We started the day early by catching the train from Cusco to Aguas Calientes, which is the town situated at the base of Machu Piccu. It is a four hours journey with an interesting twist. The train first needs to climb out of the Cusco valley, and intead of running in slow circles it is going back and forth, literally, on the mountain slope and gaining altitude on each pass. Then it runs downhill for the rest of the trip. In fact, Aguas Calientes and even Machu Piccu is situated at a lower altitude than Cusco so my altitude sickness got well during the day, only to return in the evening when we got back to Cusco.
Foure fifths of the train journey is pretty uninteresting, and if I go back I will probably just charter a taxi for a day (and save some money). The train is about $110 per person, return.
Aguas Calientes is a tourist dump and the only reason to stay there is to get up on MP early in the day.
Unless you want to walk up the mountain you catch a shuttle bus ($24 return, per person!), and at the top you pay entrance to the monument. It all adds up to a really expensive day…
Machu Piccu itself is fantatic, unless you are Irish and realize that the Inca’s stone buildings are copies of the stone houses that was built in Ireland many hundred of years before the Incas… There was one more thing that made us thing MP less special than most: A few days before we had visited the Acamachac site outside Lima where our special guide Marcelo informed us that the periods preceding the Incas were much more important and that the Incas really only were the tip of the iceberg.
We took it easy walking around, however if we had planned our time a bit better we would have set off to scale the highest peak first. Now we had to turn around halfway up since we were running out of time.
All in all, a very interesting site to explore.