Top 6 Tips for Visiting Machu Picchu:
For the best interpretation of the Lost City and all it’s intricacies hire a guide and don’t try and do it alone with a guidebook, as it’s far better to have some knowledgeable Peruvian who has a greater insight into what was happening here 500 years ago.
If you want to see the sunrise over Machu Picchu, leave Agues Caliente on the earliest bus possible, they start departing about 5:00 am. For a great place to see the sunrise hike up to the Sun Gate.
Another good reason to depart early is to avoid the crowds, which start filling the Lost City from 8:00 am onwards. By lunchtime there will be thousands of people vying for the best photographic spots, so plan your morning visit well and exit by midday at the entrance where you’ll find a good café/restaurant. Buses in the afternoon inevitably have long waiting lines, so be prepared.
Two ‘must do’ side trips are hiking to the Sun Gate early on and at some stage take the Inca Trail path at the rear of Machu Picchu to the Inca Bridge. This is a dead-end trail and you can’t cross the bridge but it’s worth the effort to see this amazing feat of engineering.
First visit the bathrooms at the entrance near the ticket office, as there are no facilities once you enter the city. Carry plenty of water and also leave your walking sticks behind - you really shouldn’t need them for a half day of sightseeing and it helps when taking photos to have a hand free.
If you arrive and depart by train be sure you don’t try and do Machu Picchu in one day, so spend a night in a hotel in Agues Caliente. The hot springs are worth soaking in and there is also a huge range of restaurants and tourist stalls to mix and mingle in. buildings that were resting in shadows high above town. By the time we had climbed to the ruins, the sun had sneaked into the storage facilities, built to hold grain, but affording sensational views across the valley to the corresponding Inca terraces and buildings that we would later explore.
Back in Ollantaytambo we visited a ‘Kancha’, a private enclosure with three single room dwellings on three sides with a wall on the last side, dwellings estimated to have been built in the mid 1500’s. Inside, the adobe walls were blackened by soot from five centuries of internal fires. In one corner an adobe wood-fired stove held three large blackened pans. The uneven adobe walls were decorated with antiquities, including farm implements, dead animals, and three human skulls, ancestors of the occupants. At the far end of the building the women of the house sat watching the Football World Cup on a colour television. It was a spooky, haunting home which if the walls could have spoken, would have had one huge tale to tell about pre-Inca people who lived here, Inca occupation and the Conquistadors who would have walked on the dried, black dirt-encrusted floors.
Our tour of the ruins that we had looked across at from the storage buildings started mid-morning. Ollantaytambo was a strategic location in the Sacred Valley of the Incas.