A Lost City and its Time Machine: Vision and Affect in Rail Travel to Machu Picchu

In: Space and Culture, Band 25, Heft 4, S. 586-599

Abstract

Research on tourism to Machu Picchu rarely addresses the ways in which transportation, particularly rail travel, is integral to a visit to the UNESCO world heritage site. Yet the majority of visitors to Machu Picchu arrive by train, making rail travel a crucial component to the way in which the site is understood and experienced. This article examines rail travel to Machu Picchu through archival research and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cuzco and at Machu Picchu to argue that rail travel capitalizes on historic and cultural imaginings of Machu Picchu as a lost city, transforming the tourist into an explorer in the process. The experience relies on vision and affect as the train acts a temporalizing machine, taking the tourist back in time to visit another world, perpetuating the myth of lost cities, discovery and dispossession in the process.