But not without its difficulties.

The odds have been stacked up against us for this one. My lingering chest injection may slow us down, but there aint nothing stopping me walking up this damn mountain.

To make life easier, we used the travel agency in the hostel. Transport, tickets, accommodation and a guide all included. ‘Easier’ turned out to be the wrong word.

All was good to start with. The mini bus picked us up only 10minutes late (basically early in SA time). The inca rail train was absolutely top. Kind of like an old fashioned steam train carriage with lashings of wood and cream leather. Very very nice. We arrived in Agua Caliente (Machu Picchu town) with high spirits.


Unfortunately from there onwards things started to go a bit pear shaped. In true South American fashion nobody was there to pick us up. Not entirely unpredictable but still a tad frustrating. We waited with a German in a similar situation and made gentle mocking comments about Peruvian lateness to pass the time. After 45mins we went on search of a wifi enabled lunch to find the hostel ourselves. Thankfully it was only 5mins away from the restaurant we’d picked. Lucky us.

Hurdle number 2 now and this was a biggie. The guide was supposed to be buying us the Machu Picchu tickets and dropping them around to the hostel at 8pm. This would allow us to get up the mountain for the crack of dawn to get some jolly lovely sun rise/tourist free photos. By 9.30pm, however, we’d decided that perhaps he wasn’t running Peruvian time and that he probably wasn’t going to turn up. The agency wouldn’t answer the phone but we managed to catch another guide for another group who somehow knew where our guide was. He phoned his mate who then phoned his mate and then some chap, apparently our guide, turned up at the hostel. He explained that all the tickets had now been sold out. UNESCO allow 2500 people up per day and all the tickets for that day were gone. I can’t tell you how frustrated we felt.

BUT, where there is a will, there is always a way. If you queue up at 5am at a government building they can still sell you a ticket for the incorrect date but then stamp over the top the correct date. It’s dodgy, i don’t see how it can be legal but who cares. Our priorities were to make it up this mountain and this appeared to be the only way.

It worked!!!! Admittedly we were on the path up to Machu Picchu at 6am rather than 4am as we’d hoped- but we had a ticket!!! Great determination, so it seemed, had succeeded.

The walk up is fairly straight forward, perhaps the altitude adds a bit of spice but it’s not too bad. Then the rain came. We’re not talking about drizzle either. We’re talking proper monsoon, oh my goodness I’m drowning rain. We powered on up to meet our guide at the top who had promised us he’d be there in the morning. Do you think he was there? No of course he bloomin well wasn’t.

We made another friend who liked digging holes and crying a lot.

 


So now we’re soaked, exhausted and guideless but we have found our way through in to Machu Picchu to the famous view:


Great.

We tried to make fun of the situation but to be honest, the grim reality of the situation was quite literally washing over us. There was a pretty good chance we weren’t going to see a thing.