Why Travel Is the Best Education: Lessons from Cusco's Twelve‑Angled Stone

Cusco's famous Twelve-Angle Stone

There is a special kind of magic you find in travel. Sorcery in being out in the world and seeing things with your own eyes. Smelling things with your own nose. Sacrificing your own spine to a 20-hour bus ride.

There. Is. Magic.

I know this because I’ve seen it.

Here’s an example: there’s a small alleyway in Cusco, Peru. On one side of the alley, you’ll find a line of endless shops—selling Peruvian flutes, “baby-alpaca-wool” hats, cute T-shirts, and other compulsory souvenirs. On the other side is a stone wall, built more than 500 years ago.

The magic is in that wall.

And by “magic,” I mean a rock. Or to be more precise, a stone. But not just any stone. This is the undisputed heavyweight champion of stones: the Twelve-Angled Stone.

What makes it special? The angles. Twelve of them. But not just any twelve. Each glorious polygonal edge fits with divine precision against its neighbors, like the Inca invented CAD software centuries earlier and then decided, “Let’s build a wall with it!”

The Incas didn’t use mortar in their stonework. Nothing holds the stones together but gravity. So every stone had to fit perfectly. No wiggle room. No room for error. And they knew there would be no mercy from earthquakes. These stones needed to fit perfectly together.

And they do. Perfectly. It is a work of art.

The Twelve-Angled Stone is Cusco’s Mona Lisa. Its David. Its Beyoncé.

It’s a marvel of ancient engineering. A testament to human precision.

But that’s not the magic.

The magic is that people flock to this stone.

Now, you might think it’d be hard to spot a single stone in a long wall of equally gray, equally quarried, equally angular rocks. But it’s easy to find. You know why?

Because there’s always a mob of tourists crowding around it, jockeying for the best “me and the rock” selfie. People lovingly reach out to touch it, counting the angles like they’re performing a sacred ritual. One... two... ten... yes, it’s real. It’s really twelve.

And that is magic.

Trust me—I’m a teacher.

Because here’s the thing: topics that I could never get students to care about in a classroom—suddenly come alive out in the world.

I promise you, if I gave a lecture on the marvels of Incan stonework—on the engineering feats of precisely stacked rocks—my students would be asleep faster than you can say “load-bearing polygon.” They’d be drooling into their notebooks, spiritually if not physically deceased. Some could legally be called “comatose”!

But take that same group to that alley in Cusco, show them that wall, and introduce them to the most famous rock in Peru? They’d light up. They’d take pictures. Selfies. Close-ups. Emotionally complex portrait sessions. Their faces would run the entire gauntlet of human feeling as they smashed that shutter like they needed to fill their memory card immediately.

How does that happen? How does the same topic go from “please let me be knocked out by a falling whiteboard” to “I will remember this moment forever”?

I’ll tell you how.

There’s only one answer.

Because travel is magic.

End of story.