The Death March of Machu Picchu (or, One Does Not Simply Walk Out of Machu Picchu)

The last time I would smile that day.

Even though I've been focusing my posts on my adventures on the ship, I want this blog to also include adventures I've taken on my own or with friends/family since I think many of them are just as interesting. Case in point was a trip to Peru that I took with my brother David and his friends from the ship (Rob, Mark, Desiree, Ali and Adam). I'll be posting about the various segments of the trip in separate posts since there are too many to include in one. This post is about what we fondly refer to as the Death March of Machu Piccchu.




To reach Machu Picchu you have three options all of which utilize the train from Cusco. Listed from longest to quickest, they are:

1) ride the train to kilometer 88 and do the 4-day hike up the Inca Trail
2) ride that same train to kilometer 104 and do the 1.5-day hike up the Inca Trail
3) skip the Inca Trail and ride the train directly to the town of Aguas Calientes, which sits at the base of the mountain where Machu Picchu resides. From there you take a bus up to the site



While option 1, doing the 4-day Inca Trail hike, sounded great, we were on time constraints because we had rented a boat in Iquitos for sailing down the Amazon River. Machu Picchu was only part of our adventure in Peru, so we opted to do the 1.5 day hike that starts at km 104, that way we'd get a good taste of the Inca Trail and have plenty of time to explore Machu Picchu before flying to Lima for the rest of our trip.

Train tracks are so convenient... who could possibly resent them?

I should note that in order to hike the Inca Trail which leads to Machu Picchu you have no alternative but to book with a company. Self-guided hiking is not permitted, and only 500 permits are sold for each day. We signed up with Llamapath, a company I highly recommend in light of what they did and were willing to do for us in the extraordinary circumstance that occurred.

The hike up the Inca Trail was surprisingly tough and the altitude did us no favors. Now, in comparison to Mt. Kilimanjaro the Inca Trail felt significantly steeper since we gained altitude so rapidly and we hadn't acclimated to the altitude, but of course it was a shorter climb.  I'll elaborate on the actual hike in a future post about the Inca Trail.

After hiking all day we arrived at Machu Picchu at around 5:30 pm, right at closing time. We were the last people to leave the site. We got great pictures of the ruins sans tourists, and afterwards rode the bus down to Aguas Calientes to celebrate our hike and spend the night. The climb had been far harder than any of us expected and we were really proud of ourselves. We were also really tired. It had been like using a Stairmaster for five hours.

That night before dinner we ran into a demonstration of striking locals.

Dudes look serious.

We learned from our guide that the government of Peru wanted to seize land from the locals and charge them for water. We sympathized with the locals but then we heard the bad news: the striking locals included those running the train.

Now, there is only one way into Machu Picchu/Aguas Calientes: by train. There are no roads. NONE. Let me repeat that: there are no roads to Machu Picchu. This means there is also only one way out: by train. Our guide told us Llamapath was willing to pay for us to stay in Aguas Caliente for a second night until the train workers went off strike. But we had a flight to Lima in the morning which we absolutely had to take in order to get to our boat that we'd rented for the Amazon River.

Our guide reluctantly told us we had one other option to get out of Machu Picchu and the Amazon basin: hike the railroad tracks back to kilometer 82, where the road then began. From there a van from Llamapath could pick us up and drive us back to Cusco. The problem, he said, was that it was an 18 mile hike.

We all thought this was ridiculously hilarious. I mean, it was so wrong that it was funny and we immediately realized it would make for a great adventure. How many people have done this? we asked our guide. He said it had happened only once before, when he'd led a single man out on the tracks last year during a previous strike. He told us it would take about 6-7 hours. Piece of cake, I thought. At any rate, we had no choice. We had to get back to Cusco in time for our flight to Lima.

The next morning we caught the earliest bus out of Aguas Caliente so we could enter Machu Picchu as soon as it opened. We'd actually intended to spend the entire day at the site, but now we had to leave by 10:30am in order to complete the hike back before the sun went down. So we whizzed through the site, and David and Adam did the Wachu Picchu climb, which is the tall mountain in the background that you see in every Machu Picchu picture. I would have done the climb too, since I doubted I would ever return to the area, but I decided not to since I knew we had the 18-mile hike still to do. Good choice.

Don't climb that huge mountain in the background if you're going to walk out of Machu Picchu.

However, if you do, this is the payoff: a unique view of Machu Picchu from the other side. This view also lets you see the winding road on the left that the buses take down to Aguas Caliente.

We left Machu Picchu and returned to Aguas Caliente and instead of beginning our hike, we decided to have lunch first, a decision that would prove to be our undoing. At 12:30 we started on the tracks at km 112. We needed to walk 30 kilometers to reach the van (18 miles). At first, it looked great. We had fantastic scenery around us and we were literally the only people there because everyone else was trapped in Aguas Calientes.

