Aguas Calientes
Machu Pichu was really hot and sunny and we were getting really hungry, so we didn’t stay particularly long and headed to our final destination, where we would stay the night In a warm bed with a hot shower in the town of Aguas Calientes. If you do a Google search and look up this town you will come across a lot of really bad reviews. Apparently, due to the great boom on tourism to Machu Pichu in the last 10 years, this town has grown a bit faster than it can handle, and the result is a lot of really bad hotels and overpriced restaurants. On the contrary, we all really liked this town. Every other building seemed to be in some state of half-construction, but it was really cute. The train tracks, which are pretty busy, run right through the center of town, are a unique feature, and really no more annoying that the busy traffic that most towns have. (Actually, besides busses, there were hardly any vehicles in this town). Our hotel was adequate (also under construction), and the staff was very friendly.
In the morning we walked up to the hot springs, the towns namesake, for some soaking of our tired muscles. The hot springs are nothing to write home about. It’s just several pools fed by hot spring water, (again, also under construction) only one of which was actually very hot, but it was exactly what we needed. The bottom of the pool was sand and gravel, which felt great on our sore feet.
The town also has a pretty large artisan market which we spent some time walking through. Most stalls had pretty much the same things, sweaters, socks, scarves and other colorful wool things, jewelry and trinkets. The atmosphere in the market though was really nice and we liked walking around and bargaining for souvineers.
Another thing this town does pretty we’ll is, surprisingly, pizza. Many places have a clay, wood-fire pizza oven and serve up a pretty tasty pie. A taste of home after a week of Peruvian food was quite welcome.
This is also a ton of dogs. Really cute, friendly, and apparently stray(?) dogs. I liked it.
We spent one night, and in the evening of the second day, we caught our train back towards Cusco. At the half way mark where we were supposed to get off the train and catch a bus the rest of the way to Cusco, our trains came to a stop just before the station for an agonizing hour. By the time it pulled into the station and let us off the busses had stopped running, but we were able to quickly grab a taxi for the hour and a half drive for only fourth bucks, which turned out to be much better than the original plan of the bus.