The Life of a Noble Savage aka on the Road to Machu Picchu

So I'm back from the four day excursion. If you're in a hurry to get to Machu Picchu, you're plain out of luck, since I am going to be a sneaky bugger and leave you in suspense - ending in a cliffhanger. 

So here is the story of my life - for the first three days of the treck.

Day 1:

Early morning we left Cusco and headed for the hills. Quite high in fact, since Cusco itself is alredy at an altitude of 3326 meters. The views on  the way were, once again, rather nice.

  

At just over 4km, our bikes were unwrapped and we started a 61km long bicycle tour. And before you start admiring my stamina too much, I have to burst the bubble and admit it was ALL downhill. During three hours we came down over 2km in hight. And I can tell you that the bends were sharp!

 

Also, in the safety of hindsight, I can admit that there were a few rather hairy moments. The worst being when I very nearly witnesses a horrific bus accident. Two buses coming from different directions both plowed bravely and at an accessive speed into a blind hairpin curve. As they managed to do this simultaneously, I watched in horror as the bus on the outside wobbled, shook and by a very narrow margin indeed remained on the road, rather than plunged down to the certain death of everyone onboard. To stay on the road, however, the bus had to do some rather extreme changes of course, resulting in the bus plowing directly into the lane of the oncoming traffic. This traffic being me and 2 other cyclists. By mere chance at this point the road had a wide shoulder and we all managed to swerve onto it. So no loss of life or limb, but I understand why the company made us sign disclaimers, where we would not hold them responsible for death, paralysis or anything else. I also stared to understand our excessive (or so I initially thought) padding of arm guards, leg guars, body armor and of course helmets. We all loked like superheroes going out to play paintball.

Another thing I hadn't anticipated was that because it's the end of the rainy season, the rivers and waterfalls coming down the mountain were all flooding onto the road. During the trip we had to ride over around 15 flooding sections of road. The water was deep enough to fly up to our heads, so we were all thoroughly soaked by the time we reached the bottom. The rest dried off nicely, but we were pouring water out of our trecking shoes and wringing our socks by the end of the ride. However we were saved from trecking 6 hours in wet boots the next day by the local restauranteur in Santa Maria, the village we stayed in for the night. For a small charge, he put our boots in his pizza oven for the night and we got them at breakfast dry, warm and smelling faintly of oregano.

Day 2:

To my surprise people occasionally ask me why I travel. Well take a look at these images from day 2 and you work it out.

Started off bright and early on our 7 hour treck through the sub tropical  forests

along old Inca trails

up and down mountains and across river canyons - pulled to the other side in a little wooden box. 

The treck as such was very easy - compared to the Colca canyon treck at least. En route we had time to pick up fruit, fallen to our feet or still clinging to trees. Guava, lemon, lime, avocado (a new addiriom to the fruit family) and passion fruit - or maracuia as it is locally known. Especially passion fruit abounded! I had eaten six before our guide suggested I ease up. Not because I was in any danger of overharvesting this fruit, which abounded, but because when fresh, the fruit is sour enough to give indegestion if consumed in excess.

Instead we picked a bagfull of passion fruits, took them into town and the local discotec and our guide, who started his career as a bartender, made us all complimentary pisco maracuias, which give pisco sours a run for their money. Especially enjoyable because we's hunted and gathered for them. Ah, the life of a noble savage!

The treck ended with a bang, as we walked straight to a hot springs, where we spent an excruciatingly enjoyable 2,5 hours watching our fingertips start to wrinkle (the raisin effect). An added bonus is that hot springs in Peru so far never smell of sulphur. Aparently the water rises to the ground through a deep layer of sand, which acts as a natural filter for impurities like sulpher. 

Day 3:

Imagine I'm young, possibly in my twenties. Well if I was I would blend right in! This part of the treck is clearly geared to the young, thrill seaking crowd. So I, a middleaged, thrill-seeking lady, did the zip line this day. I didn't even really know the term before this trip, yet now I am a hardened veteran having just zipped across South Americas longest, fastest and highest zip lines, meaning cables stretched over a river ravine with yours truly dangling from a harness and gravity doing its thing. My favourite position was the batman, a superhero flying position with arms spread. This gave not only a nice view of the ravine and river below, but also a sense of the speed, which the tour agency claims was, at best, close to 80km per hour. A grain of salt anyone?

After the zip line and lunch, we spent a couple of hours trecking. We passed the Machu Picchu power plant, with its spectacular man made waterfalls. We  had to treck a little longer than usual, because a land slide had totalled the car bridge two days earlier. The remains of the bridge can be seen in the photo above in the river, directly under the waterfall. After this we trecked beside the railroad tracs - not as bad as it sounds, since this is synonymous with a treck besides the rapids - to Aguas Calientes, the official gatehouse to Maccu Picchu. Since the whole town has been built solely for tourism, specifically as the entry to Machu Picchu, I wasn't expecting much. Certainly I wasn't expecting to find, that despite its butt ugly buildings, it's in such a beautiful location that it really has to be classified as a pretty little tourist hell / town. 

  

Day 4:

Aha! Wait for it! 

Did I make it? 

Did it rain? 

Did I slip on a banana peel?

All will be made clear. 

Next time.