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I wrote this article, because I believe that some of you may benefit from my experience of visiting Machu Picchu, and may be encouraged to take the same route. It was, indeed, a fantastic trip. Inca Trail was amazing.
Everything started when me and a couple friends decided that Machu Picchu would be a cheap nice trip we could all take together. We were college students back then, and we didn't have much money. After a few weeks of discussion, we chose a travel bureau that would take care of things like transportation and accommodation. We paid for the cheaper route, meaning everything would be by bus or train (I live in Brazil, and although it is possible to go to Peru by ground means, it still is very far), except for the Inca Trail, which is don by foot.
The day we got into the tourist bus to Machu Picchu, I had my first chock. We were the older ones in the bus. I was 22 back then, and everybody else was barely 18, and that was not the only problem; they were those kids that we can tell that are professional pot smokers just by looking at them. They all wore loose, old and hand made clothes and had that slow talk typical in marijuana addicts. I felt incredibly misplaced, but I didn't let it crush my spirit.
Twelve hours later though, my spirit was a little crushed. The bus was in the Pantanal, dozens of hours away from Machu Picchu, and it was noisy, people talked loud and sometimes yelled hysterically. The landscape was beautiful, but after a few hours of the same one, I got bored. My friends already made some friends by then, but me, I'm kind of a difficult person and I don't make friends easily.
Things got really interesting when we reached Corumbá, the border city between Brazil and Bolivia. There we had a fun, although sad moment. The border agents are used to tourists crossing Bolivia border to get to Peru in their way to Machu Picchu, and they take great advantage of it; we had to pay 5 American dollars as a bribe to the Bolivian agents, so we could cross the border. I never paid bribe for anyone in my entire life; I felt so important in that moment. Of course the feeling flew away when I saw the city that expected us on the other side of the border.
Puerto Quijarro was something I only seen in TV. Do you know those Western Movies, where they show a ghost town without a living soul around and hay balls rolling over unpaved streets? That was the scenario. The bus moved around a little before we reached what seemed like an oasis in town. It was the hotel. It was not like it was a five stars hotel, or anything… it was just much better than everything around. I saw poverty there, and the only good thing was for the tourists. Quite depressive, indeed.
That night, the people made a party around the green water pool. I stayed for a while but went to my bedroom around eleven. A few hours later I woke up with the noise of people talking in the room right next to mine; they sounded worried. I went there and one of my friends was drunk as in the verge of alcoholic coma. We put him in a borrowed truck and took him to what the natives called “hospital”. It was a small, dirty and fetid building, with rats' sized biting flies moving around like they owned the place. We had to buy the medicine my friend needed outside the hospital, and the nurse, a nun, had frightening tremulous hands. I'm still surprised that my friend survived without any sequelas. In the morning, he had the worst hangover face ever. I sincerely hoped that Machu Picchu would worth it.
The next day we took the “Death Train”, as the Bolivians call it, to Santa Cruz de La Sierra. Twenty-five hours in the most uncomfortable train I had ever been, and yet, it was a funny trip. The train stops in every city, and in all of them, vendors move outside, around the windows, selling anything you can imagine from food to craft. I bought some oranges, and my friends, more courageous than me, got some “pollo con papas” (thicken and fries - very typical in the country). Despite many people told us not to leave the arms outside the train, a 15 year-old kid traveling with us didn't feel like taking the advice. His 300 Dollars watch was stolen right under his nose in the first hour of the trip. We all laughed so much. Beyond that, there was the dirt. Really… more dirt than you can imagine. In the end of the train trip, my hair felt like clay, and anything that left my nostrils were hard and black. That day, we didn't have much opportunity to know Santa Cruz de La Sierra, because we entered a bus and took our way to the next city.
