Day 46 – Trek to Machu Picchu

To reach Machu Piccu for sunrise you need an early start. A very early start. I was out of bed at 3am putting on a t-shirt that I had slept on top of (in a vain attempt to dry it) and trousers that were so dirty a tramp would pass on them. As I stepped out of my (not very) warm room into a dark, cold, rainy night with only the prospect of a hard walk up the mountain ahead of me I did wonder why I didn't just go to Tenerife for two weeks.

The walk up the mountain to Machu Piccu is through a jungle in pitch black, it's steep and slippery when raining (which it was, of course) and altogether not the ideal way to spend the middle of the night. Covered in cheap plastic ponchos we trudged up the mountain following the small patches of light our torches threw out – a very sorry sight indeed.

If climbing for over an hour to get to Machu Piccu was not punishment enough, for those foolish enough to want to continue higher there is a further climb up Huayna Picchu which towers over the sight giving great views, this second climb is considerably steeper and more hazardous so only the first 400 people through the gates are allowed a ticket. Ciara and I arrived at 4.45am with a Dutch couple (Jan and Yvonne) from our group easily within the first 400, so if the jubilation of being soaked and sweating once was not enough for us we had the chance to do it all again under much tougher conditions.

As the gates do not open until 6am we had over an hour of watching irate climbers come close to blows as less hardy souls turned up later and tried to push into the queue to claim the golden ticket of more misery. Personally I would have been happy to have been number 401.As the gates finally opened the rain stopped at last and even the fog felt it was the right time to lift. The original nine people from our group all met up, all cold, all wet but all hopeful that the sun would start shining on us at last.

Last night our guide had ordered that if we were not inside the complex at 6.20am she would leave without us, I have come to realise over the last few days however that when a Peruvian tells you a time there is a simple mathematical equation that must be used in order to properly understand that time, thus:

Peruvian Time + 90 minutes before 9am or 60 minutes between 9-11am or 30 minutes after 11am = Actual Time

When the guide finally ambled along with her cup of tea, smoking a cigar the nine bedraggled souls that stood waiting were not impressed, as luck would have it Yvonne is even less intolerant of stupid people than I am and spent the next five minutes berating her which cheered me up no end.

The guide turned out to be hopeless, we would have been better off spending the time we waited walking back to town and buying a guide book. Just after her tour began, the weather – which had been fine all the time we were waiting – became biblical, ducks were putting on life jackets and the fog was so thick Lord Lucan could have been tap dancing naked three foot away but we wouldn't have seen him. It is impossible to stay enthusiastic watching someone struggle to say 'Zis is de altar' when the rain is so hard it is stinging your face. What she lacked in English skills she made up for in perception as she asked if we would like to cut the tour short. As always, I gave a tip. Buy a fucking watch.

We decided to wait until 10am in the hope that a break in the weather may happen, it didn't we just got colder. As we trudged to the exit of one of the newly crowned Seven Wonders of the World I couldn't help wondering what it looked like. Then, as if the great Inca gods had had enough fun with us, first the rain stopped, then the fog lifted and some time later it even started to be... warm!

Having been two minutes from leaving we spent the next six hours exploring the site and even walked up the higher mountain, it really is amazing, you should go, I would highly recommend taking either the train or helicopter.

Back in town, our useless excuse for a tour company had failed to get our return train tickets sorted so rather than having a slap-up meal and a celebratory drink we had to queue for an hour for the tickets and ate a pack of crisps. The train left on time at 6.10pm then stopped at 6.22pm and returned to the station. After seeking out the conductor I was told that the engine was broken, but don't worry as another is 'On it's way'. When she broke the news that it was on it's way from a station two hours away, the silence was only broken by the Australian 'Shit! We haven't got nearly enough beer for that'.

Having overcome the train journey the final leg back to Cusco was a two hour bus ride over the mountains. As I got on the bus only two seats remained on the back seat, I soon realised why as the bloke sitting there spent the whole ride back shrieking at imaginary monsters, punching himself in the face and generally acting like he had just managed to pull off a big white jacket and come on holiday to Peru.