Editor’s Note: Myrna Blyth is the founding editor of More magazine, was the longtime editor-in-chief of Ladies’ Home Journal and was senior editor for Family Circle magazine. She was also the chairman of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. Currently she writes for The National Review Online and is the editor-in-chief of Betty Confidential.

Lots of women celebrate their fiftieth birthday by going to Machu Picchu. That’s what Peggy Northrop, the former editor of More magazine, once told me, and now that I have been there I can understand why. Climbing up and down the many stairs and steps of the once-lost city of the Incas is, like turning 50, quite an accomplishment. Unfortunately, I didn’t get there in time to celebrate that important birthday but Machu Picchu does seem to me a place to mark something special, whether it is a CT scan that shows no sign of recurrence, the end of a difficult relationship or the beginning of a new stage in one’s life

On my trip to Peru, I was accompanied by two young men and two young women, none over 32, and that was a trip in itself. They were all smart, savvy travel writers. They bonded by talking about restaurants in Brooklyn, gay bars and clubs in Manhattan. They also constantly shared opinions about dozens and dozens of C-list celebrities, reality-show participants and the various remixes of the music one of the guys had on his iPod. Every once in a while I could catch a name I could relate to – Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Bruce – but not all that often. Still, they were fun to be with and we were all equally awed by the mighty Andes, the extraordinarily beautiful Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu itself.


I have wanted to make this trip since high school history class where I learned how Francisco Pizarro and a small band of conquistadores, seeking gold and glory, managed to conquer the mighty Inca empire of millions in little more than an afternoon. Our visit started in Cusco, the Spanish colonial city that was once the seat of the Inca rulers. The Spaniards forced Catholicism on the natives with the barrels of their muskets and now the city is full of churches. They used stones from the Temple of Sun, the Incas’ most important religious shrine, to build one of those churches, and there is still a Dominican monastery on the site. How the natives felt about this is fairly apparent from a painting, deep in the dark recesses of the grand Cathedral that dominates the city’s square. In the seventeenth century a native artist painted his version of the Last Supper with Judas looking just like Pizarro and holding not the usual 20 pieces of silver, but a bag of gold in his hand.

In Cusco we stayed in a sixteenth-century mansion that is now a boutique hotel, the Inkaterra La Casona. It is filled with beautiful Inca weavings and Spanish Colonial furniture the owners have spent years collecting. It also had the largest, deepest , most elegant bathtubs I have ever seen. The hotel’s owner, Jose Koechlin, told me when I visited his home in Lima that the tubs were modeled after a nineteenth-century bathtub given to him by the president of Peru. He uses the original as the base of a glass-topped dining room table. In his home there is an even more impressive collection of Spanish colonial antiques.