Have you ever been to Machu Picchu? If not, then we are taking you up there right now…on foot… in our backpacks… ?. And if you have, you probably have a better story to tell, since we were running out of time and had to chose the “blitz” visit to the site: get to the village below (Aguas Calientes) by Bus and Train on the first day, sleep a couple of hours and climb the mountain on foot the next early morning. We would have loved to take one of the many multi day treks to the top, like the famous “Inca trail”, or the “jungle trek”  but we just didn’t have the time and – especially for the inca trail – these tours need to be booked months in advance, which would have made our whole south america trip less flexible and less spontaneous.

So here we are, at 4:30 am standing in front of the entrance gate of the stair-path yet to be opened, with our headlamps and about a hundred other people wondering how many steps we will have to climb…. we had been told to plan with about one hour to get from the bottom at about 2000 m.a.s.l. to the top of the stairs (yes, one hour of walking up stairs!) but our over-motivation took us up in 45 minutes ?. It was a quite exhausting but really rewarding effort. And not happy with this “short” walk ? we later decided to continue on the longer climb past the ruins situated at 2400m to reach the summit of mount Machu Picchu at about 3000, again, – you will have guessed – by stairs?. And – of course – we eventually had to walk all the way back “downstairs” ?.

We reached the ruins when everything was still immersed in clouds, and the spectacle of the old stone walls being uncovered little by little as the fog disappeared was magical – on top of the fact that the ruin itself is already a uniquely incredible sight!

We will probably remember this visit for the rest of our lives, but especially the next 3 to 4 days we had a special reminder on every step we took: the pain in our legs was as undescribable as the beauty of Machu Picchu ?