The Road Less Traveled

The alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. Breakfast at the hotel was from 5:00 to 9:00. The first bus left for Machu Picchu at 5:30 a.m. We wanted to be on that bus because we wanted to get up there early to enjoy the site before the crowds got there. They usually arrive on the train from Cuzco around 9 or 10 and leave by 2:00 p.m. We had also heard that sunrise over Machu Picchu was beautiful. Finally, we wanted to have time to do as much as possible before our train left at 4:20 for Ollantaytambo.

We had breakfast, checked out, and walked to the bus station. We had bought our Machu Picchu entrance tickets the night before. I waited in line while Kitty bought the bus tickets.  Two busloads of people were in front of us, so we didn’t get on a bus until well after 6:00 a.m.

A  GUIDED TOUR OF MACHU PICCHU

While we were waiting in line for the bus, I saw the woman who had offered us a tour of Machu Picchu the day before. I saw her again in the bathroom, and again waiting outside the bathroom. I started to believe it was our destiny to have her as a tour guide. Kitty and I approached her. We explained we had seen the site yesterday, and we were interested in seeing only certain things we hadn’t found on our own.  We agreed on a price of 100 soles. For a group of two, that was $15 a person.

She introduced herself as Esbet, which I assumed was a variation on Elizabeth.  Then she explained a rock protuberance as “mala” restoration.  I confused the Spanish word “mala” (bad) with the Russian word “mala” (small).  After Kitty corrected me, I laughed at my mistake and then explained to Esbet why I was laughing. Esbet in turn told us that her aunt loved Russia and that was how she got her name. “Esbet” was actually the shortened, Spanish version of “Svetlana.” 

Esbet started our tour at the colcas, and pointed out that the aqueduct we had seen the day before was also the dividing line between the agricultural and religious sectors of Machu Picchu.  We saw the Royal Mausoleum, two tall, smooth slanted rocks with jagged crocodile-like teeth inside which sacrifices had been made.  We also saw the ceremonial spring and the temple to the air.  The Incas paid respect to the four main elements—sun, air, water, and earth.

Our next stop was the Royal Chamber. We saw the space where the king’s bed of grass and llama skin would have been laid. We also saw the royal bathroom, which was strictly for bathing. 

We went to the Temple of the Three Windows again. This time we learned that the windows reflected light onto a stone with three angles cut on the left (the world above, the present world, the underworld) and three angles on the right (past, present, and future).  At noon on the winter solstice on June 21, the light shines through the window and the shadow from the rock contains all six angles perfectly.  During the rest of the year the shadow is not as clear. 

We also went to Intiwatana and the Temple of the Condor again (without taking the scary path down the mountain from Intiwatana).  We walked with Esbet to the main entrance and gave her our money.  Kitty and I both felt we got our $15 worth of information.

THE HIKE TO INTIPUNKU

Kitty had a friend who had been to Machu Picchu and had said that she would have liked more time to walk around the back part of Machu Picchu. Kitty interpreted that as meaning we should take a little walk to Intipunku, the Sun Gate. 

We hit the bathroom (since there are no bathrooms inside Machu Picchu itself) and took a walking stick we had seen near the entrance. At first the guard wasn’t going to let us in with walking sticks, but we explained we needed them because we had knee problems.  That was totally true for Kitty and true enough for me. Plus, we had seen people many people carrying hiking gear in. 

It was now 8:45.  Esbet had told us it would take 3 hours to hike up to Intipunku and back.  That would give us plenty of time to go and come back, eat lunch at the Sanctuary, and get the bus back down the hill. Maybe we’d even get a massage or do some more shopping in Aguas Calientes before our train.

We walked up the same path we had taken the first day.  We asked a woman if she knew where the entrance was to the Intipunku trail. She told us where, then told us she had heard it was a rocky trail with no guardrails or coverage. Kitty agreed that we should still at least walk a little bit of it.

Our first sight was llamas. These were an unexpected surprise, and they walked right in front of us without showing or inspiring any fear.  Turning back around, I could see the Funerary Rock (a memorial to Hiram Bingham) and the guardhouse.  Walking ahead, I saw a series of small stones stacked on top of each other. They reminded me of prayer stones I had seen in Korea; I’m not sure what they were for here.

