The big day arrived - we were going to Machu Picchu, not on foot but in a bright yellow and red steam engine that was besieged by colourful vendors of rainbow-coloured clothes and trinkets. We sat back to enjoy the three and a half hour journey leaving the steep slopes out of Cusco in a series of zig-zags at times going backwards. After a gentle descent to Ollantambo we wound our way through a narrow gorge where the water of the Urubamba River frothed over rapids and the hills rose sheer and wild on either side. The anticipation of the trekers grew as we neared Km 88, the start of the Inca trail and they heaved their packs onto their backs when the train stopped at a crossing. Looking at the start of the trail, I felt both relief as the slope from the crossing looked very steep and also regret that I wasn’t younger and fitter.

The end of the line was at Aguas Calientes, where the railway line served as the high street dissecting the bustling market where we had to fight our way through the stalls weighed down with Peruvian fabrics and the hawkers with their strips of postcards of Machu Picchu. A steep walk out of the station led us to the bus, where we were driven up and amongst the tall pointed mountains in a series of sharp hairpin bends more like W’s than S’s. After a few miles amongst these dramatic mountains you could begin to understand why the Spanish conquerors never found this Inca city and how it remained undiscovered until 1911. How could a city have been built in such a high and inaccessible place?
Walking to the entrance, I felt nervous, wondering if I would be as impressed as with the Taj Mahal or as disappointed as at Ayres Rock. That’s the trouble with iconic places, they have such a lot to live up to. As I walked through the entrance gate, 100 yards in front the steep hillside was full, every inch used either for cultivated terraces or buildings and plazas that cascaded down the hillside. In contrast, empty, pointed craggy mountains, dark grey apart from braids of greenery that clung to their slopes, surrounded it, their tops hidden in the clouds. I breathed a sigh of relief—it was spectacular. Our Peruvian guide, Gekko, with obvious pride at this achievement of her ancestors, led us round the maze of green plazas, and the shells of a multitude of buildings connected by walled alleys and over a hundred stairways.
“Chose your bath tub,” she joked as we climbed the flight of stairs beside a series of sixteen ceremonial baths, where small waterfalls filled carved stone basins. To the left was El Torreón, the round Temple of the Sun, built on a huge rock, the walls as smooth as glass with few joints between the enormous blocks of granite. In a cave underneath was an alter, the Royal Tomb where mummies were discovered. Next door was El Palacio de la Òusta, the Palace of the Princesses.
“About 80% of the skeletons found in Machu Picchu were of women,” explained Gekko, “so it might have been home to priestesses.”

I tried to imagine living up here in a predominantly female commune. There was water and well-cultivated land but at 2,400m asl it must have been bitterly cold in winter. To get here had been an arduous enough journey by train and bus, so in Inca times, once here it would have been virtually impossible to leave if you decided the priestesshood wasn’t for you after all.
Walking upward we came to the Sacred Plaza, where on the far side there was a stone platform that looked out to the Cordilla Vilcabamba mountain range ahead and the sheer drop to the Rio Urubamba below. Surveying the inaccessible land above, below and all around, I was again stuck by the incomprehensibility of this place ever being built.
On the other three sides of the Plaza were important temples, the most striking being the Temple of the Three Windows, where you looked through the trio of identical windows onto the city below. The stones of the wall of the Principal Temple were taller than me but running my hands over the smooth cold stone I couldn’t feel the joins.
Up another steep path was the Intihuatana, the ‘hitching post of the sun’, a rock pillar used to tell the time of year from the solstices. Sculpted out of the rock itself, a rectangular post sticks out of a smooth slab used by Inca astronomers to predict the solstices.

Left to wander alone, I crossed the grassy central plaza to make my way through the more mundane living quarters and Artisan’s Quarter, where there was a large rock carved into the head of a condor, sacred to the Incas, the boulders around forming its body. Sitting on the grass for a rest, as I watched the cloud begin to descend, I had another of my ‘what a lucky sod I am’ moments. The weather was good, as the whole site can often be covered in low cloud, and there were relatively few visitors as it was a month before the tourist season began in earnest, but most of all I felt grateful for the opportunity to be here at all, as far-away Peru had been several notches down my wish-list.

With impeccable timing it began to rain as I met up with the others for lunch and stopped just as we were deciding what to do with the remaining couple of hours. Barry wanted to climb Huayna Picchu, the impossibly steep-sided mountain facing Macchu Picchu, which looked to me like it could only be tackled with a team of sherpas and about five miles of abseiling rope. Dave, whose face had gone a shade paler as he looked at the mountain, gallantly offered to keep me company as I decided to walk to the Sun Gate, an hour away along a narrow path snaking round the side of the mountain.
At the Gate, a group of walkers was resting after completing the Inca Trail, looking as if they had just spent four days having their legs and feet flagellated whilst being simultaneously rained on and starved -- yet you knew from their faces that this had been an experience that they would remember fondly for the rest of their lives. Looking back over the distant view of Machu Picchu tucked in amongst the towering mountains, I felt a pang of regret that this wasn’t the way I’d arrived at Machu Picchu.

As the last bus back to Aguas Calientes zigzagged its way back down the mountain, a young boy in Inca dress ran the quick route - straight down, stopping whenever he crossed the road to wave and shout goodbye. Each time we completed half an W I looked for him, and he didn't miss one, arriving at the bottom hardly out of breath, to hop on the bus and claim his reward. May an Inca curse strike the miserable skinflints who didn't tip him.

Machu Picchu leapt to the top of my ever growing list of memorable places.