Machu Picchu Gets a Quick Lift.

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: Brief Article

RIO DE JANEIRO has a cable-car system to ferry tourists up to Pao de Acucar and back. The Great Wall of China has one for the tourists, too, as does the ancient Israeli mountain fortress of Masada. So why not Machu Picchu, the best known archaeological site in South America?

Roberto Persivale Rivero, for one, sees no reason why Peru's leading tourist attraction shouldn't have a cable car. Last summer, his company, Peru Hotel S.A., won a twenty-five-year concession from the Fujimori government to build a high-tech teleferico that will whisk tourists from the town of Aguascalientes up to the famous Inca city in only six minutes. That's considerably faster than the twenty to twenty-five minutes needed to make the winding, exhausting, dusty trip by bus.

"It'll take us two years to build the cable car," says Persivale, general manager of Lima-based Peru Hotel, which plans to invest $8 million in the project. "We should be able to get back our investment in eight or ten years."

Persivale, forty, is a youthful-looking businessman who got his master's degree in economics from the University of Southern California in 1981. His office sits on the sixth floor of a glass building in the Lima suburb of San Isidro, the walls covered with framed color panoramas of the hotel properties his company recently bought from the government: the Hostal Plaza de Armas in Cuzco, the Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge, the Machu Picchu Inn, and--most impressive--the Hotel Monasterio del Cusco, a former monastery dating to the seventeenth century.

Like the hotels, the cable car would operate as a joint venture between Peru Hotel and the Orient-Express Hotels Ltd. unit of Sea Containers Ltd. In mid-1999, the venture won a government auction to construct the cable car after it offered the lowest bid of four companies that had qualified.

Upon completion, tourists will board the cable car at a station in Aguascalientes, then glide silently through the air and step out six minutes later at the entrance...