Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu involved the earliest rise of the trip (unfortunately not for our guides though!!), we were all up and waiting patiently in the hostel reception by 4.30 but alas due to a huge fiesta for the locals in Aguas Caliente the night before there was a no show by our guides!! Many of us were not impressed!! Half the group (us included) took the easy option (thankfully!!) and grabbed the first bus up to the ruins (its a good idea, there really is no view on the way up - save your energy for the site!)! Amazing some of the lads in our group ran the steps up in a record time of 35 minutes (most of them drunk!) (it usually takes 1h30mins!). Thankfully our guides met us at the entrance as otherwise we were ticketless!

The first glimpse of Machu Picchu is seriously breathtaking, it was a pity it was a cloudy day so the sun rise was less spectacular than you see in pictures but that soon cleared and the ruins look great in the sun. We were lucky that only about 100 people entering the site with us. We were not so lucky with the guide lumped onto us...he was seriously obnoxious and quite disrespectful of the ruins (he treated the place like a ringmaster in a circus!)...thankfully our entire group managed to escape him rather quickly (10 minutes max) although we could still hear his voice bellowing over the ruins for another hour or so!

One major difference to tourism in Peru is the lack of safety rails...we did a walk to the inca bridge and quite literally were walking along the side of a cliff, at some stages this was less than a foot wide!

We didnt have time to do the trek to the Temple of the Sun but others who did it said it was smaller than they had expected. After being quite the tourists and taking about a trillion pictures we headed back by bus to Aguas Calientes for some lunch and then caught a train back to Ollyambamba and then a bus back to Cusco where our group dinner plans didnt work out so well as we were all absolutely wrecked! We may put up more photos of here once Orla gets her memory card working...as usual she was very snap happy that day!