Back in March, Mike and I bought our tickets to explore not only Machu Picchu, but also Huayna Picchu. For those of you going "huh?", Huayana Picchu is the big mountain behind Machu Pichu. I've circle it in red below so you can see what I'm talking about.
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| It's as if I can hear everyone saying "oh!" through the internet. |
Only 400 people a day are allowed to hike up Huayana Picchu. The first group of 200 gets to go up at 7 AM and the second group of 200 goes up at 10 AM. At Machu Picchu only 2,500 people are allowed up in a day. So I recommend buying your tickets early. If their website hasn't changed much from the time we bought our tickets, there will be lots of swearing. For whatever reason, we couldn't buy our tickets using the English version of the site. Since we had entered in our information three or four times, we knew what was going on when we had to enter it in Spanish. Also, fun fact, the "United States" is not listed, but rather "Estados Unidos" for the country that issued your passport. For those of you coming with an American passport, be aware of that. Another issue to watch out for is that Chase cards do not work with the site. You need to use a card that has the Verified by Visa option. Even though Chase cards are, I think we ended up going with a Bank of America card because that is what people had the most success using.
You can either hike up to Machu Picchu, which I believe takes about an hour and a half (don't quote me) or you can pay about $15 for a round trip bus ticket. We opted for the bus. I had read a ton of conflicting information about the bus before we got there. One source told me I needed to get the tickets the day before because we would be standing in line for hours the morning of, another source told me that the tickets were stamped with the date so we couldn't get them the night before, and other sources had no information at all. So I ended up asking the receptionist at our tree house hotel. She said that we needed to be there by 6 if we were to climb the mountain at 7. And you know what? She was right. The timing was absolutely perfect. The lesson here is to ask your receptionist when in doubt, and then don't have stress dreams about it the night before (I'm looking at you, Mike).
When we were getting our tickets, Mike and I decided to go for the 7 AM time slot. I read that it was better to do the earlier hike because the sun isn't beating down on you. We got there a little before 7 and stood in line for awhile while each hiker signed in. You're also required to sign out when you're done. I guess it's done so that they can go looking for your corpse if you don't come back. Initially, I was impatient that it was taking so long for everyone to sign in but in the end I'm glad it went slowly because it meant that all the hikers weren't on top of each other on the trail.
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| A map of the hike at the area where we had to check in. |
I'm really, really glad we went with the early time slot and here is why: it is NOT an easy hike. I'm in okay shape, but Mike is in really good shape and even he was struggling. When we got to the top, just about everyone was panting and covered in sweat. I cannot imagine doing that hike with the sun bearing down on me. Now, this hike is doable, but only if your body can handle it. I cannot stress this enough. There were lots of steep stairs that went strait up. And you have to come back down the same way. By the time we got back down, both of my legs were shaking. If you're going to do this, make sure your body can handle it.
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| Hiking on up. |
The view from the top was absolutely amazing. It took us about 45 minutes to get up there. I think the record was 22 minutes . I couldn't do that if my life depended on it. In the end, I'm really happy that we did the hike, even if four days later my legs are still sore. You can't beat this view.
At the bottom of this picture, you might notice a little building that's not Machu Picchu. When you get the top of Huyana Picchu, there are two levels that you can stop at. I recommend stopping at the second highest. There aren't as many people there, which means you can get better pictures.
Since my legs were doing their best imitation of Jello, walking around Machu Picchu was a bit of a struggle for me. But I soldered through as much as I possibly could. There are a lot of stairs at the ruins, so after climbing up that bear of a mountain that was the last thing I wanted to see. However, there were llamas and alpacas running around the ruins and that was high on the list of things I did want to see. You win some, you lose some.
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| Llamas!! |
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| The quarry. |
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| The sun temple. |
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| The entrance to the city. |
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| See how the grass is leveled? That's how the Inca farmed. |
All I could think while we were walking around the ruins is, "I can't imagine what Hiram Bingham thought when he first stumbled upon these." To think that these ruins were left untouched for so long is yet another aspect of this trip I have yet to wrap my mind around. Here is what it looked like when he discovered Machu Picchu in 1911:
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| (via) |
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| (via) |
Once we got on the train back to Cusco, things started to go south for me and my travel companion. I was starting to feel slightly ill and Mike hadn't really eaten at all that day. To make things worse, the train couldn't take us all the way to Cusco, so we had to catch a bus. By the time we got on the bus, poor Mike was freezing and I was sorely regretting not bringing dramamine. We got to back to our hotel to Cusco and poured ourselves into bed, knowing that we were going to have to get up in a few short hours to catch our plane to Lima. All that is coming up in my next post.
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