The tour company got me to the train at 6am. It was very comfortable. It was similar to some of the trains that I have taken to go from Washington to New York City. The train ride is about 3 hours, assuming that everything works correctly (which it usually does. I was on a passenger train, and I believe that it is an express. We didn't make any stops between Cusco and Agua Caliente, which is the town at the foot of Machu Picchu. There were a number of stations that we passed though, so there is probably a local train. The train is the only way to get to these little towns and stations, there is no road. You can't drive to Machu Picchu. It is very isolated.
There is another way to get up to Machu Picchu though. Some tour companies operate a helicopter ride. It only takes a half hour, and I bet that the view is spectacular. It costs about $150 round-trip, as opposed to $50 for the train. The other thing that people do is to hike the entire Inca trail, which takes 3-5 days. I am sure that is an incredible hike, but I didn't have 3-5 days to waste on it.
The train take a while to get out of the Cusco valley. They have to use 6 switchbacks to get over the first mountain. After that it is pretty smooth sailing. They serve Coca tea on the train (surprise). I was told that the train ride is one of the most impressive in the world, because you get to see the climate changing. Cusco is high and dry, and the mountains are brown and scrubby. There are some farms and such. It reminded me a lot of Western Washington State. As you proceed east however, you start to get to the western limits of the Amazon rain forest. The terrain becomes more green and forested. The train follows the Ullambamba river, which is a tributary of the Amazon. It was a nice ride, and I did take some pictures from the train window.
Click here to see some pictures of rural Peru
There were a lot of other amazing views from the train, but it was tough to take pictures because everything was moving. I was also tired from getting up really early two days in a row, so I just relaxed.
Once we arrived at Agua Caliente, we were taken off the train and bustled along to a set of waiting buses. There were a lot of people trying to sell souvenirs, but I was able to beat my way through them. I will talk about Agua Caliente a bit later.
The buses were nice, and fairly new, and we started up the mountain. It was a very long and very windy road to get up to the top. The trip takes about 20 minutes, and I would not suggest it for anyone with severe vertigo.
Click here to see a picture of the road to Machu Picchu
Once I got to the top of the mountain, I checked into the small hotel that they have there. They also have a restaurant, bar, café, knick knack store, telephones, bathrooms, etc. They don't have any peasants though.
My tour book said that Machu Picchu was beyond description (and then proceeded to spent 20 pages describing it), and that it was the most impressive sight in the Western Hemisphere. I have been a lot of places in the Western Hemisphere, and I have to admit that Machu Picchu is certainly impressive. I have never seen anything quite its equal.
Machu Picchu is the name of the highest mountain in the immediate area. It means 'Old Mountain'. There is also Huanu Picchu, or 'Young Mountain'. There are other mountains that apparently don't have names. The ruins are located on a nameless mountain near Machu Picchu. No one knows what the Incas called their city.
Machu Picchu was not the capital of the Inca empire, in fact most historians now believe that it was not a very important place at all. What makes Machu Picchu so valuable for anthropologists is that the Spanish never found it. In most other places, the Spanish would waltz into a Inca city, kill the people, steal the gold, burn it down, knock over the rubble, and then build a church. That is why more Inca ruins look like Spanish churches. However, this city was pristine and untouched by European influence.
Machu Picchu was a spiritual city, in the same way that Mecca is a spiritual city for the Muslims. It was located at the end of the 'Inca Trail', which is a stone road that goes for 80 km, that once linked Cusco with a number of smaller cities and outposts. Many Incas made pilgrimages to Machu Picchu in order to view the wonderful temples they have there. Most of the Inca kings (called 'Inca') made pilgrimages there. The city was abandoned about 500 years ago, around the time of the Spanish conquest.
In excavating the site, archeologists found from skeletons that the city was probably populated with about 90% women. These were most likely virgins who tended the sacred temples. They also apparently 'tended' the high priests of the city, who would often bed 5 or 6 of them at a time. Despite the fact that the city was designed to support a number of temples, it did have housing and fields to make it self sufficient.
Well, enough background for now, here are some pictures of Machu Picchu.
