Saved the Best for Last

Machu Picchu...there are no words to adequately describe this place. It is truly amazing. I'm talking blow your mind amazing. Just how in the world was this place built?? Mike and I both agree that this is by far the most amazing thing we've had the privilege to see in our limited travels.

The trip to MP from Cusco was brutal. We left the hotel at 5:45am. The following was the journey:



Waiting at the train station

- shuttle from hotel to bus station
- 2 hour bus ride to train station
- 1.5 hour train ride
- 30 minute bus ride to MP

The train and bus ride to the park was beautiful. The mountain range by itself is worth the trip, much less MP.


This was from inside the train. The bus ride up to MP was a long, tight, twisty road and we were in a large charter bus. The cost of getting into MP was about $150. Peru makes quite a bit of money off of tourism at MP.

Ok, here are some pics... We were very lucky that it wasn't raining. Nuno said that he'd been there about 7 times and this was only the 2nd time that it was not raining.



You see that mountain in the back?? That's called Huayna Picchu. Believe it or not, there are ruins up there too. You can walk to the top and that's what some in the group wanted to do. So we thought, what the heck. At the start of the trail you had to sign in. They only allow 400 people on the trail each day. You have to sign out when you make it back too, to make sure you did indeed make it back. Trust me when I tell you that this trail would never ever be allowed at a National Park in the US. I didn't do the best job of capturing the steepness of the trail in pictures.



It was very steep with limited hand rails. If you fell, you'd get hurt, if not worse. The steepness was made doubly hard by the altitude. MP is about 8,000 ft above sea level and this made it hard to catch your breath. It took about one hour to get up to the top.








This was looking down. This is a true look at just how steep some of the sections were.



We conquered the trail. That's MP in the background.




This was at the top.



We saw this lady at the top. She carried this kid all the way up!!!! You can not imagine how hard this had to gave been. No way no how could I have done this.

It is almost impossible to imagine how the Incas built this place.

We made it back down and spent some time looking around the rest of the ruins.






















I'll never forget visiting this place. I hope that it will forever be preserved and not ruined by too many tourists.



One last picture. We rode along this river on the train ride to MP. This was the roughest river we'd ever seen. It looked like chocolate milk.

Posted using BlogPress from my iPad