Machu Picchu

After a week in Cusco we got in contact with Simon and Tove again, the Swedish couple we met in Lima. We all hung out a few nights in a row, eating, drinking, and playing darts, and decided to go to Machu Picchu together. 

There are many ways of getting to Machu Picchu from Cusco. The most popular ways are The Jungle Trek, The Machu Picchu Train, and The Incan Trail.

All of these options are very expensive, so we were happy to hear that Simon and Tove were planning on doing the same thing we where; walking the train tracks.

            We had heard from a guy in Lima that you can walk the train tracks from a place called Hydroelectrica to Aguascalientes, the town at the base of Machu Picchu. First we had to get up very early in the morning and take a crammed taxi van from Cusco to a place called Santa Maria. The roads were similar to the one we took from Lima, and the drive was about 4 hours. Once in Santa Maria we switched to a taxi with what looked like a 16 year old driver. He drove us through the mountains for an hour and dropped us off in Santa Teresa.  From Santa Teresa we were supposed to find Hydroelectrica and start walking the train tracks to Machu Picchu, which would be easy enough; every taxi driver that drove by called out the window, “Hydroelectrica?!”  But we had heard that there were better ways to cross the river and make our way there then to take a taxi. With the help of a guy named Papa, (a little old man who was apparently the town drunk) we were able to find a suspension type footbridge that took as across the river and in the direction of Hydroelectrica. Once across we followed a stumbling Papa, with wet coca leaves spilling out of his mouth, up a steep trail that led to the road above the river where we paid him off and started walking. Perhaps a couple hundred yards down the road we hailed the fist van that came by and took the twenty-minute ride to the hydroelectric plant where we would start the last section of our journey towards the mysterious ancient city of Machu Picchu.

            The walk along the tracks was beautiful. It was only a two-hour walk to the town at the base of Machu Picchu and we did it on a warm and semi-rainy afternoon. The route brought us along the river and all the way around the mountain the ruins rested on top of, which was cool because we could look up a few times along the walk and get glimpses of the ruins from different angles. Several times along the tracks we would come across dogs walking, almost always in groups of two or three. It reminded me of the movie homeward bound because you could tell they we’re all friends. At one point near the end of the walk a couple of dogs stood up as we walked by them and walked with us for probably the last half mile into town. They weren’t starved and they didn’t seem to be looking for food. We were just all walking to the same place enjoying some new company. Stray dogs are absolutely everywhere in Peru.

            We arrived in Aguas Calientes at around 4 in the afternoon with plans to climb the mountain the following day to get to the ruins for sunrise. During the high season Aguas Calientes is a tourist trap. If you’re going to Machu Picchu the city is basically unavoidable so when the hotels and restaurants are filled they can charge pretty much whatever they want. Luckily for us we were there in the low season and the first hotel we walked into gave us 15 sole rooms with two beds, a TV, and a full bathroom. We paid about 6 dollars.

            We woke up the next morning in time to be at the foot of the ruins by 5:00am. Tourists have the option to pay $20 for a 5-minute bus ride to the top, or take the hour-long hike up the mountain by foot. 

The hike up was intense but undoubtedly worth it. We climbed through the jungle on a stone staircase with maybe 100 other backpackers. The sun was rising as we climbed and every once and a while we’d see bits of the ruins.

            When we finally reached the top we it felt like we had been spit out into a post card. I was standing in this image that I had been seeing in pictures for my whole life. It was a completely clear morning and the sunrays were beaming over the mountaintops and across Machu Picchu. We walked through the entire place throughout the morning, stopping several times to sit and relax. It was an amazing spectacle to just sit and look at. You wonder how they were able to accomplish such a massive amount of work so high up in the mountains. How did they get the stone there? Why?

            Before 11:00am we were heading back down to the base. Machu Picchu is something you want to get up early for. It was starting to get very crowded as we left. Not to say there weren’t a lot of people that morning, but it got increasingly busier as the day went on.  When we got to the bottom we headed straight back to the tracks and made the walk back to Hydroelectrica.

It was afternoon by the time we reached Santa Teresa and we decided to stay the night. We had heard of some hot springs there that, after all the walking, sounded amazing. It was another 20-minute walk from the city but we didn’t mind. It was an ascent into a river valley. We spent about 2 hours in the springs. It was raining pretty hard but the water was really warm. By the time we were ready to leave our hands all looked 100 years old.

Upon return to our hostel we discovered that the two pair of underwear we had laid out to dry had fallen out the window and onto the neighbor’s roof. Now we had to figure out a way to tell the owner this with our limited Spanish. We didn’t know how to say, “ My underpants fell out the window and are on your neighbors roof.” So Mike told him, “mis pantalones estan sobre la casa” which means, “my pants are over the house” The owner laughed and tried his best to understand what we were telling him. I eventually got him to give us a broomstick so we could try to reach them. The whole exchange was really funny and had us going all night (until we went to bed at 8:00pm) It had been a long day. The next morning we would make the long journey back to Cusco asleep in a taxi van.