Machu Picchu

Can I just apologise in advance for spelling mistakes and lack of punctuation. Every computer keyboard I have used so far is missing letters and the keys are configured differently!!!


The next few days saw the arrival of Will (Will 4 adventure) and the rest of the team. There were 9 of us in total. A nicer bunch of people couldn´t be had. In real time, I said bye bye to the last of them yesterday evening. After being presented with a woven friendship bracelet as a parting gift, (thanks Lynne and Mike)I am now at the beginning of the slippery slope of starting to look like a proper gringo traveller. All I need are some beads, silly trousers, a poncho and possibly dreadlocks!
Anyway, back to the blog...
We spent a couple of days sightseeing and walking in the hills behind Cusco. Our local guide, Ophelia (named after a Peruvian soap opera character, not Shakespearean!), saturated us with Incan history and ruins,showing us all the local sights and also a trip to the sacred valley. Which is very overly subscribed tourist route that involved stopping at a Llama-Alpaca farm and also a wool dyeing and weaving co operative (for tourists).The most interesting bit was seeing real live cochineal bugs that live on cacti and are squashed to make red dye and also used to colour glace cherries!
We then set of Agua Calientes (hot water), a small town near to the base of Machu Picchu which has hot thermal springs as well as an enormous and noisy river running through it. We caught a rather lovely train there which had sky light windows in the roof as well as the sides. It felt and looked similar to an old steam train, but was diesel. Now at a much lower altitude than Cusco, the climate and vegetation was semi tropical. There were exotic flowers growing wild by the sides of the roads and there was a brightly coloured parrot in a bush out side my room when I woke.

Machu Picchu was very impressive. When we arrived in the morning the mountains and the Incan town were still shrouded in mist, which was very atmospheric, and luckily cleared by mid morning to allow us to really see the city in all its splendour.

Just in case any one reading this is unsure what I´m on about.  Machu Picchu is probably the best known Incan archaelogical site in South America. It was never discovered by the conquering Spanish and only discovered in the early 20th C by an American called Hiram Bingham, who consequently took loads of artifacts back to the States. The Peruvians are still fighting to have them returned to this day.

Many visitors come to Peru to hike along the very busy Inca trail. Nothing so easy for us. We returned to Cusco by train later that evening to prepare for the Ausangate trek!