Moths & Machu Picchu
Trip Start
Sep 03, 2010
1
3
44
Trip End
Ongoing
Where I stayed
Hostal "Angie's"
Aguas Calientes, Sacred Valley, Peru
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Aguas Calientes will forever be associated with the craziest bugs ever. Bugs the bigger than your the size of your hand. In fact, we saw a flying insect that was bigger than a sparrow.
If you ever stay the night in Aguas Calientes, don't ever stay at Hostal "Angie's". The location is great as it is adjacent to the main plaza, but just about everything else is no bueno. There must have been 100 or so flying bugs in our room. We asked them to spray our room and ended up leaving our hostel because the smell was unbearable.
Luckily, there was a cafe and a bar that were opened 24 hours, creatively called Coffee24 and Bar24 (same owners) with wifi at the plaza. The windows of the cafe were kept opened so there were moths and other insects flying around. I'm a little jumpy around insects and David started video recording me hoping to capture me react. While he was recording, a moth landed on his hand and he started flapping his arms as he jumped out of his chair. Good times.
We ended up killing a bunch of time at Coffee24 and returned to our room at 1:30am, which was harsh because we woke up at 4:30am for Machu Picchu. By 5am, we lined up, with hordes of other people, to get a seat on a bus that would take us to the entrance of Machu Picchu.
Machu Picchu was pretty amazing. The pictures and video footage that I've seen of it don't do it justice. It's incredible to imagine how they moved all the rocks that were needed to build the place. At 7am, we did a hike up Waynu Picchu and got to see Machu Picchu from a higher vantage point. They only allow 400 people up per day you get a stamp on your ticket before you enter Machu Picchu. The stamp allows you to start the hike at either 7am or 10am. I would recommend the 7am because if you started the hike at the latter time, you would have to worry about the people coming down from the 7am hike and the path/steps get very narrow at times. The hike was strenuous, but well worth the time and effort.
T'was a phenomenal day.
