What a week it has been! Last weekend we were in Cusco, which is a beautiful city with lots of old Spanish churches along with lots and LOTS of tourists. We spent the one full day we were there wandering around the square buying snacks and other last minute supplies for our trip.
We left for the Salkantay Trial (which replaced the Inca Trail as originally planned) super early Sunday morning. Over the next four days we hiked up and over Salkantay Pass for a total of 80 km and reached an altitude of over 15,200 ft before reaching Agua Caliente, the town just below Machu Picchu. The views on the trail were amazing, the paths were defintely interesting (we were the first group to return to it after the whole area was shut down due to landslides), and the waterfalls were plentiful and kept everything very interesting... Trench foot doesn´t begin to explain what my feet looked like at the end of each day!
On our last trekking day we took the new "cable car"(virtually a shopping cart on a thick metal cable) to cut off a couple hours, and had to get up at 4:45am in order to beat the police to the site and get across the river it spans before they shut it down. Once we reached the boundary to the Machu Picchu Sanctuary we found out that they had changed the ticket rules since we had left Cusco and weren´t allowed into the park without them (ours were in Agua Caliente, 12 km away). After waiting a couple hours we decided, along with the 40 or so other hikers waiting to get into the Sanctuary, to storm the gates and just walk in on our own. It worked! We walked right past them, and 3 hours later were officially done with our trek.
We headed up to Machu Picchu the next morning (yesterday) at 6am. It was beautiful. Definitely rainy, but very beautiful. We wandered and took pictures until early afternoon and then headed back to Agua Caliente for a nap before our nighttime trip back to Cusco and on to Lima. I´m currently in Lima until tomorrow night, when we start our trip up the Pacific coast. It feels great to be back at sea level and by the ocean again!
That´s all for now! Love and miss you all!
Burns
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment