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.

 Rosie in blue!

 While I was being a technodork shooting in RAW with a mini tripod, Rosie was poking around and took some great photos as the sun came up. I think this one is brilliant.

Next post: more MP (we were there until they bodily threw us out).