Date: 28th June to July 3rd 2016
Duration: Six days (5 days walking, 4 nights camping, 5th night at Aguas Calientes, 6th day tour of Machu Picchu and travel back to Cusco.
Overall distance between 70 and 80 kilometres, with about 3500 metres of climbing and 5000 metres of descents.
Who: Peter, Diana, Carrie, Siobahn, Julie, Mike, Brad, Ashok and Cherry, Drew and Anne, Andrew and Fiona, Trish and Chris, John, Geoff, Pepe, our guide and two junior guides, a cook, porters and horse-drivers.
Access: We flew from Sydney to Lima, via Santiago, then on to Cusco, five days later. Five days in Lima is about three days too many. Not for nothing is it called “Lima the Grey”.
It’s a sprawling city of 10 million, cloaked in smog and choked by traffic, sitting on a coastal desert, with an annual rainfall of 6mm. The soil is barren grey grit or clay, and plants struggle to survive.
That said, we enjoyed a couple of magnificent meals, at Astrid y Gaston, and Malabar restaurants, and visited a couple of excellent museums, particularly the Museo Larco, a private museum with beautiful sunken gardens.
We also walked around the Huaca Pukllana, an adobe temple complex used by the Lima and Wari cultures, dating back to 200 AD (presumably still there because it never rains), and Pachacamac, a massive adobe temple complex dedicated to the Pachacamac, the god of earthquakes among other things, dating also back to the second century AD.
An interesting distinction between the various ancient Peruvian cultures is that The Lima people waited until a girl had given birth, thus proving her fertility, before she was sacrificed, whereas the Inca sacrificed virgins and young warriors (the losers in ritual combat). The Wari sacrificed babies to accompany the spirits of important adults in the afterlife.
Unfortunately, Diana fell foul of the Lima water and had 48 hours of intractable vomiting, culminating in her spending her first night in Cusco in hospital.
Cusco (3400 metres) is a wonderful town, of about half a million people, mostly poor, but the city is thriving on tourism. It is the ancient capital of the Inca culture, and many original Inca walls survive, often built over by the Spaniards, who conquered Cusco in the 1530s. Our hotel in Cusco was a 16th century stone hacienda, once a private home. We were fortunate to be in Cusco for the annual Festival of the Sun, a ceremonial reenactment of the the rebirth of the Inca king at the winter solstice. Spectacular pageantry! It is greatly to the credit of the Peruvian people that they generally maintain their ancient animistic religion, even those who nominally converted to the catholic religion of their Spanish conquerors.
We also visited Saqsaywaman, above Cusco, probably the second most significant Inca archeological site after Machu Picchu, called by the Spaniards “The fortress”, but actually a palace and temple. It once had towering 30 metre walls, with 10 metre deep foundations! It was to here that the Inca royal family retreated from Cusco and were slaughtered by the Spanish. On the same day, we visited Pisac in the Sacred Valley, still a highly productive farming area, and drove up above the town to an ancient Inca town with beautiful intact terraces. There is a popular misconception that the Inca crumbled before the Spanish invasion, but the truth is that they fought a war of resistance for 75 years!
After six days acclimatising in Cusco, we set off by bus at 5am on the 7th day up to Soraypampa (elevation 3900 m) to begin the trek.
Day 1: Soraypampa to Humantay Lake, Soraypampa to Salkantaypampa.
Our intended campsite for the first night was under snow, so we tacked on an extra walk in the morning, up to Humantay Lake, a glacial tarn, ascending 350 metres over 2 km from Soraypampa, (to 4220m) and return. It was a uniformly steep ascent, across alpine meadow, with a creek crossing, finishing with a steeper climb through the moraine to the lake. Very pretty and very cold. A group of young ladies and one fellow, from another party, braved the water, but we felt no compulsion to do so! The descent, of course, went much faster, unpunctuated by the stops we’d had to make on the way up to gather our breath.
We then walked 3 km up to Salkantaypampa (4100m), where we’d intended to have lunch on the first day, and camped there. This, unfortunately, would add 2.5 km of climbing to an already long second day. At that stage we were accompanied by mountain ponies to carry tents, gas bottles etc, with their drivers running beside them!
Again it was a steady ascent, crossing and recrossing iced-over streams, quite tiring, nevertheless, given the altitude at which we’d started, 500m above our acclimatisation level of 3400m at Cusco. The sun disappeared early and a frigid cold descended. At dinnertime, our cook produced the first of many delicious meals, in miraculously short time!
Our tents and bedding kept us warm, though the tents were covered with ice in the morning.
Day 2: Salkantaypampa to Pampacahuana
Our second day began, as did each morning, at dawn, with a porter scratching at our tent flap, bearing coca tea, and then hot water to wash our face and hands. We packed up our bedding and belongings ( a 7kg duffel bag for the porters and a day pack each). A hearty breakfast appeared in the mess tent, and we were off to an early start.
The morning brought with it the daunting task of climbing through ice and snow to the Salkantay Pass, (4860 metres), over 5.5 kilometres. Di and I took over four hours to reach the top of the ridge, though some younger members were a fair bit quicker. I commented to Di at the top “If I die here, just leave me to mummify and carry on!”
After waiting for the stragglers, (including Trish on a pony), we set off down the very steep, icy, zigzag descent. This was more difficult than it might sound. I fell half a dozen times. It took a couple of hours to get below the snow-line again and we were offered a late lunch, though I, personally, was too exhausted to eat it. We then had about a three hour walk down to our campsite at Pampacahuana. (4000 m), (15 or 16 km total walk). Di, still not recovered from her hospital episode, rode the last kilometre on a pony. We crawled into our sleeping bags and slept until dinner, ate, and then crawled back in again.
