Peruvian prez to Yale: return Machu Picchu ‘loot’

Yale should return its cache of Machu Picchu artifacts by next July or be considered “guilty of robbery,” declares Peru’s president, Alan Garcia.

Next July 7 marks the 100th anniversary of when Yale archeologist Hiram Bingham ’98 rediscovered the Incan ruins on a remote mountaintop. After excavating, Bingham brought ancient treasures to New Haven, where they’re housed at Yale’s Peabody Museum. Long-running negotiations for their return resulted in a memorandum of understanding three years ago but then collapsed. Peru filed suit in 2008.

“Either we come to an understanding,” Garcia told reporters in Peru, “or we’ll simply have to describe them as looters of treasures. . . . Now is the time to start packing up the things and send them over together with the research. Silence would indicate that they are guilty of robbery.”

For Peru’s centennial celebration, Garcia adds, “we don’t want a half-Machu Picchu, we don’t want a Machu Picchu piece by piece, we want a Machu Picchu with everything it had on July 7, 1910.”

Yale spokesmen couldn’t immediately be reached for a response. In the past, the university has said it is “disappointed” that Peru “rejected Yale’s offers to negotiate a collaborative agreement and instead decided to sue the university to recover archaeological material legally excavated at Machu Picchu.”

Machu Picchu, Peru: Ancient Andes city is Picchu perfect

Hiram Bingham and the Lost City of the Incas - not as snappy or famous as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

But it's absolutely true, a real-life archaeological adventure in the South American jungle.

One hundred years ago next July, American explorer Bingham made the sensational discovery of Machu Picchu, the deserted mountaintop Inca city near Cusco, high in the Peruvian Andes.

Of course, getting to Machu Picchu is an awful lot easier today, either by walking the four-day Inca Trail - which my 3am colleague Clemmie Moodie has been heroically tackling this week - or by train. I joined the Vistadome train at Ollantaytambo in the Inca Sacred Valley near Cusco.

It's a splendid blue train, with huge viewing windows, that takes a couple of hours to reach the station at Machu Picchu Pueblo.

Then it's on to a bus to the Inca city itself via a rather twitchy ride that climbs into the mountains on a series of alarmingly tight hairpin bends.

You finally arrive at the lost city, and what a glorious view it is.

It truly is one of life's must-see places. I was so awe-struck I just stood staring and snapping away with my camera.

Finally, it's time to head in to the city itself to explore and wander around in the centuries-old footsteps of the Incas. If you are visiting Machu Picchu it's a racing certainty you will spend some time in Cusco, the chief city of the region.

Perched at a lofty 11,200ft, it merits a few days' visit to acclimatise to the altitude. I stayed at the Hotel Monasterio, which offers oxygen piped into your room to assist with the adjustment.

Cusco is a captivating city, there's a feel that you're in somewhere otherworldly in what is a dusty high-altitude Andean bowl dripping with Incan heritage and Spanish colonial architecture. It's a boisterous place too. As the starting point for trips to Machu Picchu by both rail and foot on the Inca Trail, it's a magnet for tourists of all ages and very much a thriving regional capital.

Before heading to Machu Picchu I stayed at the Tambo del Inka Hotel in the Sacred Valley, a fine spa resort made remarkable by the size of the public rooms.

They are quite simply ENORMOUS. The LA Lakers basketball team would feel utterly lost in the huge foyer.

But they would be just as impressed as I was by the view from it at sunrise as the first pink rays hit a lofty Andean glacier.

And who could not be moved by the sight of the night sky in this valley? As I strolled through the gardens a shooting star caught my eye as it flashed across the night sky.

Only then did I fully appreciate the majesty of the constellations at this altitude with no light pollution.