1-24-20 - Welcome to Machu Picchu!
/4:30 wake up call. Ouch. Especially because it’s raining. We have a 6 am entrance pass into Machu Picchu, a coveted time to get your photos without crowds of tourists ruining your shots. Kyle shares his trekking ordeal with Leanne in the middle of the night to which she offers compassionate and grateful hugs he’s back and ok. (See Kyles blog). As a result, now every morning we wake up and she says, “I’m really glad your alive today.” “You and me both,” I reply.
With our 6 am entrance ticket, Reynaldo takes us all to a great viewing spot and tells us all about the nearly 600 year history of this sacred place. We can definitely tell he is a bit down today because of yesterday’s tragedy on the Trail. The landslide that made him a bit late yesterday killed a Quetchuan porter and severely injuring two other porters. It turns out that it was the group right behind boys just a day behind. Everyone on the trail behind that group was radioed to descend immediately from the mountain. Whereas our boy’s group was told to carry forward to complete. The trail is closed 10 days earlier for the rainy season as it’s too dangerous to travel in the rain on the trail for the next month or so — exactly for this reason. Just another sign of climate change - the Andes are getting too much rain and too much melting of their glaciers. Kyle, Justin and Corey in fact were so incredibly lucky that that landslide didn’t meet their group just hours earlier.
Seeing Machu Picchu for me (Leanne that is) was just as special the second time as it was the first time when I hiked the Inca Trail with graduate school friends in 1997. However, it was a bit sweeter back then as I could first see it from the Trail’s Sun Gate, a pass that is notably higher than MP, after four days of blood, sweat and tears.
The fog keeps rolling in and out obstructing our photo taking. Reynaldo says give it three minutes and sure enough the fog moves so quickly. It is hard to describe how very special this place is. Just thinking HOW they built this without wheels or animals, just pure human power is awe-inspiring. Researchers suspect the place was built for the political and religious elite and was an important place to be for the solstice on June 21st. The shortest day of their year, where the sun is perfectly aligned with MP. In fact, it was so sacred worker’s eyes were covered when they were brought to and from here for its construction — so if the Spaniards ever captured them and tried to torture the location out of them, they would never know.
Machu Picchu in Peru is our 3rd Wonder of the Modern World following the Taj Mahal in India and the Great Wall of China in…well you guessed it, it’s in China. We take our picture with all of us holding up three fingers. In our picture at the Taj Mahal when we were holding up two fingers, our friend back home asked if that was a gang sign. If a group of seven with five teenagers roving around the world is a gang, then we qualify.
The rest of the day was for travelling back to Cusco via bus, via train and then via van. Yesterday, Kyle, Justin and Corey received yellow shirts saying “I survived the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.” Corey’s shirt was too small so are asking the guide on the van if we can exchange it when we get back to Cusco. Kyle the wisecracker asks, “Does Leanne get a shirt saying ‘I survived the train ride to Machu Picchu?” A group of European twenty-somethings explode with laughter and Leanne give me a look. “Buddy, you’re in no position to be talking trash after your butt barely made it out alive.” “Good point, I’ll just shut up now,” Kyle wises concededs. It’s 7:00 pm when we arrive back in Cusco and we are all just spent.
We leave for the airport the first thing in the morning so we can’t really unpack or do anything. So Kyle and Leanne decide to “veg-out” with some TV. Kyle turns on the TV and flips channels to find the English speaking ones. First up he settled on “Extreme Rescue” which had a guy doing extreme caving one mile underground that needed to be rescued after a rainstorm filled the cave with water. One guy is trapped and the water has risen to his neck and his death looks imminent. Leanne deemed the show a little too raw for us after Kyle’s near death experience, “let’s find something else to watch, dear.”
Next up, Kyle flips to was a show on Animal Planet where two people described their wild and nearly-fatal animal attacks. One guy is mauled by a 9 foot grizzly bear on a remote deserted island in Alaska. His brother finally fends off the grizzly with a shot-gun and has to carry his brother piece by piece back to the boat where he helicoptered to the hospital where doctors sew him back together and survives. The second story is about a woman in Australia who is wake surfing in the ocean behind a boat when a vicious sea jumps out of the water knocks here into the water where he starts to maul her and then drags her twenty feet under water. “Umm…not this one either, honey, let’s find something more upbeat to watch,” shares Leanne.
Next up, Kyle flips the channel to “Naked and Afraid”, an hour long show where producers drop two people who don’t know each other naked in the middle of a jungle and they need to survive on their own for three weeks. They have no food, it’s like 110 degrees during the day, monsoon rain ravage them at night. By the end of the three weeks, they are covered in a zillion mosquito bites, had parasites burrow into their skin, are totally dehydrated and emaciated from hunger.”
Leanne couldn’t believe that after Kyle’s ordeal on the Trail, “these are the shows you want to watch?”
Apparently adventure is running through his blood these days in Latin America. Thank you Alpaca Expeditions for an amazing and eventful journey. But most importantly bringing my boys back safely.
