I had hoped the trip would be without many hiccups. I’d prepared all the hotels, buses, and trains we would need for ten days in Peru. I was meeting the woman I loved after a four month absence, and all I wanted was for her to have a memorable birthday in an amazing place.
For a few days things went off almost without a hitch. I picked up Rachel at the airport and within minutes we were in a relatively posh hotel room. We had a great dinner in Cusco and slept like lambs in a king size bed.
The next day we checked out and grabbed a cab to our tour bus. The bus ride to Puno was probably one of the least exciting tourist jaunts in Peru, but I couldn’t have been happier.
First, we went to some kind of Church thing.
Then we went to some kind of Inca building that had collapsed, leaving only a wall. There was a high point though, a baby alpaca, and some rocks.
The last stop was some kind of museum we didn't even bother to go into, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with bulls.
Once the bus deposited us in Puno we grabbed a cab and five minutes later were in another fairly posh suite in the Plaza de Armas in Puno. Apart from a rather awful dinner from a restaurant I’d actually had good luck with before, and the fact that I’d lost my sunglasses in the bus, things were still going swimmingly.
A taxi picked us up at the hotel and took us to the dock where our boat was waiting. A microphone cracked on and I was afraid of another series of monotonous tour guide droning, but thankfully we were saved from that by a rather clipped series of short announcements. We were free to enjoy our boat ride across the highest navigable lake in the world in relative peace.
Rachel and I opted to pay a nominal fee and ride on the Mercedes Benz with the rest of the tour. Pictures were taken, unique if not relatively predictable experiences were had. Afterward we shoved off to the beautiful island of Amantani, and thankfully our “home stay” had a very nice room, and little actual contact with natives who’d long ago grown bored of tourists.
We had our passable lunch of quinoa soup and some strange native potatoes that looked like a cross between a potato and a carrot. They have a very distinct flavor somewhere between the starch of an American potato and a sweet potato. The whole tour group, actually, a half dozen tour groups met up in what passed for a plaza on this side of the island. Thankfully I already knew where they were going so Rachel and I could head them off at the pass. We coasted up the hill past the aging or wheezing gringos on the path and made it to the top of Pachamama, the Westernmost facing mountain on the island. From there we wandered, unmolested along the mountain top before retreating to a wind break to watch the sun sink into the horizon behind snow capped Bolivian mountains.
Sometime after a fairly edible dinner, there was a “party” for all the tourists in a building nearby. We went down with the Peruvian woman staying in the same homestay as us. We were given “native dress” to make the party more festive. I put a poncho on over my jacket and Rachel put some kind of wool shawl on over hers.
A Peruvian band consisting of a drum, small guitar and pan flute took the stage. Some local men wandered around the room grabbing groups of men and women and we all formed circles in the center of the room and did something that approximated dancing. Rachel and I fled after about a half hour, which was fifteen minutes too long.
I had hoped that we would get up around 4 AM to go watch the sunrise from Pachatata, the eastern facing mountain, but whether from the local food or the altitude, we weren’t quite up to it.
So we woke up around seven, ate breakfast, and moseyed down to the dock to get the boat to our next island, Takile. An hour after the boat was unmoored we set foot on our next shore. The island is beautiful, and fairly isolated in the lake, making for some spectacular views. The tour took us around the island and to a restaurant, where Rachel was interested to know that the native’s equivalent of peacocking turned out to be increasing the size of the colorful pom-poms single women draped around their skirts. The men showed their marital status via the colors of wool hats they wore.
After Takile we had an uneventful three hour slog back to Puno, where the plans would begin to unravel at startling speed.
We disembarked in Puno, said goodbye to the tour guide and group and jumped in a cab that delivered us to our hotel in five minutes. We collected our bags and got in another cab to the bus station, where we didn’t have tickets but I knew that buses left on the half hour throughout the day.
I checked at the first ticket window and a woman rather rudely brushed me off, saying that there were no buses to Cuzco for the day. The next three windows were oddly closed, and the fourth didn’t have any buses to Cuzco. When I asked who did have buses to Cuzco they sent me around the corner. Finally, the man at this counter was willing to explain why nobody had buses to Cuzco.
The city of Juliaca had decided to strike, for three days, and were closing down the only direct overland route from Puno, where Lake Titicaca was, to Cuzco, the jump off point for Machu Picchu. This was an incredibly bad turn of events.
I went back to Rachel, thinking, well we may not be completely screwed, we could just shell out the cash for the next plane back to Cuzco.
As it turns out, the only nearby airport was located in, you guessed it, Juliaca. So the rat bastards had closed off the roads and the sky.
I went back to a few of the bus companies to find out if or when the next bus was leaving. A few companies did have buses, but those buses weren’t leaving until 9:30 PM (It was 4:00 PM now) and would take 12 hours to arrive in Cuzco. This wouldn’t have been a problem if we were planning on staying in a five dollar hostel, but we had a 120 dollar hotel booked for that night. We also had a 160 dollar set of train tickets from Cuzco to Machu Picchu in the morning, at six in the morning.
The first thing we did was check the train schedule, and as it turns out, there was not a single train leaving Cuzco after 9 AM. So there was no chance to change the tickets to a later train. At this point it looked like we’d end up eating an expensive hotel and the train tickets.
We left the train station and went back to the hotel, from there we asked the concierge if they could find us a taxi or private car to take us around the road blocks and into Cuzco. After about twenty minutes of trying the best that the woman could do was a price of 380 American dollars for a ride down to Cuzco. As my eyes were starting to show murder to anyone who passed by Rachel managed to keep her cool and began trying to find some kind of solution online. Neither her useful effort or my smoldering brought us to a particularly good conclusion. I had a local phone which was both dead and out of money and the hotel was unwilling to let us use theirs, further complicating the situation and boiling my blood.
We left the hotel to go get some food and charge my phone after putting some money on it. We happened to pass a travel agency on the gringo walking street near the hotel. After some explaining the two women working behind the desk were using three cell phones simultaneously to try to find taxis past the temporary war zone of Juliaca.
At first they quoted us the same price, 380 dollars for the ride. I told them I could probably buy a used car somewhere in Puno for that price, and they laughingly agreed. Rachel and I decided to throw a figure at them, 250 dollars, a fairly staggering amount of money for a cab ride. Five minutes later the girls found us a cabbie, allegedly trustworthy, through which we could arrange transport to Cuzco, leaving a half hour later.
We jumped at the chance, grabbed the cash from an ATM, paid up, ran to a restaurant and got some food to go, and then walked over to the cab. We were feeling pretty happy about finding a solution to the problem, but Peru tends to reward those who count their chickens before they’ve hatched by burning down their farm.
After about a half hour the highway out of Puno was covered in rocks. The taxi had to swerve onto the shoulder to avoid the mass. The rocks were sprinkled with the reflective shards of broken glass gleaming under the yellow streetlights. We had assumed a truck carrying stones had gotten into an accident.
Not a hundred yards down the road there was another mass of stones, and shards of broken glass. Fifty yards further down there was another round of the same. After we’d passed a half dozen piles of stones studded with broken glass I was still wondering what the hell kind of accident it possibly could have been, and why no police had arrived to fix the situation.
Only later did it dawn on me that this was actually part of the protest. Our driver swerved to avoid all the piles of stone and glass, until at the gateway to the city of Juliaca the road had finally become completely impassable. Boulders, huge piles of glass, and pieces of tarmac had been heaped three feet high across all four lanes of the highway.
The lights of the city brightened the mass across the road, but there were no angry mobs guarding the blockade. Kids in backpacks walked down the street, presumably coming home from school, old women sold corn and vegetables on the side of the blockaded road. Teenagers rode back and forth on their mopeds, smiling and laughing. Not knowing the vagaries of Peruvian protesting and rioting, I had no idea what this meant.
The driver, Victor Hugo, reached the impasse and reversed. I was getting very nervous. I had assumed, and seemingly confirmed that the nine hours of our trip meant that we were circumventing the city of Juliaca altogether, but here we were, right in the thick of the very thing we’d paid the cab driver handsomely to avoid.
Skirting the main road, we headed down a side road, following a truck over and through an empty basketball court to get back on the road. The road was also filled with rubble and broken glass, but it was seemingly possible to avoid most of the mass and continue on.
