By PATRICK O’GILFOIL HEALY
Published New York times: November 12, 2006
AS it runs through craggy mountain passes and ancient Incan ruins, the fabled Inca Trail in Peru reveals surprise after surprise to travelers hiking its length to the lost city of Machu Picchu. But here’s a new one: To set foot on that fabled Andean footpath, you’ve first got to fight through a three-month waiting list.
A few years ago, the Inca Trail was becoming the Long Island Expressway of central Peru, brimming with trash, tourists and growing concerns about overuse. So the Peruvian government began enforcing strict limits on the number of people allowed on the trail. Right now, only 500 people a day may enter — about 200 tourists and 300 guides and porters.
And so, “alternative” Inca Trails are gaining popularity with travelers unable or unwilling to book a slot three to six months in advance. These treks can be booked a day or two in advance and can cost less than half as much as a hike on the Inca Trail.
Which is how I ended up huddled in the shadow of a 20,500-foot mountain one afternoon last summer, shivering around a table with seven other trekkers as we tried to scarf down plates of cold fish before the snow and wind tore them from our hands.
Unable to beg, borrow or steal a spot on the traditional Inca Trail, we had each decided to take on one of the most popular Plan B routes — a four-day trek past Nevado Salkantay, a jagged, snowy fang of a mountain that lies about 10 miles south of mountaintop Machu Picchu. (Tour operators also offer two other main routes, through the Lares Valley or via the lost Incan city of Choquequirao.)
The Lares Valley sprawls out to the east of Machu Picchu. Hikers generally pass by the snow-capped mountain Helancoma and thread through Andean villages, past mountain lakes and on to Inca ruins in the town of Ollantaytambo. From there, hikers walk or catch a train to Machu Picchu.
Others trek past the remote Inca city of Choquequirao, set on a ridge high above the glacier-cold River Apurimac, southwest of Machu Picchu. From there, it’s about three to five days’ hiking to Machu Picchu. The route is among the longest and hardest paths in the Peruvian Sacred Valley, looping travelers over steep and slick mountain switchbacks, across rivers and waterfalls.
Of course, these paths are often second choices or last-minute alternatives for travelers, and they lack the cachet of actually hiking the Inca Trail. You don’t see the same banquet of Inca ruins, and you enter Machu Picchu from below, rather than crossing beneath an Inca Sun Gate to descend into the city.
Still, the alternative routes are cheap and relatively unspoiled. Some tours cost $500 to more than $1,000. Yet travelers can pay as little as $160 for five days of hiking, guides and meals if they are willing to bargain hard with the hundreds of tour agencies that line the streets of Cuzco, a bustling city nearby that serves as a jumping-off point for many Machu Picchu treks.
The treks wend through remote villages and traverse farmers’ fields. You sleep in backyards, meet shepherds and watch Quechua-speaking women weave blankets, or mantas, on hillsides. You walk the same paths as farmers lugging bananas and avocados to market and see few, if any, other groups of tourists.
“This seemed a little bit less touristy and farther off the beaten path, and that was exactly what I was looking for,” said Amanda Rosenblum, 25, of Los Angeles, who hiked five days west through the Sacred Valley with the tour operator Andean Treks. “I twisted my ankles, I wrecked my knees descending a rock-strewn hillside with no path for an hour, and I fell on a cactus while bouldering. I am so glad I went.”
Though Machu Picchu itself limits the number of people allowed in each morning, travelers can still just show up, buy tickets to the ruins and enter with little waiting. Many tourists simply bypass the treks altogether and catch a four-hour train from Cuzco to Aguas Calientes, the tiny tourist town set just below Machu Picchu. From there, it’s an hourlong hike or a 20-minute bus ride to the ruins at the summit. Tourists who time it right can squeeze the entire trip into one day.
We opted to do it in four.
THE trek began at 5:30 one morning when a friend and I opened our front door in Cuzco to meet a 20-year-old munching on a banana. “I am Coco,” he said, in heavily accented English. “I am the guide. We are late.”
My friend and I, both Americans, crammed our bags into a white station wagon, where a German woman and her Bosnian boyfriend were already waiting. We would climb with them, as well as a pair of Egyptian newlyweds and an Irish woman and her English boyfriend.
We drove two hours to the mountain town of Mollepata, about 20 miles southwest of Machu Picchu. From there, we hopped into a four-wheel-drive Nissan to scale the steep, narrow and bumpy mud path leading to the trailhead.
The driver blared his horn before careening around blind corners and scattered the chickens and horses meandering up the road. A hitchhiking farmer looking for a ride home climbed onto the roof and held on for dear life, as the truck charged uphill like an angry bull.
