Advertisement
Published: August 28th 2011
Edit Blog Post
A year ago, when waiting in line at the airport to go to Vietnam and Cambodia, I happened to talk the guy in front of me. I clearly remember his bag, because attached to the backpack was a mummy sleeping bag. At the time, I thought how odd to think of going someplace cold enough to need to take your own bed, as I was headed to the Humidity Capital of The World: Southeast Asia. He told me that he was headed to Peru and Machu Picchu. I kind of tucked that piece of information back in my memory to draw back out later. Around January I was thinking of where to go, and Machu Picchu and that guy with his backpack came to mind. That’s how the whole idea of the trip came about.
Fast forward a year, and here I was on a plane to Cuzco, and then a train to Aquas Caliente, and now a bus to Machu Picchu, climbing up, up, up to the sky. Machu Picchu is that hidden Inca masterpiece of a city that the Spanish never found. It is pretty much THE place to see in all of South America. It was exactly
Machu Picchu Rain
I didn't want to get off the bus one hundred years ago, in 1911, that Hiram Bingham, an American archeologist paid a Peruvian farmer one Sole (about 25 cents) to lead him to some hidden ruins. Today, thousands of people fly here each year, spending a lot more than 25 cents to accomplish their dream of seeing the ancient site! It was my dream too, and I had left this place as the last hooray of the trip. The finale.
Even to get to Machu Picchu without the four-day trek, takes effort. You don’t just “go.” First, you take a collective to a different Incan ruin, Ollantaytambo. Then, the road stops, and you either trek it or train it. It is a two hour train ride, and when the train stops, you are in the middle of this tiny little land-locked town, Aguas Calientes. Towering cliffs engulf the little village on every side, and raging river rapids divide the town in two.
From here, you then board a bus to transport you straight up a series of mountain cliffs for over half an hour. The further you climb; you begin to wonder more and more, how on earth did they build that site? Even today, over
600 years since they built Machu Picchu, it takes a bus, a train, and a extremely hard working second bus to huff and puff it’s way to the top to get you there.
Machu Picchu. The Great Pyramids. The Taj Mahal. These are sites on many people’s bucket list. Places that most never get to. Places that the few that DO go, probably won’t get back to. Unless I would one day go back and trek the journey with my husband or a friend, I won’t ever go back. So THE DAY of seeing Picchu is huge. Gigantic. I only had one day, and it was now or never.
I’m on the bus, going up, up, up. My luck, the rainstorm of the day keeps coming down, down, down. The further up we climb, the harder the rain and the thicker the fog. By the time we reach the top, it is pouring so much I don’t even want to leave the bus. This was the tropical type rain that in one minute drenches you. Here’s the irony. I had carried a rain poncho with me for FIVE WEEKS on this trip. It had never even come out
The view
I could have just stayed home in Oregon and shot this one! of my backpack once. Well, of course I had left it back in storage at Cuzco!
I hurried off the bus and with as many other unprepared tourists as the awning would hold, we huddled underneath the 5-star Machu Picchu Lodge. Any minute I thought the management was going to sweep us off. We were squatters without cover.
I must have waited there for forty minutes, trying to figure out what to do, and hoping the rain would stop. Whatcha gonna do? It is your only day to see Picchu, and it is pouring so much rain you know your camera will ruin, but in that fog there isn't anything to take a picture of anyway. As I sat there, I started to notice something in bloom. No, not flowers. I could see multicolored plastic popping up among the masses trudging to the entrance. Ponchos. So with my camera wrapped in a plastic bag, I ventured out in the rain and started using my fabulous Spanish from my undergraduate days. “Donde esta la poncho?”
It took quite a while for me to find someone that would fess up to where I could get one. Finally, a reluctant
Cuy (guinea pig)
Tastes like chicken. finger pointed at this innocent university looking youth with a big backpack. I asked how much the poncho cost, and he shushed me and looking from side to side, told me to be quiet and follow him. So I followed after, down some stairs to a hidden area away from the tourist officials. Apparently, this was a black market poncho, and I better keep it quiet. Well, I know how to be “low key”. I slyly slipped him my cash of 10 soles, and he quickly handed me the poncho. I wanted to complain about the puke yellow color of it, but figured that was pressing my luck. Why didn’t I get the pretty lavender one?
Now I’m not one to tout capitalism by any means. However, I do have to say that the Machu Picchu gift store could make a lot of money if they sold rain ponchos and umbrellas instead of ugly magnets!
Now with the puke yellow poncho on and my camera tucked safely underneath, I climbed the ten minutes to the summit. It’s to get that view. THE VIEW. You know, the one in all the postcards, National Geographic, and calendars. The one you
want to pose in front of and say, “Hey, look at me, I was there!” Well, I guess MOST get that view. I just saw fog. All this way . . . It was to be my finale. The final act, the curtain call. Fog. And, torrential downpours. I couldn’t help but think of my friend Liz and a Philippines monsoon we were stuck in almost twenty years ago. This one was even worse. I was sitting on an ancient rock that was poking my bum, huddled under my puke yellow poncho, waiting for the rain to stop and the flog to blow off.
Thirty minutes later the rain wasn’t stopping, I could hardly see anything, it was cold, and I’d had enough. Okay, I saw it. I was drenched, and I was done.
Back down the mountain I went. So anticlimactic. Whatcha gonna do? Well, I decided if I couldn’t see Picchu, I would at least make a finale. I went and ordered a cuy at the restaurant. Cuy is a whole fried guinea pig, and it goes really well with a bottle of Machu Picchu cerveza. Whatcha gonna do? Tastes like chicken.
I don’t know.
Maybe it just quit raining in true tropical form. Or MAYBE I had made an appeasement to the Incan gods by eating the cuy. Whatever the case, in the late afternoon it stopped raining and the sun came out. Back up the mountain I went, and then I did get the pinnacle moment of seeing THE VIEW. Got the pose in front of it, too.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.07s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 6; qc: 44; dbt: 0.044s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb