Peru Part 2: Birthday in Cusco and Salkantay to Machu Picchu
I’ve always hated birthdays, just a reminder of the relentless passing of time and my shortage of progress. The closest thing I’ve ever found to a cure is have really weird birthdays, last year I took my motorcycle off-roading with a friend and didn’t mention it was my birthday until I was leaving, it was a good day. 2023 I was in Pokhara doing a tour of Tibetan culture in Nepal. Wonder what I’ll do next year.
Lima
Natalie and Vanessa arrived in the morning, dropped their gear and we were off. We met with Renata’s local friend Fiorella. They had met via a Facebook group for people wanting to learn new languages and had been video calling to learn English and Spanish. She was kind enough to give us a tour of the city that included a local ceviche place, a visit to a Paddington Statue, a market, a park full of cats, and a fancy restaurant called Clon. I felt a little like Guy Fieri checking out a hole in the wall local joint and fine dining in the same day. Fiorella was also kind enough to hold onto my motorcycle jacket and gloves as I didn’t need them for the remainder of the trip.
Cusco
The girls only got to spend a single night in that nice AirBnb because in the morning we flew to our next destination. Cusco, its an amazing city, but its all steep and narrow stone streets. I joked it wasn’t a walkable city but a climbable one, no one laughed, but that show biz, baby. Our first day there we got checked into a bit of a shabby hotel high up the hill of town and walked down to the market. We had amazing falafel for lunch and somehow I was the only one who didn’t get a little sick from it, which is unusual. We wandered the city a bit and the girls made a few coffee stops and we saw what felt like a few dozen churches.
Birthday
The day of my birthday I met Renata at a café, she had left the hotel long before me. She was kind enough to buy me a pistachio croissant for breakfast. From there we hiked to a giant statue of Jesus, high above the city. The highlight of that was getting a picture with an alpaca named Javier. We then met up with the other girls and went to a market where we had a smoothie. The smoothie lady was very excited about my birthday and kept giving me extra to drink. I think I was the only one not excited about my birthday, I had actually been dreading it and was somewhat dragging myself along around the city that day. For dinner I was taken to yet another fine dining establishment, I had the beef and it was amazing, and a birthday brownie was brought out for me. I felt a little awkward in my travel clothes being served by people in suits, but it is what it is. Fancy restaurants always make me feel like an old farm dog that snuck into the house, it feels a little unnatural like at any minute I’m going to get scolded and removed for no particular reason.
Pisac
As a test and prep for our upcoming trip to Machu Picchu we went to Pisac to see the ruins. We were driven by a delightful man named Victor. He spoke a little english. I had showed Renata the Punch Buggy Game (where you punch someone when you spot a VW beetle). He thought it was hilarious, but I was losing to bad, he started pointing them out to me before Renata could strike. On the way he stopped off to show us a big alpaca and llama farm where we could feed them by hand. Not sure what the point of the place was, but it was sure fun. The ruins themselves were beautiful and we could walk all over them. We hired a guide who seemed knowledgeable but he must have been quite a busy guy because he had a backpack full of homemade goods to sell. He first showed us his polished moon stones, then his hand made flutes, and his hand made beaded birds (identical to the ones we saw for sale in Guatemala), and his homemade aroma therapy oils that he somehow had a perfect factory looking label on… or maybe he was just full of alpaca dung and trying to sell us mass market goods. Hard to say, but I know what I would guess.
Salkantay
At 5am Victor picked us up and drove us to the start of the trek. It was a few hours drive and the last of it was on a narrow road carved off the side of the mountain. Eventually we hit a stand still traffic jam and someone informed us the road ahead had washed out. We were instructed to jump out, gear up, and start hiking. It was lightly raining and I was already cold, I hate starting a hike that way on top of being upset about being reminded just how old I am getting. My friends, my creaky knee, and I all hiked along the road between the jammed cars and micro busses until we saw the washed road and a trail down and around it. As we took the detour I saw the entire community had come together with shovels and pick axes to make our new trail and begin repairs on the road. That road was important, and it would seem the government probably wouldn’t be fixing it soon. We had only hiked about an hour, if that, and we asked someone for directions to our hotel for the night. He pointed at a building and said “that one” we assumed it was a mistake but no, Victor had driven us nearly to our hotels doorstep. We were checked into an uninsulated and unheated room with 7 beds. We dropped our gear and hoped no one else would be joining us. I put on my thin fleece sweater and my rain poncho. I left my down jacket and rain jacket at home hoping for warm weather and reduced weight… I was wrong. I ended up cold and carrying Renata’s poncho in my bag, however she was kind enough to let me wear it. We hiked uphill, in the rain, to Humantay Lake. The hike was all of an hour but I was cold and sweaty at the same time, my flimsy rain poncho, still holding on for dear life from when I purchased it for $1 in Thailand, was really just trapping moisture in. We got to the top and I was feeling a little ill and was immediately annoyed by all the influencers doing costume changes and photo shoots. I get the importance of social media fame for, almost, every job now, but it still annoys the hell out of me to see influencers in the wild. I headed back to the hotel long before the girls. When I got there I put on as many layers as I could and hid under the blankets desperate to get warm. In the evening we all played cards and huddled as close as we could to the ceramic pot being used as a mobile fire pit. Unfortunately we were seated by the door and people were seeing how much they could come in and out and they were most definitely unfamiliar with doors, especially the concept of closing them. The lovely old woman running the place caught on that I was cold and unwell and brought me a hot water bottle to put on my stomach under the poncho. She also started laying down the law on the door being closed. Lovely woman, five stars.