At the top, we met the rest of the group and set out on foot. In all, we were eight hikers, two guides, two cooks and a shy teenager named Daniel who tended (and slept with) the three mules that lugged our luggage.
Salkantay would loom over us for half of the four-day, three-night hike of about 40 miles. Inca lore personified the mountain as a god whose rivers and rain fertilized the female earth below to create life.
Farmers and ranchers still venerate the mountain every year, offering gifts of coca leaves before shearing their flocks or planting crops in the sparse and rocky soil. We passed stone-walled pens where forked branches stood upright in the center. There, the guides said, the farmers hang their gifts to the mountain.
Salkantay and its sister mountains take their due from climbers, too. Mountains in this chain are steep and prone to avalanches, making them some of the area’s most difficult peaks. In 1995, eight Argentine climbers died scaling Sullunco, a nearby peak. Two years earlier, two British climbers died on Salkantay. All of the Salkantay treks pass around, not over, the mountain.
We climbed north, from a dry valley lined with the varicose veins of old farmers’ paths, toward the first of a series of brutal switchbacks that would lift us from 12,000 feet to just under 15,000 feet in one day. The scrub brush and amber grasses vanished, replaced by moss, cactus and ever colder wind.
“Look,” Coco the guide called to me in Spanish, pointing at the ebony shards of mountaintop surrounding us. “Nine years ago, those were covered in snow. Now, there’s nothing.”
Perhaps. The guides’ accounts of Inca mythology and explanations of natural phenomena were always interesting, but occasionally dubious. After all, nine years ago, Coco was about 11 years old.
Still, up we went, over an exhausting progression of steep switchbacks. The air thinned with each step, and the members of our group began staggering, pausing to try to catch a breath. Our acclimatized guides raced ahead.
I was panting in the thin air and had run out of water when Percy, the other guide, showed me the chunks of snow and frost hidden in shadows that had survived the sun’s beating gaze. We pulled pieces from the cool crevices, dusted off the dirt and ate them.
“Muy rico,” Percy said, flicking a leaf off his piece. “Better than ice cream, no?”
It wasn’t the last time we saw snow. The mountain threw fog and snow flurries on us as we approached the highest point of the trek, a pass at 15,000 feet, which we reached at midafternoon on Day 1. When we woke the next morning, the tents we’d pitched in a shepherd family’s yard were glazed with frost.
The next day, we descended from sierra to selva, from mountains to jungle, leaving an eerie moonscape of giant moss-speckled boulders. We passed isolated mud-brick huts where sick or injured travelers sometimes spend the night.
As we dropped, the air grew sweet and warm and trees sprang up around us. We paused in the tiny village of Andenes and asked the sole shopkeeper for a few snacks.
She shook her head: “Water, coca leaves, nothing more.”
Bamboo-like trees hung off the sides of the mountain as if their trunks were made of rubber. Pollen-yellow flowers bloomed everywhere. A young boy on horseback and his father guided a chain of mules past us. We drank from the mountain waterfalls feeding the rivers below us.
We were sweating and stripping off clothes, but as we looked back across the sunny valley, we could see miles of snow-capped mountains behind us, framed by hills and mesas as green as pool tables.
In the dusty village of Playa, where we camped the second night, we passed the Salkantay Disco Bar, a dark and empty cinder-block cube. We waited in line with locals on their way to work to cross a torrent of river in a metal basket on a zip line.
We hopped into the back of a cargo truck on the third day to shorten the travel time to Hidroeléctrica, a departure point for the train to Machu Picchu. We walked along the rail lines that head toward the ruins and chatted with two railroad workers who rolled by in a tiny beetle-shaped train car.
And then, as we crossed a rouge-red train bridge, Coco pointed up and said, “There it is.” Machu Picchu, as seen from hundreds of feet below, a faint crown of stones set atop a sheer mountain.
In less than an hour, we would walk into the tourist village of Aguas Calientes and rest for the next morning’s climb to Machu Picchu.
When we arrived at the ruins just before dawn, stepping into a landscape of smooth Inca stone, drowsy llamas and grasses as flat as a putting green. After four days of traversing the rugged countryside and 20-family villages, the tourist-filled tableau of Machu Picchu shocked the system. Beautiful, of course, but so tame by comparison with the rest of our journey — like culture under glass.
Our guide caught our attention and pointed toward a line of distant mountains as the rising sun polished away their shadows. And there it was — the peak of Salkantay.
It had followed us all the way.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Prices, which the tour operators state in U.S. dollars, are for 2006 and are per person. Several operators say 2007 prices are likely to go up.
PATRICK O’GILFOIL HEALY, a former reporter for The New York Times, is now traveling through Latin America.
