Friday, March 9, 2018- Cruise day 45; Machu Picchu

Friday, March 9, 2018- Cruise day 45; Machu Picchu

We slept quite well except for getting up to  use the bathroom because the Acetozolamide we have been taking to prevent altitude sickness is a diuretic. The mattress, sheets and pillows were all heavenly. We got a wake up call at 6:00AM, even though we had been told we would get a wake up call at 7:00 AM.   

The breakfast at the hotel was fabulous. Unlike in Japan, these people know how to perfectly prepare an American breakfast, and they had a bewildering assortment of South American dishes, including the giant kernel “choco” corn, some local sausages and a variety of grilled and pickled vegetables. One unique feature was instead of having a small pitcher with honey, they had a sheet of honeycomb suspended between two sheets of glass that dripped fresh honey into a carved wooden vessel.  They also served authentic South American hot chocolate, which is not nearly as sweet as Swiss Miss and has a hint of spices. 

We packed our light backpacks with water, cell phone chargers and rain gear. It had rained during the night, so our guides were reasonably confident that we wouldn’t end up with rain at Machu Picchu. 

Our adventure began loading up into our vans and heading down the river to the train station at Ollantaytambo which is also the launch point for the Inca Trail. This trail leads to Machu Picchu and takes 4 days to complete.  

Our destination on the train was the city of Agua Caliente. We had a mediocre breaded chicken and mashed potatoes lunch on the train. They did serve small Pisco sours, ice tea and wine. The Peruvian Chardonnay was awful, but the Argentinian Malbec was OK. 

Train took an hour and forty minutes and wound through a dramatic valley bounded by mountains reaching thousands of feet into the air. The river below was a boiling brown torrent that would be a challenge to the most expert whitewater runner. We did pass one small hydroelectric diversion gate that provides power to the town of Pisco. It rained on and off during the train ride.

Agua Caliente was a medium size village lining the river with shops to resupply backpackers, as well as hostels, small hotels an restaurants. The town had lots of young people with backpacks.  We were advised to use the bathrooms at the train stations because once we get to Machu Picchu there will only be pay toilets that cost $1 to use. 

From Agua Caliente, we boarded municipal buses that have a monopoly taking tourists from the city up to the ruins at Machu Picchu. We climbed in and slid into the first row of open seats that were on the driver side, but had our knees jammed into the backs of the seats in front of us. The bus filled up quickly, but then we noticed that the rows of seats on the passenger side of the bus had a seat pitch that was at least 6” greater than our row. We immediately made a plan to sit on that side for the return trip. 

The bus ride was rough and very windy and twisty up the mountainside to the site of the ruins over a dirt road. It would have been easy to get motion sick on that trip, but I had prophylactically applied scopolamine gel, and had not trouble. 

When we got out of the buses, it began to rain, so we pulled out our rain gear and then started to walk to the park entrance. 

When we finally got to the park entrance, our guide lead our group of 13 together, explaining what it was we were about to see and various interpretations of what it meant. 

When we rounded the first corner from the entrance gate, we were greeted by the amazing sight of the great stone terraces and buildings of Machu Picchu with an awesome backdrop of verdant mountains reaching into the clouds all around us. The Incas had picked a magical and spiritual site to build their “Lost City”. 

We had learned that the Spaniards arrived in Peru in the early 15th century, and everywhere through Chile and Peru, things went badly for the indigenous peoples. The Spaniards would conquer, and the raise their cities, rebuilding them with materials looted from indigenous sacred sites. Consequently, all traces of the indigenous peoples was erased. 

However, for some unknown reason, the Incans at Machu Picchu abandoned their city in the clouds and disappeared. The Spaniards never found Machu Picchu. In 1911 an archeologist from Yale, Hiram Bingham accidentally ran across the ruins as he was looking for a different site. Abandoned for hundreds of years, the jungle had grown up through the buildings and causes most of the roof structures to collapse, but because nobody had looted the building materials, the site remained largely intact. It took years of excavation to peel the jungle away to reveal the magnificence of this lost city. 

The scope of the city is truly astounding. It is composed of hundreds of buildings and countless terraces and staircases nestled among several very steep and boulder strewn mountains. Because any wood and other organic matter rotted or was digested by the jungle, what remained was the stone work. 

It appears the work took a few generations to get to the point where they abandoned it because of the evolution of construction techniques and building design features found throughout the site. 

We were able to walk through most of the village during our 3 hours at the site. We moved as a group and would stop frequently to learn about the many features. Only one person gave up early in the tour (she had required oxygen yesterday and the walk up from the parking lot to the park entrance had done her in). She sat at the first viewpoint inside the park entrance and waited for the tours to complete. 

We did skip the highest viewpoint in the park, which our guide had explained would have exhausted everyone’s energy long before we could see the rest of the city. We were OK with that compromise because by the time we finished out tour, we were pretty much spent and ready to climb into buses. 

The site has a feel similar to Mesa Verde, but the stonework is light years beyond what the Anasazi we’re capable of, and it is estimated the over a thousand people lived in Machu Picchu before it was abandoned.  You get a real sense of mystery and wonder as you walk through the alleyways and terraces between the buildings built on this very steep mountainside. 

We didn’t end up any altitude issues, perhaps because of the precautions we had taken in advance, and because we moved at the pace of the slowest in our group. It also helped that we had descended from 11,000 ft at Cusco to spend the night in the Sacred Valley at 8000 ft. 

We were very glad and happy about that. 

We then boarded the buses to the train station, and were much more comfortable sitting on the passenger side of the bus with lots of legroom.   We had the opportunity to shop for an hour at the large crafts market just outside the train station, but didn’t buy anything. We were glad to use the free and well maintained toilets at the train station. 

We boarded the train at 7:00PM, and had a mediocre dinner of trout with quinoa with sparkling wine and regular wine to soften us up a bit. We were supposed to arrive at Agua Calientes by 8:45PM, but we noticed the train making frequent and long stops. By 9:30PM we had only managed to get less than a quarter of the necessary distance. We eventually leaned that the train was having troubles with a locked brake that was overheating. They attempted to repair the problem several times, but they eventually decided to summon a replacement train to rescue us at 11:30PM. Everyone was getting tired and cranky, and to make matters worse, the toilet in the car ahead of us developed a problem, so everyone had to use just the one tiny toilet, which ran out of toilet paper. 

A replacement train arrived at midnight but it took 15 minutes for the train crews and guides to improvise steps to get every safely down to the rail bed and then back up into the replacement train. They didn’t send the replacement train with any portable steps or platforms so the ended up finding a rickety wooden bench and a wooden stool. Two people sat on either end of the bench to stabilize it and we were literally handled by personnel on either side  safely to the railbed. The procedure was repeated in reverse to get us up into the replacement train. We pulled away from our crippled train at 12:23 AM. 

We arrived at the Ollantaytambo train station at 12:50 AM and were back in our vans at 1:00AM and finally back to our hotel at 1:30AM. Wake up is at 7:30AM. We need to have our luggage out by 8:30 and will leave the hotel at 9:00AM.