About an hour into the hike, we caught our first glimpse of the Sun Gate, two tiny stone colums in the distance where two mountain slopes meet.  There was something closer that looked like the Sun Gate, but that was not it.  (I later came to believe that this first gate was actually a temple).

Twenty minutes later, we made it to that temple.  As we wondered whether to continue on, two boys stopped on their way down from Intipunku.  They said it was maybe “15 minutes” to the gate.  But they were probably talking about how long it had taken them to get down from Intipunku to that point. It is faster going downhill then uphill. And they were in much better shape than we were. 

It took us another hour and a half to get from the temple to the gate.  Along the way we often had to stop to rest, take pictures, and enjoy the mix of excitement, fear, and mild altitude sickness as we climbed to literally dizzying heights.  Sometimes I’d look out from the trail and have to lean back against the rock wall behind me to be as far away from the edge of the trail—and the drops—as possible.  A couple of times I thought we’d give up. Then someone would come down the mountain and say it was “close” or “only another 10 or 15 minutes”.  The real last 10 minutes were the worst. The rocks were at their highest and narrowest, and had the most exposure.  Even though I could see the gate, I was beginning to wonder if it had been worth the two-and-three-quarter hour journey up there.

At the top there was a cool breeze to refresh us from the hot, humid, and sunny climb.  The views along the way and at the top had been spectacular.  I now believe we were meant to and determined to get to the top of that mountain; if we weren’t we wouldn’t have heard those low time estimates and wouldn’t have walked on even though deep down we had suspected those estimates were not accurate. 

After about half an hour of resting and taking pictures to record our achievement, we started our descent.  Again, our first ten minutes down were the most frightening.  The steps were high and seemed to want to lead us literally and figuratively over the edge.  Once we got past that, though, it was a pretty smooth walk down hill.  It took us less than an hour to get to the turnoff for the Guardhouse and the Funerary Rock. To see those sights we once again had to walk up high, narrow steps. Our “5 minute” stop there turned into 20 minutes.

LUNCH AT THE SANCTUARY LODGE

We made it back to the main entrance of Machu Picchu at about 1:30 p.m.  That was just enough time to have lunch at the Sanctuary Lodge. This is the only hotel located on the grounds of Machu Picchu. A night’s sleep there costs nearly $1000.  A gourmet buffet lunch is a mere $28 a person.  It was the perfect way to relax and cap off our visit to Machu Picchu. The highlights of the meal for me were: trucha salmonada (trout that looks and tastes like salmon) mousse; elderberry cheesecake; and free bathrooms (Machu Picchu has the audacity to charge 50 Peruvian cents to use the ones outside the entrance).  The lowlight was looking in the bathroom mirror and realizing that not only had I gotten sunburned on the trip, I had a white stripe between the red where my water bottle strap had been. 

LEAVING MACHU PICCHU

We got our passports stamped at a tourist office just outside the entrance.   A little after 2:30, we got in line for the bus to Aguas Calientes.  Kitty was still a little nervous about the drops on the bus route. For me, being in a bus with windows and a good driver seemed relatively safe after our hike.  As we got off the bus, we saw groups of other people whom Kitty said must have been just arriving.  I felt like I had just gotten off a roller coaster and was watching others get on. They were in for quite a ride.
 

THE JOURNEY TO AGUAS CALIENTES

The taxi came for Kitty and me at 8:00 a.m. at Hosteria Rumichaca, a guesthouse in a small town of a 100 people (Rumichaca) where we had been staying. Our driver was taking us on a 20-minute drive to Ollantaytambo. We would catch our train there for the one-and-a-half-hour train ride to Aguas Calientes, the public transportation gateway to Machu Picchu. The only other way to get to Machu Picchu is by walking on the Inca Trail for 1-4 days depending on the starting point.

There are three classes of train service to Aguas Calientes. The highest class is the Hiram Bingham train, named after the Latin American history professor who accidentally discovered Machu Picchu when he was looking for other ruins in the area. The train is decorated inside in turn-of-the century luxury and passengers are waited on hand and foot. It costs about $500 from Cusco.

