Chicha, a Train and Machu Picchu

 On Tuesday, June 18th, checked out of Villa Urubamba, sending their heavier luggage by bus to Cusco, while taking overnight bags with them on the train to Aguas Calientes ("Machu Picchu Pueblo").  Before catching the train at Ollantaytambo, whe stopped on the road at a home chicheria, a place where the owner of the house put out a pole with an orange plastic bag on it to show that she was open for business with her home-made chicha (corn beer).  We got a demonstration of how it was made, along with a tasting.

We went on to Ollantaytambo town and looked around before going to the train station.

We went to the station waiting room and eventually boarded our train for the hour-and-a-quarter ride to Aguas Calientes, which likes to call itself "Machu Picchu Pueblo" ("Machu Picchu Village").

We checked in at our hotel, the Casa Andina Standard Machu Picchu, then went to stand in line for our bus up the mountain.

Let me first talk about altitude and geography.  Lima is at sea level.  To get to Cusco, we flew into the Andes, over the continental divide, up over 11,000 feet.  We immediately went down to Urubamba (over 9,000 feet) and now we'd taken the train down to something over 6,000 feet altitude.  The "Lost City" of Machu Picchu is about a thousand feet above Aguas Calientes, over 7,000 feet.  As Pepe kept repeating, this is in a rain forest: the Urubamba River, which makes a horseshoe bend at the foot of Machu Picchu, is part of  the Amazon watershed.   Winds coming from the east hit the high Andes, some of the tallest mountains in the world, and drop their water on this east side, leaving the west side dry: it almost never rains in Lima (but the cold Humboldt Current offshore creates an almost constant haze or fog), and the Atacama Desert farther south is the driest place on earth.  We intentionally avoided going to Machu Picchu in the rainy season.  The Inca Trail there is washed out almost every year in February.  Instead, we went in the winter, the dry season.  But, as luck would have it, we got hit by a front that brought unusual cold along with rain.  At least, we had no mosquito problem: they would have drowned or frozen.

We would have two visits to Machu Picchu, the spectacularly sited Inca city that is on almost everyone's bucket list.  Both visits would be in almost constant rain, the second day worse than the first.  I got my camera wet and it stopped working, though in a few days it dried out and (so far, at least) seems none the worse.  Nonetheless, the swirling clouds created an impressive aura and I'm very glad I went.  Unfortunately, Mary Joy got some 24-hour gastrointestinal bug the first night and spent the second day below in Aguas Calientes.  There was a lot of overlap between the two visits and she would have been miserable going up and down numerous stairs in the rain.

We had rain gear of a sort, but bought thin plastic ponchos at the entrance to the park--that was absolutely necessary.

That evening, the group had dinner at a restaurant near our hotel, I don't remember the name.  Mary Joy had alpaca tenderloin.  I tried it: it seemed sort of bland.