It’s Thursday afternoon as I write this, though I had to use a calendar to check that. It’s very easy to lose track of days when they are measured by activity and number rather than routine. We have been in South America for a week and a day.

As per my very brief update last night, we are back in Cuzco. We got in via train and bus around 8pm last night, were asleep less than two hours later, and stayed that way until mid morning today. Ever since we have been pleasantly engaged in not very much. We’ve decided that our next destination is Arequipa, ten hours by road to the south, and we are going there by overnight bus tonight, pulling out of Cusco at 8.30pm. (We couldn’t stretch the budget to flying, as tickets were pretty expensive, but we did splash out on the nice reclining seats on the bus.) We went to the station to buy tickets, then came back and had coffee and read for ages in a cafe near the hotel that had internet access, where I had something to eat but Katie wasn’t hungry. Tables are now turned, and as I type this Katie is having lunch and engrossed in one of the ladies’ magazines that they have here in Jack’s Cafe. I can’t possibly compete with that, and so am writing this.

I really enjoyed our unexpected stay in Ollantaytambo, even though I was sick. Because we had only packed for the trail, we didn’t have much stuff, and had no books at all. There were a few magazines about motorbikes in the hotel in English which I read, and so for this brief moment I know a VFR from a Brutale. Katie read a LAN Chile in-flight magazine, and enjoyed it so much she took notes from it. (Seriously.) Going out to eat was a slow-moving experience both because we had literally nothing else to do, and because the pace of service was much slower than at home. Walking across the street to the internet cafe and ‘going online’ in an active sense certainly creates more of a feeling of activity than taking my phone from my pocket.

We even got an idea of how the local people lived because we saw them over the course of a few days, whereas most tourists are just passing through. A lovely woman with a little shop on the main square offered laundry services among other things, and so we were there a few times, and while waiting for her we played with the dog and the kids that were there. It was lovely and very unexpected, and makes me deeply wish I could speak Spanish. It also makes me wonder about the nature of travel, but I’m not quite ready to write about that one yet.

And then there was Maccu Picchu, the jewel of South American tourism.

There was no-one to be seen in the Overlook as we left; the night guy was probably asleep somewhere, or maybe sharpening his axe. I managed to figure out the locks on the main door in the semi-dark and it opened with a screech. (We had paid the night before, and indeed had been promised a wake-up call that never came.) We walked the short distance to the train station, and by the time the world popped into brightness we were on the train and heading back up the Sacred Valley.

The train stays with the path of the river, rather than trying to get over any of the passes, but the views are still spectacular. I’m inclined to envision a ‘mountain range’ as an almost two-dimensional row of mountains, and once you’re over one, you’re over the range. But when you’ve passed mountain after mountain after mountain, it starts to feel as if you are in a whole country of mountains. I’ve been fortunate enough in my short but colourful life (as Billy Connolly says) to see the Himalayas and the Rockies up close before seeing the Andes, and the thing that strikes me each time is that these places are nothing like the places that are not mountains. It’s like Feynman’s point that he can’t describe magnetism in terms of something else you understand, because it’s not like anything else you understand. It’s very hard to capture in words or pictures the feeling of standing there and looking to every visible horizon and seeing nothing but mountains and valleys and gorges and rockfalls, the signs of a distant ice-age whose power, to have left such a landscape, must have been beyond apocalyptic. It’s not surprising that the mountains made it into the old pantheon, along with the sun and the moon and the sea.

Once we got Machu Picchu, we came to the somewhat dispiriting understanding that Machu Picchu train station is not the same as Machu Picchu the world-famous archaeological site, which is in fact a fifteen-dollar-US bus-ride further on up the hill. And this was after paying 40-odd USD for the train ticket.

It was actually pretty hard to figure out what to do from the station, as there are no signs and the crowd disperses through a small closed-in market of many alleys, rather like the gas from a gunshot through a silencer . I have often found though that standing in the middle of a public place and looking confused but hopeful leads to a solution. And so it proved; a charming man who turned out to be from Bolivia wished me good day in Spanish, to which I replied in kind, and then he asked me in perfect English if I needed any help.

Luis, it turned out, was on business in Peru for a while and had decided to bring his wife, his brother, his brother’s wife and their kids out for a holiday. He had also secured the services of a guide. I had the feeling money was not a particularly impactful constraint. He told us he was going to the bus station and we could follow him and his party, which we gratefully did, and he even insisted on waiting with everyone while we bought our tickets, and saw us safely to the bus. As luck would have it I ended up sitting beside him on the bus up to the site, and he told me about tourist attractions in his native Bolivia (the underground salt cathedral sounds amazing) and about his work, and I told him about Ireland and Google. The next time I see someone looking lost in Dublin, I am going to take them out to dinner in his honour.

