We started with a bus ride to a 4300m high pass on the eastern side of the Andes, followed by a 50km mountain bike ride down said pass on the other side. Despite the downhill part it was quite chalinging to cycle, but the views were simply spectacular and passing multiple climate zones within a few hours was super interesting. We ended up in Santa Maria, at 1200m the lowest point of our journey and we learned that even in tiny towns, Peruvians can cook very well. We walked around the village through nightfall but since not much happened, we went to bed early.
Good that we did as well, because the day began early with breakfast at 7.30 and a transfer bus to our next transport option: boat. More precisely, two rubber rafts waited on our little group and we rafted down the Urubamba river for about 1.5 hours, including a capsizing (of the other boat) and some voluntary overboarding (on both boats). We got soaking wet, but had loads of fun during the trip, definitely something to repeat! After riding, driving and boating the time then came for walking. We dried up pretty quickly as we made our way up the path through the valley. Throughout the trip Rolando pointed out plants, animals and history of the area, so we never got bored. The path itself helped as well, as the original Inca trail that was part of it clung to the mountainside in a highly precarious way. In the afternoon it got easier and we ended the path with a cable bridge ride and a bath in thermal pools that had nearly been destroyed by a giant landslide earlier in the year. A final hard walk brought us to our overnight destination Santa Theresa at 1700m above sea.
Throughout the night it became clear why this part of the country is considered "rain forest": It rained without interruption - our feeble attempt at drying some clothes was thoroughly doomed. We actually delayed our departure by an hour to wait for the rain to stop, and so arrived fairly late at our next mode of transportation, flying. Well, it wasn't really flying, although it looks like it from about 50m away. We had decided to do some zip-lining or, as normal people would say: Hoping that the steel rope on the top of our heads won't give away before we reached the other side of the 150m deep valley underneath. Despite the vertigo-induction, the whole thing proved to be quite fun and we criss-crossed two valleys on six cables with a total lenght of 3.2km. Accompanying us was a group of Irish gap year students, who constantly complained about the missing "thrill" component and that the ride was to slow. I had no idea what they were talking about... The rest of the day we spent walking again, this time by the train tracks, arriving in the town of Aguas Calientes, which is the de-facto base camp for Machu Picchu. Civilization welcomed us back and laundry, internet, pizza and the opening game of the Copa America were the result. We also said good-bye to our trusty guide Rolando in the evening, not without him assuring us that he would get us a place in the queue for the buses in the morning - we were "only" to show up at 5.15am.
We realized in the morning why he had said "only". When we arrived, the queue was a good 250m long, but kindly enough he had started queueing earlier and we skipped ahead a few dozen people to be in one of the first five buses to go up. In terms of practicalities, the story of the day is quickly told. It rained a lot, we should have bought rain ponchos right away, we spent the whole day on the mountain and took a funky train in the evening to the village of Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley. The real story about this day is Machu Picchu itself though. That anybody can build a city 600m really steep above the valley ground is stunning in the first place, but he sheer, breathtaking location has to be seen to be believed. Terracing is everywhere, going down the mountainside at slopes of 70° and more. The city itself sits perched on a ridge between two mountain tops and is surrounded by cloud-covered peaks on every side, while you can see the river 600m further down snaking around the mountain. All of this comes in lush green with orderly rows of grey stones and if you have a tiny bit of imagination, it's really easy to imagine how life must have been here about 500 years ago. It was an item at the very top of our list of places to visit and it didn't disappoint the slightest, despite or even because of the rainy conditions.
The last day of our trip was spent "wrapping up" the Inca period. We first visited some nice ruins in Ollantaytambo before grabbing a street lunch of anticucho (beef heart skewers) and grabbing public transport up to the village of Maras. From there we visited the agricultural laboratory of the Incas at Moray, where they experimented with various microclimates to identify ideal climate conditions for their various crops. This area now looks like a alien landing strip. We continued to the visually truly stunning site of Salinas, an age old salt "factory". A stream of salty waters coming right out of the mountain is being diverted into hundreds of shallow pools, in which evaporation occurs and salt can be scraped of the bottom of the pool afterwards. Many of the pools go back to Inca times and according to public lore, the Inca built pools are actually much more stable and need less maintenance than anything that has been built since. A packed public bus ride brought us back to Cuzco afterwards, where we concluded the day with yet another splendid dinner.
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