This piece by Gregory Jusdanis in the Stanford humanities blog, Arcade, captures many of the internal conflicts I encountered in my time this past summer spent touring the cherished and sanitized relics of South America's past, and Machu Picchu in particular.

I have been looking for words to explain the unease at encountering de-vined, de-peopled, tour-guided, no-touch ruins and trying to find a personal sort of authenticity in my engagement with them.

To climb Machu Picchu we lined up at the bottom gates before dawn with hordes of khaki-pantsed, hiking-shoed people from places like Israel and France and Germany. When they opened, we rushed through them and across the river-bridge with all of the ceremony of Best Buy shoppers on Black Friday.

We wanted to be among the first 400 to arrive at the manicured, guarded gates so as to guarantee one of the limited entrees into Wana Picchu, but perhaps there was more to it.

Perhaps we also wanted to be first to the top to secure for ourselves a moment of authenticity free of French tourists asking us to move our wonderment to the left so they could take the cliched picture of the Inka Face formed by the mountain relief.

Perhaps we also needed to separate ourselves as much as possible from the first group of people who bussed up the mountain at dawn instead of running the two-thousand plus feet of narrow, steep Inkan steps in the dark.

We resented them their safari jackets and expensive, spotless trekking attire that spoke of the luxury trains they'd opted for over the brutal, four-day mountain and jungle foot-trail.

In our resentment towards them, there was also some amount of self-loathing.

As Jusdanis so aptly comments the paradox of modern travel and part of the reason for our guilt, "Not only does travel contribute to the melting of the glaciers in Peru that bring us there. But it also reminds us of the painful story of conquest centuries earlier."

Like Jusdanis, I traveled another Inka trail, not so crowded with tourists as the one referred to as "the" inka trail. It was still well traveled enough that there was a squat peruvian woman, often times with a baby tied to her back, selling Powerade every few kilometers.

It occurred to me in reading Jusdanis' piece that maybe there had been a moment of "visiting without being a tourist" during my travels to Machu Picchu, although one much less elegant than his encounter with peruvian musicians on a mountain trail.

On the winding, bumpy 24 hour bus ride through the Andes to Cusco, a launching point for our Machu Picchu trek, I had terrible altitude and motion sickness. I vomited until there was nothing left in my stomach, and then I just dry-retched.

We pit-stopped in a small Andean town, and I found myself on my knees gripping the bars of the sewer grill beside the one paved road, up-chucking the coca tea I'd bought from a wise-faced old woman who assured me that it would help with the altitude sickness.

I looked to my left to see a quintessentially andean-faced man on his knees as well. We made eye contact briefly and exchanged an understanding nod as he half-smiled wryly. He, I later learned, was from Cusco but hadn't been there in many years and had become unaccustomed to the altitude.

We'd come to Peru "to enrich ourselves, to observe the spider spinning webs on the crumbled barricades of Machu Picchu" but maybe the closest I came to achieving some part of a quixotic travel ideal was there, on that mountain, vomiting with a descendant of the Inkas.