Machu Picchu is a destination to rival Luxor or Angkor Wat, and ever-growing numbers are making the pilgimage to the lost mountain redoubt of the Inca kings. (The suppression of the once-deadly Maoist guerrila group Shining Path helped a lot.) Many of those visitors make the journey with little foreknowledge of what they may encounter. Let’s see - indigenous people wearing derby hats, llamas, and the Andean panpipe and drum bands seen at tourist sites across Europe and North America. That’s about it, probably. So here’s more.

(1) The Inca Empire was less than a century old when it fell to the Spanish in 1532.

Organized tribes were in evidence in what is now Peru from about 2500 B.C., evolving into several important larger cultures. The Inca didn’t even begin to coalesce in the Cusco Valley until 1430, but in fifty brief years, their empire stretched from present-day Argentina to Columbia. Pizarro and his small band of conquistadors assassinated the Inca king in 1527 and sacked Cusco. They never found out about Machu Picchu.

(2) A favorite comfort food of Peruvians and their Ecuadorean neighbors is cuy. Guinea pig, that is.

A common sight in Andean kitchens is a tiny shack made of scraps of wood or cardboard, its guinea pig inhabitants scurrying in and about. Unaware of their destiny as future dinner entrées, they contentedly stay where they are fed and watered. Roasted cuy is often served with a peanut sauce.

(3) The Inca didn’t have the wheel, mules, or horses.

Yet their temples, ceremonial platforms, walls, waterworks, and related monuments are constructed of boulders weighing many tons that had to be maneuvered up steep mountain slopes and settled into place atop one another. In most cases, the building stones were so finely cut they fit together without mortar. Even today, a copper penny can’t be pushed into the cracks in the most important structures.

(4) There are said to be over 2,000 different kinds of potatoes grown in Peru, and probably many more.

The starchy national diet can be laid in large part to the wide-scale poverty of its citizens. A single dinner plate can include portions of rice, potatoes, beans, and pasta. Vegetarians have a tough go, for even bean and potato dishes are likely made with bits of meat or animal fat.

(5) “Ciao!” is a freqent greeting among younger Peruvians.

There are three official languages - Spanish (called castellano), the language of the conquistadors, and Quechua and Aymara, ancient Indian tongues. Dozens more indigenous languages and dialects are also spoken. How an Italian salutation squeezed into common usage is a mystery.

(6) Machu Picchu is 7,710 feet above sea level, but travelers with that destination in mind must first journey to Cusco, at 11,152 feet.

If they want to take in Lake Titicaca, it lies even higher, at 12,725 feet. The thin air at all these locales can bring on altitude sickness, characterized by dizziness, nausea, and headaches, all to go along with the ever-present possibilty of -ahem- traveler’s sickness. Acetazolamiode is a prescription medicine often recommended for the former, Cipro for the tourist trots. Tea made from coca leaves is a popular beverage that is also considered an effective folk remedy for altitude sickness. New arrivals at Cusco hotels are routinely offered cups of hot coca tea even before they register. (While coca tea bags are sold widely in Peru markets, possession of them is illegal in the U.S.)

(7) ATMs dispense your choice of U.S. dollars and Peruvian nuevos soles.

More expensive establishments often quote their rates only in dollars, and both dollars and soles are legal tender everywhere. However, no one, not even banks, will accept dollar notes that are rumpled, torn, ripped, or old.

(8) The fastest train between Cusco and Machu Picchu, a distance of 68 miles, can take almost four hours. Horses and flocks of sheep amble across the tracks, impervious to the train whistle, and with the lack of controlled railroad crossings, a 20-mile-per-hour average speed is about the best that can be expected. To describe the three available classes on the train as “luxury” is overstatement, but windows curving into the roof on the Vistadome train provide slow-mo views of valleys and farmlands, of emerald jungle with brilliantly hued birds flashing between banyan and bamboo, and mountains green and nubby with vegetation giving way to high bare crags with permanent snowcaps.

(9) Machu Picchu can also be reached by a three- to five-day trek through the Andes.

For the young, athletic and/or determined, the Inca Trail is an irresistible challenge. A little over thirty miles in length, it begins at a point outside Cusco designated Kilometer 88 and continues up and down (but mostly up) past many lesser-known Inca ruins, over rivers and mountain passes that rise to almost 14,000 feet. So popular has the trek become, only a few hundred hikers are allowed to enter it per day - for a fee. They can hire porters, small but astonishingly strong men shouldering packs nearly as tall as they, who cover much of the distance at a trot.

(10) Hiram Bingham, a professor at Yale, took credit for discovering Machu Picchu in 1911.

As the Inca had no written language and the Spanish never saw it, much about the “city in the clouds” remains unexplained and subject to endless conjecture. Educated guesswork long suggested that it was a ceremonial center of largely religious purpose. Part of the justification for this was the presence of over 170 skeletons, most of them initially determined to be female, and assumed to be “virgins of the sun”, comparable to the vestal virgins of Rome. Recent revisionist research, however, attests that the site was in actuality an imperial estate, a country retreat for Inca nobility. The reasons the site was abandoned remain uncertain, though, whether by disease or war or natural calamity. Bingham, by the way, quit academe and went on to become governor of Connecticut and a U.S. senator.

Inca country is nothing less than magical, rewarding any effort to experience it. Just don’t eat the lettuce or drink the water.

But you did know that.