Joining the Machu Picchu circus… sort of

For a while, I enjoyed telling people I met along the way that I was NOT really planning on going to Machu Picchu. This site is considered the prime tourist attraction of Peru. During the high season, as many as 2000 people visit Machu Picchu everyday and more than 400,000 visit the site per year. The tour companies have really taken advantage of this, charging exorbitant fees for hikes that lead to Machu Picchu (about US $100 per day!) The official word is that there are only two ways to get to Machu Picchu: by booking an expensive tour and walking there (you are not allowed to walk there on your own), or by taking the expensive train ($50 roundtrip). What the guidebooks and tourist information centers do not tell you is that if you are super cheap and don’t mind the hassle, you can take a "backdoor route," which involves taking a 4 hr bus ride to a small town named Santa Maria, then a 2 hr combi (public transport van) ride to an even smaller town, then a 3 hr hike along the railroad tracks to Aguas Caliente, a final town that is a short 2 hr hike from Machu Picchu.

On the first segment of this trip, I got on the bus from Ollanta at 10pm, only to find out there were no seats left. I figured it was okay, since 4 hrs isn’t that long to sit on the floor. The bus driver and his helper who sit up in the front in a separate compartment were really nice and let me sit up there with them. I spent the next few hours talking to the helper, who recommended some tasty Peruvian dishes for me to try later. Unfortunately, in the middle of the night there was a landslide. The landslide happened hours before we got there and no one was hurt, but we (along with many other buses and cars) were stuck on this dirt road for 7 extra hours while we waited for the morning to come so that bulldozers could clear the road. It was very cold at night, but the helper was so nice and shared his wool blanket with me. There wasn’t very much room in the bus compartment, so we just sat up for most of the night chatting wearily in Spanish.

The next morning, after they cleared the road the bus went on its way again, but when we were almost at Santa Maria we got a flat tire! Everyone had to get out and wait in the hot sun while they fixed it, and I passed the time talking to some of the other people who had emerged from the inner confines of the bus. Before, I had been worried that I might pass through Santa Maria without knowing when to get off; some of these towns are VERY small, and if you close your eyes for a few seconds you may pass through it without even realizing it. But I didn’t have to worry at all... because after spending so much time in the bus with these people, I had about 10 people telling the bus driver to stop and let me out when we finally got to Santa Maria!

The ride to Santa Teresa and then the hike there was uneventful. I met a few other travelers in Santa Maria going the same way, so it made things a bit easier. I had been warned that it involved crossing a river by dangling from a steel bucket and being hauled across on cables. People who had done it before said it was really scary, but I actually really enjoyed watching the river rush and roar beneath me, and the whole contraption felt a lot safer and sturdier than I had feared. We then packed into the back of a pickup truck along with about 20+ other people (some hanging off the sides and top), which drove us to a hydroelectric plant and the start of the railroad tracks that we were supposed to follow to Aguas. One of the guys I met on the way was a cool French guy who wanted to make a documentary about the impact of tourism on Machu Picchu. We ended up hanging out quite a bit over the next few days, and it was very good practice for my Spanish, since he spoke Spanish and French but not very much English. We split a room together, where I learned that it is possible (though a bit painful) for me to speak Spanish even while I am half asleep at 4am!

In the morning, we woke up super early and hiked through steep cloudforest to reach Machu Picchu before the hordes of tourists arrived. And my verdict on Machu Picchu? I must say that I didn’t think Machu Picchu completely lived up to the hype. Don’t get me wrong – I still had a really great time there. But people hype it up SO much, it would be hard for anything to live up to that. I definitely agree that Machu Picchu is VERY impressive, and particularly so because it was never discovered by the Spanish and thus much better preserved than most of the other sites. The stonework at Machu Picchu also rivals Ollantaytambo. And most of all, you can’t beat the location. In the morning the site was draped in a thick veil of mist, but as the fog lifted, you could see the site in all its glory, sprawling across a ridge with the mountain Huayna Picchu in the background. On either side of the ridge is lush tropical cloudforest (Machu Picchu is lower in elevation than many of the other sites). I found it really impressive that in just a few hours, you can go from seeing high-altitude plants and snowy mountaintops to walking through lush cloudforest with bromeliads and mosses growing from every tree. On some of the cliff-sides surrounding Machu Picchu, there were so many bright red bromeliads that it reminded me of the hundreds of red and green macaws feeding at the lick at Piedras. The landscape surrounding Machu Picchu is unbelievably beautiful.

The ruins themselves are also really impressive; more extensive and better preserved than at any other site. But still, if I had to go back and pick between all the hikes I went on in the Sacred Valley and only seeing Machu Picchu, I would probably pick the former. In spite of how cools the ruins at Machu Picchu are, in many ways my experience there as a whole was not nearly as satisfying as some of my experiences in the Sacred Valley. One of the biggest annoyances was the throngs of tourists. Even though it was the low-season, the site was flooded by tourists and noisy school kids on fieldtrips. I suppose it wasn’t as bad as it could have been though, and since Huangshan, no other place has seemed that touristy to me.

I thought about hiring a guide at Machu Picchu to explain some of the ruins to me but finally decided to just walk around on my own and occasionally eavesdrop on other tour groups. I was surprised to discover how much crap those guides spout! Some of them didn’t even seem to know things that I knew just from reading “Conquest of the Incas.” They all spoke with such authority in their voice, but after listening in on a few different groups, it really seemed to me that they were making half of the things they said up, since the things they said varied wildly between guides. It also cracked me up that they all seemed to have this cheesy theatrical flair; you could tell they had given the same tour thousands of times, cracking the same jokes and even making the same hand motions. They were all quite polished presenters: never stumbling over their lines, projecting their voice fully, and using melodramatic intonations to make things sound more interesting. But I couldn’t get over how so many of these tourists, who had paid quite a hefty fee to get there and take a tour, looked bored out of their minds. Still, I had a great time there. After walking to the Inca bridge, struggling up Huayna Picchu, and walking for hours around the main site, I took a late afternoon siesta on the terraces, then headed back to Aguas for some 4 soles ($1) pollo a la brasa.