hiking to Machu Picchu
When I first announced that Glen and I were going to visit Peru, friends kept asking if we were going to hike the Inca Trail. I didn't want to spend four days of our short trip hiking because I also wanted to visit Lake Titicaca. Thus, we compromised and signed up for the two-day Inca Trail. On the first morning, we would make the three hour train ride from Cusco to the vicinity of Machu Picchu. We would then spend the late morning and the afternoon hiking the last portion of the Inca Trail, which the tour company assured me was very flat. What sold me on doing this particular version of the Inca Trail is that we would reach Machu Picchu at sunset, when the park had already closed and emptied of tourists.
Getting our first glimpse of Machu Picchu from the Sun Gate as the last beams of daylight illuminated the ancient city was as amazing as I had imagined. Getting ourselves to that point was much more difficult.
Our train dropped us off at the trailhead just before noon (an hour later than scheduled), so we knew we had to hurry along on the trail in order to make it to Machu Picchu before dark. When I say the train dropped us off, I mean it stopped for about 30 seconds so that the five of us (Glen, my parents, our guide, and myself) could hop off onto the grass and brush along the railroad tracks. Though there didn't appear to be many mosquitoes swarming around, we heeded our guide's instructions to cover ourselves in repellent. (The next day I opted out of deet and subsequently received a few bites that caused my leg to swell so much that I no longer had a left ankle. Painful!) As we were spraying ourselves with repellent, my parents didn't see--and I pretended that I didn't see--our guide point to the top of the mountain and declare that our destination for lunch.
Stair after stair. Switchback after switchback. We just kept our heads down and trodded upwards, hoping that the top of the mountain was just around the corner. My mom is a nearly 60 year old gym rat who is not athletic, and I worried that she would not have the mental stamina to push through the pain. We stopped often for her to catch her breath, and our guide used all of his peppiness to encourage her to keep moving. My favorite way of passing time when running on a treadmill is calculating what percentage of my workout I had already completed. After an hour of struggling under the blazing hot sun, I asked our guide if we had passed the halfway point of our pre-lunch hike. Nope! Keep going! After another hour, our guide finally announced that we only had to turn three more corners before we reached the top. In the end, we scaled about 2300 feet over 3 miles in 2.3 hours (in the landscape photo I took after lunch, you can see the river by the train tracks where we started). I was so proud of my mom for making it to the top and so quickly too!
Our pre-lunch hike that the tour company conveniently didn't mention put us at the trailhead for the last portion of the Inca Trail. Fortunately, this portion was as flat as advertised. However, it was lined with uneven stones, so we had to be careful as we raced to cover the last 4.5 miles of our hike in 2 hours. We had made it so far on our trip without any huge mishaps, and we crossed our fingers that no one would twist an ankle on the uneven footing before we reached Machu Picchu. And after scrambling up one more set up stone steps, we finally reached the Sun Gate, framing a view of Machu Picchu in the distance. My mom immediately declared that she had just completed the last hike she would ever do. Not a bad one to end on.
There aren't words to describe the beauty and majesty of the area surrounding Machu Picchu, so I'll let my photos do the talking. We returned the next morning at sunrise to explore the grounds before the hoards of day tourists from Cusco arrived on the train and before the sun sent us looking for shade to hide under. Glen wants creative credit for the morning photos because he said to me, "Quick, Wendy! Take some more photos of Machu Picchu before the sun comes up all the way!"