The second class of service is the Vistadome train. Kitty and I thought we were going on this train, but Jose, the manager of the Hosteria, booked us on the 3rd class of service, the Backpacker train.

Because the Vistadome train arrived at the time the Backpacker should have arrived (making the Backpacker train late), we had a chance to see the two trains and compare. The trains looked identical on the outside—interestingly enough, they had a similar design and colors as trains in Ukraine. Inside, the Vistadome had bucket seats with nicer-looking upholstery than the seats on the Backpacker trains. More importantly, the Vistadome train has a glass roof (the Vista Dome) so that you can lean back and see more of the mountains as you go by. I’m not sure if this feature is worth paying double the price of the Backpacker train. Kitty later heard that the Vistadome train also has a fashion show. I didn’t feel I had missed that, either.

When we arrived at the Aguas Calientes train station, we went to the exit and found the man holding a sign for our hotel, the Machu Picchu Inn. He loaded our luggage with that of several other people onto a mule cart and pulled it through the Indian market, over a pedestrian bridge, and down a short but steep hill to the hotel.

THE TICKETS TO MACHU PICCHU

We checked in, freshened up, and followed the hotel clerk’s directions down the hill to the Machu Picchu ticket office. We learned that since Kitty works in Lima, she gets the national rate for the ticket (61 soles/20 dollars) instead of the foreign rate (120 soles/40 dollars). If only I had gotten my student ID or ISIC card before leaving the States, I too could have paid the discounted rate.

We had heard from the desk clerk that a ticket was good for three days. This was good news because we wanted to go on two different days. However, when I got my ticket printout, I noticed it said in Spanish “only for one entry.” I asked the ticket clerk about it; she said the ticket was good for unlimited entry ON ONE DAY WITHIN THREE DAYS. If we wanted to go a second day, we would have to pay again. Kitty suggested that we go up there, walk around, and then decide if it was worth the extra cost to go again a second day.

From the Machu Picchu ticket office, we walked through the main plaza to the street where the tickets for the bus to Machu Picchu were sold. Unlike the tickets for entry in Machu Picchu, which can only be paid for with Peruvian soles, the bus tickets are paid for only in dollars. Kitty paid $9 for a round trip ticket, and I paid $12.

THE FIRST VISIT TO MACHU PICCHU

Kitty and I waited in line and got on a bus pretty quickly. By the time the ride was over, I was thinking I should have paid $40 for the bus ride and $12 dollars for the entrance to the sanctuary. The driver spent 15 minutes taking us in a medium-sized Mercedes Benz tour bus up the highest, most winding, narrowest dirt road I’ve ever been on in my life. There were several sheer drops without guardrails protecting us from them. I was clinging to the two straps on the seat in back of me and thanking God my parents didn’t know where I was at that exact moment. When I got off the bus, I thanked the driver profusely for his good work.

When we arrived at the entrance to Machu Picchu, it was close to 2:00 pm. We wrote our names on our entry tickets and had them stamped at the entrance. A woman offered to be our tour guide through the park (for a fee of course), but we had been paying so much for tours and services already that we decided to explore the park on our own first.

We followed the signs for the “long walk” and took about 15 minutes walking up a dirt and stone switchback road until we got to the point where we got our first glimpse of the Machu Picchu complex with the big mountain behind it. This is the view you may have seen in pictures and which some of you will be seeing on postcards in the mail to you. Words can’t do justice to the view of stone and grass terraces, stone houses with the straw roofs missing, and mountains thousands of feet high rising up dramatically around it all. Perhaps Kitty summed it up best: “Oh my God!”

According to a guidebook for Machu Picchu that Kitty bought at the end of the day, we continued on the path through the Main Gate and saw the rock quarry and then the Sacred Square. In the Sacred Square we saw the Main Temple and the Temple of the Three Windows. The windows represent the world above, the world we live in, and the underworld. We stopped in the Chamber of Ornaments, a storehouse for religious objects. A guide talking with another group explained that the walls of the chamber lean inward, but the individual stones that were used as shelves lean backward. He demonstrated by putting a Coke bottle on the shelf as we all watched it roll to the back of the wall.

Near the Main Temple was the Southern Cross, a diamond-shaped rock. Another tour guide demonstrated with a compass how the rock pointed due south exactly.

We walked up a set of steps near the Southern Cross to Intihuatana (the place to catch the sun). It is the highest point in the Machu Picchu sanctuary. It has a large sundial in the shape of a guinea pig. The steps down the other side of Intihuatana seemed to lead off the face of the earth. Just looking at them gave me vertigo. We didn’t want to turn around and go the same way we had come, though. Fortunately, a nice tour guide named German gave Kitty and me a hand getting down the first few steps.

Our next stop was the main square, a large grass field with nature’s lawnmowers, llamas. (I’m not being ironic here—the llamas are kept there to eat the grass). Kitty and I had not only seen llamas in the Sacred Valley, we had fed them and petted them. Seeing them here again was anti-climatic. The Sacred Stone on the other side of the square was more interesting. It is said if you stand against this large rock and stretch out your arms, you can absorb energy from the rock. It worked for me. (The next day we learned that the rock has crystals in it which absorb the sun’s rays, and the energy comes from those crystals).

To the left of the Sacred Stone, we saw the entrance to the trail to Huayna Picchu—the Temple of the Moon. The entrance to this very steep trail is limited to 400 people per day, and it is advised that only people who are fit and healthy attempt it. We weren’t sorry we couldn’t go up.

Our next major stop was the Temple of the Condor. German was there again, explaining the temple in Spanish. Apparently the smooth rock was cut in the shape of a condor’s wings. Sacrifices were made in front (on a rock which we later learned was cut in the shape of a beak with eyes). We also later learned that the condor represents the world above.

We followed German’s group through a space in the rock which represented the “stomach” of the bird. The path out also had some narrow paths with drops on the sides I didn’t want to fall into.

After the Temple of the Condor, we walked past what I later learned were colcas, storage areas for food. Then we finally found signs for the exit. It was now after 4:00 and we hadn’t had lunch. But the famous Sanctuary Lodge was already closed, and the snack bar was charging more for a sandwich then the high-end sandwich shop in Kitty’s neighborhood. We decided to skip lunch and get on a bus back to Aguas Calientes for an early dinner. We also agreed we would go back the next day to see more of Machu Picchu with a guide, as well as eat lunch at the Sanctuary Lodge.

EVENING IN AGUAS CALIENTES

We got off the bus and walked around the main square until we settled on a restaurant serving Mexican as well as Peruvian food. I ordered Chicharron de Cerdo (pork cracklings). It was all right. Kitty ordered a chicken quesadilla, but it was more like a pancake with marinated chicken inside. At least the guacamole with nachos (the word here for tortilla chips, not tortilla chips and melted cheese) was really good, as was the chicken and avocado salad. I also tried Cusqueno beer since it was cheaper than a soda, but I ordered two so I think the restaurant came out ahead on that one.

After dinner, we decided to go to the hot springs, from which Aguas Calientes gets its name. We gathered our swimsuits and money and got towels from the hotel. We walked up one of the two main roads of Aguas Calientes—a hilly, narrow, cobblestoned street lined with hotels, tourist restaurants, and souvenir shops.

After about 15 minutes, we made it to the entrance of the Hot Springs. Kitty paid 5 soles and I paid 10 to enter. The man at the entrance told us the lockers were ahead. After ten minutes of walking on a long hilly, stone path, we started to wonder. We saw some people coming down and asked if we were close. Not really, they replied.

Despite the fatigue of walking forever to those lockers, I tried to enjoy the view of the trees reflected in the orange lamps (it was already dark outside) and the sound of running water. We finally made it around 7:45. The entrance to the springs closes at 8:30 p.m., and the springs themselves are closed at 9:00 p.m. So at least we still had a decent amount of time.

The springs themselves were more like a series of small baths or swimming pools. Each section was made of concrete covered in light blue tiles. The only difference was that the bottom of each pool was made of silt. Nevertheless, the warm water refreshed our senses and got us physically and mentally ready for our return to Machu Picchu.