Things get meta pretty quickly when you’re hanging out with the team from Google. I realise this on day one of the web giant’s project to map Machu Picchu, as we amble up to a popular viewpoint and stare into the thick mountain mist cloaking the citadel. Senior staff engineer Daniel Filip has just put on the backpack-mounted Trekker camera, the clouds are clearing, and we’re ready to go.
Seconds later we’re spotted by a pair of Australian tourists. “Are you the Google guy?” asks one. “It’s Google! It’s him!” He walks up to the Trekker, stares into the camera and waves. “Hey mum!” Then he takes a selfie.
I’d arrived in Cusco a day earlier, joining the Street View team tasked with collecting the panoramic imagery needed to add the Inca site to its ever-expanding list of locations. Having mapped more than seven million miles of roads in 65 countries, Google Street View has turned its attention to some of the world’s most spectacular places, creating eye-candy for digital travellers. And it’s no surprise that Machu Picchu, one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world, has been in its sights for some time.
While most people still associate Google Street View with the small cars spotted zipping around cities with a camera on top, the past few years have seen Google develop off-road mapping methods. The street view “fleet” now includes a tricycle for narrow alleyways, a trolley for the interiors of museums and historic buildings, a snowmobile, for, well, snowy places, and the Trekker, which has been used to map sites such as Petra, Angkor Wat, the Great Pyramids, Everest base camp and the Grand Canyon.
The team sees the Machu Picchu project – a highlight of its expansion in Latin America – as one of its most ambitious. Filip, Google’s first full-time street view engineer, is there to make sure it all goes smoothly.
“When I started, I had no idea we could do a project like Machu Picchu,” he tells me. “We’ve been working for years to get permission for this.”
From Cusco we travel by train to Aguas Calientes (now officially called Machu Picchu Pueblo), an overpriced tourist town in the valley beneath the citadel. A bus then takes us up the zig-zag mountain road to the site entrance. We’ve made an early start, but tourists are already queuing outside. At 2,430 metres, the air is thin and the sun is harsh. It’s not long before I’m out of breath and sunburnt, but the view – once the mist clears – makes up for it.
Surrounded by nauseatingly steep peaks, the stone steps, temples and structures of Machu Picchu sit on a grassy plateau as if dropped there from above. The Huayna Picchu peak towers behind it like a deep green obelisk.
Our starting point for the “collect” is Machu Picchu’s Sun Gate – the main entrance through which those who arrive via the Inca Trail reach the site. We march up to it along an ancient stone path, stopping occasionally to look back at the citadel. Once at the top (after a rest, some Oreos and a sip of mate herb tea) Filip switches the Trekker on, ready to start its mission.
Google Trekker projects are physical challenges. It will take seven days of methodically crisscrossing the site to complete the capture. Doing the bulk of this work is 30-year-old Julio Corbacho, a photographer and cameraman from Lima. Dressed in a grey hoodie, with thick rimmed glasses and an uncanny resemblance to the actor Jonah Hill, Corbacho has lugged the Trekker around dozens of Peru’s ancient sites, including Nazca, Tacna and Moquega, since January.
“It’s a fantastic job,” he says, puffing a little already. “They pay you to travel to amazing places. And when I started, I weighed 10kg more.”
The 22kg Trekker comprises 15 high-resolution (five megapixel) cameras. They capture a photo every 2½ seconds, and these are matched to locations with GPS tags and spliced together into panoramas before being published on Google Maps. Corbacho’s main job is to move at a consistent speed, change the batteries and avoid running into things like branches, that can ruin the shots.
A side effect of our toting the Trekker camera is that we become a tourist attraction ourselves. In a place like Machu Picchu, which is swarming with visitors lost in a frantic orgy of photo taking, the appearance of a novel entity proves too much to resist. It becomes impossible to know who’s collecting more photos, the Trekker, or the mass of tourists taking selfies in front of us.
And it is a testament to Google Maps’ global presence (it has over a billion users worldwide) that most tourists seem to recognise what we’re doing.
“The Google landscape ... er ... the Google Earth map? Is that what it is?” asks one man in grey fleece. A younger tourist, slightly more familiar with the branding, asks me directly if it’s Google Street View. I nod, and he’s impressed. “Cool!”
I expected the Trekker to be viewed with more mistrust, as an invasion of privacy, but the response is overwhelmingly positive. Most people seem to be excited by the idea.
“I think it’s sweet,” says Australian Ryan Fuller, 23. “You get to see places before you go there, and in a couple of years they may not let so many people have access here.”
His friend chips in: “And not everyone has the resources to do what we’re doing.”
Alex, 22, from London is a bit more cynical. “It doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable,” he says, “but I do think it’s better to have a surprise when you get there. They don’t have to have everything on Google.”
