We came to the realization this morning that we had no way to make our flight out of Cusco in a few days because the train back to Ollantaytambo didn’t give us enough time to drive from Ollantaytambo to Cusco. While the web articles say this is a 45 minute drive, in reality current road conditions make it a two hour drive. So we were going to have to change our train tickets. Moreover, advice from Lyle and Lilly (B&B owners) indicated that Agua Caliente (the town just outside Machu Picchu) is so small it’s not worth staying there a full two days. So a small scramble ensued while Lilly called our Agua Caliente hotel and got them to release us from our last night there, and then called another hotel in Ollantaytambo to make a reservation. We then were able to change our train tickets when we arrived at the Ollantaytambo train station.
Lyle drove us to the Ollantaytambo train station, along the way we passed the largest lake in the area. There was a family plowing their field with oxen.
Just outside Ollantaytambo Lyle pulled off the side of the road and made us all get out and look up. If you look carefully in the lower right side of this picture you will see climbers scaling this cliff. Their goal is to reach the pod like structures you see at the top left. This is a hotel. Each pod has two bedrooms – one on each end, with a common area/dining table in the middle. When you get there they serve you a nice dinner with a bottle of wine. In the morning you take a zip line back down. Not for us.
We then road the PeruRail train to Agua Caliente. There are lots of restaurants, hotels, and massage/spas here as the only purpose of this town is to support the 2 Million visitors a year to Machu Picchu.
The view from our the Terrazas Del Inca hotel was out over the Andes Mountains.
Then it was time to head for dinner. We had made reservations at a place called “Tree House”, it turned out to be pretty good food. Food in Peru tends to be fairly inexpensive, but here in Agua Caliente things are a bit more expensive because everything has to come in by train. But even with that, it’s still less expensive than US prices.
On our way back from dinner, Mike took off his camera lens cover and promptly dropped it through a street grate. This little girl saw what happened and grabbed the giant grate and muscled it up so Mike could retrieve the lens cover. She could barely hold it up, but she was determined. We had to get a shot of her and Mike, and we had intended to give her a dollar or something but after the picture she dashed off.
Its election time here in Peru. So there were political signs up everywhere and political rally’s all over the place. We learned a number of interesting things about the elections. It’s mandatory to vote – they fine you if you don’t show up. They don’t allow the sale of alcohol two days before the elections. We also noticed that the election posters often had “X” marks all over them. We thought at first this was a way for opponents to mess up the other guy’s signs or something. However, it turns out that because so much of the population is illiterate, they use pictographs on the voting ballots to represent each candidate. So the “X” says – “put your X here to vote for me”.
In Peru no one or two parties have the majority of the vote, so there are lots of candidates on the ballot and who wins often comes down to a handful of votes. Because the elections are only days away the final pressure was on to advertise candidates. Again, because so much of the population is illiterate, elections are largely won based on who can throw the best party in your local town prior to the election. Even in the small town of Agua Caliente, there were multiple rally’s going on tonight. This video shows what one looked like. And for anyone worried that maybe there was any violence or anything like that, be sure to note the balloons and kids near the end of the video. It’s a bit more like the circus coming to town than a political rally. We saw clowns, bands, and all manner of entertainment walking the streets.
The only downside to all this partying was that they partied ALL NIGHT. Yes, really, all night long. So when we arose the next morning for our trip up the mountain to see Machu Picchu, none of us had a good night’s sleep.
The guide that was to take us to Machu Picchu met us at our hotel to discuss plans for the following day. He checked our tickets to make sure we had the right tickets to get into the park, and we agreed to meet early at the hotel and depart together from there.