My dad was backpacking through Latin America in the 1970s, and spent some time in Peru. He knew he wanted to get to Machu Picchu, so he headed over to Cuzco. From there, he took a train to the ruins. He said that there were only a few small villages along the way, and one hotel at the base of Machu Picchu. The hotel was on the pricey side, so he decided to sleep in the ruins (which was not allowed). He hiked to the end of the Inca Trail, and waited for the guards to go down for the night. Once the guards were gone, he entered Machu Picchu through the Sun Gate and found a ruin to sleep in. He said that he has never felt a place so alive with spirits, and that it felt haunted with the ghosts of another civilization. When he woke up the next morning he started to explore the ruins, and said that there were only two other people there the whole day.
My experience of Machu Picchu was very different than my dad's. I wrote about my journey to the ruins in another post here. Victor and I stayed in Aguas Calientes, the town below Machu Picchu. It was a huge tourist trap, and it was pretty overwhelming. We took the bus up to Machu Picchu at around 6am to catch the sunset, however it was so misty that morning that we couldn't see anything until around 11am. The hours between 6am and 11am were actually my favorite hours of our day. Most tourists hadn't arrived yet because they had checked the weather forcast. We explored little nooks and cranies of the ruins, and sat huddled against the stones to keep ourselves warm, or ran around the trails to get our blood pumping. It was peaceful, and I could tune into the energies that the ruins carried. When the mist lifted, the sites were breathtaking, however the crowds were not. There were thousands of people. There were so many people that we were coralled around in certain directions so that foot traffic wouldn't back up. It became pretty overwhelming, and we ended up leaving around 1pm. Despite the crowds, Machu Picchu was an experience that I'll never forget, and it was one of the most beautiful structural intersections of human living and nature that I have seen.
