Day 115 – The Inca Trail and Machu Pichu

It's a bit hard to know what to write about the Inca Trail. It feels a bit like writing about Lindsey Lohan's sex life; everyone seems to know quite a bit already.

In the interests of avoiding the same old, cliched trustafarian travelogue descriptions (“Machu Pichu is a spiritual experience blah blah blah”), I'll get to the point.

It was harder than I thought. Day 1 of the trail is a gentle toddle along a river before a slightly more challenging hour and a half uphill. Nothing too taxing. Then comes Day 2.

Day 2, quite frankly, is a bitch. It's the bastard son of a swift kick in the nuts and finding poo in your sundae. Rachel and I had make the decision to carry our own equipment, rather than give it to the porters (more on them later). Whilst I don't regret it in hindsight, at the time it did not seem like a great decision.

Day 2 sees you trudge your way (very) slowly up from about 3100m altitude to 4200m. Then, once you reach the top, you look down and realise that you have to walk down another 700m along some of the most rocky and uneven path I've ever seen.

Then, after lunch, it's up the other side of another mountain of giddying heights before yet another bone shattering descent to camp for an early night in bed.

After that, Day 3, whilst having a rather charming 1km vertical descent down the worlds' longest staircase, is a bit of a walk in the park. Whilst, Day 4 is little more than an early-morning stroll up a mountain to the final location that this whole bloody walk in the countryside is about.

In all honesty, it's not a physically taxing proposition. The two middle-aged Australian gents who we shared a group with were, by their own admission, not fitness nuts. They completed it in good time. It's tough, but at the end of the day it's one of those things that. if you get it in your mind you're going to do, you will end up doing.

The other thing that keeps you going is the porters.

When a good part of your day is spent standing to one side on the track, to let men carrying half their bodyweight in camping equipment run ahead of you to set up camp, it's kind of hard to claim the trail is in the “too hard” basket.

The porters are supermen. Their ability to lug gear up inclines most of us would struggle unladen is astounding. I genuinely felt embarrassed walking into camp two hours behind them and having them clap us. Amazing.

So, as you can imagine, when we arrived at the Sun Gate to Machu Pichu on the morning of Day 4, we were well rested, well fed and well educated on the Inca Empire. And we were greeted by....cloud.

Luckily, it didn't last long. We dropped down a few hundred meters to lay eyes on the picture postcard view the world knows. Beautifully set against the mountains in the background and teeming with people.

I still find it strange to this day that despite walking four days to arrive at the crown in the jewel of Peru's grand historical past, people on tour buses were allowed to enter the site a good hour before us. Call me a meritocrat, but it seems topsy-turvy.

So, what's it like? Well, it's beautiful. A lot of effort has gone into restoring the site, and it shows. Sure, it's an incredibly touristy place, complete with $5 cans of Coke. However, standing on the edge of the highest temple looking down into the valley below is a giddy feeling, and you can't take that away.

But, you know what? It's not the site itself that amazes. Sure, the brickwork is good, but to my layman eyes it doesn't look any more impressive than European castles of the same era, The societal structure and agricultural achievements seem amazing, but then again, think of India or China.

What really blew me away about Machu Pichu and the Incas was; where they built their empire. This is a land of impossibly high mountains, deep crevice-like valleys and inclines so steep it makes you wonder if you'd ever stop falling. This is a landscape that most civilizations would not even consider exploring. The Incas made this their domain and built an empire, which at it's height, had more people in it than the whole of Europe.

The thing is; I think the only reason I came to appreciate it is because we walked four days to get there. We experienced first hand how hard it must have been to travel between cities. How hard it must have been to transport food and raw materials (remembering the Incas did not have horses). We saw other sites along the way, each with their own exacting purpose and character. It all provided essential parts to a story that only became complete at the grand finale.

Sat there on the top of Old Mountain, watching the throngs pour off their buses, I came to this conclusion. For all the beauty of Machu Pichu, it's the walk along the Inca Trail itself that was most worthwhile.



You can have a squizz at all the Inca Trail photos by clicking here