Click here to see pictures of Machu Picchu
The ruins themselves are nice, but let's face it, they are just a bunch of knocked over stone huts. They don't have the technological impressiveness of say the Sphinx in Egypt. What makes the Machu Picchu site 'the most impressive thing in the Western Hemisphere' is not the ruins themselves, but the surroundings. There is an old real estate joke that says that the three most important factors in selling a house are location, location, and location. That is certainly true of Machu Picchu. The place is amazing. It is not quiet rainforest, because they do not get enough rain, but there are a lot of rain forest species living there. It is termed 'cloud forest' because of its height. It was completely majestic. I have never seen a mountain like the ones here.
Click here to see pictures of the mountains
It is a tremendous technological achievement on the part of the Inca to have built such a large complex where they did. Hundreds must have fallen to their deaths. It was supposedly built at this site because it is very defensible. The only way in or out (except for the new road) was the small Inca trail.
Machu Picchu was designed as a holy city, as such it has a number of temples and offering sites. Since the Incas practiced polytheism, there are temples for a number of gods. Almost every house and temple had a series of alcoves. The guide said that these alcoves were used to show off idols. I believe that some of them were used to store clothes, food, etc. The houses did not have a lot of closet space. Some new age people believe that these alcoves were used by the Incas to collect energy that was being transferred to Machu Picchu across a ley line from Tibet. The new age folks believe that you can harness the energy by sticking your head (or a crystal) into an alcove and saying 'oooommmm'. Our guide said that these people were nuts.
Click here to see pictures of the temples
They also had running water at Machu Picchu. They collected some streams and fed them into a series of pipes that led through the city and emptied into 16 fountains that were in series (the water from the first drained into the second, which drained into the third, etc). The first fountain was considered holy water and was only used by the high priest. By fountain 15 or 16, people were bathing in it.
Click here to see pictures of the fountains
They also had a bunch of llamas up there. I was unable tell if they were wild llamas, if they were owned by nearby farms, or if they were just there to sucker tourists into taking more pictures. I took some pictures anyway.
Click here to see pictures of the llamas
As I said, they grew all of their own food up there on the mountain. Their system of fields was quite impressive. They didn't grow grass like there is today, they grew all sorts of roots and fruits and psychedelic drugs. It is interesting to note that there is no natural dirt at the top of the mountain. All of the dirt that is there now was carted up by workers. It must have taken a long time. Some people wonder how they could have afforded to spend all of those man-hours building this place. It turns out that instead of taxes, each citizen was required to spend 7 weeks in the service the their lord. The Spanish exploited this by changing the service time to 52 weeks per year.
Click here to see pictures of the fields
The tour lasted all morning. About 12:30 we finished up. The tour guide was really good and spoke English well. He was a full blood native though and he really hated the Spanish, the Catholics, and everything else European. He was very nice to us though.
Then it was time for lunch. I had a voucher to eat at the restaurant, and it was buffet style. It was fairly crowded, but the food as pretty good. They said that it was all safe to eat because the hotel caters to rich tourists. I was pretty lonely though, as I had come to Machu Picchu by myself. Everyone else appeared to have come in small groups of two or three. Oh well. While I was eating lunch it began raining very hard. I went back to my hotel. The rain stopped by 2pm.
The train back to Cusco left at 3pm. It is possible to do the tour in one day and then leave without staying for the night. I think that you will miss a lot if you do that though. I was going to stay, so I had the afternoon to look around. The tour guide said that the two most popular things to do were to walk up to the Gate of the Sun, and to hike up Huanu Picchu. The Gate of the Sun walk was about 1 hour each way, while the Huanu Picchu walk was about 2. Machu Picchu closes at 5pm, so I decided to take the short walk.
The Gate of the Sun is connected spiritually to the Temple of the Sun. It is a mile or two away. You can take the Inca Trail all the way up there, so it is not too arduous. It was fairly hot though, but still drizzling, which made the trip a little unpleasant. But the views were incredible though. I took most of the pictures of the mountains during the walk
Click here to see pictures of the Gate of the Sun
It started to get dark, and I came back to the hotel. I had spoken to a British couple and they told me that they could not get a room at the hotel on the mountain. They had to go down to Agua Caliente. I told them that it was probably because I knew people at the US embassy.
