Machu Picchu, success.

So I copied and pasted the majority of this blog from my travel companion, David Smerdon which you can find at davidsmerdon.com

Here it goes:

We even made it to Machu Picchu in time for the dawn despite the worry that there would be no tickets left. I have to say, of all the things I’ve seen on my travels, I’ve experienced none more beautiful than watching the sun rise over the colossal tree-covered Peruvian mountains and illuminate the Inca ruins in some sort of beautifully silent and vaguely mystical occasion.

Together with my travel buddy David, still a little shocked by the altitude, and with no idea of whether we could get tickets to Machu Picchu, we touched down in Cusco Monday morning. The best chance Dave and I had identified involved changing flight, train and bus tickets (to the tune of almost a thousand dollars) and hoping that the tickets didn’t get sold out in the meantime. It seemed Karma had all the ingredients to record yet another point in our never-ending blitz match.
But, would you believe, things finally started going our way. The taxi we caught just happened to be the one that Mary, a local tour operator, jumped into to grab a lift back to her Mother’s new hostel. And it just so happened, as we got talking, that her tour had two cancellations and so she had just acquired two spare tickets (rarer than one of Willy Wonka gold in this manic Peruvian Independence week). Not only that, but the tour tickets came with a guided trip to the Sacred Valley, local markets and other ruins, bus tickets everywhere, and personal pick-ups from all our various transport interchanges.

All were quickly snapped up by Dave and I when we stopped by the hostel – which, it turns out, was awesome and dirt cheap. We changed reservations and booked ourselves in, whereupon, overwhelmed by illness, altitude, sleep deprivation and a little bit of touristic relief, I instantly fell asleep for a good five hours.
Cue a montage of hitch-free vacationing, resplendent with clear blue skies and breathtaking scenery, ancient ruins, colourful markets, friendly locals, hilarious guides and enough decorative Incan chessboards to keep me grinning like a politician at a fundraiser.

It wasn’t all serendipitously easy, mind you. Our 6am morning bus tickets to Machu Picchu were forgotten by one of our guides when we arrived in Aguas Calientes (the little town closest to the ruins) at one in the morning. Not only that, but our hostel had mistakenly assumed (as did most of our hospitality services) that Dave and I were a couple, and put us in a double room, ironically called a “matrimonial room” in Spanish. Considering this continent’s generic homophobia, particularly outside of the major cities, trying to convince locals in broken Spanish that we were a man and a woman travelling as amigos was frustratingly difficult – and, at times, hilarious.

Still, it wasn’t much of an inconvenience, as we were up at 3.30am anyway to get in line for bus tickets on the street in the freezing cold (the ticket office doesn’t open until 5.15am). It was all worth it, though, as we managed to get on the first bus and be at the ruins by opening at 6am, before the dawn.

After a lot of pleasantly crowd-free exploring with the obligatory thousand photos, a beautiful sunrise and a two-hour guided tour, I headed back to sleep. Dave was determined to climb up Mount Machu Picchu (no, not the cute hill in the picture at the outset, but the other mountain of twice the height that towers over the ruins and surrounds) was “only a four hour climb.”


Dave powered up in an hour. Not wanting my efforts to go to waste nor for Jessie and the other volunteers to feel they’d missed out, he decided to take an embarrassingly over-dramatic, Crocodile-Hunter-style video en route to document his ‘torment’.

I have to say, until this week I thought the town of Cusco was just a sort of jumping point for tourists heading to Machu Picchu. But after spending a few days there after visiting the ruins, I wish I could have stayed longer. The town is just fantastic, and given my occasional cravings in Huaycan for the old backpacker life, it was a bit of an oasis for the tourist on a budget.

The highlight came on the last night, when we visited the Macondo restaurant, just off the main plaza. If you ever visit Cusco, it’s in my opinion the coolest eatery/bar/music venue around. Uniquely decorated in a bizarrely postmodern style, the cosy little joint sports a menu to match the decor, including Dave’s chosen dish – alpaca steak (much to the disgust of the girls sitting next to us, one of whom was vegetarian).

Of course, Dave being the grandmaster chess champion as he is, as soon as I walked in, he sat down to a respectable game of chess with the owner of the restaurant. Following the chess came the live music, a cool style of Latin music I thoroughly enjoyed. I put it down to the bongos.

The two girls whom I had previously disgusted with my carnivorous, ecstatic alpaca-munching turned out to be two pleasant Californians who were willing to forgive Dave’s culinary transgression, in exchange for us joining them for a bottle of Argentinean Malbec after dinner. Feeling a little homesick, we were happy to head to The Real McCoy, an English-run cafe that is a bit of a haven for homesick gringos in Cusco. The four of us even kicked on to Mama Africa’s, possibly the cheesiest bar I’ve seen since my Amsterdam days, and a quaint little reggae bar that was having a DubStep night (a style of music that essentially takes a normal pop beat and completely destroys it half-way through the song.

And even better, one of the girls, Stephanie, has a far cooler blog than mine on which she’s photographically detailed the evening, saving me having to put in any more effort. There’s even a video of the dinner band. Check it out at http://lostinperu.tumblr.com/post/8272555832/on-peru-s-independence-day-we-decided-to-treat , and click the left arrow at the bottom to cycle through her posts from the night.

Although I’m leaving out tons of details, five days is far too much to document to the T. Dave and I had a pleasantly great vacation away from our well-known shanty town. It’s crazy that I go home tomorrow…I’ll try and write a post about my last few days here.

P.S. I kissed a girl and I liked it. That's all folks.