The Salkantay Trail, Peru, January 2023 (Part 3 - Machu Picchu and Starting a Riot)
Day 3
We were once again woken up shortly before 5:00 AM in order to have breakfast before hitting the trail. By the end of today, we would be spending the night in a hotel in Aguas Calientes, a small tourist town at the base of the mountain that leads to Machu Picchu.
The bulk of this trip would be through the Cloud Forest. Still feeling the toll of yesterday’s hike, I was definitely struggling when it came to some of the sections of the trail that were fairly steep uphill climbs.
Overall, despite the few uphill sections of the trek, we descended around 2,900 feet to Playa Sahuayaco where we had lunch and also got a small hands-on coffee roasting demonstration where we saw coffee go from pod, to bean, to cup. It was a pretty neat little experience and there was even a small shop where tourists that pass through here could buy coffee from that very plantation (at prices far above market value anywhere else in the country).
From there, we hopped onto a van that would drive us a little over an hour to a hydroelectric plant where the train to Aguas Calientes typically depart from but as I mentioned earlier, due to the ongoing protests, there were no trains running in or out of Aguas Calientes…so we were going to have to hike the 7 miles (11 km) to get there instead.
The terrain was almost completely flat with a very slight uphill grade as we gained a little under 800 feet in elevation over the entire 7 mile trek.
Despite the near flatness of the trail, the terrain was incredibly rocky and uneven and the conditions were running havoc on my blister-covered feet. Every now and then we would pass these small, makeshift train trolleys riding down the tracks as people made their own makeshift train wagons and used the fact that the train track was almost entirely downhill to transport people from Aguas Calientes back to the hydroelectric plant for money. This will be important later.
It took about 2.5 hours to complete the hike to Aguas Calientes. As I limped my way into town, I caught up with the rest of the group at a restaurant where we would all be eating that evening.
The restaurant had a small pre-fixe menu for us. Thankfully my appetite had started to come back to me and, although I wasn’t able to eat nearly enough to make up for the amount of calories I had spent that day already. Thankfully for me, I had some reserves built in.
After dinner we each went to our respective hotels. Melissa and I were pleasantly surprised to find out that since we had purchased the premium package, we were staying at a slightly nicer hotel than everyone else. We were even more pleasantly surprised when we were checking in and were told that (due to the occupancy thanks to the strike) we would be receiving a complimentary upgrade to a suite on the top floor.
Civilization at last. After three days on the trail, trudging through the wilderness, it was nice to finally be in my element: anywhere with room service.
Putting the bathtub to good use, and with the help of Melissa’s veterinary surgical hands, I lanced the large blisters that had formed on each feet, inexplicably between my first and second toe.
Finally getting some relief, from the pain, Melissa and I each took nice, long, hot showers. We spent the rest of the night finishing up getting our stuff ready for our hike to Machu Picchu the next morning. After that we settled into bed and watched the movie Unstoppable with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine about a runaway train loosely based on true events that happened in Ohio. It’s a solid movie. Watch it.
Day 4
We once again woke up at 4:30 AM on the morning of January 6th to have breakfast on the ground floor of the hotel before we were met by Juvenal in the lobby at 5:15. We met the rest of the tour group before walking down to the final trail leading up to Machu Picchu.
Once we got to the old Incan ruins, in an ironic bit of luck, the ongoing protests have caused many, if not most tourists to stay away until things get more settled. As a result of this an iconic landmark like Machu Picchu, which typically receives 4,000+ people a day and making the place look like a Disneyworld ride queue, had its average visitor numbers plummet. On the day of our visit, the total number of visitors for the day was right around 100.
We got to spend as much time as we wanted exploring the old citadel, looking on in awe at what man could build with little more than raw man power and without the luxury of modern equipment and machinery. Equally awe inspiring is just how quickly nature tried to reclaim everything the Inca had built as soon as they were gone.
I can’t help but get emotional in moments like this, witnessing the incredible things that humanity can accomplish but at the same time understanding that in the grand scheme of things we are here for momentarily blips of existence. What we build up will be torn down with the relentless passage of time.
