Selva - Machu Picchu - Paucartambo

As I’m sitting here writing the wind is whipping violently outside, blowing laundry off the lines and making tourists run for cover in the homes and streets of Cuzco. I could feel the weather changing the last couple days, as it has grown clouBlogger: Leona Vagabunda - Create Postdier and more impetuous. Lightening and the first rain drops are appearing, , but it’s still nice to be “home” all the same after two nearly back-to-back crazy trips.

It did rain (quite unseasonably) on us during our trek to Machu Picchu, which started in the highland jungle near the town of Santa Maria with a day full of viewing (and tasting) the bounty of local plants and fruits. Pepe, our guide who owns a vegetarian restaurant/hangout in Cuzco, was different from the start -- a bit too friendly with us girls and clearly disorganized. Our tent leaked the second night of the five-day, four-night trip, getting nearly all of our belongings wet. I woke up in muy mal humor, but while trying to find a dry spot under the leaky tin roof of a nearby restaurant I had to laugh -- all part of the adventure. Likewise when we had to walk along a muddy road for awhile after our cab got stuck in the mud produced by the derrumbes (mudslides) caused by the unexpected rain.

It felt so nice to be in the warm jungle after being chilly a good part of the day here in Cuzco -- I didn’t even mind sweating while climbing up hills or the humidity of being surrounded by banana plants, flowering vines, coffee plants, and nesting spiders. What I could have done without was the mosquito bites, from some type of the insect that left different-looking bites than I’ve ever seen from a mosquito -- very red center with itching that was delayed for about a day but royally flared up while trying to relax in the hot springs we stayed at during the trip.

Machu Picchu surpassed even my high expectations -- which were elevated from at least a decade of the Incan ruin site being near the top of my must-see list. We started hiking along the railroad tracks to it at 4 a.m. and by 4:45 started our hour long climb straight up on thick stone stairways built by the Incans but only discovered about 30-years ago. Other than the overcrowded and overpriced classic Incan Trail route, very few treks actually allow you to walk to Machu Picchu, so despite the drawbacks (that make for good stories) of our adventure, it was worth it. After reaching the entrance about 6 a.m., we hauled ass over to the entrance for Waynapicchu, literally running past our first views of the impressive stones to get in line in time to be one of 200 people granted access to the tall peak that forms the backdrop of the famous postcard shot of the ruins. We easily made it; I was number 50.

After scrambling up a shorter peak near Waynapicchu, the two other Americans on our trek (21-year-olds from LA and Boston) and us tackled Wayna itself, a taxing climb up stairs that at times were quite short and treacherous but that led to tremendous bird’s-eye views of Machu Picchu. Then I set off in search of that postcard shot (a bit of an obsession of mine -- on the Greek Island of Santorini I walked in 90-degree temps until I found the breathtaking shot from behind a stark white, blue-domed church looking out past the arched bell tower to the azure Mediterranean) and was delighted to find llamas grazing in front of it. Finally we explored the ruins themselves, marveling at the intricate Incan stone work of settling huge, nearly perfectly rectangular stones so tight together that you can’t even get a piece of paper to stay in most of the cracks. Many stone windows offered perfect, picture-worthy views of nearby ruins -- the whole site was a photographer’s dream. After dismissing the fact that we’d be late to miss Pepe, we all sat on a ledge and meditated for awhile, feeling the energy of the sacred wonder of the world.

After a lunch stop in the town of Ollantaybambo, where many of the streets, walls and doorways are still made of the original Incan stones and large, well-preserved Incan ruins surround the pueblo from the surrounding hills, we returned to Cuzco. We were there less than 16 hours before we were off again, along a very dusty, unpaved road to the 3,000-population hamlet of Paucartambo for a four-day Virgen del Carmen fiesta with our crew from Nuna Machay (who shut down their Cuzco location temporarily to relocate the bar to P’tambo). We arrived in the midst of the beginning of the craziness, with costumed dancers and musicians roaming the streets, some of the masked men bearing whips that they occasionally lashed out to the crowd with. The decked-out performers weren’t above randomly groping female onlookers and passerby, with both Niki and the victims of hasty squeezes.

After waking up groggy from a Cusqueña-beer and rum-and-coke filled night and feeling dusty and smelling like smoke from the outdoor Nuna Machay complete with fire pit, we tried to find something to eat and realized our options were quite limited. Besides the Mercado and street food which we had already had and would many times again during our stay, there was basically just one pizza place (despite my love of the cheese-and-dough combo, it is too popular in Peru!) that played an amusing selection of 90s hits (which are nearly as popular with Peruvians as the “ochentas”) including Iron Maiden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam which we figured might have been in honor of us and two Irish guys there among the Peruvians visiting for the fiesta.

We passed another raucous night in P’tambo, but were too tired to go with friends to Tres Cruces, a site at 12,000 feet at the edge of Manu National Park overlooking the jungle below that is know for a sunrise phenomenon during the months of May to July. Turns out it was cloudy that night, so after traveling over a very rough road for over an hour, they didn’t get to see the illusion that was one of the few things Niki had marked in the guidebook as wanting to see before we left home. Instead we opted to stay another day in the town -- and to collect more dust in our hair and dirt under our fingernails (showering wasn’t really an option at our very limited array of lodgings) -- in order to be rested enough to undertake the expedition to Tres Cruces.

At 3:30 a.m. we, along with our Peruvian friend and Nuna Machay co-owner Eduardo and another Peruvian girl we met while we were first sitting in a colectivo that was rounding up more passengers, were squeezed into the backseat of a police 4 x 4. Two national policeman from Cuzco who were in town as extra security for the festival were on their way to see the sunrise at Tres Cruces and figured they’d make a little extra cash and offer the same priced ride to passengers waiting in the colectivo. Eduardo jumped at the chance and we were soon bumping down a trench-filled dirt road with two cops not quite sure of how to get to this remote location. But we made it there about 4:30 and settled in amongst a night sky filled with stars and perfect crescent moon to wait for dawn. It came with rosy pink illuminating the clouds and a yellow line across the clouds covering the jungle that resembled electricity. But the main show was when the yellow globe of the sun began to rise and seemingly pulse and shake for 15 minutes or so, dazzling the small crowd that had formed to observe the optical distortion that reportedly only occurs there and in Japan.

We marveled at our luck to have not dragged ourselves out the night before with some others, but to instead wait it out in a town we were already a bit tired of -- and to get ourselves up from a 7-hour sleep -- to make the trek with just our trio. Sometimes it pays to just wait and see and not be in a rush; a strategy we’re adopting with our decision to hunker down and really get to know Cuzco, using it as a home base for our adventures through mid-August. After all, we have no obligations on this trip…