Also, a funny thing happened. It doesnt fit smoothly into the story but I just had to talk about it. The kitchen area for the hotel was outside, and there was a big group staying at the hotel so there was a lot of food being brought in. The chef, was wearing hiking pants and a down jacket, typical of the younger men in the area, but he felt it important to wear a white chefs hat. That on its own was funny enough, but more than once he ran past us, with a tray in each hand, the hat on, and running on his tip toes like a cartoon character sneaking. It was just so candid and caught us all off guard it became something we laughed about a lot on the hike.
Day two of the hike was the real highlight. It was the hike over Salkantay pass… The over part was the problem. It wasn’t raining but the previous days rain had left mud which contained a large amount of horse manure. It was effectively an uphill trudge through wet horse poo. The view at the top was nice, and we did see condors flying high overhead, but the trail was crowded and I was downright exhausted. From the top of the pass we hiked downhill for nearly seven hours. It was long enough I thought we had gotten lost. We eventually landed at our hotel which was noteworthy for how bad it was. Keep in mind how much I travel, this one was probably top 10. The rooms were simple, but had art on the wall that still had the corner protectors on the frames, and one was hung blocking part of the window. The bathrooms upstairs near our rooms didn’t have showers that worked so we had to go downstairs through the, thankfully, empty dining area to get the the shower. Three of us had lukewarm showers, but poor Vanessa had a cold one. There was no shower curtain and the drain didn’t work well which was just unpleasant. In the room I had to smash a bug for Renata, one more reason to bring a real book instead of an e-reader. Now, dinner was another sight, we paid about $5 for it, which is steep in Peru. It was boiled spaghetti with salsa and something similar to parmesan cheese. It. Was. Awful. Just downright bad. I had hiked for nearly eleven hours that day and just couldn’t finish a plate. In the morning we were woken up by a half hour of a diesel engine idling. I was glad to be walking away from that place.
Our hike to the next stop was a boring one. We hiked along the road all day, Renata and Vanessa ran off far ahead so Natalie and I had the day to catch up on gossip. There were a few waterfalls that ran across the road, so I swapped my hikers for crocs. We arrived at the Eco Lodge to find it was actually a really nice hotel and I got my own private room, which was nice. Dinner was veggies, rice, and beef, but the beef was a rather pathetic unidentifiably cut that resembled a bat wing… sometimes, its best not to investigate. After dinner the hotel called us a car to drive us to the local hot springs, the road was narrow, and the shoulders steep. I also noticed a lot of burning clutch smell and the dash lit up like a Christmas tree with warning lights whenever we went up hill. The hot springs were nice, but not worth talking about. We left after dark and I found our car had only one working headlight, and a dim one at that.
The last day of the hike was to a town called Agua Caliente, it was effectively 22km in the heavy rain. Luckily, the rain was warm and we were headed to a hotel so it didn’t bother me much. Renata and I hiked together, we thought we were ahead of the others so we stopped at a hotel/cafe for tea, from there we could see Machu Picchu across the valley, barely. We waited over an hour for the girls, and decided they must have gone around (they actually snuck passed somehow). As we got closer to town we walked along train tracks, where I couldn’t resist the urge to put a coin on the tracks and see what happens. The train squashed it, but not as dramatically as I had hoped. We met the others in town and got into our hotel, again somehow uphill. It was ok, but the windows opened into the hallway not outside, and all night the lights were on and coming in through the window. Somewhere there’s an architect who needs a slap. We then took a day off to rest, we explored town and found another Paddington statue.
Machu Picchu
We had the option to hike to the site, but it was a few kilometers of steep switch backs, so we opted to take the half hour bus. Once up there, we did a self guided tour based on some research I had done, and the previous days rain had left a lot of the drainage and irrigation systems functioning. We were supposed to hike to Huayna Picchu as part of our pass, but due to rainy season, it was closed so we were allowed to go up top to get the famous post card view. There isn’t much to tell of it, the weather was great, the views were great and I was a little sad. I wanted to visit this famous place for decades, ever since I was a kid, and especially since university. I almost went during my honeymoon in 2015/2016 but didn’t quite make it. And now I was here, and it was all just kind of a pile of rocks. I know there’s great history there, but everything was “maybe it was this” and “we think it was used for that” and in the end, it again felt like an influencer photo studio. We got our share of photos too, hopped the bus, got our stuff from the hotel, and caught a train. To be honest, I think the train was almost as much fun, we were comfortable, eating, and taking in the view together.
The Lucky Horseshoe
On the first day of the Salkantay Trek, I had left the lake early and headed back to the hotel to lie under blankets and try to warm up. When the girls came back, they found a horseshoe stuck in a muddy creek bank and knew I would want it. So they brought it back for me. I wrapped it in a plastic grocery bag and stuffed it away in my pack. It stayed there until I got home. I cleaned it with some vinegar and gave it a scrub, it revealed that it was fairly modern (not surprising) and had been made from rebar. It now hangs above my doorway for luck. In Peru I noticed they would hammer them into the floor at entryways, typically on the top step, unfortunately, that isn’t an option in my apartment.
Posted in Hiking, Travel and tagged backpacking, Cusco, hiking, Machu Picchu, Outdoors, peru, travelwith 5 comments.