Back door to Machu Picchu

The hype surrounding Machu Picchu, Peru's archaeological showpiece has been steadily building since 2007 when it was voted one of the new seven wonders of the world. Two weeks ago the site celebrated 100 years since it was "uncovered" (although it was already known locally) by Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham in 1911.

After watching countless documentaries and hearing accounts of family and friends who had visited this mystical citadel in the clouds, I was a little apprehensive when finally it was our turn to visit - would Machu Picchu live up to the hype? Had it been too built up for me to enjoy the experience? And more importantly, how would we wade through the hoards of tourists the site now attracts?

The first challenge was to find an economical means of reaching Machu Picchu from the nearby colonial centre of Cuzco, which plays host to hundreds of thousands of visitors. The two most common ways of getting there - there is no road access to Aguas Calientes, the nearest town to the site - is to either hike the Inca trail or take the specially designed tourist train.

The Inca trail books up months in advance, and is reportedly bursting at the seams even though daily numbers are restricted, and the train cost a bomb. The few cheaper class tickets sold out weeks in advance. Keen to avoid being too ripped off, we reverse engineered a route that involved going to the closest town to Machu Picchu accessible by road, and then walking to Aguas Calientes from there.

Cuzco

This involved a hair-raising ride in a shared taxi from Cuzco through the sacred valley, up through the surrounding mountains, over a snow-white pass high in the clouds, and down a series of frightening hair-pins until we had descended a vertical 3km and had traded dry, high grazing land for verdant rainforest. We changed cars at a town called Santa Maria and continued along the steep slopes of the lush river valley, climbing higher again until we reached Santa Teresa, the closest town to Aguas Calientes.

For most of this ride the car swung its way around gravel roads carved awkwardly into the steep cliffs, and barely looked wide enough for two cars to pass each other. Many times the car went within centimetres of the roadside, which fell away in an almost vertical drop. It does not help on these trips that the drivers pretty much hog the middle of the road, and tend to veer onto the wrong side of the road when they take sharp corners so they can hurl around them at the fastest possible speed.

We stayed the night in Santa Teresa and continued on foot the next morning, grabbing a lift to the start of the trail located at the nearby hydroelectric power station. A train line connects the plant with Aguas Calientes, and there is a walking track alongside this, making it possible to reach the town by foot in just over two hours.

Glimpses of Machu Picchu's terraces from the walking track

This is the real Inca trail - the route by which hundreds of (mainly indigenous Inca) power station workers are ferried to and from work every day. We didn't need to pay $500 US to experience the Inca trail - we had discovered the modern-day one free of charge! It was a beautiful walk as well as the train track is built along the river bank and because we were lower down, the steep hills were covered with lush rainforest. Best of all, we were actually walking alongside Machu Picchu, albeit several hundred metres below it, and could see glimpses of the stone terraces high up on the hills above.

Aguas Calientes, being a town that exists solely for tourism, was never going to charm our souls but I didn't think it was too bad a place to spend the night. The only thing that got really annoying is that some restaurants tried to extort a 20 per cent service charge, even though there was nothing written about it on their menus. I simply refused to pay it, and said that other places charged 10 per cent so I was happy to pay that. Funnily enough all of them backed down and accepted - I think they are used to gringos who just pay any additional charge that appears on their bill without querying it.

Walking along the train track through the river valley

A modern fleet of tour buses waits patiently at Aguas Calientes to deliver the masses of tourists to Machu Picchu, but its also possible to walk there on a set of imposing stairs that connects a zig zagging road up the mountain. It was tough going given we appraoched the task on a full stomach in the hottest part of the day and did not bring any water. Some of the steps were enormous and very steep, and we climbed almost vertically for about 40 minutes.

We timed our arrival for 2pm, as the morning tour groups had started to dissipate, so we did not find too many crowds when we passed through the turnstiles. And even after all of the build-up, it still took my breath away when I caught the first glimpse of the aerial view of the site (otherwise known as the money shot). I think it is mainly the location and the mighty building skills of the Incas that is most impressive about Machu Picchu. Walking around it I kept asking myself  "how the hell did they get that rock up here?"

The site is basically built on the summit of a large mountain, with another peak, Waynu Picchu, providing an awe-inspiring backdrop. The way the stones are assembled, without the use of mortar, and different shapes and sizes that all interlock, is amazing. The construction was more solid than many of the dodgy mud brick dwellings that Peruvians build today - in fact the foundations of most buildings in Cuzco are big Inca stones, with colonial structures added to the top.

Most of Machu Picchu consists of stone farming terraces cut into almost vertical rock walls. It made me wonder how many tipsy Incas had tripped and fallen to their deaths over the years. The site has other sections that are believed to be for residential and ceremonial uses (including a sun temple), but no one really knows why the site was really built and what happened there. Archaeologists speculate this and that, like one area being used as a prison, and the hut up on the lookout being that of  "the caretaker of the funerary rock" but really its all guesswork, so better to enjoy the city as an interconnected unit than get hung up on what each building was used for.

Escher-style Inca stonework

That night at the hostel, we got a taste of what Aguas Calientes is all about - it means "hot water" in Spanish - but for all the wrong reasons. We were sound asleep in our dorm room when our drunk roommates arrived loudly and one of them decided to have a shower in the ensuite bathroom. The idiot managed to wrench the hot tap out of the wall, and within minutes the bathroom and bedroom had flooded and we had to hurriedly pull all our belongings off the floor to avoid the inundation.

One of the hostel staff mopped up the mess and turned the water off, but didn't tell anyone else about it, so when the water was turned back on in the morning (when we were still in bed) the bathroom started flooding again. Conveniently the others had woken up really early, made heaps of noise and left lights on and left by 5am so it was left to us to deal with.

Having taken the back door way to Machu Picchu, which was really interesting but took a day and a half, we decided to zip home on the train and bus. The train was pretty funny - the carriages have windows built into the roof, giving you a great view of the steep hillsides on either side of the river valley. They try to make it a "luxury" service by serving food and providing entertainment. This included a weird dance by a local person in a really loud satin outfit and a spooky plaster mask, and a "fashion show", where the attendants paraded up and down in alpaca garments from the train company's clothing line.