Aguas Calientes

Aguas Calientes (or Machu Picchu town) is the closest town to Machu Picchu. The name Aguas Calientes means means "hot water" or "hot springs" in Spanish. The town lives on all the tourists who are visiting Machu Picchu, so it's full of hotels and restaurants. For some reason, the town actually had a feeling similar to a ski town in the Alps. 

There is no road that connects the town to anything else than to Machu Picchu. Instead, most people who visit the old ruins take a train from Cusco or Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes and then continues up the mountain by bus. That is, of course, for those who don't walk the Inka Trail. For those who have just walked the Inka Trail, it is the first contact with modern civilization they return to.

We were curious to see what kind of hotel the travel agency had booked for us. They had given us one cheaper and one more expensive alternative, of which we chose the cheaper. It turned out to be a very nice hotel, especially after having spent the previous few nights in tents. We were just very happy to have a clean toilet! And it had a shower! We didn't realise how dirty we were or how much we smelled until we walked into the hotel lobby. It was really clean and nice, but something smelled a bit funny and we quickly realised that it was us... It was also really nice that one lunch, one dinner and one pisco sour (a typical drink) were included in the price.

The first thing we did when we arrived in the town after having been hiking for a few days, was to find a restaurant and have a beer. When we were sitting there chatting, some guy came and wanted to sell pictures from Machu Picchu and the Inka Trail. We were not particularly interested since we had taken a few hundred pictures ourselves. However, he definitely wanted us to look at some of his pictures. You could say that we were pretty surprised when we saw that we were in the pictures he wanted to sell. We had completely forgotten that there was some funny guy taking pictures of us in the airport in Cusco and later in the very beginning of the Inca Trail. Now we finally understood why.