Sloth Journeys

As the last major place we’d visit in South America before it was time to head home, Machu Picchu had a bit to live up to!

Especially for Richard who isn’t so keen on ‘old ruins’! And even for me, who was worried about just how much of a crazy tourist trap it would be and whether it was really going to live up to hype.

But we’d already bought our tickets months ago, before we left the UK, and so it was time to go and see what all the fuss was about!

To get there we first caught a collectivo 1.5 hours to Ollyantambo, the small town/village from where the railway which carries 90%+ of visitors Machu Picchu pueblo (or town)) otherwise known as Aguas Calientes) departs. We decided to base ourselves here for a couple of days instead of doing a round trip straight from Cusco (which apparently makes for a very long day), or staying in Aguas Calientes, which we’d heard was incredibly touristy. But more on Olly and Cusco in the next blog, this one’s all about the big MP!

So on the morning of our MP visit, we took the train from Olly to Aguas Calientes, a journey of around 1.5 hours. Whilst waiting for our train, we were treated to a taste of the ‘entertainment’ that those splashing out for the more expensive train during their journey – some people dressed up in traditional costume, dancing to traditional music! It made us thankful we’d plumped for the cheapo(ISH – there’s no truly cheap anything when it comes to visiting MP) tickets and weren’t going to have to put up with that for our whole journey!!

On arrival to Aguas Calientes, the train station dumps all visitors straight into a market – tacky souvenirs anyone?! Having found our way through the maze of stalls we found our way to the main street, where you catch the bus up to MP. We’d heard that the queues for the bus can be quite long, but we weren’t quite prepared for what we saw!

At this point, I was starting to strongly question our life choices that had led us to this moment!! However, we were here now and the bus queue beckoned (after the obligatory coffee stop); and anyway, we’re British, so we were basically born for queuing!

And so we joined the requisite queue for the noon entry to MP, with a certain amount of trepidation as to just how crowded it was going to be over we got there.

As it happened, whilst we had to queue for a good 30 mins or more, it was quite orderly in the end and we were fairly soon on a bus transporting us up the hill and some pretty spectacular switchbacks* all the way to the entrance.

More queues then awaited us at the top (Admin – surely as Brits this felt like a little slice of home, all this queuing?!), first got the loo (there are none inside the site itself) and then to get into the site via your selected circuit (you cannot walk freely around the whole of MP like you could years ago, you have to buy a river for a designated circuit and follow that).

As we’d found out by chance, a few weeks ago, even though we’d bought tickets way back in February, there had been a bit of upheaval with the ticketing of Machu Picchu over recent months, culminating with a whole new circuit and ticketing system being employed since 1st June,so we didn’t really know quite what circuit/route we would now get. However, in the end, it seems we got quite a good deal. Because our original ticket covered two key areas that are now separated into two separate circuits, we were actually allowed to do both of these new circuits with our single ticket! We nearly had a slight hiccup when the staff member supervising the entry to Circuit 2 seemed to want to insist we must do Circuit 1, which we had just finished doing (i know my Spanish isn’t great, but he’d just watched us come out of the exit for circuit 1!) but thankfully another, slightly more sensible and less jobsworthy staff member came along and overruled him on our behalf! And so it was that we got to do a much bigger chunk of MP that most people can these days.

So what did we think? Well, in all honesty we both thought that MP is overrated and overpriced. That said, the scenery and location is stunning and I’m pretty in awe of where this citadel was built. And whilst I think it is overpriced and I don’t think we’d have built a whole trip around it like many visitors to Peru do, I’m still really glad we went and count ourselves lucky to have had the chance to go.

• Having written this blog several days ago but having not got round to posting it straight away, we’ve just heard that 4 days after our visit, one of the buses crashed off one of switchbacks during poor weather. As we understand it, noone was killed although numerous people were hurt. So again, we find ourselves feeling somewhat lucky that our own South American travels have far been incident free.