Jason D. Barr

Okay, so the 1.75km hike is just to the base of the mountain that Machu Picchu is on. This kind of occurred to me as we were headed on the road out of town and it was sloping down, not up. It’s another one and a half to two hour hike straight up to get to the ruins themselves. Oh, my goodness, it was exhausting. I don’t think I’ve every been that tired in my whole life, and that includes Tuesday at Pisac. Most (smart) people catch a bus that takes them up to the entrance to the ruins, about a 20 minute ride. Then, the (smart) dumb people walk the road that switchbacks up the mountain, walking in the ditches so as not to be hit by buses on their way up and down. Finally, there’s a class of people like Susannah and I who decided it would be faster to use the steps that cut through the switchbacks and go straight up the mountain. Yes, it’s faster, but it’s exhausting beyond description. It took us about an hour and a half to get to the top. The feeling of satisfaction to be done (not to have “accomplished”, but simply to be finished) was great.

The weather, thankfully, cooperated. It was cool and overcast, with the mountaintops around us rising up into the clouds. Since I had sweated so much coming up the mountain, my sunscreen had run off, so I would have gotten scorched if the sun had been out. We had the opportunity to get a guide at the entrance to the ruins, but since we had a guidebook that told us most of the same information that a guide would have, we decided to go it ourselves. We could do what we wanted that way, anyway. We took our time going around, looking at everything at least once, and stopping to sit and rest a couple of times. Man, it was just awesome. An entire city built on top of this huge mountain, with 360 degree views all around of higher mountains, and river valleys below, was amazing. The pictures are on Flickr, of course, but I’m not sure they really do it justice.

We spent a little over an hour in the ruins. By this time, we found it more and more difficult to get up every time we sat down, so we figured we should head back down to our hotel. This time, we bought two tickets to ride the bus down. Once back to the hotel, we collapsed on the bed and took a nap before heading out for lunch.

I realize that I seem to be writing more about what we eat for meals that any other single subject. Today’s lunch will be no exception. We went to Indio Feliz, a French-owned restaurant in a back alley that totally knocked our socks off. You could get a whole meal (appetizer, main course, and dessert) for s/45, which is pretty good, compared to the other food around A.C. (once you take quality into account). It was great, and filled us right up after the hard effort we had put out in the morning.

Once lunch was done, we walked around to the shops and basically tried to kill time, as there was nothing left for us to do, either in town or back at our hotel. The rest of the day was alternately spent reading in our room, and once that got too boring, wandering the vendors’ stalls. Rinse and repeat. Finally went to bed a little after 9:00.