Ollantaytambo, PE

Day 3

For our second full day in Ollantaytambo, we decided to do a much shorter but much taller walk up to the Inca granaries that cling to the mountain that rises right from the backside of our AirBNB. The steep trail up the mountainside begins right from one of the stone-paved streets in the historic town, and while there was a small empty booth partway up, there is no entrance fee, and almost no one else exploring besides us (unfortunately Sirius, our canine friend from yesterday, did not magically appear to join us).

Every time we walk through Ollantaytambo’s historic neighborhood, I’m going to take at least one photo!
#FindRett approaching the largest and most-visible set of granaries. There was a fence and signs limiting exploration beyond the topside of the buildings, but structures are visible nearly twice as high up the mountainside.
Did the Incas enjoy coming all the way up here just for fun? Out of boredom? No, supposedly the theory (which is more-believable than most) is that they stored grain up here because it was a cooler environment, especially with the buildings aligned and architected to take advantage of the airflow from the strong winds that pick up here every afternoon.
As usual, I wish there was more information about these places; this mud-mortared construction is very different than the famous 100% stone, mortarless walls of fancier Inca sites. How much of it is original, how much was rebuilt/restored by Spanish colonists, and how much was rebuilt/restored by later historic preservationists? Who knows!
Um, no, please don’t fly away down there, just because we have this excellent birds-eye perspective, it doesn’t mean we’re actually birds!
Our AirBNB complex is partly-visible through the rightmost clump of evergreen trees on the edge of the frame, with the core of historic Ollantaytambo at the bottom left corner. And from here at the granaries, we’re much higher than the bigger site on the far side of the valley.
Out exploring by foot in Peru!
Rett stands simultaneously below and above Ollantaytambo’s Plaza de Armas, whose near side frequently looks like an airport departure zone with vans and cars parked 3-wide.
A whole separate section of ruins runs down the nose of the mountain toward the city; some of these were also likely grain-storage bins, filled from the top, and emptied through small “windows” at their bases.
My cute young wife making both sets of ruins look appropriately ancient.
There’s a spider already all dressed up for Halloween!
This window shows a preview of the ruins across the valley (though I’ve never seen anyone walking in that section, so it might be closed-off?) It appears that there is a similar “yellow stone” granary structure over there, mixed in with the more-elegant “gray stone” walls and terraces. And for some reason someone decided to replace a roof on one of the building (at least I assume that’s not original!)
#FindRett in a relatively-distant outpost that allowed us to get a view around the corner of the mountain and upriver along the Sacred Valley (no sight of Sirius down there though!)
It’s always seemed strange to see how today’s descendants of the Incas plant their crops on such challenging and distant-from-everything terrain, but maybe it comes from something deep in their genes!
Cactus on a cliff.
Maybe these structures were actually built by a pre-Inca society, given their roughness?
Rett pointed out that much of the (relatively-unusual) plant life growing out of the rocky cliffs looked like it was aquatic, growing in the sea and waving in the underwater currents.
Back down onto another Ollantaytambo street. The kids in the colorful smocks are a bit of a tourist attraction, though I’m surprised how few tourists actually come into these streets (at a later hour, the terraces above will be covered with them crawling like lines of ants).
A statue of a Cura Ocllo, one of the last Incan royals who became a folk heroine for her resistance against the Spanish conquerors, but here clearly sculpted by a horny dude (which, it sounds like the Spanish conquerors were too, and that’s a large part of why they captured her).
What a magical place this would be to live, where you step over this every time you enter or leave your house.
An after-dinner walk through Ollantaytambo’s darkened lanes back to our AirBNB.

Days 4-5

There is no easy way to get to Machu Picchu, though we certainly have better options in 2025 than the Incas did in 1525. We first need to get to the modern, hotel-filled town of Aguas Calientes, deep below the Inca citadel. And since it’s impossible for travelers like us to buy advance tickets (that are sold-out months in advance), we need to show up in person at the ticket office there to buy two of the 1000-available next-day tickets, spend the night in a hotel, and then visit the citadel. We decided to make our lives a bit easier and take the 1.5-hour super-expensive train (by both Peruvian and American standards!) from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calienties. The far-cheaper alternative (which would soon become relevant!) is a 4-hour roundabout bus/van/car ride up and over the mountains to Hidroelectrica, and then a 2.5-hour (7 mile) walk along the tracks to Aguas Calientes.

We booked a Tuesday morning train on Sunday night (two one-way tickets: US$152), booked a hotel in Aguas Calientes on Monday morning (2 nights), and then spent much of Monday planning and preparing for, in Star Trek terms, a shuttle excursion from our normal starship-based form of travel. Our Ollantaytambo AirBNB was cheap enough that we’d planned to just “pay two mortgages” for a couple nights, since our starship/room would be the most-comfortable place to keep our bikes and 80% of our luggage.

