Amazing 4 days trip to Machu Picchu...AAAND I LOST ALL THE PHOTOS!

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That's right, ALL OF THEM.

After eventful 3-days journey from Cusco to Agua Caliente (the closest town to Machu Picchu), which involved mountain-biking, hiking through cliff-hanging trails along the Andes mountain range, we (the people from my tour group) were celebrating the end of journey and the exciting next day at Machu Picchu, with a dinner at a restaurant. We had a good dinner, went back to a hotel, and I didn’t even realize that I left the camera at the restaurant until then. I rushed back to the restaurant but it was gone. I asked the waiters, they had no idea where, and didn’t even notice the camera below the chair. I was devastated; not only that I lost all the photos from the trip up to Agua Caliente, now I don’t have a camera to take pictures next day at Machu Picchu. Agua Caliente was small town purely made for tourists to spend a night and they don’t have any market to buy a camera, and if there were some overpriced cameras sold at some of the souvenir shops, those stores were already closed by then. The next day, we were going up to Machu Picchu before the sunrise and I won’t be able to buy one then. The only thing I could do was to go up to Machu Picchu without a camera, and ask everybody in the tour to take pictures of me with Machu Picchu in them, and ask them to send them later to me. I asked around about 6 people in the tour to do this. Each took a couple of pictures at various points. Only three of them send the pictures of me in later days. I guess the bond you feel in a tour together while people are in it is quite temporary. Once the tour is over, it’s over. Not everybody cares much about or even remembers some guy’s problem.

This was a tough lesson to learn, but I leaned it. Since this incident, I diligently back up photos from the SD card to a USB drive, almost every day. I since then met people who had similar experience (losing all the photos from their trips by losing their cameras), and each case was devastating to that person.

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