The sheer sugarloaf of Huayna Picchu rises like a rhinoceros horn at the end of the spur, and the Urubamba roars in a tight hairpin bend around the site, trapped in a green canyon hundreds of feet below.
As if having a landscape of sugarloaf peaks, jungle and old colonial grandeur were not enough, Principe's beaches are, well, perfect.
A good hour was spent taking pictures before the sailors hiked down to the citadel itself, nestling between Machu Picchu Mountain and the sugarloaf peak of Huayna Picchu
However, bands of basal scale-cutting appear on a few opaque-white pieces, such as a sugarloaf decanter gilded with Hamilton ‘vases and laurels’, as described in Christie's 1774 catalogue.
The endless noise of the capital and the pollution soon forced us into the countryside and we managed to secure an illegal private taxi to take us south-west to the sugarloaf - shaped mountains around the small town of Vinales.
These include a blue sugarloaf decanter decorated with spiralling vines, the badge of the London Company of Masons and a ribbon inscribed ‘THE LODGE OF PERFECT UNION’, which operated in Cheltenham between 1763-73.
Definition of sugarloaf in US English:
sugarloaf
nounˈʃʊɡərˌloʊfˈSHo͝oɡərˌlōf
historical
A conical molded mass of sugar (now used chiefly in similes and metaphors to describe the shape of other objects)