Inca Trail Day 3

Day 3 of the Inca Trail was delightful. Yes, we descended 3,000 super steep steps and I fell on my bum in a puddle of water, but we saw some amazing ruins, beautiful scenery and ended the day early.

We started the day seeing beautiful scenery like this.

When we asked our guide about the this days trail he told us it was Inca flat. We had come to realize this meant a lot of up and down, step steps and a rocky trail.

I was totally fascinated by this colorful moss growing along the edge of the trail. It looked so soft and spongy. In fact, our guide grabbed a piece of the moss and literally rung quite a substantial amount of water from it. Then he stuck his walking pole in the middle of a moss pile and it disappeared almost to the handle because the moss was so thick.

Snow capped mountains in the distance.

Climbing through a dark, step rock tunnel.

Exiting the tunnel, you can hardly tell where the exit is located in this picture.

Loved the mossy trees.

And the beautiful flowering vines along the trail.

The delicate flowers.

The exotic looking flowers – it was just beautiful!

There were a lot of areas where one side of the trail dropped steeply off for thousands of feet. It didn’t really seem to scary because there were so many bushes on the way down. One of our guides had a huge coil of rope that he carried with him each day. We finally figured out what they might need to use it for!

The porters catching up and passing us once again. I backed up on the edge of the trail to get a picture of them and actually made Chuck nervous because on that side was one of those sheer drop offs. You know it must have looked bad if Chuck was actually worried about my activities!

Gotta love that Inca “flat”!

Another set of ruins along the way.

A few llamas were hanging out by the ruins. After the first hissing llama, I always had a somewhat nervous crazy smile when trying to get a picture near one of them. Chuck gave this one a pat and a good deal of dust flew up. We saw them rolling around in the dirt so that fur can get pretty dirty.

Our other guide Reynaldo. He was our junior guide and from the highlands of Peru. All of the guides from the various companies had different stories about the ruins. Even our two guides had their different opinions. Because Reynaldo grew up in the highlands hearing the stories passed down from generation to generation we figured he probably knew some of the details better than many of the others.

These ruins looked really amazing with the clouds rolling in.

Our guide drawing with his hiking pole in the dirt of the ruin and explaining what they believed about the Incan Gods. There was another guide right behind him from another company that wasn’t nearly as entertaining. He just gave his group members a paper and had them read it.

 

If you look closely on the hillside you will notice a patch where it looks different from the surrounding area. That was our next destination, another set of ruins built on such a steep slope.

But to get there we had to descend 3,000 rock steps just like these. And they were steep! This is actually where I fell on my bum. I turned around to see if Chuck had finally caught up to me and because it was so steep I tipped over backwards. I started laughing as I landed in a puddle (it had obviously rained there at some point). Landing in a puddle wasn’t really too funny, but tipping over backwards was and I was just super glad I went that direction instead of forward.

Chuck finally catching up – he got stuck behind the slower part of our group for a bit.

Pictures just don’t do the steepness justice! I mean it really was tough – 2 hours straight of downward climbing on this stuff!

Even though the descent was difficult we had beautiful vistas all along the way and fun people to climb beside as we chatted away the thousands of stairs.

We made it to the ruins on that steep hillside.

It was amazing to look at the river down below and to think that is where we started a few days prior – we had covered a lot of territory!

We rested, ate snacks and waited for the rest of our group on one of the ruin terraces. These two llamas were just resting near the edge of the terrace.

They obviously try to ignore the crazy tourists that want to get a picture with them.

They farmed on the terraces. All I can say is they must have been super fit climbing all those steep steps between the terraces!

Looking down from the ruins on the hillside we could see where we were going to camp for our final evening. All the groups on the Inca trail camp here on their final night. Then it is almost like a competition to see who will get up the earliest to wait in line for the gate to open for the final 2 hour sprint to the sun gate.

We walked down those set of steps you can see carved right in the middle of this ruin.

We reached our camping spot in the early afternoon. After talking with our guide, who clearly liked to be one of the first groups to reach the sun gate to view Machu Picchu, we decided to get up at 3 a.m. the next morning, dress and eat super quick, then hike a short distance to the gate and wait in line until the gate opened at 5:30 a.m. I literally slept 2 hours that night, but I hadn’t slept much longer than that any night on the trail!

Later that afternoon we hiked a short distance to explore another set of ruins.

While our guide talked about the ruins we sat on one of the terraces and took in the amazing views all around us. I just kept thinking how amazing this experience was and how lucky I felt to be watching the sun set over the Andes mountains. Spectacular!

There were a few waterfalls in the background.

It’s amazing that they grew corn on each level of these terraces.

All the ruins had areas carved out for the water to run. Supposedly they would collect their water here.

Endless steep steps at every ruin! We grew to love our walking poles. I’m not sure our knees would have held out if it weren’t for the walking poles.