Peru trip - Machu Picchu

Finally the day of Machu Picchu had arrived! We left our hotel early to drive to the Ollantaytambo train station and catch the so-called Vistadome train departing to Aguas Calientes, the base location to the renowned site.

Even though we were sitting facing back in the train, we caught quite a few good sights... There, after disembarking we boarded a bus that drove us up to the actual Machu Picchu archaeological site through a zigzagging, unpaved mountain road dangerously narrow, with plunging views over the valley, an ultra-steep 4,200 feet below.

When we got there, along with an overbearing multitude of tourists (they were 400,000 visitors in 2004!), we took the tour of the ruins, listen to our guide story, took as many photographs as we could, had lunch in a tourist-food restaurant processor and then used up our precious remaining time to hike up to the “Inca Bridge” a spooky passage carved into the rock to protect the access of the ancient city.

The place is listed as one of the new seven wonders of the world and is also on Unesco's World Cultural Heritage sites list. The return trip starting with “undoing” what we had done in the morning, namely riding the bus on the never-ending hairpin turns road.

A modern gondola or better yet – a buried funicular - would be an excellent idea to replace this dangerous and polluting mean of transportation; this is something that has been considered and still is viewed – for no good reason – as a controversial issue!

When we go to the bottom, we spent sometime visiting the rather ugly looking agglomeration of Aguas Calientes below; a worst version of Chamonix, at the base of a major tourist attraction. Then, it was back on the train for a long trek back to Cusco where we arrived around 9 pm, totally exhausted.

Fortunately we had no longer any trace of altitude sickness and were fortunate to stay, once more, at our favorite Cusco hotel, the Quinta San Blas!