INTERESTING LINKS FOR VISITORS
Inca trail tours
Inca trail map
Alternative Inca trail
Tambopata Jungle tours
Manu jungle tours
Published New York times: November 12, 2006
AS it runs through craggy mountain passes and ancient Incan ruins, the fabled Inca Trail in Peru reveals surprise after surprise to travelers hiking its length to the lost city of Machu Picchu. But here’s a new one: To set foot on that fabled Andean footpath, you’ve first got to fight through a three-month waiting list.
A few years ago, the Inca Trail was becoming the Long Island Expressway of central Peru, brimming with trash, tourists and growing concerns about overuse. So the Peruvian government began enforcing strict limits on the number of people allowed on the trail. Right now, only 500 people a day may enter — about 200 tourists and 300 guides and porters.
And so, “alternative” Inca Trails are gaining popularity with travelers unable or unwilling to book a slot three to six months in advance. These treks can be booked a day or two in advance and can cost less than half as much as a hike on the Inca Trail.
Which is how I ended up huddled in the shadow of a 20,500-foot mountain one afternoon last summer, shivering around a table with seven other trekkers as we tried to scarf down plates of cold fish before the snow and wind tore them from our hands.
Unable to beg, borrow or steal a spot on the traditional Inca Trail, we had each decided to take on one of the most popular Plan B routes — a four-day trek past Nevado Salkantay, a jagged, snowy fang of a mountain that lies about 10 miles south of mountaintop Machu Picchu. (Tour operators also offer two other main routes, through the Lares Valley or via the lost Incan city of Choquequirao.)
The Lares Valley sprawls out to the east of Machu Picchu. Hikers generally pass by the snow-capped mountain Helancoma and thread through Andean villages, past mountain lakes and on to Inca ruins in the town of Ollantaytambo. From there, hikers walk or catch a train to Machu Picchu.
Others trek past the remote Inca city of Choquequirao, set on a ridge high above the glacier-cold River Apurimac, southwest of Machu Picchu. From there, it’s about three to five days’ hiking to Machu Picchu. The route is among the longest and hardest paths in the Peruvian Sacred Valley, looping travelers over steep and slick mountain switchbacks, across rivers and waterfalls.
Of course, these paths are often second choices or last-minute alternatives for travelers, and they lack the cachet of actually hiking the Inca Trail. You don’t see the same banquet of Inca ruins, and you enter Machu Picchu from below, rather than crossing beneath an Inca Sun Gate to descend into the city.
Still, the alternative routes are cheap and relatively unspoiled. Some tours cost $500 to more than $1,000. Yet travelers can pay as little as $160 for five days of hiking, guides and meals if they are willing to bargain hard with the hundreds of tour agencies that line the streets of Cuzco, a bustling city nearby that serves as a jumping-off point for many Machu Picchu treks.
The treks wend through remote villages and traverse farmers’ fields. You sleep in backyards, meet shepherds and watch Quechua-speaking women weave blankets, or mantas, on hillsides. You walk the same paths as farmers lugging bananas and avocados to market and see few, if any, other groups of tourists.
“This seemed a little bit less touristy and farther off the beaten path, and that was exactly what I was looking for,” said Amanda Rosenblum, 25, of Los Angeles, who hiked five days west through the Sacred Valley with the tour operator Andean Treks. “I twisted my ankles, I wrecked my knees descending a rock-strewn hillside with no path for an hour, and I fell on a cactus while bouldering. I am so glad I went.”
Though Machu Picchu itself limits the number of people allowed in each morning, travelers can still just show up, buy tickets to the ruins and enter with little waiting. Many tourists simply bypass the treks altogether and catch a four-hour train from Cuzco to Aguas Calientes, the tiny tourist town set just below Machu Picchu. From there, it’s an hourlong hike or a 20-minute bus ride to the ruins at the summit. Tourists who time it right can squeeze the entire trip into one day.
We opted to do it in four.
THE trek began at 5:30 one morning when a friend and I opened our front door in Cuzco to meet a 20-year-old munching on a banana. “I am Coco,” he said, in heavily accented English. “I am the guide. We are late.”
My friend and I, both Americans, crammed our bags into a white station wagon, where a German woman and her Bosnian boyfriend were already waiting. We would climb with them, as well as a pair of Egyptian newlyweds and an Irish woman and her English boyfriend.
We drove two hours to the mountain town of Mollepata, about 20 miles southwest of Machu Picchu. From there, we hopped into a four-wheel-drive Nissan to scale the steep, narrow and bumpy mud path leading to the trailhead.
The driver blared his horn before careening around blind corners and scattered the chickens and horses meandering up the road. A hitchhiking farmer looking for a ride home climbed onto the roof and held on for dear life, as the truck charged uphill like an angry bull.
At the top, we met the rest of the group and set out on foot. In all, we were eight hikers, two guides, two cooks and a shy teenager named Daniel who tended (and slept with) the three mules that lugged our luggage.
