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!

Nazca Lines

For all the hype about the Nazca lines – stories about how the lines came to be, intriguing documentaries on TV, weird supernatural events said to have occurred there – we wanted to go check it out for ourselves. Unfortunately, the best way to see the lines is to contract a private plane ride over the area, which was, first of all, out of our budget, and second, an impossibility for Ricardo who hates planes. Even I would be hesitant to get on one of those small planes knowing the lack of safety regulations in Peru.

But we heard there was also a mirador (lookout tower), from which you can view some of the lines and still get an understanding of the place. So we headed in that direction, once again through dry, sandy Peruvian desert.

We arrived to the lookout tower, which is just alongside the main road from Lima to Nazca. It was an old metal tower, with a couple guards and people selling handicrafts underneath, and a handful of tourists climbing up, not really very mindblowing. 
 

They charge 2 soles, which is less than a dollar, to climb up. From the top, you can look down onto the two Nazca images immediately below – one is supposedly a tree, and the other is two hands.

the tree (roots to the top left of the picture, the rest are branches)

 

the "hands" are behind me

 

I was utterly unimpressed. Ok, maybe I missed out because I didn’t take the plane ride and only saw two of the hundreds of Nazca images. But they were very shallow lines and the images weren’t really on the grand scale that you imagine when you hear the stories. The shapes were interesting, but I felt like I could have made a Nazca image myself just by dragging my shoe in the dirt. According to the guards we asked, the lines don’t erode because there is so little wind in the Nazca valley. The images have been there, supposedly, for longer than anyone can remember – no one knows how or why they are there. 

Maybe we were disappointed because of all the hype about Nazca. Stories abound about the images being created by beings from another planet so that when they came to visit earth they see the images as the spaceship is landing…that they could not possibly have been made by humans because humans can’t even see them except from the air. Except that there are mountains around, and you can see the images from the mountains, and also it seems quite feasible to me that people could have built structures like the tower we were on to view them as well. The question remains, why would people make these images? Well, why do people do any kind of artwork? It looks pretty. The designs that we could see from the mirador were quite simple, so probably given the chance to see the others, I would have been more impressed.

If you ask me, I found the mountains and the sunset to be much more spectacular than the actual Nazca lines.





We asked the guards at the mirador if we could stay the night in the parking lot there (after all, it might not be too late to experience some supernatural phenomenon, we thought). They said no at first, that it’s not allowed, but after some begging on our part, they told us that there were no guards at night to bother us if we stayed, but we had to promise them we would stay in the parking lot and wouldn’t go to the lines during the night to mess with them.

We set up our chairs in the parking lot and opened a bottle of wine to enjoy the colorful desert sunset. Incredible.

It wasn’t too long until our "supernatural phenomenon" occurred, though…Ricardo started feeling sick and was very sick all night. We don’t know if it was something he had eaten, or some Nazca voodoo, but it was a rough night.

The next day we stayed in the parking lot for most of the morning, and then finally got moving on down the road towards the city of Nazca. On the way is another viewpoint, this time a small hill you can climb to see more lines. These aren’t images, but mostly straight lines crisscrossing the land.

on the hill

We overheard a tour guide talking about these lines and how they may be airplane/spaceship guidelines. What do you think?

 

From there, we headed into Nazca city to recuperate for a couple days before heading on. It was a nice town, actually; I enjoyed it.

plaza de Nasca

There happened to be a small parade and flag ceremony in town…

The band had the music clothespinned to their backs.  Good idea guys, haha!

During our stay, we also visited some nearby ruins. One was called "Cantalloc" – it had an extensive aquaduct system with many of these circular wells –

 

 

 

The next site was called "Los Paredones" – this was very close to the city itself. This was an Incan city, and it is supposed that the ancient city probably extended much farther, but the current town of Nazca is built over top of it.

While we were there, the place was completely deserted, except for a boy who wandered up and offered to give us a tour. Well, how can you refuse this guy?

Our tour guide, Jefferson, told us all he knew about these ruins – he was actually quite good. He explained all about the section that was an Incan "jail" where they would lock up the lazy people who wouldn’t work, haha.

Jefferson even brought us to a "mummy museum" he knew, which was actually a little shelter in the backyard of a woman living nearby. Inside, there were old skulls, bones, hair, and pottery, most just thrown unorganized in cardboard boxes or on shelves.

The relics are said to be Incan artifacts taken from the ruins site. Some of the skulls even had skin and long hair still attached. Creepy!

Our last stop before heading out of Nazca was the "Las Agujas" (The needles) viewpoint, from where you can see more Nazca lines, this time in a zigzag pattern.

 

In the end we did enjoy our visit to Nazca, even though we didn't do the plane ride over the lines – it was more than just the legends say about the mystery of the lines…there are plenty of other things to see and do. A cool place to visit.

Next, we would head east in the direction of the most famous tourist attraction in Peru – Cusco and Machu Picchu. But that’s for another post!