We went down a few of these roads, swerving to avoid the stones and glass, but much of the time wincing at the sound of glass getting crushed beneath the wheels of our less than rugged Toyota Yaris.
Eventually we’d gotten off the roads of the city completely and were climbing up a dirt path. It was wide enough for our car but the distinction between a large path and a small road was razor thin. We climbed in a cloud of dust until the entire city of Juliaca glowed in the silent geometry of its street lights. From the heights there was no indication of the chaos and anger brewing in the city center. There was only the beauty of its sharp orange edges arrayed like an army of fireflies marching along the contours of the valley, below the ovular silhouettes of the surrounding mountaintops.
The dirt road made Rachel nervous, but I thought we were finally heading out of harm’s way and to the highway on the other side of Juliaca.
After ten or fifteen minutes on our dirt road the cab managed to find asphalt again, and again that asphalt was covered in boulders and glass. We’d taken a mountain road above the heights of the city but confusingly only seemed to dive right into the city again. We drove on, the streets on the outskirts darker but less peopled than before. We turned around a half dozen times and though I was confident we’d make it out before, the driver seemed hopelessly lost in this particular quarter of the city. He bottomed out over a couple of different roadblocks before taking some kind of shortcut through a construction zone.
Afterwards we were driving along the side of a set of train tracks, seemingly the only part of the city that had avoided the walls of stone and glass before again finding ourselves in a new maze of roadblocks. An another side street we watched a girl sweeping the broken glass in front of her parents’ tienda to the other side of the road. There was a vanishingly quick moment of tranquility within the maelstrom as we passed by, like children poking their head out of the door in a recently shelled city.
We finally made it onto what seemed like a major artery out of Juliaca but the waves of boulders and shattered bottles continued for what seemed like ten or fifteen miles outside of the city. I can only assume that the people of the city had loaded huge construction trucks with the empty bottles and rocks and driven around the city while people standing in the back had been tossing them onto the road. The shutdown of Juliaca, one of the largest cities in Peru, was a seemingly herculean effort of thousands and thousands of people.
At one point we’d passed a street filled with what seemed like all of the city’s police cruisers. It evoked an odd feeling, that such a huge collection of the symbols of order could perfectly represent a total absence of authority is not something I would have ever considered.
After we’d passed what seemed like the last of the barriers erected by the angry populace the cab ditched off to another mountain road. This one was larger and reminiscent of many of the roads I’d traveled between the mountain towns of Peru, which is to say thousands of feet up with hardly enough room for two cars to pass, and girded by nothing but air separating the car from the cliff face and a fall into the endless dark.
I was immensely thankful that Rachel couldn’t see much of that.
The mountain road finally gave way to the main highway, which we’d traveled in a cushioned tourist bus only two days earlier. The driver sped up to about 110 km/hr and despite a few whining noises that weren’t there when we left Puno, the car deftly sped us back to Cusco. We arrived at an amazingly well appointed hotel room around midnight.
We’d be able to enjoy our little oasis for about four hours before we had to leave for the train to Machu Picchu.
I’d lived in Cusco for the last three months, and in that time almost all of the beauty I’d found, driving between islolated mountain towns not connected to the electric grid, was that the Andes were a region of very stark contrasts between the browns of the mountains and the white of the occasional snow capped peaks. The valleys would take on green hues of their slightly increased fecundity.
I had assumed this would prepare me for the terrain around Machu Picchu, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. There is a reason that Machu Picchu makes it onto so many bucket lists, and it was obvious on the train ride into Aguas Caliente.
The area around Machu Picchu is a few thousand feet below Cusco, the city that most people will fly into when they arrive in Peru for the trip. That slight difference in elevation is enough to create a microclimate totally unlike anything in the mountains surrounding Cusco. The windows outside of the train revealed a breathtaking panorama that went on for three hours. The Urubamba river wound its way along the train tracks, taking millions of years to carve out the valley along which the train wound its way.
Mountains rose up on both sides, separated only occasionally by the rivets that glaciers had made as gravity pulled them down to the valley floor. There was no obvious distinction between those draped with snowcaps and those carpeted in plants, a subtle shift in the weather patterns could probably turn an icy peak green or vice versa anywhere along the range.
