Okay, back to our recent travels.
After leaving Cuzco and taking the train, we arrived in Aguas Calientes. Its a tourist stop-over filled with hotels and restaurants and where you need to buy a pass to get into the ruins. We did actually run into folks we know! Hannah from Minneapolis, who was doing some kind of shaman training in Peru. We also ran into, Sam, a college student I met in Valparaiso. Small world.
Anyways, I (Laura) got up at 2am the next morning to save a place in line for the four of us for a 5:30am bus which climbs 3.5 miles of switchbacks up to the ruins. Why such an ungodly hour - so that we could be one of the first 400 people to enter the ruins and thereby be allowed to climb Huayna Picchu, or
"young peak"in Quechua, which overlooks Machu Picchu, or "old peak".At 6am when the entrance gates opened, we were one of the
last to get tickets to climb! So we made our way through the misty ruins, saving it all for later, took a right at the llamas, stood in another line, and finally 
climbed a very steep and sometimes vertiginous (no railings) trail up 1,000 feet to the top of Huayna Picchu at around 9,000 feet.We were all sweaty when we got to the top among the clouds. It was strewn with Incan temple ruins and tourists. We found a nice terrace that wasn't too near the edge and waited for the clouds to clear, so that we could see Machu Picchu from above. We snacked on Pringles potato chips and something akin to Powerade, our long awaited breakfast, and I napped!
The clouds cleared after 45 minutes or so and it was SPECTACULAR! The ruins lay below you, while everywhere else as far as the eye can see are incredibly high peaks, some of them standing on their own, jutting up from the tropical, snaking Urubamba River basin. Its lush and green and easy to imagine why the Incans chose this area to be close to their gods.
Well worth a night without sleep. :-)
Laura
"Its lush and green" what? Or did you mean to write, "It's lush and green . . ."
ReplyDelete"It is (It's) the responsibility of the elders to keep on correcting the grammatical mistakes of the youngsters in their clan, even though the youngsters may actually be oldsters themselves." ---- Margaret Mead
Uncle Dan Rogers
Amazing and rather scary photos. Did you look down while climbing? It's an awfully long way:)
ReplyDeleteThe photos are beautiful and give a glimpse of what you experienced. I don't know that I'd be up to that climb, but I'm so glad you all were able to do it.
@Mom - it was a little scary and yes, we tried not to look down (although there were only a few spots where there was an extreme vertical drop).
ReplyDelete@Uncle Dan - thanks for the grammar comment. It seems like no matter how many times I proof something, I always find grammatical errors after publishing, but then I feel guilty about edits as that sends repeated notifications to our readers. I also notice as my Spanish becomes more proficient, my English becomes more awkward. Wish you were here to do some proofing for me!