The journey home (home being Cusco now of course)

Alex was very keen on walking all the way back to the town of Ollantaytambo, from where local buses head straight back to Cusco (most of them via the town of Urubamba). This hike is 30km or something along train tracks, and the main reason for walking was to avoid the high cost of just hopping on the comfy train that travels the very same tracks. I had considered walking (being keen as always to avoid being ripped-off), and Sarah was quite keen to walk too, but on the way down from Machu Picchu I had felt a slight twinge in my knee, and at dinner that night it was quite painful. So I decided not to chance damaging my knee, and instead to see if we could get the train the next day, or if not (as we'd heard that seats sell out very quickly), just wait another night in Agus Caliente and maybe walk the following day.

So Sarah gets up the following morning around 9am and strolls down to the train station (we weren't in any particular rush and didn't have any idea of the train times or seat availability as the station was closed the night before). She arrives back at the hostel 10 minutes later breathless and in a bit of a panic, telling me to get packed immediately as she's just bought tickets for the 9:30 train - the time of the only cheap train each day. I have a quick shower and hobble down to the nearby train station (my knee is still a little sore, but much improved from the evening before).

The station is all a confusion of arriving and departing passengers, but after a bit of running around we find the right train and get seated in the lovely comfy seats with just a few minutes to spare. The journey is only 2 hours by train to Ollantaytambo, but after an hour I spot Alex walking alone along the tracks. It's 10:30 and he's only halfway, so either he started much, much later than he'd expected or he was really struggling with the hike. It turned out that the hike was all uphill too, and not downhill as he'd told us (the tracks follow the Urubamba river all the way, and the river was raging the wrong direction for poor Alex I'm afraid!).

Yet again on this trip I felt really 'lucky' that I'd made the right choice. Even though I couldn't have tackled that hike with my knee anyway, I intuitively felt that the hike would be a bit of a nightmare regardless, since walking along train tracks doesn't allow easy appreciation of your surroundings. This is because you need to concentrate on your feet most of the time, as there are small, misshapen rocks everywhere on which you can easily twist an ankle. So it wouldn't have been a particularly enjoyable hike even though the mountain landscapes were beautiful - I reckon I got to enjoy the views better from the train itself (again we just happened to get seats on the correct side of the train to enjoy those views).

So we effortlessly made it to Ollantaytambo, where we'd been before to visit the town's famous ruins. After a nice lunch there by the river we strolled though the small village to the waiting local minivans and within 3 minutes we were off to the town of Urubamba. There we had to get a connecting local bus back to Cusco, and yet again we were waiting literally only a couple of minutes before heading off (I don't want to jinx anything of course, but it continues to be uncanny how we never have to wait for local buses, having caught what seems like hundreds now on this trip).

We arrived back in Cusco early in the afternoon and walked back to our original hostel where we'd left our rucksacks. Of course they had a room available, in fact the very same one we'd had before, so it felt very much like coming home. So much so in fact that we decided to just hang around for another couple of days just relaxing.

It meant we had time to use Glen's computer to burn a load of photos onto DVD (although I can't read either copy of one set of photos, so hopefully I can recover them when I get home somehow!). We went to McCoy's bar for lunch and Sarah used Glen's computer and the free wi-fi there to upload hundreds of our photos onto her Facebook account (I think this link should get you there if your interested).

So this afternoon while I used the internet Sarah bought our bus tickets to Arequipa, our next destination in Peru, and we leave tomorrow morning. Cusco has been a great place to spend the past couple of weeks (Glen's been here for 3 months, and he leaves tomorrow too), but it's finally time to move on. Arequipa is famous for it's colonial archecture and also a mad huge canyon famous for condor spotting, so no doubt we'll end up spending ages there too...