Day 3: Pampacahuana to Llulluchapampa
Day three began with a beautiful 8.5km descent of 800 metres to Paucarancha, passing small subsistence farms and skirting a tumultuous little river, which had been converted in stretches by Inca stonework over 500 years ago to a canal, channelling water down to the Sacred Valley. They even had a system of locks! Footnote: The Inca carried soil, by hand, from the Sacred Valley to fill the agricultural terraces of Machu Picchu!
At Paucarancha (3200 m) was an archeological site, a fortified Inca way-station, and a little village where we had to clear all the requisite paperwork, including passport checks, to continue on to the Inca Trail proper (though the Salkantay trail is and was an Inca trail, just not made into a granite road). Here our horses turned back, (not allowed on the Inca Trail), our bags were weighed (occupational health and safety!) and we picked up a dozen more porters. These guys are absolutely amazing, carrying huge loads and running with them! The oldest porter, we found out later, was 77 years old!
We walked on to lunch at Wayllabamba, then continued climbing to our campsite at Llulluchapampa, (3850 m), making 14km for the day.
Day 4: Llulluchapampa to Phuyupatamarca
Day four was billed as our longest day, ascending Warmiwanuska (Dead Woman’s Pass), (4200 m), then dropping 600m to Pacaymayo, ascending another pass, Runkurakay (3900 m), down to Chaquicocha (3600 m) for a late lunch, then up and down (Inca-flat!) to our fourth camp at Phuyupatamarca (3600m), loosely translated as “the camp above the clouds”. Again, about 14km, I think.
All this was along the Inca Trail, a granite roadway, made for foot travel (they had no horses, didn’t use llamas as beasts of burden and didn’t have the wheel), built more than 500 years ago, and still intact! It’s all the more amazing to look over the edge of the trail and see 10 or 15 metres of stonework supporting the road! Inca runners (“foxes”) ran in relays, two miles each, averaging 11 minutes, it’s thought, for each leg. They had no written language, so messages were passed orally from one runner to another. So efficient was the system that it was said the Inca king in Cusco could eat fresh fish in the evening caught on the coast in the morning! The Inca built 40,000 kilometres of such roadways!
After the snow and ice of Day 1, and the cold , barren, treeless upper pampas, it felt extraordinary to have descended into jungle, with bamboo, ferns, bromeliads, orchids, spongy mosses and myriad flowers! Hummingbirds flitted about and we saw falcons, but no condors.
Day 5: Phuyupatamarca to Machu Picchu
We had a more leisurely start to Day 5, (ie the sun was up). After breakfast a ceremony was conducted for the tipping of the porters. These guys are all farmers, with no cash income other than working as porters, and it’s highly sought-after work. Siobhan started a slightly outrageous trend by kissing her designated young porter!
We broke camp and began a long, steady descent to Winaywayna (2650m), a mightily impressive Inca agricultural centre, with acres of steep terracing and beautifully preserved buildings (granaries and houses), where we had lunch.
We then continued, across “Inca-flat” terrain, and regrouped at the top of a long climb, where Pepe said mysteriously, “the next section is a gift for you from the Inca gods!”
We turned a corner to be confronted by a near vertical stone stairway, which we struggled up, to arrive, quite unexpectedly, at Intipunku, the Sun Gate (2745m), offering our first view of Machu Picchu! After an extended photo session, we continued downhill, to Machu Picchu itself (2400m), though we weren’t allowed into the city on that first afternoon.
We took a 30 minute bus ride through endless switch-backs, to Aguas Calientes (2050m), scrubbed ourselves under a hot shower, dressed in our last clean clothes, and adjourned to the bar!
Day 6: Machu Picchu
We were mustered at 6am to catch an early bus up to Machu Picchu, to watch the sunrise, and beat the main influx of tourists. Pepe proved to be a very knowledgeable tour guide, and the early start meant that stray tourists didn’t intrude too much into our photos.
The majesty of Machu Picchu is breathtaking! It sits in the saddle of two mountains, in the most impenetrable mountain range imaginable. Until relatively recently, the only access was the Inca Trail. which had been lost in the jungle. Machu Picchu was never permanently inhabited, but was a royal palace and temple complex. The stonework is nearly all “royal inca”, massive stones, each finished on the wall, joined without mortar and polished in place, so perfectly that you can’t slip a piece of paper between them. Amazing to consider that the Inca had only bronze chisels and stone hammers. A chisel had to be replaced after 20 blows! Some individual stones weigh 6-10 tonnes, transported on cut logs by human labour (no wheels, no beasts of burden!) Doorways, windows and niches are trapezoidal, with huge stone lintels, and all of the walls incline inwards at about 7 degrees, thus conferring remarkable stability against earthquake. When the 16th century Spanish cathedral in Cusco was extensively damaged by earthquake in the 1950s, the Inca Temple of the Sun, which the Spaniards had partially demolished and cannibalised for their own structure, was revealed, essentially undamaged! Machu Picchu would certainly not exist as it does today if the Spaniards had found and plundered it, as they did virtually everything else from the Inca period.
Incredibly, the remarkable architectural heritage of the Incas and their 40,000 kilometre road system were all built in only a hundred years!
After lunch at Aguas Calientes, we caught the little train (The Machu Picchu Choo Choo), out of the mountains, then transferred to a bus back to Cusco. Next day we embarked on a 34 hour return journey to Sydney.
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