Today marks the first day of the Macchu Picchu trip. I woke up really early, around 5:30am. We had to get to the agency at 6:15am, so we left around 5:45am. At the agency, we met the other members of our tour group. Corey and Derek were the other guys, and Nina, Christine, and Pam were the girls. Overall, we had seven people in our group, plus our tour guide Johan. His girlfriend Carolina also came on the trip, along with our driver Fernando. We got on our tour bus and went for a bit before coming to Lorenzo’s Lodge, our center for all our equipment. We had some breakfast in the lodge, which was bread, jam, peanut butter, an omelet and some peach yogurt.
From here, we loaded up all of our biking equipment and ourselves into the tour bus for our travel to Abra Malaga, the place we would start the part of our trip on bicycles. We took a small stop in Urubamba, where we learned about the importance of the Sacred Valley of the Incas and the different crops they grow there. We were also introduced here to our tour guide and learned a little more about him.
Next, we took a scenic bus ride from Urubamba to Abra Malaga, which took about two hours. Abra Malaga is a pass at 4350 meters, so it was really cold and a little tough to breathe. Here, we were given our biking equipment for the 80km bike ride we were to complete. I was really impressed by the bikes we got, as they were mountain bikes with great suspension and gears. For safety, they gave us knee pads, elbow pads, gloves, and a motorcycle helmet. We started biking at 10:00am, and were on a paved asphalt road for about two hours. This was a really scenic ride, as we got to see a ecosystem change from a glacial landscape to a rainforest. We started above the clouds for the first hour, and as they cleared, we made our way into the rainforest. The asphalt road was pretty easy to bike on, but after our time there, we had to switch to a dirt road for the last hour of biking on our way to Santa Maria. Throughout the entire bike ride, we descended about 3000 meters in elevation.
Once we got to Santa Maria, we took a bus for about 20 minutes for a stop to go rafting for about an hour and a half. This was the first time I had been rafting, so I was a bit nervous. We went rafting altogether on the Lower Urubamba river, which had a difficulty of class 1-3. Overall, it wasn’t too tough to raft on the river, although the water was a little cold. In one of the flatter sections of the river, we had a chance to swim. I was really excited to do this because it allowed me to experience one of my favorite sports again. I even got a chance to swim up the river a little bit, which was tough but also a lot of fun.
Once we returned from our rafting excursion, we dried off before taking a bus for about an hour to Santa Teresa, where we would spend our first night. The place we were staying was called the EcoQuechua Lodge, which can be described kind of like a tree house. There were three levels to the lodge. Our rooms were on the third floor, the bar, restaurant, and main lobby were on the second floor, and there was a jungle scenery and the owner’s room on the first floor. Once we settled into our rooms, we had a great dinner at the lodge. This was definitely the first great meal on the trip. We had an appetizer of chicken soup and a main course of rice with grilled chicken and a traditional salad.
While we could have stayed up a little longer, all of us were pretty tired from the biking and the rafting. We decided to go to sleep in order to rest up for tomorrow, our hiking day of the trip.
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