Machu Picchu

Updated 2026-08-18 · 7 min read · Researched and edited by PoppaTrip

You cannot drive there, and that changes everything

There is no road to Machu Picchu. Not a bad road, not a long road — none. Whatever you do, however much you spend, at some point you get on a train that runs along a river at the bottom of a gorge, because that is the only way in. I find this genuinely wonderful. In an age when you can drive to the rim of almost every wonder on earth and photograph it through a windshield, this one still makes you travel to it.

The train leaves from Ollantaytambo and takes about ninety minutes. Sit on the left. The Urubamba river runs brown and fast and very close on one side, and the walls of the gorge climb up out of sight on the other, and the vegetation thickens the whole way — dry Andean scrub at the start, dripping cloud forest by the end, with bromeliads growing out of the rock and the occasional flash of an orchid. You are descending the entire time, which is the part nobody warns you about pleasantly enough.

Cusco sits at 3,400 meters. Machu Picchu sits at 2,430. You are going down almost a kilometer, and your lungs will file a formal note of thanks. This is a rare case of traveling toward the famous thing and finding it easier to breathe than the town you left. Give yourself two nights in Cusco or, better, in the Sacred Valley first anyway — altitude does not negotiate, and there is no version of this trip that improves by arriving breathless.

The bus line forms in the dark, and you should be in it

It is five in the morning in Aguas Calientes and there is already a line down the street. People in rain shells holding paper cups of coca tea, nobody talking much. The buses start before dawn and grind up a series of switchbacks so tight that the road appears to be arguing with the mountain. Twenty-five minutes, thirteen or fourteen hairpins, a lot of engine noise.

Then you are through the gate and walking up, and — if the morning is kind — the cloud is still sitting in the valley below you, so the first thing you see is not the citadel but the top of Huayna Picchu poking out of a white sea. It burns off in twenty minutes, sometimes ten, and it does it from the top down, so the ruins arrive in pieces: a terrace, then a wall, then a whole quarter of the city, then all of it at once. People go quiet. I have been in crowds of three hundred people that made almost no sound at all.

What you are looking at was built in the middle of the fifteenth century, probably as an estate for the emperor Pachacuti, abandoned about a hundred years later, and never found by the Spanish — which is why it is still standing. Local farming families knew exactly where it was the whole time. Hiram Bingham, who is usually credited with 'discovering' it in 1911, was led there by an eleven-year-old boy.

Go down among the buildings once the light is up, and look at the stonework properly. The Temple of the Sun is a curved wall of granite blocks fitted without mortar so precisely that you cannot get a fingernail between them, built around a rock the builders decided not to move. On the June solstice, sunlight comes through a window and lands on that stone. They did that with no iron, no wheel, no written language.

Buy two days, not one. This is the advice I would give anyone.

The citadel is ticketed by circuit and by entry hour, and no single circuit shows you everything. Almost everyone comes for one morning, walks the famous terrace, photographs the postcard and leaves — and I understand why, but the second visit is where the place stops being a photograph and starts being a city.

Because on the second day you are not chasing the view. You are standing in front of the Intihuatana stone, a carved granite outcrop whose angles line up with the surrounding peaks and the sun's path, watching a guide explain that at midday around the equinoxes it casts almost no shadow at all. You are ducking into the Temple of the Condor, where two natural rock faces form spread wings above a carved head on the floor, and someone in your group is quietly saying 'oh' as it resolves.

You notice the drainage channels. You notice that the terraces are not decorative but engineered — layers of rock, gravel and soil designed to keep two thousand millimeters of annual rain from washing the whole mountain into the river. You start to see a settlement rather than a ruin. That is worth a second ticket, and second tickets are cheap compared to the flight you took to get here.

About that mountain in the background of every photograph

Huayna Picchu is the sharp peak behind the citadel, and yes, you can climb it. Entries are capped at a few hundred a day in timed slots and they sell out weeks ahead in high season, so this is a decision you make when you book, not on the morning.

It is about an hour up. The path is steep, stepped, wet in places, and there are sections where the drop beside you is emphatic and the only handrail is a cable. If you are unbothered by heights it is exhilarating and the view down onto the citadel is the one that makes people say 'like a model'. If heights make you unhappy, skip it with a completely clear conscience — the view from the upper terraces is the one already in your head, and nobody at home will be able to tell the difference.

The gentler and, I would argue, more moving option is walking up to the Sun Gate. It is an hour of steady, unfrightening climbing along the old Inca road, and at the top there is a notch in the ridge where trekkers finishing the four-day trail get their first sight of the city below. Sit there a while and watch people arrive. They come over the rise filthy, exhausted and radiant, and some of them cry, and it is impossible to sit there without feeling that you have taken the easy way and also that you are very glad you did.

The town below deserves one unhurried evening

Aguas Calientes has a reputation as a place to be endured between trains: a small, steep, damp town of hotels and souvenir stalls jammed into a gorge, with a railway running through the middle of it. All true. It is also, if you let it be, a lovely evening.

The hot springs that give the town its name are a ten-minute walk uphill from the square — a set of thermal pools built into the mountainside, varying in temperature and, let us be honest, in clarity. Go late, when the day visitors have gone. You have spent a day walking up and down several hundred stone steps at altitude, and lowering yourself into hot water in the dark, in a gorge, with the river audible below and cloud forest above, is a specific and excellent kind of tired.

Then eat early and sleep early, because the line starts before dawn and you have already decided to be in it.

More destination guides: Bali, Indonesia · Bangkok, Thailand · Beijing, China · Chiang Mai, Thailand · Hanoi, Vietnam · Hoi An, Vietnam · Hong Kong, China · Istanbul, Turkey · Jaipur, India · Kyoto, Japan · Lisbon, Portugal · Los Angeles, California · Luang Prabang, Laos · Mexico City, Mexico · New York City · Paris, France · Porto, Portugal · Shanghai, China · Siem Reap, Cambodia · Taipei, Taiwan · Tokyo, Japan · How PoppaTrip builds a trip

Researched, edited, and last updated 2026-08-18. Opening hours, ticketing and prices change — check them before you rely on them.