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
No comments:
Post a Comment