track our trek

at last! now that we were in cusco, we were excited to make our pilgrimage to machu picchu...it would be the last major tourist attraction on our trip & it promised to be a trip highlight. and in light of its recently being named one of the new 7 wonders of the world, we figured we'd better get there quick before that new title ups the prices even more!
machu picchu is not easy to get to...lots of folks do the inca trail, a 5 day hike along the trail used by the incas long ago...there are actually many ruins along the way which are inaccessible to tourists except by way of the inca trail. alas, we knew were in no shape this time around to handle the 12-hour/day uphill hikes at high altitude and camping in the cold to get there. we'd recently heard horror stories of people getting stomach viruses and diarrhea along the way...when i say it's a 5-day hike...i mean it's a 5-day hike...you have no choice but to walk the whole way...whether you're running from both ends and dehydrated or not!! no thanks... i think it would require some very serious training to be ready for that! so we joined the bandwagon of tourists who sign up for two day/one night trips by bus and train...this means taking a 1 day bus tour through the sacred valley, then the tourist train to aguas calientes (the town at the foot of machu picchu) for 2-3 hours from there. the trip can be done in one day, by leaving cusco at like 4:30 am, but you spend about 10 hours traveling and only 2 hours at machu picchu. so we opted to spend the night in aguas calientes...it is a miserable town whose sole purpose is to handle tourist traffic to machu picchu...hundreds of restaurants with terrible tourist food and cheap ugly hotels...on the day of our visit to machu picchu, we woke up at 5:00 am to catch the first bus up the mountain. at that hour, the tourist buses are lined up in the rain and mist, idling and waiting to take off in a caravan up the windy muddy road. the reason you leave so early is to watch the sun rise over machu picchu, but it wasn't in the cards for us that day...in fact, our first few hours were fairly miserable in cold heavy rain climbing among the slippery rocks. but that didn't take away from the fact that the city is incredible!! and the mist and clouds actually made the light quite dramatic! we had a two-hour guided tour, after which we were free to explore on our own.
the city is in an amazing state of preservation, because it was never found by the marauding spanish. it is believed to have been abandoned by the 300 or so incas who were living there as other communities along the inca trail picked up and fled the invaders and carried their treasure to hide it in the jungles. it was discovered at the turn of the 20th century by a guy looking for the "lost" inca treasure. and it is incredible to learn about how sophisticated the city was...right down to the 3m wide channel that was left unbuilt because the incas knew it was a dormant fault line! after our tour, while we huddled under a leaky tent sipping overpriced, and not-very-chocolate hot chocolate, we contemplated calling it quits and heading back down to aguas calientes (a.c.), but we couldn't fathom what we would do for a whole day there! i'm glad to say we stuck it out in the rain, and were rewarded with warm sunshine later in the day. we met monique, from the netherlands who has been traveling all over south america for months. and we passed a nice afternoon chatting with her and watching the light change over machu picchu change below us before we hiked down for an hour and a half back to a.c....it was magical! one minute we were in the clouds, and the next minute, a cloud would shift to give another breathtaking view! that night we had dinner and headed up the hill to the hot springs everyone raved about (hence the town's name)...sounded like a good idea right? soak in the natural hot springs after a long day of hiking in the rain...that was an experience i could've skipped for sure! luke warm water of very questionable cleanliness, jammed full of tourists and locals in their underwear, and freezing outside air...can we say breeding ground for ringworm?? blech...jokes...