As the 5am bus I was on snaked its way up to
Machu Pichu, the mist surrounding Huayna Pichu seemed to disperse and
reform every couple of minutes – looks like there would be no
guarantee of a decent view once I got up there. Arriving at the
deserted Machu Pichu with only a handful of others was much more
enjoyable than yesterday's experience when the town was already
rammed with big groups of camera laden tourists slowly snaking their
way through the ruins.
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| View from Huayna Pichu |
Wandering through mazes of eerily quiet
avenues, climbing devilishly steep stairs into cramped corridors and
traipsing along the dew-covered terraces with hardly another soul
around was a hell of a lot of fun. Having gotten my fill of playing
explorer it was time to go and tackle Huayna Pichu, a mere trifle at
2720m above sea level (and actually only a climb of 360m from Machu
Pichu). Nevertheless, I worked up a good sweat blasting up the steps
and squeezing through the odd cave en route to the top - God knows
how the camera crew and numerous fat people I passed on the way made
it up.
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| Camera crew on the top of Huayna Pichu |
Cloud hung thick around the summit (which was little more than
a collection of massive boulders and progressively filled up with
tourists as time went on) but I had brought plenty of biscuits and my
ipod so I settled on the the top boulder to wait. As I listened to a
podcast about the impending development of a strain of
person-to-person transmittable bird-flu (for some reason that stuck
in my mind) the mist lifted and my wait was rewarded with a delicious
view of the ruins below; box ticked. I spent another couple of hours
trekking the deserted paths around Huayna Pichu, taking in an Inca
site embedded in the mouth of a cave, a few more hours around Machu
Pichu (its unlikely I'm going to come back here any time soon so I
thought I'd make the most of it) and then it was time to head back to
Aguas Calientes and from there catch the train back to Cuzco.
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| Cave Inca site |
On the
train I had an interesting chat with a geologist-cum-environmentalist
from Chile who told me a bit about the currently turbulent situation
surrounding the indigenous Mapuche people in Chile. My rusty Spanish
language neurons creaked back into life but the sheer breadth of
vocabulary he was using reminded me that I really have to keep
studying.
Arriving back into Cuzco in the late evening, a
few of us wandered along to Loki, a “party-hostel”, where some of
the others from the trek were staying. The first person I bumped into
was the Russian guy I'd met in a club weeks ago in Quito, Ecuador.
Nothing surprises me any more.
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| The money shot |
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