Day 6 – 3/21/12 – Machu Picchu; Cusco

The post-card shot

Well, Dear Reader, every trip has at least one tough day, and today was it on this one.  Things started off very well as today was an unchaperoned day at Machu Picchu.  The Lady, TBJ and your Blogger headed out for a hike, originally planning to take the relatively easy trail to the Sun Gate, but making a game time decision to hike up to the top of Machu Picchu Mountain.  As it turned out, this was a bit ridiculous.  The trail to the top of the mountain would have been challenging on its own, but with the added weight of TBJ in a backpack it became excruciating.  We made it about 2/3 of the way up until we got to a little clearing and realized that we had just made it to the hard part, then headed back down.  Even that, though, as a good 2 hour hike, so we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.  Since we had already checked out, we had a few hours to kill before catching the Hiram Bingham train back to Rio Sagrado, and from there a van ride to Cusco.  We spent a nice few hours hanging out in Sanctuary Lodge’s botanical garden watching TBJ play in one of the absurd number of fountains in Peru, as well as a few hours in the bar attending to miscellaneous matters including jotting down this journal for your benefit, Dear Reader.

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Day 5 – 3/20/12 – Sacred Valley; Machu Picchu

The Lady and TBJ at Machu Picchu

Today dawned absurdly early as it was a heavy travel day involving a 7:05 train from the hotel to Aguas Calientes, the town at the base of Machu Picchu, then a bus trip up to the top of the mountain itself.  I had a funny little experience when the train pulled up (and by that I mean when the train literally stopped outside our hotel for Gilmar, the Lady, TBJ and myself to get on) as we were expected a “real sized” train, but the one that arrived was only 2 cars long.  Our return trip will be on the famous Hiram Bingham train, but I had understood that the trip to Machu Picchu was on a normal Peru Rail train.  This thing, however, was tiny, and I briefly thought that we were to have our own private train to Aguas Calientes.  Thankfully (sort of), this was not the case and it was just a short train that had come up in the rotation .  We got lucky on seats (which is its own story involving one of the people across from us who could have been the central casting version of “spoiled ugly American”, but luckily we scored) and TBJ absolutely loved the Thomas- and Chuggington-like experience of actually riding a real train, so the journey was quite pleasant.  We also saw the character of the Urubamba change completely as the bottom dropped out of the river and it went from “swift but flat” to some of the most insane Class V stuff that I’ve seen.  It looked ridiculous even from the train, though it did make me long for my kayak even if I would have been taking the “far right” line on most of the rapids.

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