One we got to MP proper, we were hardly in the gate when we randomly bumped into our trekking party, and there was much hand-shaking and delight. It was very nice to see them again. Saul showed us around the site, and we got a good sense of its size and complexity. Only 700 to 1,000 people lived there, apparently, mostly priests and farmers.

The five Australians were in various stages of disrepair from the trek – one of the young guys had twisted his ankle painfully on the final approach, and so was hobbling around on two walking sticks, and the couple were definitely feeling the strain. So once Saul’s tour was over, they all headed off, and we said goodbye once again. Katie and I stayed another hour or so, climbing up to the highest point of the site and looking out over the ruins and terraces and getting significantly rained on.

And being at MP was… good. Like so many other places, its popularity is not so much an Achilles heel as body-sized Achilles target. As a location, it is beyond wonderful. The clouds open and close like three-dimensional curtains over the mountainscape, changing the light from moment to moment so no two photographs are quite the same. The paths wind among the original Inca walls and buildings, the grass terraces cut into the mountainsides look as if all they need are a knowing hand and they will start producing potatoes and maize and everything else just as they did before. MP is like a capsule, as though it was an intentional recording for posterity of what this civilisation was like before it fell to those from across the seas, telling us of their strength and their education and their power.

MP’s failing is its crowds. For every rock, there is a tourist and a North Face logo. The Inca trail disgorges 500 people a day (controlled to that number) on the site, and the buses up from the train station release many more. The most popular paths are crowded. You need to queue to get up the stairs in places. It’s almost impossible to take a photograph that doesn’t have a large group of people in it. A sandwich in the cafe outside costs more than its equivalent in Dublin or Paris or London.

Somewhere in the mind-twisting rainforest of Peru, I am sure, there are ruins that are something like MP, but not nearly as spectacular. They are overgrown and crumbling and dangerous in places, and no-one ever goes there because it’s so hard to tell what it was once like, and the Spanish pilfered it into oblivion nearly 500 years ago anyway. And to get there is a multi-day hike through hot and raw jungle that requires a level of toughness and fitness that keeps myself and my train-riding, doctor-visiting ilk safely locked out. That is the place where I would like to go. I like to think that in an alternative universe, a fitter, more Indiana-Jones derived version of myself is standing there now, scratched and bitten and sweating, listening to the never-silent noises of the jungle, shaking hands with the guide, and thinking what a thing it is to see something so rare.

Anyway. Back in real life, the clouds closed in rather comprehensively and Katie and I left MP behind and headed back in the bus to the town of MP below. On the short journey I was sitting beside a Peruvian guide who was chatting (or more accurately, chatting up) an American lady on his tour. It was a fascinating conversation to overhear, partly because of the fact that the woman seemed to have nothing whatsoever to offer that was not related to her work, and partly for the interesting facts the guide kept dropping whenever things were getting a bit slow. The contrast between the two of them was severe. Anyway, from the guide’s side of the conversation I learned that there are five-star tours of the Inca Trail where six porters are assigned for each guest, there are shower-tents at each campsite, and oxygen is available for anyone who needs it at any point. There are also zero-star tours where if you want to eat, you have to bring it yourself. And it is also possible to do the whole trail in a day – starting at daybreak, you just keep up a steady 2mph for 13 hours, and there you are.

Once in the town we almost immediately ran into Saul again, who took us to where the three lads were eating, and we were united for the third time. We had a decent lunch and then played a card-game which I last played as a drinking game in India. I had forgotten most of the rules but that did not stop me from winning two out of the three games we played in a definitive triumph of luck over ability. Katie proved good enough at it that I must remember not to play against her for money. Then we said goodbye for one final time, and Katie and I got the train back to Ollantaytambo.

We had originally been booked on a late train, but changed to an earlier one which was more expensive. It was, I think, the first-class train, and everyone on it seemed to be the type of person you would expect to see on such a conveyance, but it still seemed less comfortable to me than the train we had come in on. It included, however, some entertainment – first a dance from a masked chap in local dress, who frightened the life out of Katie by poking his head around the corner of her seat, and then a ‘fashion show’ from the people who a few minutes before had been serving the tea and coffee, where they marched up and down the aisle wearing the latest Alpaca styles. It was all very strange.

From Ollantaytambo we got a bus back to Cusco for the equivalen of about E1.50. While waiting for it to take off we saw Saul yet again through the window, and he got on to say hello and goodbye. You seriously cannot shake that lad. The journey was slow and seemed long over the mountains, and we arrived in Cusco late. And the rest you know.