Deep Into the Mountain Sound

On the Monday morning, we woke up before sunrise (second day in a row of doing this after a red eye flight), and headed down to breakfast to fill up on not-so-delicious food before heading up the mountains. We were pretty excited until Dave realized he had lost his debit card, which was likely still in the ATM in the Cuzco supermarket. After a bit of a panic, he managed to get through to Chase from the depths of the Sacred Valley (thank you T-Mobile!) and we were ready to head out.

We queued up for about half an hour for the shuttle bus (as of course you've got hundreds of people also heading up at dawn), which then drives around twisty, thin curves at quite a fast pace, and consequently gave me a minor heart attack.  Here's a view of the twisty bus road from the top:

After semi-attempting to hire a guide at the entrance, we decided not to bother (and to just mooch off of other people's guides) and started climbing the steep steps to get our first views of the famous site.

Good morning, sunshine!

Steep was an understatement

The money shot!

The funniest part of this experience was right at the beginning when you enter upon the famous site in the photo above. Everyone thinks that this is the only opportunity to get this shot, so everyone is going crazy trying to get their photos in the first 5 minutes of arrival, like so:

One of you

One of me

One of us

After picking our jaws up from off of the floor, we turned around to discover another amazing find - llamas! I had been rather upset that I hadn't seen any alpacas or llamas during the trip so far - I had imagined they'd just be walking around Cuzco like the locals, but this had not been the case. Machu Picchu had a few of them on the grounds and I might have been so excited about this that I sort of forgot about my surroundings.

LLAMA!

Llama trying to chat up Dave while sunscreening

Its all about the shadows

I think that a lot of people misinterpret the layout of Machu Picchu (as did I.) Its a huge area - a city of ruins, not just the famous mountain peak which is in all of the photos (including mine above.) That mountain is called Huayna Picchu, and only 400 people are allowed to climb it daily. There was no way in hell you could get me to climb that thing, but for your viewing pleasure, check out a zoomed image of it with some climbers to follow -

It's that big one on the right, you know, the famous one:

Crazy people climbing:

There is also a mountain in the other direction that is actually called Machu Picchu, but we didn't trek it (well, we accidentally started to go that way but got stopped because we didn't have tickets for it - this worked out in our favor because we found a little hidden spot that sold water bottles - they don't sell food on site, drinks are impossible to find, and bathrooms are outside of the entrance, so once you've made you're way in, it takes a lot of effort to go back.)

The site is absolutely enormous, with several options of treks to take. We decided to start with the walk to the Sun Gate - this is where the Incas would first arrive and see the grounds from up top after hiking the Inca trail. This "road" was scary as shit - it was about 4-5 feet wide, all uneven rocks, uphill, and if you slip, you fall into the valley and die. It took and hour and a half to walk this road to get to the gate. I pretty much gripped the wall the whole time, but in the end we made it.

Taking a mid-hike break:

A few steps backwards and BYE BYE!

Living on the edge

Are we there yet?

Made it!

I couldn't believe the amount of older people hiking this trail - I'm talking people in their 70s+, it was pretty amazing.

Here's a view of the Sun Gate Trail to give you an idea of what we walked (if you can see it going horizontally across the mountain)

Here's a zoomed in image of the Sun Gate from down below:

We exited the grounds for lunch, where wild dogs were swarming around us the whole time (I felt bad but once you give one dog food, you have to feed them all, ya know?) By the way, wild dogs roam around all over the place in Peru, just like in Bangkok (all well behaved...the scary ones are in Bolivia.)

On the way back in after lunch, we got our passports stamped with a pretty Machu Picchu stamp - yay for tourism!

In the afternoon, we checked out the agricultural areas and the "town"

One of the coolest things we saw were the snow-capped mountains which were absolutely breathtaking amongst all of the green:

Another breathtaking view:

The rolling hills actually looked like Laos, which I was not expecting at all

(I borrowed this image of Laos from the internet since my personal photos are crap):

Another surprising thing was that with the capped amount of entrants, and the grounds being so enormous, there were multiple areas and times of the day where you were alone - literally no tourists in site. We even laid in one spot and took a brief nap, because hey, we were tired alright?

