Home > Travel Writing > The Inca Trail to Machu Picchu

In Cusco, the Inca capital, the ancient masonry is so supple you'd swear that the stones were woven. We leave it one frost-fanged morning on the six a.m. train for our destination, Machu Picchu. The old pistons wheeze out an eponymous pant - "machu-picchu-machu-picchu" - as the train inches up a series of switch-backs towards the lip of Cusco Valley, then ramps off into the bright Andean sky. The four-hour journey winds us northeast along the Urabamba River valley, where the mountain walls crush in upon the narrow cleavage of the river and rails.

At kilometre 88, we - some eight trekkers of varying passport affinities - bundle off the train. Clear skies and a bridge across bright water seem like good omens. The Urabamba roars the sound of its own name, and our trek begins. I'm hiking with three friends - Cindy, John and Ellen. Backpacks crammed with gear, sleeping bags and food for five days, crush down upon our shoulders.

In the late afternoon we reach the stone huts of Wayllabamba village and, after a communal stew with other trekkers, we take advantage of the schoolmaster's invitation to shelter from the cold in the mud-floored slab hut that is his schoolhouse. We are awoken at midnight by the distinctly Australian tones of two campers noisily joining us. They introduce themselves as "Schrapnel" (named so after his description of Peruvian coinage) and his lanky, six-footer companion known as "Dos Metros". They have forsaken their tent pitched outside next to the burbling creek, because, as Dos Metros bluntly explains, "It's like sleeping next to a bloody tap."

Next morning Cindy presents our Frisbee to the school kids and a small donation to their teacher, and we begin the long ascent of the first pass. Like the Quechua Indians, we chew coca leaves for energy and a thirst-less, frozen mouth. Unlike them, who skim past, seemingly unburdened by the huge bundles they carry, I am reaping the fitness rewards of months of sitting on trains, boats and couches.

For hours we climb around the side of the sky; sometimes ducking through the roots of a damp, lichen-clad forest; at other times out on clear alpine pastures beside streams of glass. La Veronica keeps watch like a silent, blue-veiled nun.
Half way up the slope we find Schrapnel and Dos Metros, who were last seen woofing coca leaves before getting lost - with enormous vigour - up the wrong valley. Now they are mending their backpacks and bodies with tape and Band-Aids. Schrapnel points to a distant cow. "See that creature? We tried to catch it and make it carry us and our bags, like these Indians do with their llamas. The bugger let us get on OK, then pitched us right off again."

Behind us, the valley we've climbed out of is a deep wedge of air driven into the earth. The cathedral-spired shadows of the Cordillera Vilcabamba tumble over us. Every thirty metres or so we have to pause, breathless, to catch more oxygen. Ellen, who is a strong but slightly built Chinese woman, is having additional trouble with her bulky pack. We take several hours to reach the 4420 metre pass, which we must cross and descend before nightfall.

On reaching the top, we find a small cairn of stones. John tells me that to the Incas they symbolised the coca leaves they would spit out at the summit saying, "With these, I leave my exhaustion".

I spit my leaves and place my stone, but the exhaustion takes longer to ditch. Ellen and I eat some raisins, while John pulls on another jacket against the icy blast which hurdles the pass. Below us, Pacamayo Canyon drops away in a dark twist from the snow line we stand on. The sun is falling, so we begin our descent into that solemn enclosure and leave this place that the Indians call El Abra de Huarmiwañusqua, "Dead Woman Pass".

Not far down, I turn to speak to Ellen, but the words are never said. I watch as her foot slips from the narrow track and she overbalances backwards, dragged by the weight of her heavy pack. Aghast, we see her crash down the steep mountainside, bouncing and sliding between the boulders until she disappears.

Scrambling frantically down the slope, we find her motionless some 20 metres below the trail, wedged between the rocks of a small watercourse. John and Cindy free her from the backpack. She begins to revive. To our amazement she has no broken bones. Blood from a deep cut above the eye covers her face, but other than this and numerous grazes, Ellen - miraculously - does not even have a sprain.

