Climbing to Cusco and the Cloud City

Making the trip to Cusco and Machu Picchu is Peru's gringo rite of passage. The postcard shot of the famous ruins backed by green, finger-like mountains is one of the most coveted photo opportunities in South America. An entire tourist industry has exploded into being to charge visitors a pretty penny to hike, train, raft, or bike their way to the mythic spot. And as much as my inner-Dutch self rebelled at the price tag of the journey, I had heard enough testimonies from past visitors (like Brianne) to know that I shouldn't miss the chance to see them for myself.

Luckily, Cusco's beauty has survived the crush of foreign tourists, and despite the prevalence of hawkers and five-dollar-a-photograph llamas, it's a charming and picturesque city. Brianne and I stayed in a quiet hostel on the hillside, which afforded us gorgeous views and literally breath-taking hikes up long stairs in the high-altitude thin air. We took a break from graduate applications to explore the city, try Peruvian Pisco, and become almost twice-a-day regulars at a tiny but delicious veggie cafe.

Veggie burger + falafel taco = dos gringas felices

But the real fun started when I got to planning my solo trip to Machu Picchu. I needed an entrance ticket, two train tickets, and two bus tickets to get there and back, and Cusco seemed to be conspiring with the tour companies to make an independent acquisition of those items as difficult as possible. After a half-day romp around the city looking for the suspiciously unmarked Instituto Nationale de Cultura so that I could buy my entrance ticket (literally you have to walk by the doorway three times looking confused and white before a security guard stops you and whispers "Machu Picchu?" like an underground code word), and a very frustrating evening trying to navigate PeruRail's website (which went something to the effect of: "We accept all credit cards. Except no, not yours. Here's your ticket, except that no the transaction didn't actually go through. Do you have a ticket? Maybe..."), I finally got all the pieces in place for my trip. I spent a semi-sleepless night waiting for my 6:30 AM taxi and then started the long, tiring, gorgeous, expensive, wonderful day at Machu Picchu.

The scene at the ruins is overwhelming in more ways than one. Sunburning tourists everywhere in khaki shorts, guides filling the air with historical tidbits in European languages, and a vista so unbelievable that no matter how many times you photograph it, you always seem to miss the essential element. It can be hard to share an experience that large-scale with so many other people. Even when I found a quiet spot to rest and take in the view, a French tour group would wander by, or a gang of eleven-year-old Peruvian schoolboys would want their photos taken with me (true story). Fortunately, being alone in a crowd has always held a certain appeal to me, and I enjoyed a day with my inner monologues and Ipod-compiled soundtracks. I did my best to carve out my own snapshots of a place both overexposed to tourists and stubbornly inaccessible to them. I like to think I walked away with a little something of my own.