Mid-afternoon, it was finally time to head back down to Aguas Calientes to catch the train back to Cuzco. Perhaps the most bizarre part of the trip occurred at this time. On the train, the staff took our experience to a whole new level - now keep in mind, these were the people on the train who collected our tickets and served the food and drinks. Mid-way through the return trip, the first guy came out dressed as some type of clown (part of a traditional story), scaring people (Dave being one which was too funny), and then dancing in the aisle with some of the girls in the middle. Then, the other two people held a fashion show right down the aisle! They were modeling clothing made out of alpaca wool - like, literally modeling, Tyra Banks style. I kind of loved it.

Clown dude:

Clown dude and fashion models:

I was pretty nervous that our cab driver from the day before wouldn't be at the Poroy station upon our arrival to pick us up and return us to civilization. When we exited the station, there were dozens of drivers holding up signs for their passengers, but our was not around. A few steps further, and there were at least another 30 or so drivers that were physically locked out of the train station clawing at the gates for passengers (these were the illegal drivers, I presume), and low and behold, our guy was actually out there with my name on the sign!

We made it back to Cuzco, and ended the night in the cutest pizza place that just had 4 tables and a huge pizza oven. If you ever go to Cuzco, check out La Pizza Carlo - yum yum yum!

Up next - Sexywoman and a morning of forging vaccination documents.

Current music: Oasis - Morning Glory

Peru (Be-Doo-Be-Doo)

It's been a little over a month since we returned from our South American adventure. We left from Newark on a Friday evening with a stopover in Miami - I'm convinced we were the only mid-night flight out of there as there was literally no one around as we trekked across the terminals for a good half hour (and what felt like 5 miles) until we finally found our Lima flight, departing at 2:00 am. Well, one good thing that came out of this was that Dave found a Dunkin' Donuts where they still served his favorite sandwich on a French roll, rather than on pretzel bread which is now the menu's norm. Here's Dave relaxing in between terminals:

After the red eye flight on the lovely LAN Airlines, we landed in Lima, had an airport coffee, and hopped on the plane to Cuzco. Upon arrival, the first ad you see is for altitude sickness pills which is kind of hilarious:

The only stand that seemed to have an official taxi service was a complete ripoff, so we found some guy outside to take us into the city. After we left, it became apparent that he didn't know where our hotel was, and when we finally got into the center of town, he dropped us off somewhere that was not our hotel. It turned out that our hotel was located in an undriveable alley, but still he could have gotten us closer (seriously, it was difficult walking around with a suitcase in a high altitude and no sense of direction.) When we finally found our hotel (Unaytambo), they seated us in their lovely, but freezing courtyard to fill in our documents, and gave us cocoa-leaf tea (yes, that's the same cocoa leaf that is used to make cocaine.) Locals and tourists either chew the cocoa leaves or put them in the tea to "help with the altitude sickness." I drank it at every opportunity I had, "just in case," but no, there was no high gotten off of this very mild tea.

Cocoa tea:

Immediately after settling in, we went on a mission to find the office that sold the Machu Picchu tickets. I had been trying for the past 3 weeks to buy them online, but I continuously received processing errors (as did most people on the Trip Advisor forums.) We walked around in the rain and cold (it felt like it was in the 40s), and after asking a few people directions in my high school level Spanish, we finally located the office on some random back street. On the door was a small hand-written sign posted in Spanish saying that the office had moved...grrrr! I shouldn't have been too worried, as Machu Picchu lets in about 3,000 people per day, and the day before, there were still over 1500 tickets left, but I did not want to get all the way there and not get in because it had sold out. After a ton of more walking and figuring out where we had to go, we found the new ticket office, and they were actually able to process our tickets. Phew!

Starving, but finally relaxed, we had lunch - I had a beef steak which was very tasty, and Dave had an alpaca steak (also quite tasty - sorry, guys.) We walked around Cuzco and the Plaza de Armas, bought Alpaca clothing (which I actually had to wear most of the time because I was so cold), and got "suckered" into getting $7 one hour body massages. The massage room was freezing, but totally fine when we got under the covers. And might I add that they had us put our belongings under the tables which we stuck our heads through, so we could keep an eye on our stuff the whole time - nice touch!

Plaza de Armas:

Following that, we went to the Museo del Pisco, which was a Pisco Sour bar (the national drink of Peru made with egg whites.) Some of the tourists got to go behind the bar and actually make Pisco Sours, I was definitely having pisco envy. After some exploration in the local supermarket (we found cocoa candies and quinoa cereal for sale), we were so exhausted that we went back to the room and skipped dinner.

