Macchu Picchu

The morning of MP the hostel never gave us our wake up call. Disaster. We packed in two minutes, no time for showers and ran with our backpacks to meet our guide at the other end of town for breakfast. Noone had gotten a wake up call as promised so everyone was rushing about the place in the panic. In the morning there is a choice of walking up the hill to the entrance or bussing it. Even though we were late, we wanted to do the real McCoy so we ended up running the whole way. I had an asthma attack but kept going determined to arrive before sunrise, which we did just at 7.30am. The sunrise itself wasn´t that amazing. In fairness its just the sun coming over the mountain- not nearly as good as a sunset, but Im glad we made it in time. We were supposed to have a talk with our guide about the history of the place but because of the confusion that morning, we couldn´t find anyone in our group which was really annoying as we had bonded so well and wanted to be there with them. We ended up climbing the adjoining mountain Waynapiccu in order to get a better view. It was incredible- an experience I´ll never forget. I felt like I was on top of the world. The best thing is they only let 400 people do this part and luckily we got into the queue early. None of our other mates got to experience it as they didn´t make it in time. We looked around MP in the afternoon which by this stage was crawling with tourists, but we had to leave early as our guide hadn´t told us what time train we were getting home.

When we got to the train station we were told that in fact our agency hadn´t bought us train tickets. Disaster. There are no roads out of this town (Aguas Calientes), only a train track so we were stuck. This is Peru so they didn´t offer us a hostel, just the floor of a pizza restaurant to sleep on. I wanted to get a hostel but most were full or really expensive as loads of tourists were in the same boat. Oor group decided it was better to stay together and have the craic. Basically the tour companies regularly let people book a tour knowing that there aren´t enough train seats for the return. It was looking like the next available seats were 3 days away but luckily our guide managed to get us on a train the next morning to the next stop from where we would make our way home. It was one of the craziest days of my life. We eneded up having to get 3 very dangerous bus rides to get back to Cusco. The trip took 15 hours instead of four. There had been a mudslide that afternoon so we got delayed for 4 hours in a nothing town. When we finally got on the necessary road, it was full of HUGE goverment trucks that had obviously been sent to help clean up the landslide. The problem was that it was total chaos as each vehicle passed each other on the skinny cliff edge road. Our guide had spent the day getting drunk and was constantly distracting the driver which was even more unnerving. I honestly thought I was going to die. There is approx 200 plus deaths a year on Peruvian roads due to buses overturning etc and I was convinced that I would be one of the stats. I kept thinking how grateful I was that I had called by bro James the night before for a chat. We made it home safely...just, thankfully.

Everyone in our group spent the next two days trying to get a part refund from our respective agencies, who all used the same tour operator. (There were loads more problems as well) Again, this is Peru and we got the biggest runarounds ever. ¨Come back in an hour "etc etc. We´d organise a meeting with the boss and then he wouldn´t show up and turn off his mobile. All this kind of messing... but I had a bee in my bonnet by then and there was no stopping me. Its a long story but I got a sixth of the money back which is quite a victory of a backpacker over here so I was well pleased with myself.