Salkantay would loom over us for half of the four-day, three-night hike of about 40 miles. Inca lore personified the mountain as a god whose rivers and rain fertilized the female earth below to create life.
Farmers and ranchers still venerate the mountain every year, offering gifts of coca leaves before shearing their flocks or planting crops in the sparse and rocky soil. We passed stone-walled pens where forked branches stood upright in the center. There, the guides said, the farmers hang their gifts to the mountain.
Salkantay and its sister mountains take their due from climbers, too. Mountains in this chain are steep and prone to avalanches, making them some of the area’s most difficult peaks. In 1995, eight Argentine climbers died scaling Sullunco, a nearby peak. Two years earlier, two British climbers died on Salkantay. All of the Salkantay treks pass around, not over, the mountain.
We climbed north, from a dry valley lined with the varicose veins of old farmers’ paths, toward the first of a series of brutal switchbacks that would lift us from 12,000 feet to just under 15,000 feet in one day. The scrub brush and amber grasses vanished, replaced by moss, cactus and ever colder wind.
“Look,” Coco the guide called to me in Spanish, pointing at the ebony shards of mountaintop surrounding us. “Nine years ago, those were covered in snow. Now, there’s nothing.”
Perhaps. The guides’ accounts of Inca mythology and explanations of natural phenomena were always interesting, but occasionally dubious. After all, nine years ago, Coco was about 11 years old.
Still, up we went, over an exhausting progression of steep switchbacks. The air thinned with each step, and the members of our group began staggering, pausing to try to catch a breath. Our acclimatized guides raced ahead.
I was panting in the thin air and had run out of water when Percy, the other guide, showed me the chunks of snow and frost hidden in shadows that had survived the sun’s beating gaze. We pulled pieces from the cool crevices, dusted off the dirt and ate them.
“Muy rico,” Percy said, flicking a leaf off his piece. “Better than ice cream, no?”
It wasn’t the last time we saw snow. The mountain threw fog and snow flurries on us as we approached the highest point of the trek, a pass at 15,000 feet, which we reached at midafternoon on Day 1. When we woke the next morning, the tents we’d pitched in a shepherd family’s yard were glazed with frost.
The next day, we descended from sierra to selva, from mountains to jungle, leaving an eerie moonscape of giant moss-speckled boulders. We passed isolated mud-brick huts where sick or injured travelers sometimes spend the night.
As we dropped, the air grew sweet and warm and trees sprang up around us. We paused in the tiny village of Andenes and asked the sole shopkeeper for a few snacks.
She shook her head: “Water, coca leaves, nothing more.”
Bamboo-like trees hung off the sides of the mountain as if their trunks were made of rubber. Pollen-yellow flowers bloomed everywhere. A young boy on horseback and his father guided a chain of mules past us. We drank from the mountain waterfalls feeding the rivers below us.
We were sweating and stripping off clothes, but as we looked back across the sunny valley, we could see miles of snow-capped mountains behind us, framed by hills and mesas as green as pool tables.
In the dusty village of Playa, where we camped the second night, we passed the Salkantay Disco Bar, a dark and empty cinder-block cube. We waited in line with locals on their way to work to cross a torrent of river in a metal basket on a zip line.
We hopped into the back of a cargo truck on the third day to shorten the travel time to Hidroeléctrica, a departure point for the train to Machu Picchu. We walked along the rail lines that head toward the ruins and chatted with two railroad workers who rolled by in a tiny beetle-shaped train car.
And then, as we crossed a rouge-red train bridge, Coco pointed up and said, “There it is.” Machu Picchu, as seen from hundreds of feet below, a faint crown of stones set atop a sheer mountain.
In less than an hour, we would walk into the tourist village of Aguas Calientes and rest for the next morning’s climb to Machu Picchu.
When we arrived at the ruins just before dawn, stepping into a landscape of smooth Inca stone, drowsy llamas and grasses as flat as a putting green. After four days of traversing the rugged countryside and 20-family villages, the tourist-filled tableau of Machu Picchu shocked the system. Beautiful, of course, but so tame by comparison with the rest of our journey — like culture under glass.
Our guide caught our attention and pointed toward a line of distant mountains as the rising sun polished away their shadows. And there it was — the peak of Salkantay.
It had followed us all the way.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Prices, which the tour operators state in U.S. dollars, are for 2006 and are per person. Several operators say 2007 prices are likely to go up.
PATRICK O’GILFOIL HEALY, a former reporter for The New York Times, is now traveling through Latin America.
INTERESTING LINKS FOR VISITORS
Inca trail tours
Inca trail map
Alternative Inca trail
Tambopata Jungle tours
Manu jungle tours
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