The Inca Trail: Amazing!

Yesterday Jess and I completed one of the activities in our trip that we were most looking forward to: the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. This benchmark also means that we are done with half of our trip, which is sort of unbelievable. However, the Inca Trail was everything we had hoped it would be. For 4 days we fell into a comfortable routine of hiking till exhaustion, eating, sleeping, and seeing Inca ruins. The food was also amazing: 3 or 4 courses of good local food for breakfast, lunch and dinner with plenty of snacks in between. We had a lot of fun with the other couples in our group--an interesting assortment of people from England, Sweden, Holland and Portugal.

The Incan Trail was certainly anything but flat and the Incan´s don´t appear to have been interested in switchbacks. We hiked mostly stone stairs up and down the Andes for 4 days. The second and hardest day involved hiking over Dead Women´s Pass at 13,776 feet. The pass is so named because the profile of the pass looks like a woman lying on her back, including her nipple which we spent hours staring at trying to reach! On the third day we saw several ruins as we continued to hike up and down two more passes. Our extremely knowledgable guide taught us a great deal about the Inca Empire and ethic, some of which survives to this day in remote mountain communities.

However, the fourth day, when we were to arrive in Machu Picchu, was when the real contest began. The checkpoint at the beginning of the final stretch of trail leading to Machu Picchu opens at 5:30 am and everyone wants to be the first group to reach the Sun Gate for the postcard picture of the city at dawn. Our group woke at 3:30 that day in order to eat and queue up at the checkpoint--ensuring that we would have a competitive advantage on the final 6 km hike. After passing through the checkpoint, our group broke into a run, fueled mostly by the desire to be first for it´s own sake (we were a bit of a competitive group). I suspected that it might not really matter all that much but the game had already begun.

We lost a bit of steam when we arrived at a set of stone stairs leading straight up for about 50 feet. The stairs were each about 6 inches deep and 2 feet tall, meaning that all 4´s were necessary. Afterwards the trail leveled out a bit only to take a sharp left turn into an even longer and steeper set of stairs. This is when it began to feel like a real pilgramage. I thought maybe the Sun Gate would be at the top...but it wasn´t. When we did arrive a few minutes later we realized that we had won! We were the first group to the Sun Gate overlooking Machu Picchu! It took me a minute to locate the ancient city, however, because it was obscured in a giant cloud that wouldn´t burn off for an hour or so, by which time it would be filled with tourists. No matter however, because they also sell the postcard pictures and they are probably better than I could take anyway.

For the next few hours our guide gave us a tour of the city and explained that this was likely the center of learning and religion for the Incas: here they were undertaking the study of astronomy, experimental farming with plants from the Amazon, and worship of the Sun. It was also the location of the Temple of the Condor, one of the three mythically important animals for the Incas (the others being the serpent and the puma). It was an amazing city and I think that the 4 day trek made us appreciate it even more.

After exploring Machu Picchu a bit on our own we headed down the mountain to the nearest inhabited town called Aguas Calientes, so named because of its thermal springs. Our group indulged in some beer and pizza and headed for the springs to soak our achey muscles.

Feeling two parts tired and one part nostalgic, we headed back to Cuzco where we prepare for our next trip, this one to the Amazonian jungle. As we have had more luck with the internet connection here, you can find some new pictures on Flickr now. Our new strategy is to post only highlight photos, not all the photos and some are quite old as we have much catching up to do. Enjoy!