cusco & machu picchu, peru

So, my first stop after leaving Huaraz was Cusco.

I arrived there on the 31st of December after two long busrides, and that`s also why I was really tired and went to sleep for some time after arriving.

When I woke up the New Year`s Eve party in the hostel had already started and I met up with Maria and Gerhard. Unfortunately they were tired from their trip to Machu Picchu and also a little sick. So I celebrated New Year`s with a Peruvian (meeting Kato in the stuffed Plaza de Armas didn`t work out..) and went to bed not too late.

But the party in Cusco was crazy - the streets, and especially the main square, where full of people and fireworks.

On the next day I tried to organize my trip to Machu Picchu. I decided to go with a German guy, who I had met in the hostel, and together we went to the ticket office - which was closed because the first on January is a holiday.
 But we found a travel agency through which we could not only buy the bus tickets to Hidroelectrico but also the tickets for Machu Picchu.

So we could leave the next day in the morning. Of course the bus was late, but after a while we started our 6-hours ride.

The landscape was beautiful, but if I would`ve known what the road would be like I would have thought about taking the bus twice. It was a dirt road and next to it an abyss of many, many meters. I was actually really scared, but also glad that it didn`t rain.

From Hidroelectrico it was a 3-hours walk to the little town Aguas Calientes. It took us along the trainline and the vegetaion started to be a bit more jungle-like and I saw lots of cool plants. I really enjoyed the walk, but was also pretty happy when we finally arrived in Aguas Calientes.

Since it`s a small town it wasn`t too hard to find our hostel, which was a pretty awesome place with lots of art stuff around. We were tired, so we only went to eat and then to sleep.

The day we went to Machu Picchu, we got up at 4 in the morning (surprisingly the hostel served breakfast from 4:30), packed some snacks and then started to walk. It`s a short walk until you reach the stairs that take you up to the ruins of Machu Picchu. We had a little bad luck with the weather (fog and rain, yay!) and the stairs were super exhausting.

But we made it. At the entrace there were tons of tourists, and in the chaos I unfortunateky missed it to get a map of the area. So we just walked around, and sometimes you were even able to see something through the fog. But that also made the mountains around look absolutely magical and surreal. And of course, Machu Picchu itself was quite impressive too.
We also had tickets to the Machu Picchu Mountain, but because of the fog and the exhausting walk that it would have been, we didn`t go up there.

After some time we decided to go back down to Aguas Calientes and spend the rest of the day in the hostel or around town.

I had time to organize some pictures and again, we went to bed pretty early because all the hiking and sightseeing had made us really tired. And on the next day we had to go back to the bus, so we had another 3 hours of walking in front of us.

In the morning we split up, because I didn`t want to rush and I knew my travling partner would walk faster than me. So I left some time earlier than him, and enjoyed the amazing landscape and flora.

After we survived the chaos at the bus stop, we were already on our way back to Cusco - another 6 hours on that scary road, where you could now see quite a bunch of rocks that fell off the day before. And we also passed an accident, where a car just fell off the road and could be seen far below...

But we also survived that, and back in Cusco we had a little time before our bus to Copacabana, Bolivia left.