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We got to Aguas Calientes in the dark, so missed the mountain scenery, but the silhouettes of the cliffs looming over the town is incredible. It´s like being at the bottom of a massive stone bucket. The only way in is by train or trek and the only level(ish) bit is under the river. How and why people lived here before they had a tourism industry we don´t know, but now all there is here is Gringos and dodgy hostels - we came in on the original gravy train.
We´d booked ahead, planning to get sorted quickly so we could get up for the first bus at 5:30am, but when we saw the hole that we´d be sleeping in we marched out to look for something else. Luckily we found a room for 50 soles that had a private bathroom. Unluckily the builders next door started work when we got our heads down and didn´t stop until 1:30am. Luckily Chesta couldn´t find anyone when he had a look for someone to batter. Unluckily we were woken up at 4:00am by some wankers having a row. So after a night of grinding our teeth we decided to give Machu Picchu a miss until the next day.
We changed our return train tickets, bought the entrance tickets for Machu Picchu, and sorted out the bus tickets for the following morning. Which gave us the rest of the day in Aguas Calientes. Don´t do it kids - it´s shite.
On Thursday we got up at the crack of a sparrow´s fart to get the 5:30 bus. We managed to be first in the queue because we´d sorted all our tickets out the previous day - Must Win Must Win - were the fourth and fifth people into Machu Picchu when the opened the gates at 6:00am (we would have won but for three cheating French).
It´s a massive, incredible place surrounded by massive, incredible mountains. There´s alot of tourists there from around ten until three, but it didn´t feel as crowded as we´d feared. We stayed there for 12 hours - saw the sun rise and set, and walked the citadel twice. It is an awesome site in the proper sense of the word (Yanks take note). Bloody magic. Some archeologists reckon that Machu Picchu could have predated the Inca but that they did alot of improvements. It´s so remote (which is why the Spanish never found it) that it might have been a kind of temple - sanctuary - convent - royal retreat. There´s no way you could have popped down during the week to run the empire, it´s right on top of the middle of nowhere, so after a while the rest of the (conquered) Inca´s forgot it existed. Which is great for us.
Unfortunately there´s so many visitors that the western slopes of Machu Picchu are slipping down at around 1cm every month, and the ruins that you see have been rebuilt quite a bit (about 30%). But it´s still a wonderful bit of the world and a great way to finish our tour of Peru.
Next stop Bolivia. Wicked.
previous travel blog entry
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