Great Travel Experiences: Morning at Machu Picchu

There are two different ways to get to Machu Picchu . The easy way is to take the train to Aguas Calientes and then take a bus up to the ruins. It's a great way to do it, sitting on at rain through some stunning scenery, arriving at the small town, getting a beer and chilli while you wait for the bus, riding up the hill to the most famous ruins in the world.
It's a great way to do it but it isn't the best way. I've visited the site twice, once by rail and once by hiking the Inca Trail and without doubt the Inca Trail is the best way to see it.
Actually, from the Inca Trail the first sight of the lost city is a major disappointment. The hazy light renders the tree covered mountainside into a dull greenish grey against which the walls of the city are a dull brownish grey with no visual impact at all. Worse though is the vicious white zig-zag scar of the road which has been carved through the trees to carry busloads of tourists from the valley to the city. This is such a high visibility feature of the landscape that Machu Pichu would be insignificant by comparison if it were painted day-glo pink. To add insult to this monstrous injury the road has been crowned with a bus station and hotel with no attempt at all to blend them into the background.
That's only first impressions though and as soon as you dip down onto the trail that leads from the Sun Gate into the ruins you lose sight of both the road and the bus station and the closer you get, the better it gets.
We had arrived early, before the first trainload of daytripping tourists and so it was eerily empty. At a point that was still outside the city walls we paused on a grassy plateau looking down at the remains of the buildings. Our guide, Raoul, gave us a potted history and we listened attentively to his words.
As we sat listening to him a bank of cloud rolled in from the left gradually but inexorably eating away the view until we were looking at a white wall. He paused in his descriptions and silence fell. Then, just as gradually it dispersed, this time like a morning mist, first thinning and then vanishing, slowly revealing the city again. As it thinned, changing from a thick shroud of cotton whiteness to a vanishing series of lacy threads it was easy to imagine the city as it must have once been, populated and thriving. I could almost see the sunlight glistening on the gold hanging on the walls, almost hear the noise of the people going about their daily tasks, almost smell the llamas. As the last wisps vanished I realised that I could smell the llamas, a silent herd of them stood just one terrace down.We deceded the steps and entered the city.

Great Railway Journeys

While I've been on my Christmas Break, I've been scouring the TV channels for anything worth watching. It hasn't been an easy task but tucked away at nine o'clock each morning on BBC2 they have been showing various episodes of Great Railway Journeys of the World, and a true gem of a program it is. True some of the presenters are better than others but the travel and the trains are the important things and they have been marvellous.
A fair bit of my travelling has been done by train, in Mexico, in China, in Peru, in North Korea and it can be a lot of fun. I particularly recall a journey back in 1994, from Puno to Cuzco in Peru.

As a daily commuter I have little love for trains but as a traveller I realise that you have to learn to enjoy the journey as much as the destination. Therefore the news that we were to travel from Puno to Cuzco by an eleven hour train journey filled me with mixed emotions. The trip so far had hardly been uneventful. There had been problems from the outset. In spite of paranoia induced by dire warnings from all our local guides we had had the theft of a camera from a bag in Lima, the theft of a whole rucksack from a pile of guarded luggage outside a hotel in Puno and a slick mugging which thankfully had not resulted in anyone getting hurt. And we'd only been in the country for five days. The one person telling us, in the face of all the evidence, that there was no problem was our holiday company tour leader. Perhaps it was this that undermined our confidence in her glowing and optimistic descriptions of the train journey when we gathered in the bar the night before for a briefing.

All of our luggage, she said would travel with us and could safely be left unattended on the train at the various stops while we got off to look around the towns. No-one felt any confidence in this pronouncement and it was noticeable that when we actually made the journey there were always members of the group sitting around watching their own and other peoples luggage. It may have been, as she insisted, an unnecessary precaution but better safe than sorry is sometimes true.


The train was a creaky old fashioned thing although it was pulled not, as I had hoped, by an elegant old steam engine but rather by a dirty ugly old diesel. Inside, the compartments in our Pullman class coach were relative clean and comfortable even if it was a tight squeeze with all of the passengers and their luggage. The cases and rucksacks were forced under the seats, piled onto the overhead racks, hung from hooks in front of the windows or simply left on the tables. On the other hand as the Pullman class was all in numbered and ticketed seats at least all of the passengers could sit down which is more than I ever managed on my British Rail journeys to and from work.
As the journey began the realisation of just how long a span eleven hours might be started to register on us and it was with a mixture of anticipation and concern that we contemplated the day ahead. How would we pass the time? Some people had brought books with them, others packs of playing cards. I had neither. What would I do? Well, first of all there was food to be had. Attractive waitresses in very short red mini-skirts came from table to table taking orders for breakfast and lunch. The quality of my breakfast cheese sandwich was such that I instantly regretted my rash decision to order lunch at the same time. It was two pieces of bread so dry that they had the texture and taste of polystyrene with a slice of something yellow and very sweaty between them. I threw it out of the window, which seemed a far better option than eating it. While we were dining on this too humble fare a man came round selling maps of the route printed in five languages - one of which was English - with a printed guide to Machu Picchu. I bought one, as much to get some small change as to get something to read.
Outside we were heading through a mainly flat and dull landscape on the way to our first stop in Juliaca.


