I picked a hi-resolution photo, so if you were planning to go this year youcan now click on the above, download and tell your
friends how great is was without leaving the beach.
After the rains comes the perfect storm. The flooding and chewing-to-bits of the rail connection to Machu Picchu has isolated Peru's jewel in the tourist track crown and according to latest reports the citadel will be inaccessible for the next seven to eight weeks. However, the new accesses that will open are footpath only, because they're now talking about five months to get the rail line back up and running.
This is not just a problem for Cusco. The two days (or so) that tourists spend at Machu Picchu form part of a whole circuit that runs typically for two weeks and shuffles coachloads of gringos from Lima-to-Paracas-to-Arequipa-to-Lake-Titicaca-to-Cusco and then flies them back to Lima. So with the main event now cancelled, tourists are turning their back on the whole deal because going all the way to Peru without getting to see the star attraction just doesn't appeal the same way. The result? In the last few days, foreign tour operators have cancelled no less than 50% of all their tour packages, leaving hotels all along the circuit facing empty rooms and tour guides with nobody to tour.
A quick ciggypack calc done yesterday by your humble scribe and a couple of pals who do numbers better than himself put the loss at about 0.5% of projected country GDP. This isn't a disaster in itself, but that money isn't part of the big purse run by the government; it's cash that goes directly to the populations of some of the poorest parts of the country and supports a whole range of service and ancilliary industries (the families that rely on market stalls selling trinkets to people wearing backpacks are in for the tough time, for example). All this on top of flooding that has cost the subsistence farmers of the high plains to the tune of eight million soles and wiped out crops for around 20,000 farmers, according to the Agro ministry.
Moral of this story: Don't build your railtrack next to a river in the high Andes.
This is not just a problem for Cusco. The two days (or so) that tourists spend at Machu Picchu form part of a whole circuit that runs typically for two weeks and shuffles coachloads of gringos from Lima-to-Paracas-to-Arequipa-to-Lake-Titicaca-to-Cusco and then flies them back to Lima. So with the main event now cancelled, tourists are turning their back on the whole deal because going all the way to Peru without getting to see the star attraction just doesn't appeal the same way. The result? In the last few days, foreign tour operators have cancelled no less than 50% of all their tour packages, leaving hotels all along the circuit facing empty rooms and tour guides with nobody to tour.
A quick ciggypack calc done yesterday by your humble scribe and a couple of pals who do numbers better than himself put the loss at about 0.5% of projected country GDP. This isn't a disaster in itself, but that money isn't part of the big purse run by the government; it's cash that goes directly to the populations of some of the poorest parts of the country and supports a whole range of service and ancilliary industries (the families that rely on market stalls selling trinkets to people wearing backpacks are in for the tough time, for example). All this on top of flooding that has cost the subsistence farmers of the high plains to the tune of eight million soles and wiped out crops for around 20,000 farmers, according to the Agro ministry.
Moral of this story: Don't build your railtrack next to a river in the high Andes.