Morning in Machu Picchu
Even since I was a little girl for some reason I've wanted to walk the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, and so I did, finishing a four day trek and waking up the next day at the site on my 50th birthday. When people ask what it was like, my answer is often that I learned if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, no matter how slowly you're going, eventually you get someplace.
The trail isn't technically hard, but it's high (crossing three high passes, almost 14,000 feet) and steep. The scenery is utterly incredible, simply spectacular. There's an annotated photo album on Facebook and also many more photos at http://gallery.me.com/buzzarte. There are far, far, too many things to go into here, but let me close with one more image:
This giant monolith, an immense irregular boulder about 60 feet high, stands on the trail between the Sun Gate at Machu Picchu itself, facing north and overlooking the Machu Picchu site almost as a guardian. I was drawn to it very strongly. Later on I found out that about four feet in front of this rock was found "the finest burial" at Machu Picchu: a female human skeleton, with artifacts, along with the skeleton of a small collie-like dog. It's no accident that this burial was here, or that I felt its power.