As the train rolled to a halt in Juliaca dozens of street vendors, mainly women and children, appeared running alongside the coaches and throwing their wares in through the open windows. They were selling all sorts of things - carpets, hats, jumpers, fruit, sandwiches, souvenirs. One of them tossed a white alpaca wool hat in the old cossack style in through the window and the women passed it around trying it on before one of them began to barter for it. Eventually she achieved a price that she was happy with and bought it.
We were scheduled for a forty minute stop at Juliaca, time enough to see the town around the station. Descending from the train we found the platform crowded with all sorts of people. Some of them were selling. Some were waiting. Some, like us, were looking around. Others were ostentatiously and self-importantly standing in their uniforms waving big guns around. I walked, a little nervously, past some of these military types and out of the station into the square, another Plaza de Armas. Like the similar squares in the other cities it was laid out around a central park where street vendors sold everything they thought that you might want to buy. I bought some delicious hot vegetable pasties from a woman keeping them hot in a metal tub packed with hot towels and bottles of unidentifiable purple fruit juice from a wheelbarrow.

After Juliaca the train wound first of all through some depressingly bleak urban sprawl. Dirty hovels lined the track while some of the poorest looking people that I have ever seen sat in the dirt selling bits of scrap metal and inedible looking food and torn ragged pieces of old clothing. No-one seemed to be buying. The train didn't stop here. This was a side of Peru reserved for the Peruvians and it was a very sobering experience. After a few miles we rolled clear of it and out into more green plains with the mountains visible only as a dark ribbon along the horizon.
Somewhere along the line we were served with lunch. My misgivings at breakfast proved to be well-founded. My plate consisted of bone-dry chicken, dryer rice and even dryer vegetables. After a few mouthfuls I gave up and ordered a bottle of beer. Then I made it two. They would, after all have to keep me nourished for several hours.


At Chuquibambilla while the engine refuled we walked around the station stretching our legs. A traditional Peruvian trio of pipes, drums and a kind of guitar played for our entertainment and their enrichment. After a while the certainty started to grow in my mind that I knew the tune they were playing. I listened carefully, following the melody. I turned to one of my fellow travellers.
"Isn't this 'Imagine' ?"
He started to scoff but then, as he paused to pay attention and hum along, he nodded. As we listened it moved smoothly into 'Michele', then on into 'The Long and Winding Road'. For twenty minutes we were treated to a medley of Beatles hits. Then, with a few Sol tossed into the basket to show our appreciation we were off again.


Now the scenery had changed. It was lush and green and we had passed the highest point of the journey and begun to wind down towards Cuzco. The mountains had marched briskly in from the horizon and were crowding the track. We stopped at a dozen tiny stations, always too briefly to descend from the train. We ordered and drank several more beers. We walked around the coach to stretch. We played cards. We slept. We talked. Eventually we ran out of things to do and sat around in silence.
At about eight O'clock in the evening, already two hours past our E.T.A. and thirteen hours after starting our journey we pulled into the outskirts of Cuzco. It was at least an hour later we reached the station. The line the whole way was crowded with people trying to sell things at the windows of the moving coaches. The train proceeded at the slowest of snails' paces. The closer we got to the station the more bogged down it became until it eventually halted in what seemed to be a siding where we had to fight our way through the crowd of locals to reach our minibus. The luggage was piled precariously on the roof and we climbed inside for the twenty minute drive to the Hotel Carlos V where I dumped my luggage, splashed two drops of water on my face and headed for a local Pizzeria to fill the gaping hole in my stomach.

An untold story of Peruvian plumbing

It occurs to me that in my recent post on toilets around the world I omitted a story of Peru. This isn't a story of an oddly located toilet. Nor is it a story of a particularly unusual or disgusting toilet. It's just something that happened in Cuzco.
We had been to Puno and travelled back from there by train to Cuzco, a journey that even on schedule takes eleven hours. We stopped in Juliaca and again at Chuquibambilla and at each we were delayed in starting out again. The result was that, after a fourteen hour journey, we reached Cuzco at around eight thirty and then piled into a minibus to drive into the city. Twenty minutes later we had unloaded our gear into rooms at the Hotel Carlos V. Twenty minutes after that I was eating pizza in a tiny local restaurant and twenty minutes after that I was upstairs in the Cross Keys pub drinking a bottle of beer and listening to a splendid mix of Lou Reed, Bon Jovi and AC/DC.
I stayed there drinking and playing pool until about one in the morning when I decided that I was drunk enough and should head back to my bed. My temporary room mate, a Danish teacher, was, while not exactly a teetotaller, a rather more modest drinker than most of us and had left straight after the pizza, so I tiptoed in as softly as only a very drunken man who has been awake for about eighteen hours can. Somehow I managed to avoid waking him.

