Honeymoon in Peru! Installment 4: Machu Picchu I

We took the tourist train to Aguas Calientes, the town in the narrow valley below Machu Picchu. It's about 90 min down the Urubamba, which forms a narrow canyon for much of its length. There is room for a railroad, or an auto road, but not both, meaning that Aguas Calientes can only be reached by train, or by walking. Or by whitewater kayak, if you seriously know what you're doing. Of course, there's always helicopters. Or you could jump out of an airplane and parachute into Aguas Calientes. But anyway.

We wandered into our hostel at 10ish, plugged in camera battery chargers, and got our packs organized for a wakeup at around 3:45. Our goal was to be at Machu Picchu for sunrise over the mountains. The first bus ran at 5:30 but the line began forming much earlier than that. This was not always the case--some of the info I had seen made everything seem more low key, but luckily Rosie did some more careful research and realized...we were in for a very early start.

After some sleep (but not a hell of a lot, made worse by the light outside our room which stayed on all night) we hauled up out of bed, grabbed our camera batteries out of the wall, and stumbled down to Peruvian continental breakfast. I was not feeling great, and the dense brown Nescafe universally served with these meals was not pulling me out of it.

We walked to the bus pickup. We were not the first and things didn't look great, but the buses started rolling and we were on the 3rd or 4th one.

 We were in the way way back of our bus. I was moderately worried about losing my breakfast. I still took some photos out the back window though as we made our way up a wildly twisty switchbacked road, often passing the descending buses with just a foot of road margin between us and a couple thousand feet of humid, cloud-jungle air.

We got out of the bus, breakfast still in my belly, and passed through the entrance gate. Below, Rosie is seen displaying amazing patience with me as I basically led her on a wind sprint up the mountain to get to the famous overlook point. The running made my stomach feel better, though.

Honeymoon in Peru! Installment 3: Pumamarca hike

One of our main interests for our trip to Peru was to hike to some of the many archaeological ruins which are a bit off the beaten path. Our first opportunity to do this was the Pumamarca ruins, up the Patacancha River from town. This hike was mentioned briefly in our guidebook, so nothing too far in the bush. We did see one small group of Euro tourists descending as we headed up, and one dude who showed up solo. Otherwise, the whole hike it was just us, some cows, goats, goat herders, a couple chickens. We also met one caretaker who was--by hand with a scythe--cutting the grass around the ruins site, and we also chatted with him about this and other ruins in the area.

Maybe a couple km out of town we came upon a spot called the Terraces of the Moon. I assume they date to the Inca. There is a small house on the far side of the terraces and they are under ongoing cultivation.

 I believe this is agave. These things were everywhere.

 After a while, we came upon an old aqueduct and various ancient terraces and stoneworks.

Most of it appeared to be original, but there were some places where it had been repaired a bit with modern cement. The Inca irrigation ducts and terraces are still in regular use all over the places we hiked. In a book (a thing I read occasionally) I read about an archeology group which is both studying and documenting the agriculture/irrigation systems, and also helping to clear them and set them up for use by today's residents. 

Interestingly, I also read that during the height of Inca control of this area, the population was greater than it currently is, and was presumably self-sufficient (ie, no regional-level crops trading in which the commoners would engage). There's no doubt that they knew a lot about squeezing maximum nutrition out of their land.

 Billygoat the Kid.

Honeymoon in Peru! Installment 2: Ollantaytambo sunrise

On our second morning in Peru, I opted to get up pretty early to catch the good light in Ollanta.

 The towns streets were originally laid out by the Inca in the 1400s, and, according to Wikipedia, these buildings are some of the oldest in continuous use in South America. This dog is certainly impressed.

 I scrambled up the hillside toward a site called Pinkulluna, grain storehouses located up a mountainside opposite the main ruins, where the cooler temperatures would apparently preserve the crops.

Picture from Wikipedia:

It's visible in the background in this photo from my last post.

Looking across to some of the ruins.

Honeymoon in Peru! Installment 1: Cuzco and Ollantaytambo

10 months after getting married, Rosie and I went to Peru for our honeymoon. It was a good time. We flew from Boston to Lima via Panama City and had an overnight (barely) layover there.

We ate some really good roasted chicken around the corner from the hostel while watching Gigantes Pequeños, a TV show where small groups of 5-10 year old children perform song and dance routines. It was magical. Then, at about 2:30 in the morning, we got our wakeup call (also magical) to take a taxi back to the aeropuerto and we were off to Cuzco.

We flew over the crest of the Andes, past mountains almost as high as our flight path.

We landed in Cuzco, which sits at around 11,500 feet. The first order of business was to get a taxi into a part of town where we could catch a bus of some sort down to the corridor known as the Sacred Valley, the valley of the Urubamba river, a river running from SE to NW about an hour north of the city. Getting there, we took a van up and over Cuzco's immediate ring of mountains, across a high plain filled with wheat and barley fields, and down a sequence of switchbacks to about 9,000 ft and the river.

View out the front end of the collectivo van.

 The last of the glaciated peaks before the mountains give way to the Amazon.

About 7 hours after our wakeup call in Lima, we got off the van at the end of the line, Ollantaytambo. We had eaten basically nothing, so we had breakfast. I confused juego when I meant to say jugo with my meal.

Cats happen in Peru, too.

Next, we walked around to find a hostel or other accomodation. We went in to one place and asked if they had any available rooms, and the guy looked at us as if we were crazy thinking we could just walk in like that. This temporarily terrified us, as if maybe all the rooms in town were booked. However, this was not the case and Ollantaytambo is actually a pretty sleepy little place. We found a charming little place which was charging a bit more than we planned on paying, but we took it anyway...unexpectedly, this became a pattern for the whole trip.

For the afternoon, we toured the Ollantaytambo ruins. Photo below not mine-- from http://2totravelperu.blogspot.com/2009/04/day-6-ollantaytambo-ruins.html.

The town of Ollantaytambo in the background. The Ollantaytambo ruins were the site of a major battle between the Inca and the Spanish not long after the Inca were initially driven out of their capital of Cuzco. Although they won the battle, the Inca eventually had to withdraw, and for several decades existed as an empire in exile among some of the upper Amazon tributaries to the west and south of Ollantaytambo.

Skiing in Huntington: video addendum

In May I skied Central and Diagonal Gullies in Huntington Ravine with Coz. He took some videos.

Here's a video of me skiing Central. Skip forward to about the halfway point.


Here are two videos from Diagonal Gully:





Thanks again to Coz for the videos, and for the great day!