Best Way to Prepare for Inca Trail Trek to Machu Picchu? Visit Peru’s Sacred Valley

BY KAREN RUBIN WITH ERIC LEIBERMAN & SARAH FALTER TRAVEL FEATURES SYNDICATE GOINGPLACESFARANDNEAR.COM

Just a few weeks after returning from our monumental adventure in Peru, completing the four-day/ three-night Inca Trail hiking/camping trek to Machu Picchu, political unrest broke out when the president was impeached for corruption and replaced by the vice president. At the outset, some tourists were stranded at Machu Picchu because of protests that blocked transportation routes. The unrest has for all practical purposes ended. But what protests remain have now been better organized specifically to avoid interfering with tourism, a lifeblood for the country’s economy –even giving advance notice sufficient to allow tour operators to plan accordingly. It is all the more reason to travel with a reputable, well-established tour company, like Alpaca Expeditions, the company we traveled with. Check with the US State Department to get the latest information (https://travel. state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-TravelCountry-Information-Pages/Peru. html).

We prepare for our Alpaca Expeditions four-day/three-night Inca Trail hiking/camping trek to Machu Picchu by spending an extra day Cuzco and the Sacred Valley –the best way to begin to acclimatize to the high altitude before the trek, which goes up to nearly 14,000 feet. This not only helps us avoid altitude sickness but also lays the foundation for appreciating what we will see and experience along the trail.

While it would be better to have arranged two or three days to acclimate before the trek – which would also provide more time to visit the extraordinary sights in Cuzco, Pisac and Ollantaytambo - having come from a week in the Galapagos for this grand finale to Eric and Sarah’s sixmonth odyssey, we only have one full day before starting out on the trek, so Alpaca Expeditions’ one-day Sacred Valley private tour is ideal.

Our guide, Jaime, picks us up at 8 am our charming boutique hotel, the Amaru Inca (Cuesta San Blas, 541, Cusco City Center, Cusco, 84) which must once have been a hacienda, and we set out by car into the countryside, where we immediately see neighborhoods, villages and communities.

The road begins its twisting rise into the mountains and Jaime stops just before the Sacsayhuaman for- tress at a point where we are level with Cuzco’s most famous monument, the statue of Christo Blanco that overlooks the city with open arms

Cuzco was the capital of the Incan Empire and the “navel” of the world, according to lore; at its peak, it had 30,000-40,000 inhabitants.

“There is nothing like Cuzco in any other part of South America for the concentration of people and sites,” Jamie says. There are some 1,250 sacred sites in Cuzco.

The hostels and inns we stay in today were once grand homes – first of the Inca rulers who began to take over Cuzco in 1000 AD, then rich Spaniards who came in the first century after conquest, in 1536.

The Incan heritage pretty much had to be resurrected because the Spanish did their level best to eradicate the culture and especially the “pagan” religion – literally building their palaces and churches on top of the foundation stones of Incan palaces and temples

The Spanish renamed Cuzco’s central square, which would have been the city’s market place and where Incan religious ceremonies would have been held, the Plaza de Armas, “the place of arms,” where the conquistadors would have executed rebels.

We tend to think of the “Incan civilization,” but our guide explains that the Inca were actually the ruling family – not the people. They ruled over some 50 different tribes and citystates, speaking different languages. Some 20,000 to 40,000 Inca nobility ruled over a population of 10 to 20 million that at its peak, spanned as far as Columbia, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina. The Inca expanded its empire from Cuzco by conquest and “diplomacy” between 1000 and 1536, reaching its peak in the mid 1400s, 125 years before the Spanish conquest.

What is so remarkable is the Empire the Inca built – the monumental architecture and 3,000-miles of road network reaching all corners of the empire – was accomplished without the benefit of draft animals like the horse, the wheel, iron or steel tools, a written language, currency, or slaves.

So how was it possible for a few hundred Spanish conquistadors to conquer the Incan Empire? The Spanish seemed to arrive during a perfect storm of turmoil and weakness in the Empire. The Inca Emperor Huayna Capac had died in 1529 after contracting smallpox that likely came from Maya fleeing south along

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