Article Lares Trek

We are embarking on the so-called combined Lares + Short Inca Trail. The first part, ie Lares Trek, starts early in the morning in Cuzco, from where the minibus will take us after about two hours of driving to the village of Calca, where there is a market, ie the last chance to buy supplies.

After another 2 hours of driving on a beautiful mountain road, we start the trek itself in an unconventional way: by visiting the thermal baths in the town of Lares. We bathe in hot water and get breakfast. Probably a psychological preparation to stop worrying about what's to come. It helps a bit …

Then we drive a little further, and finally the guide lets us on the road. The next day and a half we'll just go uphill.

For lunch we stop at a tourist base in the village of Hatun Queuna (a walled place where we can build a shelter). Then we continue uphill, after about 2 hours we have before us these beautiful waterfalls.

We arrive at the shore of the lake, where we are to spend the night. Unfortunately not in the nice stone house, but in the tent. We are at an altitude of 4000 m, at night there will be a nice scythe.

In the morning we set off around the lake and further uphill and use the moments when the fog rises to take pictures (the higher, the more fog, sometimes it also rains, for a while even hail falls)

The pass at an altitude of 4650 m is the highest point of the whole trek. I breathe the last 150 meters as a locomotive, even though we are walking slowly. The guide offers me that I can ride a horse, which I refuse, but in the end I like to entrust my backpack to the hobby so as not to delay the others, because I stopped every 10 meters to catch my breath. The guide measures the oxygen content in our blood, they say everything is OK. Another clever psychological move, I'm feeling better right away. Or is it that we are no longer going uphill?

The place of accommodation today is the village of Cancha Cancha. A place accessible only on foot, from the nearest civilization it is a day of walking uphill. People live here as in the 15th century in the Inca era (whose descendants are, they speak only the language of Quechua). In the evening we go to visit one of the houses, which are built of stones and mud, the roof is thatched. One large room with a stone fireplace where the fire burns because it is cold at night. Guinea pigs, raised for meat and fur, run on the ground. Potatoes and quinoa are grown here, and of course llamas and alpacas graze all around. When someone grows more than they consume, they go to the city, where they exchange it for something else in the market. If there's a place in the world where time has stood still for 500 years, it's here. But these villages will not survive long. The old settlers live here, but their children prefer to move to the cities, and of course no new ones come here voluntarily.

After another night in the tent, we go to visit the second house in the morning. It is exactly the same as the first one, just instead of my grandfather, my grandmother lives there. She showed us how to use stones to crush corn into flour. Then we go down the river. The herdsman who drives the llamas to graze is our acquaintance, whom we visited yesterday.

Just two hours and the surrounding vegetation changes dramatically with decreasing altitude, there is already a regular jungle. The tourist part of the trek ends at noon in the village of Puente Charan, where our river flows into Urubamba. After lunch, we say goodbye to the escort, the guide loads us on the bus and we go to see the salt mines.

This trip was a kind of pendant to Lares Trek to kill the rest of the afternoon on the third day. Thematically, it fits into the concept of the trek, which, in addition to the mountain beauties, is supposed to show a typical way of life, which has persisted in some places in the Andes since pre-pre-Nazi times. Salt mines are such an example, it was said that they were already here before the Inca Empire, just gradually the number of pools in which natural salt water is caught and salt is obtained by evaporation has increased from several tens to several thousand. This is what it looks like today.

After sleeping in a hotel at the station in Ollantaytambo (finally civilization!) In the morning we take a train along Urubamba, get off in the middle of nowhere, cross the bridge over the river and join the Inca Trail.

I will not describe the abbreviated Inca Trail in detail here, but the last photo must of course show the goal of our entire effort. The entire Short Inca Trail is actually a one-day trip, leading around two other archeological sites, and ending with an ascent to the Sun Gate (Intipunku), from where there is the right view of Machu Picchu. While some versions of the treks work so that tourists spend the night in tents just below the Sun Gate and climb up in the morning to enjoy the sunrise over Machu Picchu, we took a few photos in the evening, took a bus down to Aguas Calientes and the next day we got on the bus in the morning before sunrise, drove back to Machu Picchu, where we spent half a day; we combined it with an optional and pre-booked climb to the hill in front of us called Huayna Picchu. But that's another report …