Pisco sours:

My new Alpaca hat:

When we booked the hotel, we had selected a double room, and after the booking went through, they notified us that only a room with twin beds was available the first night. Sleeping in the same bed was an absolute necessity due to the freezing cold, but this was NOT comfortable after a red eye flight. They had a portable heater, but between that and the people having a good ole time on a Friday night outside, I barely got any sleep. I will give them two thumbs up for the hot shower (I made sure to book places that had reviews stating that there were hot showers, as many places do not actually have this), as well as a nice little breakfast where they brought you eggs however you liked them cooked. Also, to emphasize how cold it was, the people who worked at the front desk all wore winter coats while they worked.

Anywhooo, the tourist books all say to have the hotel call a taxi for you whenever possible, which is what we did when departing the next morning. This didn't appear to be a legitimate taxi (no signage depicting it was), and the driver also tried to overcharge us for the ride to the Poroy train station (luckily, the hotel staff told me how much it should cost so I bargained him back down with no issue.) When he dropped us at the station, he asked when we were coming back from Machu Picchu because he wanted to pick us up. We hadn't made any arrangements for the ride back, and it's not like you can just hop on a bus when you get off the train, so I again tried to explain in my elementary Spanish that we were coming back the next day on the Vistadome train with only the departure time rather than arrival, and gave him only my name - fingers crossed we were going to get back to Cuzco from Poroy (remember this story for later.)

The train to our next destination was the mid-level train (in between the cheaper backpacker train, and not even close to the Hiram Bingham which is owned by the Orient Express - rides each way cost $400 a pop on that!) Our train was comfortable with leather seats, delicious snacks and nice Peruvian music with tidbits of information provided along the way. This journey (on any of the 3 trains) is notorious for being the most expensive train for the distance you are going - for us, about $90 each way for a three hour ride that is actually less than 60 miles from it's destination - but hey, it's Machu Picchu so I can't complain.

Awaiting our meal (in my alpaca sweater):

YUM!

The train had windows on the ceiling so you could see the mountains through them:

More views:

The train takes you to the town of Aguas Calientes which is at the foot of Machu Picchu (you can't actually see MP from there.) We chose to stay there for a night so that we could get an early head start the next morning. Aguas is a complete backpacker town - tons of restaurants, drink specials, a souvenir market, hostels, and places that solely sold you a hot shower. Dave found this hotel and it was brand new, located right between the train station and the river (and a great value, as is everything in Peru.) Here are some views of the river taken by us hanging out of our window:

We pretty much had the whole day to walk around the town. They've got a few nice bridges (that were very scary once you stood on the actual planks), so I made sure to take some photos on them:

Me:

Whee!

Apparently, I like to pose this way when I wear this jacket, like at Glastonbury last year:

But, I digress...

Quinoa is a big thing in Peru, so I had some quinoa risotto, which was okay, and we were served Coke Zero in wine glasses:

The train goes through the town so we also watched that in excitement while we ate:

Here's a sign for a hot shower (top right):

Here's the main road that is way steeper than it looks:

This town is known for their hot baths (hence the name Aguas Calientes.) I had read many mixed reviews about the thermal baths online, mostly negative, but I was thinking that everyone was being really prissy, complaining that it was full of stinky people who had just come down from trekking Machu Picchu + locals who were literally bathing in the lukewarm bath-like water. We decided to do it anyway, because frankly, when in Aguas Calientes...?

On the way to the baths, you can rent bathing suits (just writing that made me throw up in my mouth), as well as towels. Here we are on our way to the baths:

When we got there, they would not allow us to wear our sneakers over to the baths (flip flops only), which I did not have, so I also threw up in my mouth from that (don't worry, I was extremely careful in the changing room to never let my body or my clothing touch the floor, ewwwwwwwww, my worst nightmare!!!!)

The baths literally turned out to be 5 little pools, the warmest one (not hot, warm) was the most crowded so we stayed in there for about 20 minutes. The temperature was tolerable and my arm hair turned yellow from the sulphur, but it was totally fine after the terrible expectations I had from the reviews. Not to mention the view was spectacular. 

Here's a shot of the pools (taken when we were leaving): 

This was half time during a local football match as well:

In the evening, all of the restaurants were selling 4x1 drinks. Yes, I said 4x! We went for 2x1 though because we wanted to live to actually see Machu Picchu the next day.

Here's the town square:

The restaurant had all these tchotchkes on the table, including Jenga:

4x1 baby! 

End of part I - Macchu Picchu next!