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spectacular, exhausting and unforgetable

2 hours in the slowest train ever took us to Aguas Calientes where we checked out our room, organized ourselves AND the guide"s" and coordinators and arranged a breakfast at 4 am for the next day.

3.45 am - the alarm clock rang and I insisted to wake up the rest of our crew to leave the appartement on time.

4.20 am - breakfast, enough clothes, water, etc. was packed (erm ... well, Andres started with just sneakers, a jean, a tshirt and his bag of snacks in his hands :) ) ... the main square was already crowded from other clever persons who also wanted to be the first ones up at Machu Picchu and additionally there was an offer of walking foody, snacky and waterstands around, who were prepared for people like Andres ;) . We almost had fullmoon walking the first 2 km to the bridge which led to Machu Picchu and therefore a torch wasn´t necessary, but as we decided to take the faster single track our torch and headlight were very useful again. The single track was having one steep step after the other and we realized soon that Inkas weren´t in favour of serpentines. However we did the way up to Machu Picchu ... sweading, but we did it - alltogether!!!!

about 5.30 am - the gate opened at 6 and we were just in time to queue before the first bus arrived. Therefore we were at 6 am within the first few people entering the Machu Picchu ruins. We enjoyed these few first SILENT moments and were shocked after 15 min how was it got loud and crowdy.

7 o´clock - Maggo and I decided to head for Waynapicchu, the impressing mountain behind the Machu Picchu ruins. Clever enough not to checkitout before we had to wait for an hour to get the tickets for the next run of 200 tourists at 10 am. In our view that was way too long to wait and therefore tried to avoid the entrance control and ... managed to do it. Therefore our ascend was perfect as they closed the gate about 15 min before we entered. All the people within the 200 allowed were mostly up there already to the half of the mountain and we had the whole, steep, stairy single track for ourselves. As most of the people were creeping up there without any preparation or experience climbing mountains, we caught up with the first ones after a little while ... still in the middle of the mountain. Up there, we had an astounding view of the whole Machu Picchu area and the surrounding mountains. Waynapicchu is probably the steepest moutain I´ve ever been to and you can just sit there at the edge and watch down about 400 metres straight! Relaxing in the sun and enjoying the great view from up there for an hour gave us the energy to run down the mountain again to be in time for the guided tour at 11.50 am. There was just a small problem at the exit gate, because they wanted us to sign our exit and realized that we never entered officially. Maggo didn´t have his entrance ticket and I was looking for it about 10 min, but in the end there was not more than a small pledge not to do that anymore :) .

The guided tour took about 2 hours and led us through all the different parts of Machu Picchu ... just too much information to give here, but always worth to be seen it by oneself. After the tour we started descending and as we didn´t have enough sport from all the day ALL of us ran down the single track to the village again.

The evening was were relaxed .... pizza and some beer, a visit in the termal waters and a couple of drinks with two british and one guy from new zealand ....

that was Machu Picchu! fantastic!

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