With everything we thought we’d need packed into our two convertible-pannier backpacks, ready to go on Tuesday morning, I got a message from our Aguas Calientes hotel: “make sure the train is running”. Huh? I checked, and no, it seemed that the trains weren’t running! Some protests had escalated over the last day, and local belligerents had blocked the tracks with rocks and logs! With National Police arriving on the scene, two “emergency” trains had been allowed run late last night to get standing-room-only crowds out of Aguas Calientes, but there were still plenty of tourists “stranded” there, and more taking the hike-to-vehicle route through Hidroelectrica.

Real-time information was difficult to come by (I was getting most of my news via various Machu Picchu/Peru Facebook Groups), so we decided the best source would be to just walk down to the station/ticket-office (with our packs, just in case!) While the clerk still couldn’t tell us anything completely-definitive (understandable; even if the tracks were currently clear, it only takes a few minutes for the protesters to drop a big rock on them somewhere), he at least made us pretty confident that no trains would run today.

So! Change of plans. No fun, but most people were much worse-off than us, since they had bought their (non-refundable) one-day tickets to Machu Picchu months ago, and designed a tight two-week all-of-Peru itinerary around them. With our flexibility, we’re able to choose to wait out the protests. Though “Machu Picchu is closed to us” would at least have a pleasing certainty rather than the watching-and-waiting phase we were now entering (we soon got some certainty when news came that the protesters had dug under the tracks, destabilizing them. Definitely not going anywhere today!)

Days 6-8

We did an easy walk to the Quellorakay ruins at the bottom of the town’s terraces. The town is currently finishing up a new promenade, with sheltered benches and colorful plantings; it currently feels a bit like a road to nowhere (only two other people were at the ruins with us), but it’s always nice to see towns choosing to make infrastructure improvements.

The aqueduct/canal system through Ollantaytambo flows through a lot of fun connections.
Quellorakay ruins
The Quellorakay ruins stand next to Inca terraces that modern farmers are still happy to make use of (the canals that drain down this way and irrigate the fields made it locally quite humid!)
The agriculture here made it feel much more Shire-like than any other ruins, and it also felt like the structures were more-likely to have been dwellings.
At least half the “windows” and 20% of the “doors” in Inca walls don’t actually puncture through to the other side. Here Rett shows that they must have been niches for beautiful life-sized statues.
Or maybe they were shower stalls, built tall enough for even modern European-descended men that they didn’t even know existed?

On the way back up through town from the ruins, we stopped at a place on the plaza for pizza lunch. During that lunch, we each made it through all four of the cocktails on their 2×1 “Happy Hour” cocktail list. As near 50-year-old travelers, the set of inhibitions lowered by alcohol consumption are somewhat different than those of hormone-addled teenagers: Rett was tossing her need for travel-preparations to the wind! Despite barely being able to handle yesterday’s walk to-and-from the train station with her heavy and uncomfortable pack, she decided that we should just skip the train to Machu Picchu and all its uncertainties and do the bus+hike through Hidroelectrica instead. She was still sober enough that she was methodically going through her initial packing list and eliminating things that she thought she had “needed”, which would also enable switching to her lightweight-but-smaller Osprey backpack. Maybe it was the alcohol in my brain too, but she was able to convince me that even in the harsh light of tomorrow, she would still be up for the much-more-challenging approach to our “away mission”.

Mojito, cocktail #2 of 4, sitting and people-watching on Ollantaytambo’s plaza.
Us, four lunchtime cocktails into our day!
A literal castle stands high on the mountain behind our AirBNB, twice as high as the granary we hiked up to a few days earlier.

So I started looking for more information about getting a bus/van/etc. to Hidroelectrica, and that’s when I saw it reported on the Facebook groups that a truce had just been struck between the railway and the protesters, and the trains were running again! The first one was leaving right now, so, with a small tinge of regret (but mostly relief), we tossed the barely-solidified plan we had just cooked up into the trash and headed directly to the train station to revert to the old plan.

It seemed the word got out quickly, because one of the available trains I had seen online had disappeared by the time we got to the ticket office. The best we could get (for an equivalent price) was the same morning train we’d originally booked, now on Saturday, three days from now (and four from our original booking). Well, we really like our place in Ollantaytambo, and it’s cheap, so I guess we’ll just extend our downtime here!

Inca doorways on the streets of Ollantaytambo.
Inca doorways on the streets of Ollantaytambo.
I told you I’d never walk through the historic streets without taking photos!
At some places it’s easy to tell that the original Inca building has been completely replaced, and some are indeterminate, but I figure when the stones are this large, it’s not something someone has put in place anytime soon!
One of multiple faces that dwell in the mountain above Ollantaytambo.

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