In one of my final entries of my Antarctica travel journals, I mention that, in instances like these, where I stare in the face of man’s feeble attempts to try to master the world around him, I’m always reminded of the Percy Shelley poem Ozymandias,
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.”
Just because we finally got to Machu Picchu doesn’t mean the climbing is over. Because apparently we’re masochists, in addition to visiting the Incan ruins, we also bought passes to climb the mountain next door, Huayna Picchu, an additional 850 feet (260 m) in order to see Machu Picchu from up high.
It took me about 20 minutes longer to get to the top than everyone else but thankfully Juvenal was with me the entire way and being extremely encouraging. My original plan was to go up as much as I could, expecting to quit before the halfway up point, but something about the day and the continued encouragement from Juvey kept me going until eventually I got to the top and the views did not disappoint.
Out of time, we all made our way down to the bottom of the mountain and went to have a pretty late lunch at the same restaurant we had dinner in the previous night. My appetite today was even better than it was yesterday and this time I ate almost my entire massive plate of fettuccini alfredo.
Fortunately for us, our guides Felix and Juvenal had come up with a better plan on how to get us back to Cusco: Rather than hiking 26 miles to Ollantaytambo, where a van would be waiting to take our group on a 2 hour trip to Cusco, we would instead trace back our steps and follow the train tracks 7 miles back to where we had come from yesterday at the hydroelectric plant where a van sent by the tour company would pick us up and drive us 6-8 hours to Cusco instead.
Our guides warned us that there was the possibility of road blockades due to the protests but that by traveling at night, the blockades should be cleared, allowing us to get to Cusco.
Remember those makeshift train trolleys I mentioned seeing earlier that were ferrying people downhill from Aguas Calientes to the hydroelectric plant? Well, our group came across two men with one those makeshift train trolleys coming back up the tracks…and we decided to hire their services.
In what is arguably the dumbest fucking thing that probably any of us has ever done, we crammed the eight members of our tour group, our two tour guides, all of our backpacks, AND the two dudes controlling the speed of the trolley, onto what is little more than a pair of train wheels with various busted pieces of scrap wood to sit on.
Day 5-ish
We boarded a white Sprinter van that was waiting for us at the train station near the hydroelectric plant at around 6:15 AM. We were going to be sharing the van with a five person group from the same tour company (4 tourists and one guide). This meant that our van had a total of 17 people on board a van really only meant for 15. Mind you, everyone in that van had been hiking and sweating all day without the chance to get a shower in.
It was hot. It was cramped. It was fucking awful.
We drove a significant portion of the first two hours on unpaved roads in a large van that was definitely not built for off-road usage. It was a bumpy, bumpy ride, but at least for the time being there were no roadblocks.
Our luck however was quick to run out. Our van stopped behind a long row of other parked Sprinter vans unable to go forward due to a blockade made by a small group of protesters in the town of Santa Maria.
We had pulled up to the road just outside of Santa Maria around 8 PM. Naturally curious (and to get away from a stuffy van full of people), a lot of the tourists from the vans went to the town to see how the protest was progressing, hoping it would end soon and allow the vans full of tourists to pass so they could get to Cusco, get on a plane, and get the fuck outta dodge.
The seconds ticked on by and became minutes which became hours. By around 11 PM, the protest was down to a mere 10-12 people sitting on a bench in the middle of the only street through town drinking liquor. Despite pleas from the stranded tourists asking for the police nearby to do something, the cops felt ill equipped to pressure the protesters into moving. Long story short, the cops were afraid of incurring the wrath of even more protestors if they didn’t do anything.
I am not a patient person, and the idea of 12 assholes keeping hundreds of people from getting home was not gonna fly. Especially not if I was one of those people. Getting incrementally more annoyed, I started talking with a bunch of the other stranded motorists unable to get anywhere and we all vented our frustrations with the situation. At that point, I proposed that we get a large group of motorists, go to the police station and tell them that if they don’t clear the road for us to get through, we would do it for them just with sheer numbers.
One of the members of our tour group, Dave, looking on impatiently as we wait for the protesters to let us through