Machu Picchu by Brice

Brice was nice enough to volunteer his services for a blog post (or two?), because it really is high time I finished this thing. He'll be telling us all about Machu Picchu as soon as he gets around to it. In the mean time, I'm going to cut right to Puno and Lake Titicaca!




* 26 September 2009 - Brice thought about writing his post today.
* 2 October 2009 - Brice didn't write his post today.
* 12 October 2009 - Brice got his journal out of storage today!
* 15 October 2009 - PUBLISHED!

Macchu Picchu.

It was cool.

Have some pics.

THE END

[Cheeky]

We had to get up freaking early, but it was ok because our hotel which was a hostel kinda sucked. I mean, it was cool in that third-world-country walk through the restaurant and up the unfinished back stairs kinda way, but that's all. [On the bright side, it was cheap and close enough to everything. Also, reasonably clean room.]

Anyways, we were planning on catching a bus up before the trains started getting in, along with lots of other people. I just looked up the numbers. 6.30 am, and it was the 15th bus up. We passed the rest on our way up - plenty of switchbacks. Luckily MP is pretty huge up top, so no real worries.

We got up in time to watch the sun rise, which was cool, but not really as awe-inspiring as it coulda been. But since we cut across the front to get to where the best view would be, we ended up doing the entire thing in reverse. [No complaints here; I saved my feet until the worst of the climbing at the end.]



It was cool. They had alpaca's grazing in the middle (and people to yell at tourists who got to close to thier tourist attraction). At one point you could go up to the very top (ray elected to stay near the room showing the earthquake damage) to see the sundial. I met up with some of the people we'd met on the death march up there, and we all caught up some more.


It was finally beginning to get crowded, and we had to wait for people to move out of camera shots, tour groups to pass, or people to stop scaring the animals (scary looking bunny, lizards) away. We did see a cool door though, and then went up to the top. [The top of Machu Picchu (old mountain) was awesome, but I nearly killed myself trying to climb all the stairs and small outcroppings; it would have been more fun to climb the smaller Wayna Picchu (new mountain), but they only let the first few bus loads of tourists into that area of the park, and we didn't feel like wasting our morning at Machu Picchu waiting in line for something we MIGHT be allowed to do.]


The top had more steppes [I think this is the wrong word] [he means terraces / tiered farm land], one of which I convinced Ray to climb, and I wandered out the "back" side on some steppes to capture a few shots of the impressively steep drop off to the river on this side.






We got bored though, and had a few hours before our train, so we went back down, played around on the rocks at the town (washed our blisters in the stream), and perused the market for a while. Ray bought.... a necklace? [Llama charm for my bracelet.] I think a necklace. I do know that is was s/20 [US $6.75-ish] though. I remember all the worst parts.