Piece of cake. Just watch your step and you're golden.

A rare area with a strip of gravel beside the tracks.

Not so bad, right?

But then we discovered that the tracks never cleared of rocks. Neither did the ground on either side of the tracks. In fact, the rocks grew in number and size. They became the size of golf balls and baseballs but were all jagged and irregular.

Like walking on Angry Birds made of stone.

It was impossible to set your foot down flat. Every time you stepped down your foot landed on a misshapen rock and your foot rocked forward or backwards or to the side. It was a miracle no one sprained their ankles. Plus, remember that beautiful scenery? I barely saw any of it. You couldn't look up, otherwise you'd step on a dangerous rock and stumble or twist your ankle. Every time we stopped for a break I'd finally raise my head and be dizzy because of having spent so much time with my head bent down. Other people complained of pain in their necks. Desi seriously thought she was having acid flashbacks and was freaked out.

We picked and stumbled our way down the tracks while our pace became slower and slower because of how strenuous the terrain was to traverse. We were supposed to do a 3 mph pace, which is so easy most elderly people can do it. But on those rocks we couldn't. We fell to a 2 mph pace. If you've ever used a treadmill you know how unbelievably slow that is.

That's when the sun went down. It went down when we still had 6 miles to go. Our guide had become concerned for us because it was pitch black. Our guide told us he'd hurry ahead and try to find help for us but he told us we couldn't stop to wait for him; we had to keep going.

My brother and Rob were the fastest and they decided to go on ahead and try to find help, too. For some stupid reason I tried to follow them, but I couldn't keep up. And I found myself alone.

It's, um, a little dark.

I took this picture while I was sitting on a rock by myself in the freakin' Amazon basin. I'd picked my rest stop very deliberately, putting my back to a small cliff that led down to a creek. That left a small clearing in front of me where I could face off against any animals that tried to eat me. I wanted to take more photos to fully illustrate my situation but I knew I needed to reserve the batteries in my camera. My only weapon was the camera's flash, a la Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.

Eventually more of our group picked their way up the train tracks. I couldn't see their bodies (yeah, it was that dark) but their flashlight revealed them to me. It was Ali and Adam. I joined with them to continue on, which was good because next was a long tunnel to travel through which was the darkest space I think I've ever been in since the womb. At the time I didn't know how David and Rob, lacking a flashlight, made it through. They revealed afterwards that they'd walked along the wall of the tunnel, feeling their way through inch by inch.

Trust me when I say you don't want to be in this thing when it's pitch black outside.

We experienced a slightly concerning moment when someone stood at the other end of the tunnel and aimed a flashlight at us. It wasn't our guide because he didn't respond to our calls, and the person didn't identify himself. We continued forward and found a man, a Peruvian, waiting there. He offered to help light our way. So the four of us continued walking and the guy, when he learned of our predicament, told us we should leave the tracks and walk through the jungle because it would be faster. He knew the way. But Adam didn't trust him, saying this was how you got robbed, so when the guy reached his destination -- a shack beside the tracks -- we declined his offer to guide us and stuck to the tracks. It was in the back of my mind that he would round up some buddies and rob us but we didn't see him again.

On and on we walked, finally making it to the first checkpoint where David and Rob were waiting for us. But we couldn't stop. Our goal was km 82.

We walked 3-4 more miles in complete darkness, guided only by a mini mag-light. I wanted to stop. I wanted to sit down and wait for help. But there wouldn't be any help. The trains were stopped. There weren't any roads that would allow a vehicle to rescue us. We had to walk to km 82 to reach the road. It was a frightening, incredible feeling to know that you had no choice. Either walk or spend the night, defenseless, out in this wilderness in complete blackness.

At one point we heard the sound of a train. I kind of wondered if I was hallucinating. But there it was, and we all jumped off the tracks and began waving our arms. The engine of a train rumbled toward us, absent of any cars but with people hanging from its sides like a San Francisco cable car. We shouted at it to stop. David waved cash at it. But cruelly it didn't stop, disappearing down the tracks and leaving us alone again. So we we walked on like zombies, hypnotized by the sway of the mag-light that was our only guide in the darkness.

After carefully stepping over open planking where the tracks bridged a river, we finally reached the road and the van that was waiting for us. Eventually Mark and Desi staggered in, too. In the end it had taken us 9 hours to complete the hike from Aguas Caliente. I was so exhausted I was shaking. Twice during the ride back to Cusco my brother had to ask the driver to stop the van so he could throw up.

Delightful.

Rob told us the next morning that when he'd woken up he'd seriously considered leaving $500 on the nightstand to cover his portion of the trip and then flying back to the U.S. That was how traumatized he'd been by the march, haha.

Of course, now it's an awesome story to tell and we're proud that we did it. No one else can say they did this at Machu Picchu. But at the time... it was one of the most awful experiences of my life.