for a massage at the spa. The aromas of lavender and mint guided me to my masseuse, under whose capable hands I let the day seep out of me to the music of chirping tree frogs in the dimming twilight. We had dinner at Kapi Kapi, a restaurant with both Costa Rican and Thai influences, where we had a brilliant macadamia-crusted mahi-mahi, sugar cane-skewered prawns and a slice of magnificently tart mandarin lime pie. I fell asleep as soon as we returned; relaxation, it turns out, can be difficult work.

The park itself is a relatively short stretch of trails on upraised concrete blocks under cotton-silk, almond and coconut palm trees. Stepping out of the steaming jungle on Tuesday, onto the breezy beaches, had a “Robinson Crusoe” feel — until we saw other people already sunbathing. Even the park’s farthest beach, called Puerto Escondido, or the Hidden Port, filled up quickly when the tide receded, leaving the path accessible without a scramble over sharp rocks. In the end, I felt more like Goldilocks: this beach was too small, this one too rocky, and all were too crowded, with negligible waves.

Dispirited, we left the park and returned to Espadilla Beach, where we had been before, as the rain again began to fall. We stopped in the restaurant with the plastic tarp roof and had a plate of surprisingly delicious pork ribs, then sat on chairs again. The same man came to take our money, but recognizing us, he stayed and joked around with my father for a while.

As the rain intensified, the sky darkened and all but the most hard-core of surfers left for drier places, I took a second look at Espadilla Beach. Of all the beaches we had visited, it was the only one with any waves. Nestled between two knobby bluffs, the arc of its cove was smooth and sweet, and the little islands offshore broke up the horizon just so. How had I missed it?

It is amazing how the character of a beach can change when the dingy restaurant becomes a local gem, the pushy entrepreneur becomes a friend, and the rest of the tourists clear out. We waded into the surf, savoring every swell and break that buffeted our bodies, drifting in the gunmetal sea.

Hiking in Yunnan, China (GENERAL TRAVEL)

http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/travel/05explorer.html?scp=1&sq=Yunnan&st=cse

I HAD high expectations for the holy lake. The locals called it Mystic Lake. Who could not be inspired by a place with a name like that, in the Tibetan hinterlands of southwest China? A sip of the water, and I would either attain enlightenment or get giardiasis.

Then there was the fact that I and several companions had just spent five hours that morning striding and sweating and clambering up the sheer side of a mountain. We had a guide with us, a construction worker named Tsering. We had also been joined by Ngawang, a young monk in red robes from a nearby monastery who was making his first pilgrimage to the lake.

The path had been hard to follow, weaving back and forth beneath a canopy of pine trees. The view opened up only after we emerged from the rhododendron groves covering the steepest part of the trail. We were greeted by a sweeping panorama of the snow peaks, including the 22,117-foot summit of Kawa Karpo, one of the holiest mountains among Tibetans.

After lunch in a high pasture, we forced our aching legs over a ridge and to the lake.

It was not what I had expected. Dull water lapped at the edges of the lake. Small hills, even duller in color, ringed the lake, which did not look much larger than one of the ponds in Central Park. There were no glaciers tumbling down from the mountains, no ice floes in the water. A small set of Tibetan prayer flags fluttered next to a pile of stones.

“So this is it?” said Shu Yang, a backpacker from Henan Province whom I had met at my guesthouse.

Then Ngawang dropped to the ground and prostrated himself before the lake. He pulled a book from a satchel and began reciting mantras. So high up were we, at nearly 15,000 feet, that the soft chanting seemed to float like incense into the clear blue sky.

I sat down and closed my eyes and listened. I began noticing things: The warmth of the afternoon sun on my face. The silence after Ngawang stopped chanting.

The minutes wore on. The silence deepened. Even the cries of birds seemed to be swallowed up by the void.

It was for a moment like this that I had made the long journey last fall to northern Yunnan Province from my home in Beijing — which has the dubious distinction of being both one of the most polluted and one of the most populous cities in the world.

Back home, looking at a map of the rugged Tibetan areas of western China, my eyes had fallen on the deep river valleys of Yunnan, where three of Asia’s great waterways come tumbling down from their glacial sources in the mountains of the high Tibetan plateau.

The Chinese authorities have always made it difficult for foreigners to travel in the Tibetan areas, but restrictions have gotten much worse since the protests and ethnic riots that erupted across the region in March 2008. In the last year, the government has occasionally closed off large swaths of western China to foreigners, including Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and the famous monastery of Labrang, in Gansu Province. Parts of northern and western Sichuan Province, long a favorite of backpackers, have also been shut off for months at a time. Ethnic tensions are still high, and the government has deployed soldiers and paramilitary units throughout the area.

I had heard that northern Yunnan was an exception. There was no unrest there last year. What’s more, the local government has adopted relatively progressive tourism policies, and foreigners have not had their access curbed. Ethnic Han Chinese tourists also seemed less fearful of going there.

Months after my trip, the Chinese government closed most Tibetan areas of China to foreigners as security forces prepared for possible unrest in March, during the 50th anniversary of a Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. But foreigners were still allowed to travel in northern Yunnan, and it remains the most accessible Tibetan region of China.

The centerpiece of the tourism in that corner of Yunnan is the Tibetan town of Gyalthang, called Zhongdian by the Chinese but renamed Shangri-La years ago by the local government to boost tourist numbers. The government had hoped to evoke the mythical lamasery that is the setting for James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon.”