The weighty pack which had caused her to overbalance had also saved her. As she tumbled backwards, each bounce was cushioned by the pack beneath her. I avoid thinking of how it might otherwise have been, trying to carry her out, injured, or worse. With wonder and relief we count her karma as very good at Dead Woman Pass. Other trekkers arrive to help us carry her down to around four thousand metres, where we set up a tent and a fire, and dress her gashed forehead.

We spend next day relaxing by a stream further down, while Ellen recovers from shock. All around the ginger-olive softness of its floor, gleaming in the sun, seems to belie the savagery of the canyon's heights. Over its rim, a cataract tumbles, seemingly from the clouds, to roar down dark rocks and cascade away into an impenetrable sponge of jungle - the Pacamayo wilderness where, we are warned by an Indian woman, there are poisonous snakes, black bears and no trails.

I climb up beside the waterfall's enormous roar, and spy an astonishing hallucination in stone. Less than a mile from me, on the valley's rocky, opposite wall I see a huge image of an Indian's head in right profile. The image seems as intricately detailed as though it were man-made: a powerful aquiline nose, long swept-back hair, paint lines below his eyes. With an intense eye, he gazes like a spirit guardian, across the valley to the ruins of Runku Raqay, an old Inca outpost.
A slow, cold night follows before we can depart this all too ominous valley. We distribute Ellen's load, then begin the climb out of the canyon. Soon we reach Runku Raqay, perched on a rock platform overlooking the Inca Trail, as it has done for at least five centuries.

Runku Raqay, translated from Quechua means "egg shed," referring to its round-walled structure. No mortar was used, yet many of these stones lie so perfectly fitted together that it is impossible to slip a knife blade between them. Sadly, every room here houses a trekkers' dump of tissues and tin cans, awaiting some phantom Inca garbage man.

Mists sweep up from the valley floor in fantastic explosions of vapor. A short, steep climb brings us to the next pass at 4000 metres. We have to dig in with hands and toes to make it up the muddy, vertical trail. Avoiding the plummeting drop of hundreds of feet demands our total concentration. At the top, we begin a descent down the easy switch-backs of the original Inca Trail. The path is now paved in hewn stone blocks, placed as steps, which remain in almost perfect condition, 500 years after they were laid. Strolling along on them is a welcome break from clawing up cliff-hanging trails and homicidal passes.

We climb a stone staircase to the labyrinthine ruins of the next fort, Sayajamarca. Here is the past reincarnated in stone. With a sense of drama and spectacle, the Incas often built on the crown of a ridge. Their jigsaw stones paid no heed to the right angle. Legend says the Incas had a leaf which could dissolve stone, hence the mating of surfaces, the plasticity of design. The knowledge of this leaf is now lost, but its existence is hinted at by a bird of the region which uses an unknown substance to dissolve nesting holes in rock surfaces.

After a lunch of canned sardines, three-day old bread and eggs that were hard-boiled in Cusco, we hit the trail again. Dessert is a wad of coca leaves and its baking soda catalyst. With green bulges in our cheeks and frozen gums, we push upwards through a slushy jungle of bamboo and lianas, leaping from stone to stone to avoid the boot-devouring mud.

The terrain now changes frequently, from swamp to jungle, from cliff-face pathways to thickly wooded hills. I find myself sitting on a top-of-the-world pass with nothing on either side but silver air. To the east, shadow-shrouded mountains rise in an untraceably complex patterns of peaks; a thousand metres below is the silent curve of the Urabamba's silk skein.

That night we sleep within the walls of Puyopatamarca fort, and survive a savage rainstorm better than the other trekkers. Among them, and drenched to the bone - because of a plastic lean-to whose sagging load of water inevitably had to fall - are those under-dogs of the gods, Schrapnel and Dos Metros.

With the morning, we look down from our tower upon a sea of mists and mountain-top islands. We are ringed by nine mountains. Amid these citadels we understand why the Incas built their temples here, where they had already stood - unbuilt by humans - for ever.