The train stopped in a little town called Aguas Caliente though it has apparently been renamed “Pueblo Machu Picchu” in recent years. The train station is surrounded by an artisanal market of a labyrinthine nature which is pretty disorienting. I had expected to get a cab to our hotel, which neither of us knew the address of, but there’s only one main road in Aguas Caliente and its frequented solely by the buses that take people up to Machu Picchu.
Luckily for us though, a little tired and very sandy from the last day and a half of hussling, the hotel was not two blocks from the station. The room was incredibly spacious and comfortable as well. From the top floor we had a stunning view of the Urubamba river beneath our balcony and the imposing mountains that shielded Machu Picchu from Aguas Caliente. Rachel took a well deserved nap and I, not wanting to wake her with my melodic snoring, took a walk around the town and found out when, where, and how we’d get to Machu Picchu the next day. We bought tickets for “Machu Picchu and Mountain.” Having done absolutely no research ahead of time we weren’t fully prepared for what that actually meant. We only knew that we weren’t going to do Huayna Picchu (the iconic rounded mountain directly behind Machu Picchu in all the pictures) because Rachel has some issues with heights and the path is decidedly more dangerous than the average hike.
The next morning we got up around 3:30 and were waiting in line for the first bus around 4:30. It was already raining. Breakfast wasn’t up until 5 so Rachel and I took turns waiting in line and walking back to the hotel to eat breakfast. The bus left at 5:30 for the winding half hour drive up to the gates of the city. Once we got to Machu Picchu we still had to wait, and behind us the buses piled a steady stream of ponchos into the line. A rainbow of cheap plastic waited eagerly for the gates to open.
There are definitely parts of Machu Picchu that feel like going to Disney World. Luckily, after we got through the gates, we made a beeline for the first uphill trail we could find. Despite the rain there was a clearing at the altitude of Machu Picchu itself and the clouds rolled around in the upper parts of the surrounding mountains, obscuring the peaks but leaving the city at its charming, picturesque best. We managed to get some really beautiful shots on the empty viewing platforms, not only of us in the clear without being surrounded by tourists but of Machu Picchu itself without a single soul roaming its rocky corridors.
After about a half hour of taking photos and climbing up the hillside we had to admit our total lack of research was beginning to come into play. We had a choice of going up “Machu Picchu Mountain,” whatever that was, or going down into the city itself. We chose to go up, and after wandering around for a bit found the gates to the mountain trail. The mountain didn’t open for another twenty minutes so we had to listen to some middle-aged southern California blondes banter until we were mercifully allowed to run up the mountain ahead of them.
The view from Huayna Picchu is supposed to be epic, but Machu Picchu Mountain makes it look like a little hill. We climbed for almost an hour straight, up stone stairs, stopping only to get a few agonizingly disappointing views of the clouds that had descended to cover everything. And though Rachel was a trooper, bounding up the stone stairs, sometimes fairly well exposed to precipitous drops, her fear of heights kicked in pretty hard at the top. We went down a little slower than we’d gone up, but the whiteout across the trail probably came in handy here as we couldn’t focus on much except putting one foot in front of the other. To help out I took Rachel’s bag and put it inside my water proof one, this will be significant later.
When we got back down to the bottom of Mount Machu Picchu we’d been getting steadily rained on for at least four hours. We were wet, my poncho had large holes in it, and I’d given my jacket to Rachel, who was basically shivering. Rachel was also wearing old running shoes which had a fairly prominent hole in the front so both of us were we through our socks as well. We had bought “boxed lunches” with the understanding that we could eat at almost any beautiful spot throughout the part on a sunny day. When it was raining though, there are very few places for cover at Machu Picchu, so we simply had a couple of granola bars and pressed on.
The city center of Machu Picchu, though filled with thousands of tourists a day, has absolutely no markings, so we knew if we went into the city it would basically be meaningless to us and we’d get bored easily and leave. We went back to the entrance to get a guide.
We actually lucked out and were able to piggy back off of a group of five tourists that already had a guide. He led us into the city, where we took some of the same pictures we’d taken three hours earlier, only this time surrounded by people and of the city turned into colored walkways by all the ponchos roaming around the edifices.
The guide explained most of the sites pretty well, sometimes with pictures dating back a hundred years, and there were periods that we listened attentively and others when the rain, which hadn’t stopped, and the increasing wind were getting to us. We were soaked and cold and only getting wetter and colder. Rachel hadn’t been wearing a hat so her hair was soaked, and I was having trouble figuring out where the sweat ended and the rain began.
Once the tour ended, around noon, we’d been wandering around Machu Picchu in the rain for over six hours. We darted into one of the buses back to town, tearing off the already half torn ponchos and throwing them in the trash. Thankfully, we got to go back to our warm hotel room rather than a hostel.
We relaxed for a bit and then went out to the free dinner provided by our hotel, which was pretty delicious the night before. We looked at the wine list and Rachel wanted a Malbec that the hotel didn’t have. I took a few minutes and spoke to the manager and he sent one of his employees out to grab a bottle from another restaurant nearby. I may have mentioned that it was Rachel’s birthday and she wanted a piece of chocolate cake as well.
Two woman wearing Peruvian mountain garb came over with the manager and another employee to do a Machu Picchu version of the embarrassing Happy Birthday song they do at Applebee’s. They also wrote “Happy Birthday Rachel” in chocolate sauce on her plate with a really good piece of cake. My girlfriend was embarrassed on her birthday, so my job was done.
When we got back from dinner I realized I hadn’t taken my phone out of my bag. I wasn’t too worried as I’d hiked for hours and hours in the rain with it before and everything inside stayed dry. What I hadn’t contended with is that putting Rachel’s wet bag inside of a watertight seal had essentially turned the bag into an oven which sucked all the water out of it. When I looked into my bag there was a pool of about a third of a gallon of water at the bottom, in which my phone had been floating for the better part of half a day.
I went downstairs on Rachel’s orders to get an airtight container and some rice, and left the phone in it until the next morning, but alas Machu Picchu and its Incan ghosts had claimed my phone as tribute.
We had one more day in Aguas Caliente so we decided to go out for a hike to a place called Mandor ( MANDOOR!!!!) to where there was some kind of pretty mountain thing and a waterfall of some kind. To get there, the hotel proprietor assured me, all we had to do was walk for a bit along the train tracks to the easily marked entrance. So along the train tracks we went. After we passed our second or third “Don’t walk along the train tracks it’s dangerous” sign we were staying into a relatively long train tunnel. We half-walked, half-sprinted through it, thankful no trains had come before we were at yet another train tunnel. I still maintain that there was probably enough room for us to spread eagle against the rock walls to avoid getting squished, but Rachel thinks there wasn’t enough room.
It seemed that this was probably not the way to Mandor so we turned around and went through the tunnel again. We had passed a set of stairs earlier but assumed it was the path to Putucusi, which was apparently steep and dangerousy. After yesterday’s adventure with heights I didn’t want to press us into another steep situation.
We got to the stairs and started to climb. It was a very pretty path and before long we arrived at something I’d never quite seen before. There was an empty booth much the same as the entrance to Mount Machu Picchu and a little wire mesh door framed in wood standing ajar. There was also a ladder. The ladder went up for probably about a hundred feet. A thick steel cable was bolted to the wall next to it. I won’t even venture to guess what the actual angle was, but it was a damn near vertical ascent up the rock face on the ladder to a point where the climber then disappeared into the mountain before ascending the next ladder which was just as steep and about half as tall. I could not imagine a more terrifying “hike” for someone who was afraid of heights.
Rachel said she thought she could do it, and I certainly didn’t want to press her one way or another. I told her we could climb about thirty feet up the ladder, her first with me behind her, and we could see whether we wanted to keep going or not. We made it up to the pre-determined point and decided it probably wasn’t worth going all the way up.
Rachel was adamant that I go up and take some pretty pictures though, so I left my bag at the bottom and shimmied up the ladder, and the next one, and the next one. One can apparently climb mountains much faster if ladders are scaling the face than other hiking methods, and before long I was way, way above the starting point. Pretty pictures were taken. I half jogged up the mountain a little bit more after the ladders, not wanting to keep Rachel waiting too long, but wanting to get some good shots before I went down.
As I scrambled back down the trail and the ladders I got a few more pictures before I was stopped in my tracks. The first thing I saw at the space between the ladders was a Peruvian guy wearing my bright orange backpack. The next thing I saw was Rachel sitting down near him, at the top of that hundred foot vertical ascent. I don’t think I would have been more surprised if I saw Abraham Lincoln arm wrestling a velociraptor at the top of the ladder. I still feel bad that, probably from the strain of running up and down the trail I wasn’t able to even remotely convey how proud I was of Rachel at that moment. Climbing up the path of Machu Picchu Mountain on a well worn trail was one thing, but to come up that ladder, faced every rung with the thing that most terrifies you, was an amazing accomplishment.
Apparently a young Czech lady, her mother, and Peruvian boyfriend had given Rachel the 8-Mile speech (one shot) and convinced her to climb up the ladder. So the five of us reclimbed the trail together, and after four or five more ladders, a few narrow spots, and another 45 minutes or so of climbing we got to the top of Putucusi. I had no idea what was waiting for us but apparently Rachel did. We had a totally unobstructed view of the entire city of Machu Picchu, and it was gorgeous. I should mention that the sky was clear and blue, and not a drop of rain fell, until we were going back down the trail. Not only did Rachel have to climb back down these incredibly frightening things, but she had to do it in the rain. The Peruvian guy, fleet footed as anyone I’ve ever seen, went down first, and then Rachel, with me behind as I tried to talk her down the increasingly slippery rungs of the ladders.
We went straight from the trail to the train station. A frightened young American girl was asking us how to get a hotel as she realized that she left her backpack on the train. Rachel did an amazing job of comforting the hapless girl and bought her a little gift before we were back on the train. We were treated to another three hours of the picturesque valley of the Urubamba river before we got a cab back to the hotel.
The next day we spent most, if not all, of the day shopping. Over the course of six to eight hours markets were visited, gifts were purchases, and Christmas was firmly destroyed under the barrages of haggling. That night it poured, the skies opened up and after a few hours of rain pebble sized pieces of hail scoured the surface of Cusco. The roof of the hotel sounded like it was under attack until the squall passed and it simply continued raining.
The next day I had planned for us to visit some old Incan salt mines and hiking to an Incan amphitheatre before retiring to a fancy spa in Urubamba. However, when I looked at the weather it said rain for a solid week, so we just gave up and went to the Spa. Posh would be an understatement for this place, a five star luxury resort called Inka del Tambo. We went in, ate a meal by the pool and then went in for an odd hour of “hydro therapy” before a hot stone massage. The hydro therapy consisted of a dry sauna, an ice rub, then a steam sauna before a series of random water jets in various positions. There were also some kind of scouring shower jets before we went in for the massage.
On the ride back to Cusco we were treated to some more beautiful Andean skies, but Rachel was feeling particularly sick. It was touch and go by the time we got back to Cusco, and after moving a dinner reservation to 8 PM Rachel made her recovery and we went to a ridiculously tasty Tapas restaurant called Cicciolini’s.
Rachel’s flight left at about 5:50 in the morning, but the Cusco airport is an odd beast. There are virtually no flights in or out of Cusco after 4 or 5 in the afternoon because the weather becomes wild and too dangerous for even regular airliners. They don’t open the airport until 4AM after the last afternoon flight, and Rachel’s was the first flight of the day. We left at about 4 to go to the airport, and when we got there was a long line to check into her flight. None of the other flight operators had even opened yet.
After waiting over an hour in the check in line it was looking like something had gone horribly wrong. It had also started raining. Apparently, Lan had downgraded the flight to a smaller plane, so some of the passengers were going to get booted to the next flight. Rachel was less than happy, but when it was finally her turn to check in everything went off without a hitch. My plane would be another matter.
I got to the airport around 9 for my 10:20 flight. They told me they were still trying to figure out when the plane would actually take off. Despite the significant profusion of tourists that flew into Cusco, only one airline, Rachel’s (LAN) had planes that were equipped with the necessary devices to thread the needles necessary to take off from Cusco in bad weather. My flight eventually took off around two and I made it back to La Paz, already missing her by the time I landed.
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