My friend Tini and I made the town our first stop. The large and wealthy monastery on its outskirts, Ganden Sumtseling Gompa, one of the most important in the Tibetan world, was now being carefully renovated decades after the destruction of the Cultural Revolution. Tourists could walk among the buildings, looking into prayer halls as rows of monks sat reading their sutras.

But a sense of loss, so deeply ingrained in Tibetans, could still be felt here. An older monk, when he heard I was from the United States, turned to me and eagerly asked, “Have you seen the Dalai Lama?”

Back in town, Gyalthang seemed a little too manicured, with cafes in the renovated old quarter serving pizza to tour groups and souvenir shops hawking colorful pillow cushions. I wanted a rawer experience, something closer to what I had experienced years ago on the Tibetan plateau and in the mountains of Ladakh and Sikkim, both in India.

For that, I would have to go beyond Shangri-La, to the foot of the Kawa Karpo massif.

Tibetans consider snow mountains to be holy sites, life-giving forces, and Kawa Karpo is one of the most sacred. Tens of thousands of pilgrims come from far and wide each year to trek around the massif, gaining karma by repeated circumambulations. I was told most Tibetans do the circuit in under 10 days; foreigners usually take longer.

We only had a week off, so we decided to hike the “inner circuit,” a shorter walk that goes first from the valley of the Mekong River, called the Lancang here, to the secluded Tibetan village of Lower Yubeng, then to several sacred sites near the village. Among those are Mystic Lake and Mystic Waterfall. With names like that, the area promised no shortage of spiritual encounters.

AFTER we left Gyalthang, we spent two days getting to the trailhead village of Xidang, stopping first to view the Kawa Karpo massif at sunrise from the lookout point of Feilaisi. The next day, we hiked up to a sprawling glacier above the village of Mingyong. The glacier, the lowest in China, is retreating at an alarming rate because of climate change.

Standing on a platform above its white and blue crevasses, we could hear the crunching from its maw as ice shifted in the nether reaches.

Xidang was just a short drive from Mingyong, along a rutted road that ran along the stunning Mekong Valley. Villages with white Buddhist stupas dotted the valley walls. On the final stretch of road up to Xidang, our driver stopped at a monastery to burn juniper branches, unleashing an intensely fragrant smell that, for me, instantly evoked the Tibetan world.

No corner of the world was immune to change. For one thing, capitalist cooperatives had arrived here. Dozens of Tibetan horse handlers had formed such a cooperative at the trailhead to Yubeng. They charged tourists a fixed rate to carry people or luggage over the Nazongla Pass into Yubeng.

Tini and I wanted to walk, but not with our large backpacks, so we hired Aqinmu, a middle-aged Tibetan woman, to take our packs to Yubeng on her horse.

Most Chinese tourists opted to ride horses over, as did a group of Tibetan city slickers who wore cowboy hats. We saw them along the trail as we hiked up, their horses kicking dust in our faces. But the horses always outdistanced us, so we had the trail mostly to ourselves — just the birds and pine trees and blue sky for company. It was late October, the end of the good weather, but the days were still warm.

Living in Beijing does not do wonders for the lungs, I discovered. I huffed and puffed my way up to the 14,000-foot Nazongla Pass. It was anticlimactic. There were prayer flags and Tibetan horsemen and a soda stand in a small clearing, but no panoramic mountain views.

We didn’t get the views until we arrived at the village of Upper Yubeng. That and its sister village, Lower Yubeng, were nestled in a beautiful valley right at the foot of the Kawa Karpo range. Snow peaks pierced the sky in every direction. The best part was that people had to get here by foot or on horseback: roads had not been built yet, though no doubt many locals would appreciate easier transport options.

In recent years, Chinese backpackers had begun flocking to the valley. Locals were building wooden guesthouses in every corner of the two villages. We walked down to the very end of Lower Yubeng, where we found the Mystic Waterfall Lodge, one of the older and more popular guesthouses. The Tibetan owner, Aqinbu, had been putting up travelers for years in simple wooden rooms.

What the lodge lacked in creature comforts it made up for in the view: a small monastery, home to a lone monk, sat across from the lodge, and behind that rose the snow mountains.

“You won’t find a more beautiful spot in Yunnan,” Aqinbu said.

We happily threw off our boots and plopped down on our balcony. We sipped cups of tea while watching the snow peaks turn pink with the setting sun, then fade to blue as twilight set in.

The next day, Tini and I did a three-hour hike up to the Mystic Waterfall, in a cirque of mountains. The entire way, we met Tibetan pilgrims carrying bundles of food and green bamboo walking sticks. A grandfather in a gray suit walked next to his grandson, and a mother carried a baby in a sling over her back. “Tashi delek,” we said to each other — “Hello” in Tibetan.

Right before we reached the waterfall, we ran into Ngawang, a young monk wearing sunglasses and brandishing a digital camera. He was coming back from the falls. I had seen him at our lodge the night we arrived. He had taken a few days off from his religious studies to travel here with two Chinese friends.

“I’ve been to the waterfall seven times,” he said. “It’s a holy place, like so many other places here. Have you been to Mystic Lake?”

He pointed to somewhere high up the mountains, hidden in the trees. I shook my head.

“Neither have I,” he said. “Not many monks I know have gone. It’s a long walk and very far away.”

So the next day, we went.