Aguas Calientes

Lies, waits, crowds and nonsense - my Machu Picchu experience.

Aguas Calientes is a strange town. It's the closest town to MP and exists solely to serve the tourist (as with every other place along the way). It is surprisingly upmarket; paved streets, concrete footpaths, glass facades, flashy restaurants and boutique hotels fall oddly into place in this isolated riverside town. They even chill their beers which is a testament to how un-peruvian the town has become. Obviously, along with that comes the hustle; hoards of locals with relentless and agressive sales attempts - probably the worst all trip.

Our guide spent the best part of half an hour trying to find our accommodation. When he finally figured it out, it was at the expense of his sweaty shirt and brow - he had run most of the city trying to find it. It was a stroke of luck that we got a big room with a comfy bed and a hot shower - all much to our delight given the previous night's experience. Of course, just moments before, I was panicking because the hotel staff physically couldn't find our room. Lost it like a set of car keys. But a whole room. In a three storey hotel. With six rooms per floor. Unbelievable.

Dinner that night was an atrocious display of rice and something followed by a fruit salad which, given it's 95% banana content, has redefined the fruit salad. The company however was great and given that almost the entire group had brought their own dinner prior to this one, it wasn't such an issue. Dinner was followed by a briefing for the next day, with which we were provided tomorrow's box-breakfast - only for Cat and I to have ours taken away again as we weren't officially part of that group (even though we ate the last five meals with them). Following that, power went out in the whole town so we packed up shop and went to bed. I did take a moment (a lengthy moment at that - ask the German kid who was holding the torch) to fill out a tour feedback form with some colourful words which probably shouldn't be repeated.

Three forty-five triggered a blaring alarm which was quickly snoozed at the expense of a shower. Four am had me at the hostel table awaiting my promised breakfast. I waited five minutes with no activity before leaving to finish preparing for our 4.15 departure. When it finally did come it was bread, jam and tea - a far cry from the colourful box-breakfast prised from my hands the night before.

Running only a smidgen late we stormed down the hill to join the line at the bridge to the park. At 5am the bridge opened. We streamed across in single file and began ascending the 2000 odd steps to the gate of MP. Under some specific and very heavily emphasised instructions not to be late, Cat and I bolted up the steps in forty-five minutes arriving at the top in a borderline liquid state - at 6am on the dot. We were in the first hundred of the five thousand visitors the UNESCO World Heritage site sees per day. But we couldn't enter without our guide, who arrived a tardy thirty minutes later, at least ten minutes after the last people in our group. When he finally arrived the queue to get through the gates was in full roar and he'd casually picked up another group (an entire group!) to ensure that the process would include as much palava as possible. I was livid and just a camel's straw from ditching the group altogether.

Fortunately he split the groups into English and Spanish and began what could be described as an average tour of quite an incredible place. But I'll bite my tongue for a moment, pause the rant and let you know why Machu Picchu is frequently beheld as the Holy Grail of Peru.

For me there are three things that make MP so spectacular: the setting, the scale and the craftsmanship. You could throw in the friendly llamas, dynamic microclimates, and pristine lawns but they're just the icing. MP was constructed on top of a mountain with near vertical 600m drops on most sides amongst a plethora of other peaks in every direction (some more snow capped than others). The views are fantastic and landscape dramatic! MP itself is said to once have been home to 600 Incas in 120 odd buildings (don't quote me on that). But that's just housing. Then there are the temples, the stores, the ceremonial areas and so on. That's inside the city walls. Outside the walls are a myriad of terraces for farming complete with stores, lookouts and a variety of other buildings. And that is just on the hill. Then there's the lookouts which were constructed on the adjacent (and not so adjacent) hills, the Sun Gate and, of course hundreds of kilometres of Inca trail that lead to and from all that, as well as all the way back to Cusco and in numerous other directions which geographically elude me. Bear in mind the Incas don't make trails from mud - these things are entirely made of stone and navigate some incredibly treacherous and inhospitable stretches of cliff. Finally, the craftsmanship at it's best (the temple buildings) is jaw dropping. Solid granite stones are carved and fitted so precisely that the walls could well have been monolithic with the joints drawn on in pen. Not a crack or pinhole in sight, with perfect vertical walls and symmetry that would put even the most obsessive compulsive at ease. With proper understanding, there's so much to appreciate.

And therein lay the problem. Proper understanding is hard to get when your first language differs from that of your guide. Or when your guide gives you a brief overview then shows you the gate. We did a small loop of just a few important places before being driven out the exit. MP has two one-way circuits which both force you to exit the park. You then get one opportunity to queue up again and re-enter to complete the second loop. If you take a wrong turn or need the bathroom, tough you had your chance. I can understand a one way system but the forced exit has to be the biggest waste of time since airport security. There is also something very un-Inca-like about the pre-selfie hair brush at a world heritage site - as entertaining as that may have been (on more than one occasion). People these days.

We did take a side trip to the 'Inca bridge' which was really cool. It's suspended off a cliff and was a secret escape for the Incas in an emergency. They had a mechanism to collapse the bridge behind them and prevent the enemy from following. I managed to overhear the blurb on the bridge from a guide who was apparently far more qualified than ours. Oh what it could have been.

At the end of the day we did enjoy Machu Picchu itself, despite the average guide and vast quantities of tourists. Our day digressed from there however, as we had come to expect. We had a three hour walk back to the van, interrupted only by a 45 minute wait for a burger. We raced to the vans where we ended up waiting another hour in a hot, dusty, mosquito-infested car park for our van. There were about 200 other tourists in the same scenario, witnessing a system so disorganised it was difficult to believe. Finally after a Spanish girl threw her toys out of the cot and gave the head 'organiser' what for (much to our delight) we were on our way. It was the third van we were instructed to board and disembark. The van ride took the best part of seven hours on windy gravel roads and we got to Cusco at 10pm, heavily fatigued. The tour had been a right faff from start to finish and I wouldn't recommend it in a hurry. I especially wouldn't believe a word a tour salesman tells you - ever. Not a single word. The best part? We had a 3am wake up for our Amazon tour the next day. Ugh.

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