Watching months of anticipation, uncertainty, and planning pay itself off  was dreamy. I’ll certainly look back to this day for the rest of my life. The following is the narrative component to the information outlined in my first Peru post.

 

Day Four

4:00am I was more than ready to jump out of bed after a night of tossing and turning, listening to squealing children.

After rolls and jam and eggs, the five of us sped towards the bottom of town, crossing an orange bridge and turning left underneath it, continuing along the river past hordes of people waiting for an $8 bus to take them 20 minutes up the mountainside. At a larger bridge with a security checkpoint, we showed our original passports and printout tickets and moved on.

Before long, a series of grueling switchbacks took up all our energy.

Perfectly timed, we were in line at the entrance by 6:40 and then walked to the line for Huayna Picchu just in time, an add-on option that must be booked weeks in advance. 200 people are allowed to enter at each 7am and 10am. Thankfully we were in the first wave because MP was very hot. It’s about 45-90 minutes to ascend for all-encompassing views of the ruins and the rest of the valley. The other, less popular option is Machu Picchu mountain, taller and requiring 4 hours and a lot more endurance for a more distant (a.k.a. crappier) view. March 1st was during low season and others told me they booked this the day before.

 

 

More stairs. Up until this point, everything had been totally blanketed by clouds. I was fretting, but as it turns out, this place was entirely unpredictable and the views completely cleared for sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes. I recognized a marshy patch in the river and realized I could see the outline of the train tracks from the grind of yesterday evening, the switchbacks we had just taken at dawn. As it was rainy season, I was more than grateful.

I was high off the feeling of success, after investing months of mental and days of physical effort to make it to that moment.

Around the back a trail marker leads to “Gran Cavern” that is labeled as 90 minutes away, but took me and Will 40 at a casual place. I kept asking everyone where the temple of the moon was, but this was it, the two sites are next to each other. A path halfway up Huayna Picchu leads to this spot as well.

The trail took us to Temple of the Moon,  which was a pleasant surprise since I had been looking for it anyway. Unexpectedly unimpressed, Will and I enjoyed our usual sustenance of Clif bars and before long, others started trickling in. There was a small shrine to the far left in the dark with a few bills and coins and sprouted plants that need little light, but I’m not gonna lie I got creeped out and was expecting to see corpses if I kept looking.

The “cave” just downhill and to the right seemed to be some more ruins, I’m not sure if there really was a cave. Sand flies and sun got the best of us and we climbed back up many more flights of stairs, weaving through mossy jungle. By now Quentin had bumped into us.

An aside: I had been noticing the prominence of #peruvianhair on Instagram and I swear there was magic in the country’s climate. No matter how clean or dirty my hair was, it fell out of a bun in beautiful curls, including in the humid, sweaty jungle.

Once our trail rejoined the main path, we began the descent. I met an exceedingly cute Japanese couple and took a photo for them. Just as we were at the exit of HP, a third guy from Japan said doing Huchu Picchu was totally worth it. And knowing the unspoken rule is to always be thorough, especially with the efforts behind that day, we found ourselves with even more stairs and slabs of rock upwards.

This was much better and I recommend doing this first on a clear day, and not missing it on any day. No one else was there to photobomb us with elbows or tops of heads. It’s much lower, so the view is better. The cherry on top? All the clouds were gone and I could even look across to Machu Picchu mountain.

 

 

I was so truly happy.

By now it was around noon and we had the actual ruins to explore. Facing the main entrance, the right side had the Temple of the Sun, Royal Tomb, and this Intihuatana structure which can predict solstices. On the left, across from the central plaza which may or may not have grazing alpacas depending on your luck, was the less crowded residential sector. Further out are extensive agricultural terraces.

Losing energy and patience, I did my best to find the photographed structures from my guidebook. The official brochure is useless. Don’t do a handstand cause they’ll force you to delete your photos.

1:00pm We were hangry and wrapped up our visit, stamping our passports at the exit.

We didn’t slip on our way back to town. Having agreed to buy a one-way ticket out of this tourist nightmare, we bee-lined for the AC train station while many busses splashed mud on us. We watched other busses get washed and groomed until they were twice as clean as myself.

The train station was above ground level, reminding me of City Walk at Universal Studios, and purposely forced every traveler to wind through stalls and stalls of souvenirs so that they would ultimately cave to the temptation. At the ticket desk the one-ways ranged from $70-150, and we accepted our fate that our legs were not done working today.

I tried not to think about the eight miles I had to cover, preferably before dark. We wanted to nap and plug into social media, but instead we had more banana bread, walked past gringo cafes, and managed to find three course meals for around $4 each. Appetizers included nachos and guac, veggie mayo salad, cheese-smothered avocados, and Peruvian potatoes and eggs. The fuerte, or main courses we selected, were alpaca, lomo saltado (beef strips), and aji de gallina (chicken strips in creamy yellow sauce that mildly resembled curry). Had I known the pancakes with chocolate was really a quarter of a pancake, I would’ve picked a drink like chicha for my third item.

The three of us rushed to get our things together at Supertramp hostel and in order to save ten minutes, I bought a giant water bottle and asked them to throw in a lemon for good measure.

Hiking out somehow felt much faster than hiking in. I glared at the train as I was stuck straining my ankles on the gravel. I glared at the train as tunnels dripped on me. I was in disbelief as we crossed the same bridges I had been staring at from way above, just hours ago.

At the very end, there are several exit points downhill to the hidrioelectrica. Signs and stray dogs kept me company through a patch of jungle. I ended up reaching Quentin before Will, which was alarming. Five minutes later our friend showed up, pissed as hell because he had been waiting for me at a different exit point.

A collectivo took us back to the broken bridge, $1.40. Thank god they were still running. We followed the next driver down a dirt hill and over a suspension bridge, and yelled in frustration at the never ending hiking. Well, at least I did.

Perhaps the funniest moment of my time in Peru was what is now known as this taxi squat. Having agreed on 12 soles at the hilltop to be taken from Santa Teresa to Santa Maria, which was already a rip-off, people kept coming to our window, telling us that in order to leave now we had to pay 15, or keep waiting for other hikers. It was unlikely anyone was behind us, but we had accomplished all our trip goals and little else mattered. We said sure. Okay. Quentin said “acceptar” which sent the men, and then us, into uncontrollable giggles. A Peruvian in the passenger seat was doubled over, silently laughing at us too. We got out our phones and started deleting the bad photos. They got nervous, saying there was no other tourists behind us. And again we said fine. We were telling jokes, feeling high from hiking over 22 miles, and obnoxiously slurping at granadias. Did they expect us to pay up, as if they didn’t have to drive back to town, regardless of us riding along or not? By lowered the price to 13 and after I got in their face a little bit,  two backpackers evidently came out of the woods and walked past us, and finally yet another driver came up to our window and said 12 was good with him.

We got out and moved 10 meters into another vehicle. It was meant to be, our German friends Till and Luka from yesterday were already seated inside. The last two hikers I had just seen turned out to be Argentines who had met each other in Cusco. One guy had biked, as in pedaled a skinny bicycle, from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Cusco, Peru. Like through mountains and rivers.The taxi had to make frequent stops so he could vomit from motion sickness. The other guy was cute.

Probably the stinkiest taxi for miles around, it was a party now. We bumped back to Santa Maria as I asked the non-puking guy about Argentina while eating more fruit and canned salmon (…with my hands). Another transfer and 25 soles, or about $7, took us into the black night, with water gushing beneath our tires as they occasionally submerged in run-off, towards Cusco.

 

Title image- Will

Each post from this trip includes this map that I intensively labored to create from how I saw the trip in my mind: