Back to a 5am wake up call for us today. We got the bus back up to Macchu Picchu for a 2 hour tour around. Our guide Jose told us lots of interesting things, both on the tourand on the previous days on the trail.We got the bus back down to Agua Calientes and had a wander around the shops. We bought a couple of pin badges for our rucksacks. We sat in the square for a while, then went to have lunch (pizza - mmm!) at a restaurant right beside the train tracks that r...

Today we had a lie in - 5.30am... We breakfasted on pancakes with 'GAP' (the name of our tour company) written on them in a kind of caramel syrup (well, Andy ate mine too). Compared to yesterday, today's walk was relatively easy. We started with a 150m fairly easy climb. This part of the trail has it's own subtropical mirco climate with lots of interesting plants and trees. Then we had to descend 900m down wet and slippery stone steps. This bit wa...

We were woken at 5am after spending a comfortable night in our tent. We had porridge with little pieces of apple in for brekky - very nice!After breakfast we set off for the 900m climb up to 'Dead Woman's pass' - 4200m above sea level - the highest we'd been. As a reference, Snowdon in Wales is 1085m above sea level, Mount Everest is 8850m above sea level, so we were almost halfway up Everest...The first part of the climb was in the shade of the t...

Wake up call today was 5am for the start of the Inca Trail. Our bus took us to km82, the start of the 47km (about 29 miles) 3 day hike to Machu Picchu. We had our passport stamped to say we´d started the trail. We started walking before 7am... The start of the trail was different to what we´d expected. Instead of the block pathing it was a gravel track with lot of plants and animals along the way. There were small houses and the usual donkeys, pigs, s...