So we made it all the way to Machu Picchu in one piece although it may not have felt like it at the time. Amanda and I had a few guests that week to make the journey with. Her boyfriend came over from California and my mom and her boyfriend came to visit for a week. Amanda and I went our separate ways to entertain our visitors. My mom's trip seemed doomed from the start. With delays all over the east coast, they were going to miss their connection to Lima and so on. About twenty four hours, a handful of frantic text messages, and a phone call later they arrived at the Cusco airport...with no bags. I showed them around town a bit, we went shopping in Pisaq ( the market I wrote about weeks ago) and then set out on our journey to Aguas Caliente. The base of Machu pichu.
Qorikancha church in Cusco
I'm not sure if I've written on here about the strikes in Cusco, but they are quite annoying. Roads and businesses close, and tires are set on fire in the middle of the road. Lucky for us there was a strike to be planned for the same day we left. Since they usually start at 8am, I changed our tickets to an earlier time and thought we could miss it. When we arrived at an empty train station at 5am it quickly became apparent that that wasn't going to be the case. I've mentioned before that my Spanish is atrocious. That still stands, but it's not so bad that it's useless and having to carry my mom instead of being carried by Amanda's Spanish made me realize I have much more than I thought. The employees at the train were extremely helpful and managed to get us a taxi to the station where we could get the train which was two hours away. About a half hour into our drive, we came to a road blocked by protesters and had to turn and go another way. The road we had to take was a miners dirt road that could have been washed out at any given moment. Driving through sludge, dirt, and large pools, my mom and her boyfriend were just about shitting themselves. Accustomed to nothing going the way it's planned, I felt calm, but extremely determined to get there. I remember thinking to myself that if we got stuck I would just walk because there was no way I wasn't going to get there.
Travelling taught me to let a lot of things go. Sabai sabai as well, but there are some things you fight tooth and nail for and this was one of them. We got to the train station and paid a pretty penny for the driver, but we made it unscathed and got on a very nice train made of all windows allowing us to view the Sacred Valley from nearly all angles.
Aguas Calientes is a town based on nothing but tourism. It's as if you took all the cheap parts of Cusco, took out the genuine people and put in a pool, you'd get Aguas Caliente. Our hotel was one of the nicer ones in town, yet was still no where near worth what we paid for it. That said it was just a place to stay for one night. We got up at 5am again the next morning and it was dumping rain outside. We ate breakfast slowly and then caught the bus up to Machu Picchu. We were going to climb Huanupichu which only opens to a few hundred people a day from 7-8 and 10-11. We ascended into a cloud climbing up hundreds of slick wet stairs carved out of rock. At some points you could grab a cable along the way, but overall it was difficult and wasn't for the faint hearted. Luckily I have never been faint of heart and since I'm a boss, I rocked that mountain. At the summit you can see over all Machu Picchu and you can look down on a huge raging river that curves around the bottom. This did not apply to us because we were still up in a cloud, so at the top you could see nothing more than white clouds on every side. The clouds would shift allowing you to see the steepness you were standing on for maybe a few seconds but then another blanket of clouds would roll in.
A view from the top at the river below.
We loitered around at the top hoping for conditions to change, but they never did so we started our descent. At the bottom of Huanupichu is where we met up with Amanda and her boyfriend Tommy, who had just hiked up a thousand or so steps to get from Aguas Caliente to Machu Picchu. We walked around the ruins for a few hours, ease dropping on tour guides here and there. It hadn't occurred to me or Amanda's boyfriend, who was deathly afraid of heights, that there would be so many more stairs to hike up at the grounds. With visibility going in and out so quickly we would climb up to one point to overlook an area and by the time you got up there you couldn't see a thing. It got a little tiring and eventually my body told me to sit the fuck down. We all hopped on a bus together and went back down to Aguas Caliente, where we ate like I hadn't seen food in months. After that we got on the train back to Pachar and finally arrived in Cusco after dark.
Second mountain in from the right. Yeah I climbed that. So high you can't even see the top;)
The next day I met my mom and her boyfriend for breakfast at their hotel, which was set high up overlooking Cusco. A young blonde blue eyed man came over to ask how breakfast was. He ended up being a masters student in international affairs at the University of Utah. We all chatted for a bit and eventually got down to life advice. We did the familiar debate/discussion of 'do what you love' vs ...not. My friend Brian recently sent me an interesting article about how that's actually a terrible philosophy.( ). Anyways the point is, we can't all afford to do what you love. Sometimes you have to take on extra work. I'm not saying just shut up and work your miserable cubicle job, but something I learned from teaching in Bangkok is that you don't have to love what you do. If you make millions of dollars and have no time to spend it, to me that's worthless. If you can afford to do what you love with the money and time you have then you're doing okay. I mean after all it is called work for a reason. It's work, not play. If you get to go into your office and feel like you're just enjoying yourself the whole time, then understand you're one of the lucky ones. Someone has to deliver mail and clean toilets and so on, and they don't have to be in love with that. I don't care that much about teaching, but I can do it and I did it with amazing staff in a fun place where I could afford to vacation frequently with the money that I earned. But tell me I'm supposed to love explaining present perfect to a fifteen year old kid and I'll tell you to fuck off.
Anyways, I told the blonde boy who was saying he wants to take time off to surf in Hawaii that you don't have to love what you do every minute of the day. Everyone's got a different way to live. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong. An Aussie I sat next to on the bus from Pachar to Cusco was leaving his life in Australia to continue travelling. "Work to travel, Travel then work, and do it all over again", he said. Couldn't argue much with that.
I said goodbye to my mom as she got in a taxi to the airport. I immediately went to go get a massage. Although I'm still sore from the hike, three days later, I have had more energy this past week than the whole trip so far. I've been doing yoga with Amanda and although I've held downward dog for an absurdly long time today, I feel good once it's over.. Good enough to be eating this chocolate brownie that's currently in front of me.
Tomorrow, we hit the road again. Having a home has been nice, but we aren't seditary people and we still have so much more to see. We hope to hit Santiago by my birthday, until then it will be one bus ride after another with a stop over at the beach in Arica. We will hopefully find jobs at the beach because right now I'm good on the mountain department. The Andes are amazing and so different than the Rockies, but I guess I just don't appreciate mountains as much when I have to walk up and down them vs chairlift and snowboard. However, they are really cool and absolutely HUGE! On a side note, all this writing and traveling has paid off. I got offered not one, but two jobs. One is blogging for a women's travelling website which is pretty cool and the other is writing a blog for a teaching program. In other writing news, my paper from my presentation in Uganda is soon to be published. I'm excited to be able to get more writing out there hopefully it'll be like the entrance to the Temple of the Moon where whatever you put in you get out three fold. Well just have to wait and see. Ciao.
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