Machu Pikachu

It’s not pronounced Machu Peechu, explained our guide, but Machu Peekchu. Either way, it is truly a stunning place.

Peru is full of Incan and pre-Incan ruins and archeological sites. Everywhere you look in the countryside there are Incan terraces and walls. Cusco was an Incan city and in the historical centre of the city you can see where the Spanish built their city on top of the Incan sites. The streets are narrow and made of stone with drainage channels. The bottoms of the buildings are walls that the Incas placed. They placed two tightly and perfectly packed rows of stones a foot apart and filled the spaces in between with gravel to make each wall. These walls went down into the ground for a metre and are earthquake resistant. The Spanish built their colonial-style buildings atop these sturdy bases. Temples became churches and palaces became municipal buildings. That was what happened to a city inhabited by Incans at the time of conquest.

Machu Picchu was a different story, but I am getting ahead of myself.

Our trip to Machu Picchu started with a bus ride from Cusco to Ollantaytambo to catch the train to Aguas Calientes, aka Machu Picchu Pueblo, a town built solely to service tourists visiting Machu Picchu. It’s named after the hot springs located at the very top of town. G & I took a trip there after lunch. All along the path there are bathing suits and towels for rent. It costs 3 soles to go in, there are concrete pools of different temperatures, and they have a bar just up the hill from the baths. If you sit in the baths and wave your arm they will bring you a beer or cocktail. There’s no form of transit but foot - up and down the steep hills of Aguas Calientes. It almost prepares you for Machu Picchu.

Our bus ticket to Machu Picchu was for the 6am bus so it was a very early morning. We got packed up, went to brekkie and headed down the hill to catch the bus. All access points to the site are heavily controlled. To get on the Machu Picchu bus or the train the previous day we had to show our passports and matching tickets repeatedly. This presumably keeps scalpers out of the game. We were all in line for the bus with our CEO passing out our tickets when G realized she didn’t have her passport. They were not letting her on the bus without it so she had to run back to our hotel at the far top of the hill to get it and there was no chance she would make our bus. We all got on our bus while Kati waited for G. to catch another bus.

The ride up to Machu Picchu was on a tightly packed, sweaty bus hugging winding switchback 2-way roads through the cloud forest. It dumped us off at the control point to attend to all the necessaries and to await Kati & G. Our Lares Trek companions had joined us by now and once we got into the site we would meet back up with our Inca Trail companions once they passed through the Sun Gate. The control area was chaotic with people trying to get their passports stamped with the Machu Picchu stamp and everyone eager to use the last bathroom before entering. The only toilets are outside the actual grounds and if you leave to come out you can’t return. My theory is that’s how they get people to leave. You have to drink so much water at altitude to keep going that you will eventually need to leave and pee.

The moment we all got in we had to climb stairs like mountain goats to get up to a terrace viewpoint. When the mist cleared for a moment we all gasped. There it was - Machu Picchu: Lost City of the Incas! The clouds parted and nestled into the mountains there were the remains of a city circling verdant green lawns. There are a lot of sections to the site but the part everyone has seen in photos is this. It’s the lost city because the Incans began to die out and abandoned it before the Spaniards came to Peru and they never found it. If they had, it would probably be another Cusco with colonial buildings built on the ruins. There is a quarry on site where they got the stones to build the buildings and the impossible retaining walls to keep it from sliding down the mountain. There are huge gardening terraces to grow vegetables 3 months of the year and most of our crew went out to see the Inca Bridge. This is a narrow windy path along a sheer cliff face with no guardrail that takes you along an Incan trail that contains a wooden bridge they had been able to remove to keep their enemies from accessing the land. Some of our companions were quite nervous about the narrow paths and huge drops and with good reason. We were told that a tourist died while we were there from falling over a cliff. After the Inca Bridge we had a guided  tour of the city. We learned that Incans had bathrooms in their houses with drainage systems and they had no words for numbers or furniture because they didn’t use either. Their belongings and sacred objects were kept in trapezoidal niches in the walls. 

The entire time clouds would drift in and out obscuring part or all of the site, giving it a magical aura. The entire experience was incredible.

To top off the magic of the day, it turns out that two of our companions became engaged the day before while finishing the Lares Trek and we all went out to celebrate the day and them with Camino Inka cocktails, crispy guinea pigs (not me) and some frisky dance moves from D before taking the train and van back to Cusco.