MACHU PICCHU

By Ricardo

So after our fun time in Nazca we headed to Machu Picchu to take a look at those ruins people never shut up about it.

 

 We first arrived to Cusco, the famous city many explorers from the early 1900’s talk about and found it to be very beautiful, although quite touristic now. It is a very big city and it’s really hard to drive there when you are towing a camper, as it has been the case in many cities in Central and South America so far.

 

(You can’t escape the ladies wearing the old traditional native attire that want to be in your pictures for some money)

We arrived there during the weekend when they were having a huge party in downtown, including parades and festivals, where people from kids to adults parade in the town and around the plaza dancing to the beat of the traditional Peruvian music. It was quite awesome to see!

 

 

We spent a couple of days in Cusco waiting to go to Machu Picchu. The train to the ruins (well, the city below the ruins which is called Aguas Calientes or City of Machu Picchu) costs nowadays about $150 there and back, which is ridiculous considering it only takes a few hours, so we discarded that possibility, especially since the tickets to the ruins themselves cost over $50 already!

We decided to go through the “back door” and drive to Santa Maria (or something like that) and then to a hydroelectric plant where you can park your car and do a gorgeous 10 mile walk through the mountains, following the railroad tracks. We first passed through Ollantaytambo, which it a small but very touristic town where you can also find a set of ruins. We didn’t enter these ruins because we did not consider spending the extra money and left most of it in Cubby (We had already paid in advance for the Machu Picchu tickets and only needed money for a night in a hotel and some food). We did take pictures of these ruins though because they are right there.

 

Past Ollantaytambo there are many ruins along the way, where you can just stop and climb them, and by many I mean many. We stopped at a few and also took some pics.

 

After that the ride gets a little cold (pretty high in elevation) and then quite dangerous and even a bit scary if you are not used to bad roads and sharps cliffs.

 

But we finally made it to the hydroelectric plant and after talking to a group of workers staying at a house so I could leave the car there, we started the gorgeous walk to the city of Aguas Calientes. During the hike we saw a lot of people coming from the ruins, but not many going to them like us, and I guess that was because it was getting late, and most people did that hike earlier in the morning.

The walk is just gorgeous! You are always surrounded by mountains and you have most of the time woods on the left side, and the river on the right. We really enjoyed it.

Later in the evening we finally arrived to the town.

 

After talking to some people, we decided to stay in a quite nice hotel near the Main Square, so we headed that way to leave all our crap and then walk in the town for a while.

Now let me tell you, we have seen many touristic towns during this trip, but this is one of the most exaggerated ones! Everything is laid out to welcome rich tourists that come to have a “South American rough and enriching experience”, but that want ALL the comforts they would have at home, hahahaa. The area where the town lays is simply amazing, including the rivers that go right through the town and the many pretty bridges you have to cross, but the pueblo itself is just the typical kind of town built just for tourists.

 

Anyway, after a few hours of walking through Aguas Calientes we decided to call it a night and went to our hotel to sleep well so we could get up early to visit the ruins.

The next morning we overslept a little bit so we got up quite in a hurry. By the way, the busses that take you from the city to the ruins (roughly 20 min) are about 20 bucks a person, so we decided the day before that we would hike up to the ruins (which takes about an hour, although it is a very rough climb!). We crossed the bridge after showing the guard our tickets and began the ascension.

Once at the ruins ticket gate we had to show again our tickets and our passports so we could be let in, so we stood in line for a while and made it inside. Now, I am sure you have all read and heard a lot about Machu Picchu so I am not going to bore you with a long account of the ruins itself. I will just say it is totally worth it, even though so many people go there that you really feel like you are in a shopping mall instead of ruins!

Needless to say, we had a great time; this place is really amazing and it has been a dream come true for me to have actually visited the lost city in this lifetime.  We took a thousand pictures of course and many of them were in the places that you always see on postcards and shit.

 

 

 

After several hours of exploring the ruins, we decided that it was time for us to leave, if we wanted to make it back all the way to where we left the car, and try to make it to Cusco that night. So we walked down from the ruins again, this time directly to the railroad tracks, and walked all the way back to the car. This day, after some calculations, we realized we walked more than 30 miles, so yeah, we were pretty tired. We made it to the car later in the evening and started driving back to Cusco, but I was too tired to drive all those hours back, so we just pulled over at the side of the road after a while (we didn’t have Cubby) and just slept in the car that night.

The next morning we arrived to Cusco, and saw an amazing parade (a continuation of the celebrations I spoke of before) with indigenous dances and shit. It was pretty awesome!

 

Later that day our friends Patrick and Noemi, the Swiss couple we crossed the Panama Darien gap with, sent me a message on Facebook to let me know they were also in Cusco, so we got together for a couple of beers and also to remember that crazy, dangerous and amazing journey so many months ago where I literally broke my ass, which let me tell you, still hurts!

Next post, Arequipa! Stay tuned because I hope this time we will catch up with these damn posts!