While the Trekker moves across the site, popping in and out of view as it traverses the stone walls and alleys, I catch up with the director of the site, Fernando Astete, also known as El Capitan. Silver-haired and dressed in khaki, spectacles hanging around his neck, Astete has headed Machu Picchu since 2001, through a period of enormous growth as a tourist attraction: the number of visitors rocketed from around 100,000 a year in the mid-1990s to over a million in 2014.
He’s not surprised at the growth: “We knew this was going to happen. Since the beginning of the 20th century, people involved in culture and history were saying Machu Picchu would be the mecca of tourism. So we were waiting for that.”
Astete is interrupted as a woman asks him take a photo of her. He obliges. He is remarkably relaxed about the intrusive level of snapping.
“Technology is a fashion,” he tells me. “These things will happen – people coming with bigger cameras, selfie sticks. Soon we’ll probably forbid selfie sticks and tripods, which stop the flow of people. But cameras are just part of the experience. People will always want a photo to show their friends and family, or just to say I was here.”
But his colleague José Bastante, a rather dashing Indiana Jones-esque academic in charge of archaeological and interdisciplinary research at Machu Picchu, feels the balance could be better: “Machu Picchu is not Disneyland; it’s a sacred place and it should be regarded like that. But we understand there’s a pressure from tourism. It’s a world heritage site, and people have the right to see it.”
Unesco has commissioned a report, to be delivered this year, on the way tourism has affected Machu Picchu. Since 2011, the number of visitors has exceeded the daily limit of 2,500 set by Unesco, which has been pressuring the Peruvian authorities to improve the situation and upgrade the facilities. A £27m project, to be completed by 2019, will include a new interpretation centre and new routes around the site to distribute tourists more evenly. While the number of visitors will still increase, they will enter the site in groups of 100, hopefully reducing congestion.
For Bastante, the interpretation centre is crucial to encouraging respect for the sacredness of the site. “My ideal situation in Machu Picchu would be to close it for a couple of months a year,” he says. “But people need to experience and understand the Incas and the sacredness of this space. A hundred educated tourists will do less harm than one uneducated one.”
Does he feel the Google project can support conservation work there? “That would be the ideal scenario. If we can use Google Street View to analyse change over time.”
Street View has proved useful for this in the past. It was used to compare damage before and after a hurricane in Japan, and several Google Trekker projects have been completed in conjunction with conservation groups, who use it as an opportunity to engage the public. The most recent was a collaboration with Samburu national reserve and Save the Elephants in Kenya – using Street View to map the park, and the elephants in it to raise awareness of the animals and their habitat.
But more comparable to Machu Picchu is last year’s project to map Angkor Wat in Cambodia, another vast ancient site and major attraction. As with Machu Picchu, it is one of the country’s biggest assets, attracting visitors from around the world. According to Unesco’s culture sector, mapping, just like aerial photography or satellite images, is essential for the conservation of world heritage sites.
The organisation believes that tools such as Google’s Trekker technology are valuable, particularly in terms of sustainable tourism, by documenting properties too fragile to be opened to the wider public.
For Google, on a mission to map the entire world, the appeal of these projects is easy to see. But I ask Filip whether it’s right to invest so much in mapping trophy locations while vast swathes of the world – mostly in Africa – don’t even have basic Google Maps as a resource.
He maintains that they’re not just going for the glory spots. “We’re also going to be expanding in Africa,” he says, admitting it’s a hole in their coverage. “We just want a completely comprehensive map, and the Trekker loan programme (where local organisations borrow the equipment to produce their own maps) is a good example of that.”
The Google project offers a huge opportunity for countries such as Peru, India and Cambodia to promote their world wonders. But as we watch the Trekker disappear down the track towards the citadel, I put it to Astete that if people can explore these places from home, won’t that ruin the experience of visiting?
“Ruin the moment?” he exclaims. “No! Surely you have seen a lot of pictures – do you think it’s the same as real life? The feeling of being here is completely different. It’s a feeling you can’t describe.”
MORE SITES FOR DESKTOP EXPLORERS
Angkor Wat, Cambodia
In a project that used cars, Trekkers and tripods, Google mapped 100 of the breathtaking Khmer temples found at Angkor, launching more than 90,000 panoramic views in April 2014.
El Capitan, Yosemite, US
Some of the world’s best climbers were roped in to help Google create a vertical map of the sheer rock face of El Capitan in Yosemite national park. Cameras were carried up the granite cliff by climbers including Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell earlier this year.
Petra, Jordan
Launched last week, one of the latest Trekker projects to hit the internet is a tour of Jordan’s most famous ancient site, with commentary provided by Queen Rania of Jordan.
Grand Canyon, US
The first official outing for the Trekker camera was in October 2012, when Google began collecting imagery along the Grand Canyon. More than 9,500 images were taken, documenting two of the canyon’s most popular trails.
Venice, Italy
It would be impossible to capture the city’s watery byways with street view cars, so in 2013 the Trekker camera was loaded on to a gondola to map Venice’s canals. The team covered 265 miles on foot and 114 miles by boat.
