^^The promised photos. We biked down that valley! The other photo is from the 3rd day. Me in from of Machu Picchu ruins. In case you couldn´t guess.
So mountain biking was something of a baptism of fire, and I still have the blisters on my hands to prove it. Due to reasons I can´t be bothered to explain, at the end of the first day I was leaving the group I had started with (bye bye Kaia and Nathan) and skipping ahead to join a new group in a place called Santa Theresa. So, feeling battered and tired and seriously needing a shower, I was unceremoniously plonked in a taxi and driven about an hour away to meet the new group. It was a precariously winding mountain road, which I thought was great fun, and I had a conversation in Spanish with the taxi driver and we stopped to buy mangoes and I washed my face in a mountain stream and he let me drive the jeep for a bit! So the journey was great, and when we arrived in Santa Theresa I was then driven to the hot springs where my new group were bathing their weary limbs in the warm pools. Mmmmm. It was slightly tricky finding the group, because by this time it was dark and I didn´t know what my new guide looked like, so it involved a bit of wandering around, peering into various pools at scantily clad relaxers and saying ´... Juan Victor? - which was embarrassing and I was very tired and grumpy and a bit worried I wouldn´t find the new group and would be stranded in some random mountain town.
Luckily I found them and hurrah and oh my goshness - Tim Ellis was amongst them!! Now, I knew Tim Ellis was in South America and I´d met him briefly in Lima, but there he was again, quite unexpectedly, swimming around half way through a trek to Machu Pocchu! Oh, fortuitous circumstance, how glad I was to see him. Yet more suprises awaited me, though, because also part of this new group were Steve and Mather - you may recall, the very American Americans I met in Lima also. Yay! A lovely group full of old friends. (Tim Ellis is a family friend of old, known since I was... 8 or 9, and used to be Hellen´s best friend as a youngster, for those who don´t know)
So I was very very happy and tired and joyfully paddling about in lovely warm water. After the hot springs we had dinner (oh my god, I ate alpaca!) and then some Walter (a strange liquor we didn´t know exactly what it was so we called it Walter. Good ol´Walter) and then went out dancing ´til the early hours. Not sure that was the best plan, because we did have to hike at 10 the next morning, but oh well, good fun was had by all. There was a pole in the club. Pole dancing ensued.....
Umm, but the less said about that the better, and we ended up hiking at 1sh anyway, because Victor was a very relaxed guide, fortuitously. The hike was quite easy in a manner of speaking, because it was all flat, and beautiful surroundings obviously. I kept having to pinch myself - hiking through Peruvian jungle towards Machu Picchu, chatting to Tim Ellis about the good old days and reminiscing about my lovely sister and the mad times we all had when ´twere knee-high to a grasshopper. A most bizarre and wonderful situation.
We arrived absolutely knackered in Aguas Calientes, which also had hot springs to bathe in but these were somewhat smellier and uglier than the ones in Santa Theresa, unfortunately. Didn´t do much really, because we had to be up at 3am the next morning to hike to Machu Picchu. So early to bed, ridiculously early to rise.
We set off at 3.50am, into the darkness. Oh it was so so hard. It only took an hour-ish but it was all uphill, a ridiculously steep climb up up up, always up. And the high altitude made breathing a bit harder than it would be normally. My D of E training kicked in though, and we kept up a sturdy pace right to the top. The reason we had to leave so early is because the gates open at 6am, and the first 400 people through are allowed to climb another mountain -Waynu Picchu- that gives panoramic views of the Incan ruins. And we really wanted to climb it! And we were the first 14 people in the queue. Our group would have been the very very first, but two people beat us. Still - not too shabby. Bloody awesome actually. We sat on the steps and waited for the gates to open at 6, feeling very smug as the queue grew longer behind us. We were the first in, and we ran as fast as we could so we could see the ruins whilst they were empty and not crawling with tourists (Typical tourist trait, by the way, disdian and distaste of all other tourists). Photos photos, lots of photos, then a two hour guided tour of all the temples etc. Absolutely insanely inspiring, by the way. I know it´s THE most visited tourist attraction in all of South America but it deserves to be. Then we had lunch. Hmm. I say lunch. This was at 9am in the morning, but we´d already been up for 6 hours. Then at 10am we climbed Waynu Picchu. By the way, Machu Picchu means Ancient Mountain in Quecha (indigenous language), and Waynu Picchu means Jungle mountain. Hence the title.
Waynu Picchu was again ridiculously steep (you had to haul yourself up with rope in some places) but we took it easy because there wasn´t reason to rush as there had been for the other climb.
You can see how steep it is. It´s that ridiculously steep mountain in the background of the photo at the top. (tried to put the damn photo in the middle of the text but can´t). I climbed that! So we hung around the top and took in the view, and contemplated the absurdly steep climb DOWN.....
Reached the bottom at 2sh, with very very wobbly legs and quite happy to be on flat road again. Then we ambled back to Aguas Calientes and had lunch (proper lunch.) Then it was time to get the train back to Cusco. Which proved to be something of an unwelcome adventure. Steve and Mather and I had been rewarding ourselves with some wine, and were quite trampily swigging from a carton of wine whilst walking to the train station we´d seen, about 15 minutes walk out of the town. Then we got there (having already hiked up two bloody steep mountains, I might add) only to be told there was a train station IN the town and that was where we needed to be. We had about 20 minutes, but it was 15 minutes back to the town and we were knackered and a bit drunk and we didn´t know WHERE in the town the station was. No taxis, the only option was to leg it back to Aguas Calientes (still sipping the wine... hmm). Mad dash, mad dash, donde esta la estacion de tren? Donde donde, run run, panic panic, madly flap the ticket in the face of the guard, jump on to the train. Phew. Sleep.
Slept all the way back to Cusco, went to the hostel and sleeeeept. Right. Thus ends the mammoth blog about Machu Picchu. More to come, however. Wow, it really is very long. I´m sorry.
Wow, nice.
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