With the original Inca trail walk being long since booked up, prohibitively expensive and obviously waaaay too mainstream for us, we instead embarked on the Inca jungle trail with Lorenzo Expeditions, which included a first day mountain biking instead of walking, nights in hotels, incredible food three times a day and the trail almost all to ourselves, all for half the price of the classic trail. It's fair to say that going on that trip was one of the best decisions we made.
It didn't seem like that on the first day as we biked down a mountain road from way up in the pissing wet clouds at over 4000m, only emerging out a good two hours and 2500m of descent later just before the end of the ride, only redeemed by beers down by the river with our fellow trekkers and of course excellent food and pisco sours in the village bar.
However, the remaining two days of trekking had it all.
On the first day we visited local families and learned of the farming and way of life of the people whose land we walked through, walked along an incredible remaining section of another Inca trail, sweated a lot on the 20km hike (and endured crossing the 100m deep valley in a little box dangling from a wire and hoiked across by a burly man on the other side) to be repaid with hot springs at the end of it, and almost witnessed a bus load of moronic American gap year travellers tumble down a cliff after trying to drive through a mudslide. I guess many trips leave you with some form of regret...
An interesting talking point was the many fields of coca leaves that we walked past. In the last decade the president of Peru had tried to outlaw the cultivation of coca in order to move the country away from cocaine production. This was met by strong opposition amongst the indigenous community, who have been producing coca for many centuries and believe strongly in the properties of coca as a reliever of altitude sickness. It makes a darn tasty cup of tea too.
In the end the ban was reversed with the agreement that coca growers would have to register their intent if they wanted to conduct large-scale operations (it takes roughly 100g of coca leaves to produce one gram of cocaine). The fact also remains that cocaine is big business and Peru produces the most coca leaves of any country in the world, so it's in the government's best interests to leave people to it.
The next day (after we'd recovered from the spectacle of a young Brazilian girl keeping us awake with some excessive ass-shaking outside our hotel the night before) we headed off to zipline at speeds of 60mph between four mountains, some of us (me) even managing to hang upside down above the valley below. After an hour we finally had our first sight of the big MP far up above, and spent the rest of the day walking around the mountain (also called Machu Picchu - no one knows the original name of the city) on which it stands by the way of the train line from Cuzco to Aguas Calientes.
Aguas Calientes has only existed for ten years as a tourist town to make the trip to Machu Picchu more comfortable, and the unrealistic way that the train line cuts through the city like those little 'cities' you encounter by the entrance to Disneyland certainly feels pretty false. It served us very well as a place to have a five star meal as a group sendoff (I never wanted each mouthful to end) and get an early night before the 4am alarm the next day.
We met at 4.20, trudged down to the over the river to the Machu Picchu side for its 5am opening, and then set off with the hundreds of other pilgrims on the race up the 1772 steps to the entrance in the muggy dawn before sunset at roughly 6.20am.
The hour it took us to this would not rank as one of the most purely enjoyable of my life, nor was the feeling of getting there drenched in sweat to find we'd been beaten there by hoardes of freshly showered tourists who took the bus up there. However Wilbert, our excellent and knowledgeable local guide, took us up to a less-trodden vantage spot from where we saw the clouds slowly part at 6.20 to reveal one of the most eerily beautiful sights I've ever seen.
At Machu Picchu you're prepared for the look of the place, that big, improbably steep mountain behind it, and the llamas, of which there are many. What you're not prepared for is the truly stunning scenery, with steep drops over every side that you look and lush forested vegetation surrounding the site. The feel of the place demands a real reverence and as such even the large numbers of visitors can't spoil that feeling that you're somewhere very special.
We were taken on a tour around to learn of how the citizens probably lived and the sacrificial ceremonies to the gods of the sky, before our guide left us to our own devices.
I had booked a ticket to hike up the Machu Picchu mountain (everything is ticketed), and almost didn't make it after leaving it with Mareike and racing around the site for half an hour to find her. Ticket procured, I had to race up to the summit, another 500m and countless steps above the ancient city, to catch up with the group. The views (not that I was hanging around to look at them) on the way up were stunning, but the summit at 3000m above sea level meant we were in the clouds and unable to see the tiny-looking city below.
Nevertheless, we were so enthused by the experience that on the train back to Cuzco that evening we hatched a plan to get tattoos inspired by the trip. 24 hours later I had an Inca sun surrounded by an Ecuadorian design on my inner bicep, and Mareike had an Inca cross on the back of her neck. A guarantee, as if that was needed, that we'll never forget that trip.