I know what you are thinking. What has this to do with toilets. Patience, I'm getting there.
Before I climbed into my bed, I decided that it would be wise to go to the toilet and relieve the pressure from all of that beer. It was, after all the first time I'd had any en suite facilities for almost two weeks. So I tiptoed into the bathroom, did what I had to do and flushed the toilet. I turned to leave but I was vaguely aware that something was wrong. The toilet was still flushing. And still flushing. And still flushing.
And it was loud. The kind of flushing that rattles all the pipes in the whole building. The kind of flushing that shakes the cistern. Certainly the kind of flushing that wakes up your Danish room mate.

It was clear that until the flushing stopped neither of us would get any more sleep. We tried, sober man and drunk man working in imperfect harmony, to fix it, but half an hour and a whole roll of insulation tape later it was still flushing and my room mate was extremely annoyed. He went off to seek an alternate room and fifteen minutes later the staff had found one for us. We moved in and he climbed grumpily into his bed.
By now my bladder was bursting again so I went into the toilet. It was about three O'clock. I did my business and turned to leave. As I did so I flushed the toilet.

I'm sure that you can guess what happened next.

The Buying And Selling of Saints

The Buying And Selling Of Saints

A wooden carving of Saint Mickey Mouse
raises a three-fingered hand
in unauthorised benediction
at the centre of the stall.
Other, more conventional, saints
gather at his red boots
acknowledging their lesser status
in the modern world.
Welcome to Santuranticuy,
the buying and selling of saints.
Statues and portraits,
nativities and crucifixions,
silver and gold,
plaster and plastic,
fill the stalls that fill the streets
until there is almost no room
for the people.
I sail through the sound;
I steer a course from voice to voice;
I circumnavigate the cacophony
and reach the safe harbour
of a first floor bar
where I can sit in the window
playing backgammon with a friend
and watching the Christmas crowds.

I like to think that I'm a reasonably amiable sort of a guy. Mostly I get along with people. Of course, like anybody else, I can get irritated or angry at times but on the whole I'm fairly placid. Also like anybody else there are some people I don't like and, it goes without saying, some who don't like me. Usually though I know why.

Sometimes I don't.

That was the problem in Cuzco. After months of travelling with a group where everyone got along just fine, there had been a new group. For reasons I couldn't fathom at the time – and still can't to this day – I had become something of a social pariah, ostracised by a substantial section of the group. My travelling companion for the last six months, Manu, had found himself in the same situation. We were about as popular as dead slug flavoured crisps.

I had been seriously considering leaving the trip and travelling on alone. Before I committed to such a final action though there was a chance to get a break from things – the Inca Trail. Manu, as far as I knew, had never had any intention of doing it and, while I had, it hardly mattered as I had hiked it a few years earlier.

Both of us decided to stay in Cuzco, while the others went off to do it. We would take the train in a few days and rejoin them at Aguas Calientes, near Machu Picchu.

It was no special hardship. Cuzco is really lovely. We had arrived at the perfect time to see it at its best – the day before Christmas Eve. Our hotel was a short walk down one of the streets leading off the main square – Plaza de Armas. The square was filled with a lively colourful Christmas market. This was Santuranticuy, "the selling of saints". There were all sorts of colourful stalls there. Most were selling plaster representations of various religious scenes. There were saints and nativities and staues of the baby Jesus. Many had figures of a child with a thorn in its foot that the stall holders said represented a child who had preached from village to village in the mountains. (Others claimed it to be the Infant Jesus.)

Those weren't the only stalls though. Others had more secular items for sale – jewellery, alpaca sweaters, Incas versus Spaniards chess sets, pottery, statues of Mickey Mouse. From early morning until way past midnight the square was so filled with people that crossing its two hundred yards could take half an hour or more.

On Christmas day the market had gone but it was no less crowded as thousands crowded the cathedral steps and the square to hear the Christmas service. Many of them were carrying the plaster saints and icons that they had bought at the market. I'm not a religious man, quite the opposite in fact, but it was a fascinating and colourful spectacle. The Latin words of the priests and the songs of the choir were amplified first of all electronically and then by the natural acoustics until they merged into an unintelligible echoing rhythm.

By boxing day everything was once again deserted. With both the crowds and my unfriendly travelling companions gone I felt almost alone in the city. I strolled down the eerily deserted street to the square in the early morning, accompanied only by a couple of stray llamas, and sat eating a breakfast served by a waiter whose obvious hangover made him very slow indeed. It didn't matter. I was feeling more relaxed than I had for weeks. I had nowhere to go and no time that I had to be there. I could just sit in the bright morning sun and do nothing. When breakfast was finally finished I went for a long walk around the city and marvelled again at how pretty it all was. I felt a new sense of optimism. I hoped that it would survive rejoining the group but for now, for the next few days, until it was time to take the train out to Aguas Calientes, I could just wander around the streets and alleys check out the galleries and museums, visit the Cathedral and churches, pass time in the bars and restaurants and generally take the time to be happy.