Cusco and Machu Picchu...

I think this one will be brief because whilst Machu Picchu was truly magical I don´t really have a great story to tell about my visit... sorry! I went, it was amazing... that´s that! Alright I´ll fill you in a bit but don´t get your hopes up for amusing annacdotes!! hehe!

I went with 3 friends from Hands On... Dennis, Marsha and Emma. We really had a fantastic time. We took the poor man´s route which involved a few buses, a couple of stops in little villages along the way and some walking along the old disused railway. Forget the hype, the bus loads of tourists with bum bags, the over done inca trail... Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley truly are enchanted. No amount of cheesy tourism, over priced sandwiches and tacky trinkets can ever take that away. We arrived when the gates opened at 6am... this is the perfect time to take in the atmosphere of the place... the misty clouds sit over the ruins and the surrounding mountains. It has a feeling of a lost city. There´s only you and a handful of other early risers. But by 9am the flocks arrive and are herded around by their whistle blowing tour guides... so much noise and bustle... if it weren´t for the setting you´d start to feel like you were in a theme park or something. I think it´s the location that really sets Machu Picchu apart from other ruins I´ve seen... it makes your hair stand on end it´s so much to take in... there´s definitely an indescribable magic about the place.

The peak that you can see immediately behind the ruins is called Wayna Picchu. They only let 400 visitors in per day to climb it. We got there early enough to get in so we huffed and puffed our way to the top. The view was incredible. Looking down at the ruins below through breaks in the morning clouds. You need to take a minute up there to look around and soak it all up... and snap some pics of course!

By the time we got back down it was like were at a different Machu Picchu to the one we had left behind to ascend Wayna Picchu. So many people it was craziness. They also enforced the rules on how you are supposed to walk around the ruins. We didn´t know about this when we arrived. There weren´t enough of us for it to matter. But with all the tour guides there now telling us which way to go it became apparent that many of the path ways were one way... we soon realised that one wrong turn and you end up being herded back down to where you started! It was like an elaborate game of snakes and ladders! I wanted to reach the high point on the opposite side so that I could get a glimpse of that classic picture book view of Machu Picchu (with Wayna Picchu in the background)... after a couple of attempts that resulted in me sliding down the dratted snake to my starting point, I eventually landed on the correct ladder and made it to my destination where I sat and took in the view, giggled with my friends at all the funny people doing silly poses for pictures, and marveled at how wonderful it was to simply be here.

Contented we eventually made our way back to the ugly dump that is Aguas Calientes (the nearest town to the ruins) and then headed back the following day to Cusco... a little about Cusco. It´s an incredibly beautiful city that is greatly uglied by mass tourism... at every turn there are tour touts, beggars, people selling massages, drug dealers, more hoards of tourists, robbers, poor kids selling pictures of them with their llamas, terrible night clubs full of peruvian women trying to pick up foreign men... but when you sift through the rubbish there´s lots of good stuff to be found as well and it still retains some of that inca magic.

So the four of us had a couple of days of fun together (along with the two lovely aussie gap year boys we picked up on the way to Machu Picchu. Confident, wise beyond their years, intelligent and entertaining... wish I´d been so clued up when I was 18!) saying our goodbyes and heading our separate ways. My final Hands On goodbye... sniff!

I was in a hurry now... I wanted to make it to La Paz, Bolivia for my birthday and I only had a few days to get there. So next up was a whistle stop tour of Lake Titicaca...