Visiting Machu Picchu in Peru: an awe-inspiring experience

This article was originally written by Ben Gilbert for Business Insider.

It’s hard to describe the experience of visiting Machu Picchu. People who’ve visited like to call it “breathtaking”.

While being a cliché, it’s not inaccurate. How often are you likely to find yourself standing on an Andean peak, walking through thousand-year-old ruins, looking down on the clouds?

For Indiana Jones, perhaps the feeling is common. For the average person like myself, the feeling is momentous. Visiting Machu Picchu evoked the kind of awe that my childhood brain produced regularly – the kind of awe that’s since faded from my daily life.

Perhaps best of all, visiting Machu Picchu means dedication. Even if you live nearby, you have to really want to visit Machu Picchu. Even if you take a bus to the main entrance, you still have to work pretty hard to just traverse the grounds. Here’s what that experience is like, first-hand, based on my visit in late March 2017.

There’s no easy way to stay near Machu Picchu itself. That makes sense: Machu Picchu is on a remote mountaintop in the Peruvian Andes. For most travellers, including me and my wife, the trip starts very early in a bus at the Cusco bus station.

The bus we took started in Cusco – the former capital of Peru, and the original capital of the Inca Empire – and went to Ollantaytambo.

You could stay in Ollantaytambo, saving yourself an ungodly early bus ride from Cusco. We instead chose to stay in Cusco, as many people do, because it’s a slightly bigger city offering plenty to do. It was the original capital of the Inca Empire, which means there’s a lot of fascinating history in Cusco itself: gorgeous plazas, churches, museums and more. It’s also a common staging area for tourists going to places other than Machu Picchu, which we did.