Brett and Emily in South America: Hiking the Salkantay Trail

Our hike to Machu Pichu was along a path known as the Salkantay Trail. In the last post about Cusco I explained all of our options for getting to Machu Pichu and after discussing our options with our friends Sophie and Dean we had decided upon this trek and signed up with a company. The trek was a 5 day/4 night trek that took us through some amazing terrain. Our group had 16 trekkers (us, Sophie and Dean, 2 British couples, 2 friends from New Zealand, another Brit, an Aussie, a Spanish couple, and 2 friends from Brazil), plus our two guides, 2 cooks, and 2 porters. Unlike the Inca trail which does not allow horses/donkeys/mules, the Salkantay trail does so the two porters effectivly just loaded up the donkeys everyday and also setup our tents for us and took them down everyday. Also our cooks were amazing! The food was better then anything I could have ever made while I was trekking and every morning when we had to wake up at 4:30 or 5:00am they were right at our tent doors with a hot cup of coca tea!

Quickly I will just give an overview of the trek and then just upload a bunch of photos.

For further explanation from one of many tour companies you can check out this link...SALKANTAY TOUR

Day 1) We arrived in the morning in a small town, Mollepata, where we met up with our porters (who are from the town), the cooks and guides were from Cusco. The majority of the first day was steady uphill starting probably around 2,900m and ending at 3,800 over the course of 6 hours. The majority of the trail was on a dirt road that basically ended at our first camp site (I think the total hiking for the day was 20+km).

Pictures after we arrived at our first campsite of both Salkantay and Umantay Mountains...

Salkantay

Crossing in to the first campsite

A porter unloading one of the donkeys at the campsite, with Umantay Mountain in the background

Dean, Sophie and Emily during our dirst day hiking

Day 2) This was the difficult day. First we woke up really early. The main reason was we had to trek from 3,800m to 4,600m in a very short time and our guides wanted us to finish all the uphill before the sun really came out. The top point was to an area known as the Salkantay Pass (the lowest possible area to pass between the Salkantay and Umantay Mountains. It also had an amazing view of the Salkantay Mountain, even though when we got to the top of the pass we couldn´t see the peak of Salkantay or Umantay (we were able to see them the day before and watch them disappear during the sunset). We also had the great pleasure of being able to view a pretty amazing avalanch of snow and ice come down from a glacier on Salkantay. From this point which we hit by 10am (I think the whole uphill was just over 2 hours, but 800 meteres straight uphill in that time is not to fun but less hard as the whole group thought). We spent the rest of the day descending a valley until we hit the campsite in the late afternoon and beginning to see the huge change in landscape from an almost tundra like terrain near the mountain pass to the border of the rainforest. The day in whole was only about 18km of walking but that first part was no picnic.

Myself, Sophia, Emily, and Dean after the 800m uphill (Dean was to lazy to jump)

Dean, Sophie (holding a picture of our friend Nuno from our Salt Flats trip), Emily and I at the top of the Salkantay Pass

Great view of the valley past the Salkantay Pass

The Avalanch that occured while we were taking pictures at the top

Descending down in to the jungle (pretty cloudy)

Check out the cool colors of the flowers and rocks

Entering the Jungle

Wild Strawberries!! They were delicious!

Day 3) Walking the what is considered the highest point and beginning of the Amazon basin. WOW! The flora was absolutley amazing as you could see from two post ago with the collection of flowers. It was also so weird how the day before we were in such cold terrain and not more then a few kilometers away we were in the jungle. The day was mainly descending through amazing jungle scenery and getting some cool picks at several waterfalls. That night we camped at our final campsite (and said goodbye to our porters who returned back to the original town).

Result of January mudslides

Us on a bridge

The jungle

Another bridge next to a waterfall

Look carefully at that leaf that is not another leaf on top of it

Craziest Turkey I ever saw

In January this river was much much larger (also another landslide from the January rain)

Day 4) Evidently before last January our trek use to head to the town of Santa Teresa (which is famous for its hot springs) and then you would either hike along train tracks to Aguas Calientes (the town below Machu Pichu). However, this past January because of the affects of El Niño the hot springs in Santa Teresa were almost completely destroyed when the river that runs past the town swelled to record levels and basically destroyed everything along the banks of the river. Luckily the town itself was not destroyed, this had happened in the 1990s during one El Niño and the town had to be rebuilt near the old town but higher up. Also during the previous few days we had been able to see several affects of the damage the bad rainy season in January did to the region including several remains of landslides throughout our trek. Are guide had also told many of us about how the last trip he led right when all the land slides happened he was stuck in Machu Pichu for 3 days for his group he led was helicoptered out. Becuase the route to Santa Teresa was no longer possible the guides gave us two options. If we wanted to we could leave early and hike up a large mountain (with a possible overview of Machu Pichu from a distance) or we could take a bus to a river crossing point where we crossed the river about 40 meters over the river in a small metal basket. Emily and I chose the second option and had a pretty enjoyable time crossing the river. After this point we had another 3 hour hike into Aguas Calientes. We finally arrived and after showering our entire group had a large dinner at a resturant connected to our hotel (that the trekking company paid for). We headed off to sleep many of us anticipating the next morning...Machu Pichu!