Machu Picchu

Getting to Machu Picchu is half the adventure and the half that will test you. I flew from Miami to Lima on LATAM, a six-hour overnight flight that deposited me into the fog-grey smear of the Peruvian coast at 7am. Lima got a full two days — the seafood ceviche alone justifies the stop, specifically at Central in Miraflores, Virgilio Martínez's extraordinary menu of Peruvian altitude ingredients that might be the most intellectually exciting meal I've had anywhere. The ceviche at La Mar was more approachable and equally brilliant, eaten on a terrace in Barranco with a pisco sour the size of my head.

Then the flight to Cusco — a 1 hour 20 minute hop on LATAM that climbs up into the altiplano and deposits you at 3,400 metres above sea level, where your body immediately stages a protest. I stepped off the plane, walked 50 metres to the terminal, and felt like someone had placed a sandbag on my chest. Altitude sickness is real and Cusco is its headquarters. I'd taken acetazolamide (Diamox) starting two days before arrival, which helped, but the first afternoon I spent lying in my hotel room at the Palacio del Inka, drinking mate de coca (coca leaf tea, available everywhere, legal everywhere in Peru, mildly helpful with altitude, strongly recommended) and watching the terracotta rooftops through my window.

By day two I was functional. Cusco is extraordinary — a living palimpsest of Incan stonework on which the Spanish built their colonial city, so that everywhere you look you see perfectly fitted Incan granite at the base of a Spanish Baroque church. The Qorikancha, the great Incan temple of the sun, now sits beneath the Santo Domingo convent, and the contrast is jarring in the best possible way. The walls of the Incan original are so precisely fitted — no mortar, the stones shaped and interlocked with a tolerances of millimetres — that they survived every earthquake that destroyed the Spanish additions on top of them.

I booked the Inca Trail months in advance. Permits sell out fast — the Peruvian government limits entries to 500 people per day and they go in the first few minutes of sale each year. Four days, three nights, 45km of mountain trail, camping at 4,200 metres, arriving through the Sun Gate to see Machu Picchu at dawn. The agency was Alpaca Expeditions, the guides were exceptional, the porters who carried the camp equipment up gradients that made me want to cry were the most impressive human beings I've encountered. Day two — Dead Woman's Pass at 4,215m — nearly finished me. I sat at the top in freezing cloud, gasping, eating glucose tablets, and a porter walked past me carrying 25kg going the other direction and asked if I needed anything.

The Sun Gate arrival is the moment. You've been walking for three and a half days through cloud forest and mountain and you round a corner at 2,700m and suddenly, below you through a stone gateway, Machu Picchu appears in its entirety — the terraces, the Temple of the Sun, the perfectly fitted stonework, the green mountain Huayna Picchu rising behind it. I sat down on a stone wall and cried a little. Not ashamed of this.

I spent two full days at the site with a licensed guide who explained what we were actually looking at — the agricultural terraces, the astronomical alignments, the Temple of the Three Windows through which the solstice sun enters exactly. I hiked Huayna Picchu on the second day — the steep peak behind the citadel with near-vertical ladders at the top — and stood there looking down at the ruins and the valley and the Urubamba River 600 metres below and thought about the people who built this, without iron tools or the wheel, and felt appropriately humbled.

The train back to Cusco from Aguas Calientes — the Peru Rail Vistadome — has glass roof panels so you can watch the cloud forest rising on either side as you descend the valley. Two hours of legitimate spectacle. Then the bus back to Cusco, then two more days in the Sacred Valley at Hacienda Urubamba for recovery and horse riding across the valley floor. I flew home from Cusco via Lima on LATAM, carrying three kilos of Peruvian coffee and the quiet certainty that I'd done something I'll measure other experiences against for the rest of my life.