Furious clouds of stinging midges drive us from the ruins. The Inca Trail drops into a forest of moss-furred trees. As the altitude decreases, wild flowers and birds emerge by the side of the trail. We walk out onto the shoulder of a hill, and straight back into the twentieth century. The only tree on the opposite ridge is a high-voltage power pylon striding up from the hydro-electric station on the river far below.

Resting my descent-wearied knees, Cindy suddenly sits bolt upright. She has caught a glimpse of something seen so often in images that it now seems a dream - the stone terraces with the myth-castle and spire of Machu Picchu. When poet Pablo Neruda saw this vision, he wrote

"Everything you were
dropped away: customs and
tattered syllables, the dazzling masks of light.
And yet a permanence of stone and language
upheld the city raised like a chalice
in all those hands: live, dead and stilled."

We wait out the fog, until the fabled, distant thing and its tower, Huana Picchu, guarding and stern above, are at last real. A mecca glimpsed.

A bog-jumping, root-ducking trail leads us down into an impassable chaos of jungle, which the Swede who drew our rough map had described with fine understatement as "a difficult forest". Several hours and three dead-ends later we emerge onto a side-track which we had, in exasperation, given up all hope of finding. It leads us to an enchanted fort-castle, one to soothe any traveller's weariness, known as Wiñay Wayna, "Forever Young".

Its buildings tumble down an amphitheatre hillside. Fifty green terraces descend as neatly as an escalator from jungle above to jungle below. Five hundred years after their construction they might still be used for cultivation. We drop plans of going further and instead explore these houses, granaries and temples that could hardly be called "ruins". Replacing their roof beams and thatching would immediately make them re-habitable.

Beside the terrace stairs is a descending line of ceremonial ablution cubicles, still with running water and drainage. Built on a rocky promontory at their base is a cluster of high-roofed houses, one of which has an observation platform with a stunning view: in a rift where two mountain faces fold together, a white cataract from heaven to the Urabamba
The indestructible Ellen (whose forehead wound has healed rapidly) and I cook up a conglomerate soup - the last of everything: noodles, fish, eggs, tomatoes, raisins. We pass our fifth night safe from the rains: four sardines in a two-person tent. Early morning shows a chequerboard vision of brooding, black six thousand metre peaks amid ivory clouds. The spectacle, like Wiñay Wayna itself, reminds us that awe is itself "forever young".

The last leg. Our final miles of jungle - an ancient highway of footstones, fleeing lizards and orange butterflies. Thicker, warmer air, but still the ever-present precipices beside us. Stone walls netted with roots. And finally, a carved rock gateway at the last pass - the lost city of Machu Picchu, looking much as it would have when explorer Hiram Bingham "re-discovered" what the local Indians had never lost in 1911.

We amble down the long inclination by which Inca emissaries arrived and left on their journeys up and down the giant Andean system, a distance of about nine thousand kilometres. From the uppermost terraces we have our first close view of the complex. It occupies a narrow ridge, with its nunneries, temples and houses spilling over the edges into the emerald gulf of air. Behind it, Huana Picchu, a sacred observatory, soars another 300 metres to a pinnacle of stone and wind.
Today there are neither priests nor Inca nuns - just tour groups and ticket collectors. After six days of Andean silence and a company of four, the resonant Spanish of a tour leader and the neo-English squawk of a New Jersey flock are all too abrasive. "Shock culture," Cindy calls it.

Already an Indian guard is approaching. Looking as threatening as an Andean avalanche, with his cudgel he points us down the labyrinth's stairways and corridors of jigsaw stones, towards the ticket gate. Staying means paying. As we descend, from above comes the sound of dispute. We turn to witness a running argument - in Quechua and Aussie slang - disappearing into a temple. The guard is in hot pursuit of two fare-evading gringos, Dos Metros and Schrapnel.

Read more travel writing by John Borthwick