The hotel was very nice, almost up to US standards, but I don't know if I would recommend it. First of all, I hear that it is pretty expensive (although I have no idea how much since it was packaged with the rest of the tour). Secondly, there is very little to do at the top of the mountain after dark. Agua Caliente is a crappy town, but it is a town, with restaurants and bars and people. The top of the mountain is very quiet. The last bus down leaves at about 5pm, so you can't get off the mountain until the next morning. There are about 30 rooms in the hotel, and about 25 had been taken up by a tour group that had a private party. That left very few people for me to interact with. I had a few beers in the hotel bar and went to bed early. I was tired anyway.
I was scheduled to take the 3pm rain back to Cusco the next day, so I felt that I would have some time to look around some more. According to my guide, the Gate of the Sun was the best thing to do outside of the ruins, but there were two more things to look at. You could scale Huanu Picchu, which was 'safe' and really beautiful, or you could go around the back of Huanu Picchu and see the 'Temple of the Moon', and a huge number of orchids. They said that the two walks would take a total of 4 hours. I 6am, and was done with breakfast by 8am, so I figured that I would have plenty of time for the trip before I had to catch my train back to Cusco.
One nice thing about staying at the top of the mountain is that you get a head start. The first buses from Agua Caliente don't start arriving before 8am, and the trains don't come in until about 10am. If you show up before 8am, you will be the only one at the mountain. It costs $10 to get into Machu Picchu, but only $5 for the second day. The Peruvians consider the site to be a national treasure, but there is no requirement to have a guide. They do have some security workers who will yell at you if you try to climb on things though.
I walked through the ruins to the head of the trail up to Huanu Picchu. The trail quickly splits in two directions, one to the summit, and one to the Temple of the Moon. I decided to go to the Temple of the Moon first.
The trip was an arduous one. It starts off on the same mountain trail that leads to the summit, which I will talk about it a minute. After a while though it starts to descend into a jungle-like area. There is dirt instead of stones, there is no precarious cliff to fall off, and there are trees and bushes. It is very rainforesty. There is not much of a view, and you do descend quite a bit, so not many people go this way. It was worth it though. After about 45 minutes of walking, the trail opens up to the Temple of the Moon. No one really knows what the temple was for, but it seems to be aligned with the rise of the moon over the horizon. It consists of only a few building, a cave, and some terraces. It is not as impressive in scale as the main ruins. However, the buildings are all really well made, and no one goes here, so everything is pretty pristine. I walked around for a half hour before another person showed up. In my opinion, it was the most interesting part of the whole tour.
Click here to see pictures of the Temple of the Moon
It was a long way back up from the Temple of the Moon. I was very tired. It was also raining and hot, which made things rather uncomfortable. I considered just going back to the hotel, but I still had a few more hours to kill. I started up the trail to Huanu Picchu. Hiking to the top of that mountain was the only thing impressive thing that I did during the whole trip. It was very vertical, very hard, and very scary. If the guide thought that this was a 'safe' hike, I would hate too see what a dangerous hike is like. There are many places where falling to your death is a real possibility. I would not suggest this hike unless you are in good health and are not scared of heights at all. I met a guy from Switzerland who was giving up! I don't want to give the military a boost, but there is one thing that they do teach you. They learn that even if you are too tired to continue, and you are too scared to continue, you can still continue. I took this advice to heart while climbing. I kept wanting to stop, but I kept saying to myself that I could go 'just one more step'. It was very frightening, and tiring.
At the top there is a huge set of Inca ruins! I was amazed at the amount of stuff they had up there. I mean, I barely made it, and I had Powerbars, hiking boots, and guardrails. How the Inca got up there while carrying loads of brick I will never know. Many must have died. I bet that it would have been really incredible to have lived up there though. Unfortunately, it was very cloudy, so you couldn't look down and see the main Machu Picchu ruins, but it was still worth the trip up there.
Click here to see pictures of Huanu Picchu
I made it down from the mountain by noon. I was really tired, and very thirsty. I drank a bottle of water and another bottle of soda as soon as I got to the hotel. Then I got on a bus and went down to Agua Caliente to start the trip home.
OK, lets go home,
Part 5: Going Back
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If for some reason you think that I'm a great writer, and you like scary, conspiracy-laden, psychological thrillers, you can read my novel, City of Pillars, published by The Invisible College Press. It has nothing to do with Peru though. PS: I use my middle name as my nom de plume, but it's still me.