Machu Picchu

Hearing the alarm on Jon’s mobile phone go off at four o’ clock in the morning was not very appreciated! Through our hazy snooze it took a short while of dismissing the alarm in favour of sleep to realise that the alarm was to get us up for one of the first seats on the bus to one of the seven new wonders of the world, Machu Picchu. We knew exactly where everything was, so we were able to crawl out of bed to find our things through bleary eyes, and head off down the road to the bus station. Loud precipitation and darkness tempted us to stay put for a while, but this was our once in a lifetime.
We thought we had been fairly cunning in getting to the bus stop over an hour in advance of departure, but as we proceeded around the corner, it turned out that a large queue of people had the same idea. As it was still raining we couldn’t cover under the shelter quick enough and we saw an indent in the alley where the queue appeared to have finished. Relief! Simon then got a tap on the shoulder and a friendly face said to us, “The queue goes on up there.” At this moment the length of the queue magically doubled and we shuffled our way to the back.
The bus driver called us on as the very first light of dawn began to show itself in a gorgeous sapphire blue light above the almost-vertical, pitch-dark mountains that hides the town of Aguas Calientes from the outside world.
As we drove out of town, the large river on our left was splashing violently at height, and huge, broken waves were banging down on the rocks beneath due to the large amount of rain feed. For those of you extremists, a grade five white water rapid is nothing in comparison! We continued our zigzag up the merciless face of the forested mountain, peering out between the tree cover whenever possible to catch a view, but we saw only a baby-blue sheet of cloud that was succeeding in instantly eliminating visibility past ten centimetres. We were desperately hoping that we’d be able to see the lost Incan city of Machu Picchu, the surrounding mountains and the deep valleys but at this moment we weren’t too convinced.
After hurrying off the bus, we saw another massive queue and our hearts sank. The secret, when visiting Machu Picchu, is to be one of the first people there, not only for better views and photos without tourists in their bright red, blue, pink, yellow, or whatever colour ponchos, but more importantly to have access to Waynapicchu. The name ‘Waynapicchu’ means ‘young mountain’ in the Quechua language, which is spoken widely throughout the Andes, generally between Quito, Ecuador, all the way down to the Rio Bio Bio area, Chile. Out of the huge numbers of curious tourists that visit this archaeological site every day, only four hundred of them are admitted to climb Waynapicchu for the rarer view of the ancient city. More on this part later!
But for the moment, we are at the stage where we have just arrived through the entrance post and are walking towards the lost city. As we reached the brow of the hill and turned the corner, we where stunned by a hypnotic view of Waynapicchu wrapped in whitey blue clouds with a perfect space, like a viewfinder, which revealed to us an extensive mass of the most beautiful ruins on earth. There were a mixture of different types of Incan construction techniques and so many different shades of greens from trees, bushes and grasses that was particularly overwhelming. A sudden spiritual feeling overwhelmed us as we imagined this place full of Incan’s building their city and going about their daily living there. How on earth did we Europeans come to discover this ancient site that’s hidden so well in the mountains? We were due to meet our guide at quarter-to-eight, which gave us just under two hours to explore freely. For some unknown reason, we chose uphill to start and were hiking up another S-shaped trail that led us to some amazing terraces, which the Incans used to cultivate vegetables. In fact, the whole site is covered in terraces where, for example, different species of potatoes grew depending on the altitude of the particular terrace. One other vegetable that they used to grow was the famous purple maize vegetable, which is called ‘Chicha’ here. One fantastic Peruvian beverage, our favourite in fact, is called Chicha Morada and in order to make it, one must boil the chica vegetable and keep back the juice. For enhanced flavour, a squeeze of lemon and some spoonfuls of sugar never hurt anybody, and once left to cool, it’s delicious. The closest taste we can get to describe it right now is undiluted Ribena, though perhaps not quite as strong.
Getting back to the higher terraces where we decided to stop for our sneaky breakfast of cheese and pate sandwiches, we encountered some lovely llamas grazing on the luscious, emerald-green grass. We had seen postcards of llamas in Machu Picchu the day before and we came to the conclusion that the llama had been superimposed onto it. How wrong we turned out to be?!





We continued upwards for a bit to the Machu Picchu mountain itself, which as a matter of fact means ‘old mountain’ in Quechua, but we turned back as time got tight for our guided tour arrangements. We finally met up with our guide, Eddie, who was brilliant and very informative! Perhaps, though, the sites around Machu Picchu are better told in pictures.





You'll have to wait for the next blog entries to see the rest!