Friday night we took the bus from Arequipa to Cusco. The road starts at 2500 m in Arequipa, goes through a pass at around 4500 m before reaching Puno near Lake Titicaca, and then goes through another pass around 4300 m and down into Cusco at 3400 m. Quite a trip, supposed to take 10 hours. Unfortunately, there was a major car accident in that first pass. Traffic was totally stopped for many hours, and it was slow going for some hours after that. We were supposed to arrive in Cusco at 6am. At 11:30am we finally stopped for some food (dinner was around 9pm and we didn't get food after that) in Pukura. After that it was only 5 more hours until we got to Cusco, almost 11 hours late. There we found out that our train to Machu Picchu left earlier than we had bargained for and we were being picked up at 4:30am, just 12 hours from our arrival in the city after a 21 hour bus ride. Ugh! We got dinner, picked up snacks for the next day, and went to bed.
Our taxi to Ollantaytambo (try saying that five times) was right on time, and we got on our train at 6:10am. The tracks follow the river in a very steep valley, not quite paralleling the Inca Trail. We stopped a few times to let folks off who were taking the shorter versions of the trail. We reached Agua Caliente (aka Machu Picchu Pueblo) at the base of the mountains and got the scoop on our guided tour. We hung out in town a bit since our tour didn't start for a few hours, then took the bus up the mountain. The next five hours we spent in Machu Picchu, two with the guide and three just wandering around ourselves. Awesome! Here are some pictures:
We took the bus back down and had dinner in Agua Caliente before catching our train back to Ollantaytambo at 7pm. We arrived back in Cusco around 10:30pm. Long day! We're really glad we went to Machu Picchu, and after that we probably won't go looking for more ruins.
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