trek day audi quattro; macho macho picchu

so the night before we are to head up to macchu picchu, our guide pulls us aside along with the british couple after dinner and says that the agencies that we booked thru hadnt put the money for our tickets on the train home($43) or for our entrance tickets to macchu pichu(45$). they said that it happens sometimes and that we will not be able to go the next day unless we pay our own way. obviously we were furious. he said that they would probably put the money in tommorow after their people went to the booking agency the next day to get the money but we would still have to buy our own tickets and they would pay us back when we got back later that day. we were already pretty sketched out by these agencies and there was some talk of shady business. we couldnt get him to explain why they would not get the full amount at the time of departure. it didnt make sense. they just said thats the way it is. we told him that they were responsible to fix it. not us. if anyone was taking a hit it would be them. everyone in the group started getting worked up. they had forgotten to buy one girl a ticket and it was just non stop lies and story changing. all in spanish of course. as soon as there was a problem our guides conveniently forgot how to speak english. i was ready to kill. all this way to get this bullshit dropped on us at the end, the night before! we didnt get anywhere arguing, went to the cops, who only spoke spanish and who seemed more interested in looking at alissas chest than doing anything else. i might as well have been dealing with chief wiggam from simpsons. so we made our guide sign a written promise to deliver our money and tickets when we got back. the whole idea is to try and get up there before anyone else so you get better pictures. but since we didnt have our tix and the tix office was closed till the next day, we just got angrier.


putting a brave face on in the morning after we bought our tickets and waited for the bus which drove you up the snaking road to the top of the mountain where M.P. is.


i bet you are buddy, i bet you are! lol. actually the rainbow flag is the flag of cuzco, or incas, either way i´m not getting fooled again


it was truly awesome when we came up as it was all fogged in and then it just started gradually lifting


that is waynapicchu in the background rising high behind the city. we would later climb it


ya had to step in and ruin out pic didnt you! damn you and your blue jacket


morning sunshine


to make all that u see they would chip small holes in the rock hen punch in wooden wedges. they would then pour water in, causing the wood to expand and crack the rock. i can´t imagine having the patience for that.


when i was a king


machu picchu was one of the main incan cities. build by the most powerful of the incan leaders. it took over fifty years to build i think. it was his personal city. very few were actually allowed in. mostly high ranking religious and gov´t officials. when the spanish threat became great the king at the time knew he had to preserve the city as stories of the spanish looting and destroying everything spread. he took half of the treasure contained in the city and moved it with him to another city. he then destroyed the north and south access trails to the city so that the spanish could no find it. as time went on they looked but never found it and it lay as a mythical story for hundreds of years and became overgrown with vegetation


the city´s location is important in three aspects; it has a continuous water supply, it had a large quarry of materials needed for the building and it was on the top of the temperate zone required for growing crops of all kinds. the basics of all mankind. food, water and shelter. no big screen tv´s tho. i guess the view sufficed


the mountain was apparently dan akroyds inspiration for the movie coneheads


stairway to heaven


there are three main temples; one each involving the past, present and the future. they would be represented each by an animal. this was the condor, or the future. where sacrifices were made


they use the llamas to mow the grass and american yuppy volunteers to clean the moss and algae off the rocks to prevent degradation

the terraces from below look very much like a medieval fort


the walk to wayna(wonder)picchu


some tight spots for the brave to.... well..... brave


awesome sets of stairs against the backdrop.


the magnificent view from above


just to prove we were there


so many great spots for precipitous pics


the orabamba river, considered sacred to the incas as it surrounded macchu piccu


in 1911, hiram bingham, an american professor came in search of the lost city. he eventually ended up talking to some farmers who worked the region and they mentioned a few old ruins up on top of the mountain. macchu picchu just means ¨"old mountain" in quechua, the language of the incas and the language subtitled by mel gibson in his movie apocalypto . so the name of the city isn´t as such, it is just what the locals called it at the time and hiram bingham branded it. he later returned in 1913 with a large expedition of experts, funded by national geographic and yale university. he proceeded to basically loot the golden city, much like the spanish had intended. he removed over 40,000 artifacts and an incredible amount of gold and precious metals. ironically the inca descendants ended up with nothing but the ruins in the end. somehow the luxury train to macchu pìcchu that runs from cuzco for 350$us one way is named the hiram bingham. apparently headway is being made to return some of these treasures to peru but it is a faint hope from their accounts.


the stone work would make laurence walker proud


everything is built into the mountain


baby next to a sacred wall


version mc


apparently they were not a tall people


the sacrificial stone. you can see the catchments of for the blood on the left. made to look like a condors eye


the wings of a condor. im such a tourist


beauty the redux


the view from below one of the main buildings


llamas are pretty much dogs. stinky dogs


the sun really brings out the rock. the contrast with the grass is great


lazy llama inhabiting where once humans did


following ma dukes


it was fabricios birthday that day so they go him a bun, put a candle in it and sung happy birthday in 4 diff languages


the legs at the doctors the next day after the infection had set in. glad it wasnt me!

so after we had arrived back the shady business continued, promises of payment and train tickets continued. they said they only had confirmation numbers for tickets back to cuzco for 6 of the 12 people. so we just went to the train station, got them to look up our names on the passenger roster. they were there, mispellled badly enough as to be almost impossible to find. a bit of relief set in at that point as we had resigned ourselves to having to buy tickets for the ride home. so we all went to the pub and had drinks and dinner. still being shorted the 90 bucks for the macchu picchu tickets i went head hunbting. i turned that town inside out looking for that little criminal of a guide that we had. he had gone into hiding, knowing that we would be leaving on the train. if i woulda found him, i cant honestly say that i woulda been able to control myself had i got my hands on him. just a litany of lies that spewed from his mouth over the past 24hrs made my blood boil. thanks to his fellow guides and hustlers looking out for him and following me he lived to scam another day.

we were arriving back in cuzco at 10pm and then had tickets to go to bolivia at 11pm the same night so we didnt have much recourse to do much about the situation once we had got back into town which is unfortuate because i wanted some justice, walker texas ranger style.