Reaching Machu Picchu

By Darius


On Sunday we went to Machu Picchu. It was so cool! We got to hike up the Inca Trail a little bit. You can’t go past the Gate of the Sun, though, because they want you to buy a train ticket back to Cusco, the city where the trail begins.


When you first see Machu Picchu, it doesn’t look like what you see in the post cards. When you first see it, you see granaries and terraces. After you walk a little bit along one of the terraces, you are able to see the guardhouse and the main gate. Walk some more and you can see a little bit of the town and the Temple of the Sun.


In the main square, that is a big open area covered in grass, there were llamas. In the royalty section there was a place called El Condor where there is what the Incas thought was a rock in the shape of a condor. It also doubled as a one-cell prison that you got to by a tunnel. There were lots of guards making sure no one ate food or stepped over the ropes. Instead of putting you in the prison, now whenever someone did something wrong, the guards blew a whistle at them.




On Friday, we visited the ruins at Ollantaytambo. Ollantaytambo was a small a town that was peaceful. The Urabamba River flew through it. The Incas thought this was a sacred river because the water came from the top of a mountain. In the middle of the town there were lots of Inca foundations that were made of big stones and that people built their new homes on. Just outside of town, there were a bunch of terraces and a steep staircase that climbed up the middle of the terraces.


At the top, there was some housing above the terraces and a really cool stone doorway next to a wall made of huge stones. There was also a stone path built into the mountains that was narrow that led to another set of ruins. Below them there were a bunch of baths where the Incas would clean themselves before going into the temples. There was still water flowing through the aqueducts that led to the baths.


At our hotel in Ollantaytambo there was a game called “sapo” that we were able to play. Sapo means frog in Spanish. The rules were that you stand about 10 feet back and you throw a medal coin and try to get it into the frog’s mouth. There are also a bunch of other holes built into a table that the frog sat on. If you get the coin into the holes, it is worth different amounts of points. It was lots of fun to play when we were resting.

To get to Machu Picchu, we took a train to Aguas Callientes. When we got there, we went to our hotel, called Rupa Wasi. It was like a tree house that was built into the mountain side. From it we could see most of the town and we could also see a little bit of Machu Picchu. There was also an orchid garden that was near the train station that had the Hirham Bingham train that served a six course dinner and costs $350 per person for a four hour ride. Just past it there was an orchid garden built into a mountain. It was supposed to have 350 varieties of orchids, but only a few were flowering. We took a bunch of pictures but they came out blurry because it was dark in the rain forest.

After visiting Machu Picchu, we took a train to Cusco that is four hours away. It was called the VistaDome because it has a glass roof. It also had table and served a snack that was a ham sandwich, bread sticks, and a chocolate truffle. They also had a clown that ran up and down the aisles in a traditional costume. The clown was holding a toy llama that he was letting everyone pet. My dad said he would pay me three soles to go up and down the aisle and let all the people pet my stuffed animal called Rudolph. We are now in Cusco which the Inca’s called the belly button of their empire.