Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

Our second day at Machu Picchu was very wet. It was pouring in the morning, so we didn't get going until 10am, and didn't make it to the park until almost 11.

I happened to find Jenny and Don and we chatted with them briefly before they headed back down for lunch.

We got a tour of the ruins with a guide named Reuben. He's been giving tours for 15years, though he spends more time on the Inca Trail than in Machu Picchu itself. He's covered the trail 478 times, and can do it in 12hrs (it's a four day guided hike). He mentioned that his record for the hike we did yesterday in two hours, is 20min. It seems his Inca Trail time is a little slow... the record for guides is 7hrs, and for porters it's just over 3hrs. Heh.

He was an excellent guide. We covered the highlights of Machu Picchu and he was able to answer all of our questions. One of the most interesting parts was seeing how the Quechua people made the perfectly fitted stones for the Incan Imperial Style. They started out by perforating the stones, using slightly harder stones as chisels (no iron tools...), then split them by putting wood into the perforations and adding water to make the wood expand. The final smoothing was done by rubbing river sand against the rock.

After the tour, we split up to wander around and then met up again to catch a minibus to town to catch our train to Cuzco.

All of these connections are starting to make me travel-weary. I'm missing being in complete control of my schedule.

They have a shortcut bus from Poroy that lets you skip the last hour of the train ride. I took it.