Inca Trail Experience

A late-afternoon landing and a straight run into Miraflores, the district Lima built along the cliff edge above the Pacific. The clifftop is a chain of parks the length of the neighborhood, with paragliders working the updraft off the face. The evening is open on purpose: two nights at sea level make Cusco, two miles higher, much easier.

Cusco sits at 11,150 feet, so the first few hours are yours to settle in and the sightseeing waits until afternoon. It starts at Qoricancha, where the Spanish built a church straight onto the Temple of the Sun, then climbs to Sacsayhuaman, the fortress above the old capital, with the whole city open below. Last is the little lookout fort at Puka Pukara, out where the road turns down toward the Sacred Valley.

Breakfast in Ollantaytambo comes before dawn, and the porters are loading while you eat. From the checkpoint at Km 82 (9,072 ft) the first miles run easy beside the river. They end at Patallacta, the terraced Inca checkpoint that controlled who came up this valley toward Machu Picchu. The climbing starts after lunch and finishes at Ayapata (10,830 ft).

Two passes in one day, and the trail never gets higher than the first. Warmiwañusca, Dead Woman's Pass, tops out at 13,829 ft after four hours of climbing, then gives back most of it into the Pacaymayu valley. The second pass drops to Sayacmarca, a village on a rock spur that a single stone staircase still reaches. Camp is twenty minutes further on at Chaquicocha (11,811 ft), the dry lake.

An easier day, and all of it losing height. The trail runs level through cloud forest to Phuyupatamarca, where Machu Picchu Mountain shows itself down the valley with the city still hidden behind it. From there it drops by stone staircase past the terraces of Intipata. Camp sits beside Wiñay Wayna, Forever Young, with time in the late afternoon to walk its terraces before the light goes.

Camp is awake at three. The gate above Wiñay Wayna opens at half past five, the earliest the rangers will let anyone onto a trail this narrow. An hour of walking, the last of it up the near-vertical steps hikers call the Gringo Killer, ends at Inti Punku with the city laid out below. The Inca aligned the gate on the solstice sunrise, so the light comes through it and lands in the window of the Sun Temple. The last hour is downhill into the site, past the last of the terraces, for the guided walk through the ruins.

If the flight out is late enough, there is a last morning in Cusco: the steep lanes of San Blas, the artisan workshops, the market stalls off the main square. Then the transfer to the airport and your onward connection.