Ciarán & Elaine's Travelog

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Aguas Calientes (Machu Picchu village)

We couldn´t stay too late last night as we had to be up at 5am again today - getting far to used to these early starts!

Today we went to Aguas Calientes which is the village just below Machu Picchu. The train was at 6 and thankfully this time there were no hitches (landslide from last week has been cleared away).
Sitting opposite us on the train were two police men, one of whom had a special forces badge on his uniform and a machine gun under his arm!!! eeek! After pointing to the gun and saying ok? ok? a few times he reassured me that he wasn´t going to shoot me - phew!

We arrived in Aguas Calientes about 10am and just spent the day wandering around the small town. Not too much to do as the weather was terrible. In the afternoon we decided to go to the natural hot springs (Aguas Calientes means hot water in Spanish). We arrived at the springs to discover that they were outdoors, not to be put off we got into our swimmers and into the hot water with the rain lashing down on us. The water was just what we needed to work out the last aches and pains from the rafting and looking across the pool we spotted our two police men - not so tough looking now!

Met our guide and a couple of people from our group over dinner in the hostel, then off to bed for an early night - tomorrow they´re going to wake us up at 4.45AM for the trip to Machu Picchu!!!!

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