You can't go up,there might be a tornado

Today, we went to Machu Piccu for the 2nd time. This time, the plan was to climb to the top of Machu Piccu mountain, for the view. A four hour hike. A miniscule time compared with our hikes in the Southern Andes.

That was the plan, but at 1130, it collided with the immovable object each country has. The low-level public official whose only job is to say no. In our case "no you can't go up there."

Our well educated guide had said we could, nothing at the entrance excluded our destination, but apparently there is a rule our guide with 9 years experience didn't know, namely that entrance us only allowed at 7am. The official explained that this was because winds could be high, and there was a risk of tornadoes. I stupidly tried to rationalise with him, of course it brought precisely nothing.

Oh well, let's try the Inca bridge walk instead. So we did, and despite not having the correct ticket, this particular junior official turned a blind eye. Quite why we will never know, but he did take a personal risk.

His risk was that we would fall off the cliff face walkway and not return. ( Fired for letting people through without a ticket, not because they died). It wouldn't be the first time people didn't return, but happily in our case, we made it to the bridge and back.

The walk for us vertigo sufferers was seriously nerve-racking. Luckily, we had the walk entirely to ourselves and therefore did not need to share the narrow walkway with anyone. ( In normal times, 100 people a day do this walk, and so passing would be a must) The gatekeeper told us before us there had been nobody all day.

The bridge itself is scary looking but no scarier than the walkway across the entire cliff face. Apparently, it's designed so that Incas could run across the cliff face. Full disclosure, at the worst bits I crawled on all fours.

Nota Bene: The photos are not from the narrow bits.

After the scary walk, we had a 2nd visit to the citadel before the scary bus ride down. Last crash just last December, 4 dead many injured. A real-life roller coaster with non-zero health risks.Read more