Day 5 - Aguas Calientes & Inkaterra Hotel

We survived the four days of hiking, got to tour Machu Picchu, and I found a geocache! Can't get any better than that! :-)

The bus we boarded took us down to the town of Aguas Calientes, down a very windy road that you can see in the picture below that I took from the "Sun Gate" spot as were hiking down into Machu Picchu earlier that morning. This is how the "normal" people get to Machu Picchu, take the train to Aguas Calientes, then board the bus to Machu Picchu, but not us, we took the hard way...

Our bags were dropped off at a restaurant in town and Boris (who had left us after he finished our tour) would be hanging out there until about 2:00pm so he could catch the train back to town now that his duty was done. When we got there, we found Boris and Peter and Kate who were hoping to catch the 2:00pm train, rather than the 5:00pm they were scheduled for. By this time, I think all of us were starving as it was around noon, so we hung out, had some beers (well, they did, not me), and ordered some pizza (which was delicious, by the way!). We bid our goodbyes to Boris and to Peter and Kate here.

After we finished eating, one of our porters was there with our backpacks (the ones the porters were carrying on the hikes). I can't remember his name, but he was one of the older porters (in his 50's I think!), he set a cloth blanket down, threw all of our packs on the cloth and slapped all those packs on his back like it was nothing to take us to the hotel which was probably the equivalent of 3-4 blocks away from the restaurant. He literally was running from the restaurant so we must have looked like a sight trying to follow him so we wouldn't get lost since he knew where the hotel was and was carrying our stuff. Those porters are just amazing.

We were spending one night at the Inkaterra Hotel, it was an amazing place, a 5-star hotel in my eyes built in the middle of a forest. I think we could have stayed in a Motel 6 and I would have been happy! We saw lots of butterflies, hummingbirds, orchids, bromeliads, etc. It was our first night in a bed after 3 days of camping and our first opportunity for a shower in four days. It felt so good just to have a shower! Heaven....

As dinner was included in our hotel stay, some of us were brave and tried alpaca meat for dinner. It was actually really good, tasted like beef, but much more tender. They also eat guinea pig in Peru, but I don't think I would have been brave enough to eat that, not when we have them as pets here in America!

I think this was the first night I actually slept soundly. It was finally time to relax, have a nice meal (not that we weren't eating good the rest of the trip), take a shower, and kick back knowing we had made it...