Old Penis

Apparently Machu Picchu mean Old Mountain, however, if you pronounce the Picchu wrong - as most everybody does - it means Old Penis.

Anyway, back to the story.  3.30am was the wake up call for the morning of Machu Picchu.  Being woken at 3.30 is never fun.  The rain and cold made it worse.  The pancakes and knowing we were only hours away from the Sun Gate made it better.

And yes it was still raining.

After breakfast we stumbled through the dark to the control gate where we stood in the rain and cold with the other 200 people on the trail to wait for the 5.30 opening.  Finally, the gates opened and everyone went through, we were the last.  We walked the last hour through the approaching dawn to finally crawl up the last steep staircase to come up through the Sun Gate.  But there was no sun :(  Only clouds and rain.  We didn't even have time to take photos of the clouds, let alone wait and see if there was any chance of anything appearing through the mists before our guide was 'Vamos, vamos!' and we were back on the trail and heading towards the lost city.



Machu Picchu during a brief break from cloud cover.


Barely 15 minutes later as we passed another lookout, Machu Picchu did peer through the clouds.  It was a brief glimpse before the clouds moved back in.  But it was amazing.  It was so huge.  And the way it appeared from the mists and disappeared again gave it an air of mystery which bordered on surreal.  So we entered this mysterious and ancient city, walking paths that had been laid and tred by the Incas centuries before, and beelined for the cafe and a hot choc because it was bloody freezing.

After being invigorated by a warm drink and a snack we spent the next few hours exploring the ruins, waiting patiently for the cloud cover to break so we could get pics and musing on how amazing this place would have been like in the day.

Machu Picchu arising from the mists

All day as we wandered the ruins we kept an eye out for people from our tour who had gone on a seperate trek.  We were pretty excited to see how their day had gone.  It wasn't til we got back to the little town of Aguas Calientes that we finally ran into a couple from the tour, Lawrence & Sharon, who told us the news we'd been waiting to hear.  Lawrence had manned the fuck up at Machu Picchu and dragged Sharon all the way up to the Sun Gate, where there was no sun, and proposed to her!  Everybody except Sharon had already known this was going to happen.  So we were all keen to get back to Cusco to celebrate.  However, the celebrations had to be put on hold when our bus started blowing smoke from the engine and we had to wait for 2 hours on the road for another bus!  But the wait wasn't so painful, we had a few beers with us, a guitar magically appeared and a couple of the guys, Colin & Rodney, entertained the troops til the new bus appeared.