Inca Trail - Day 3 - Views that make it all worthwhile

Without doubt the views in the first couple of hours of the third day are the best you see all along the trail.  With the most difficult second day behind us, we only had to climb uphill for about the first hour of the day, and the scenery along the way really makes it quite an easy trek to do.

The rest break sees you at the top of a hill set around 50 metres above some more ruins, and you have panoramic views for pretty much 360 degrees.  We were even treated to the sight of eagles gliding around at about our eye level which is quite a nice little bonus.

Once again Fernando gave us a nice little tour of the ruins, this one translating to 'City in the clouds' if I remember right.  Fortunately it wasn't living up to it's name so we had plenty of good views down the valley.

  We then learnt some background on Incan religion, the split in to trinity of cosmos, earth, below lining up with condor, puma and snake.

After that Nelly led us for a big downhill session for a couple of hours.  I think we dropped something like 1000 metres in 2 hours so this was the part of the hike which hammered the knees the most.  This was probably the only part of the trip where I might have liked having a hiking stick, but I managed to live without it.  After the long descent we had a rest break overlooking some pretty impressive farm terraces near the holy Incan power lines ;)

So a relatively short day's trekking was complete not too long after lunch, it really is quite odd the way the trek is split up with around 8 hours of hiking on the second day, but only about 3 hours worth today.

Ah well, I'm sure those Incas knew what they were doing.  All that remained for the day was a brief 20 minute scamper from camp for a tour of another set of ruins near the campsite, this time given by Nelly.  This was a great chance to just wander the ruins for a half hour or so, they had some pretty impressive waterfall systems set up that were still flowing even today.   Jannes even managed to find a secret room so I think there's bonus points for that :)

This campsite brought with it a couple of new dimensions. Firstly the tents were pitched at the top of a ledge that wasn't that much wider than the tents themselves, so this meant any late night dunny runs were fraught with danger particularly for Shane and Emer's tent on the end which was the most likely place for a body to fall.  The toilet's themselves also added a new acrobatic manoeuver since as well as being floor level, you also had to pull a string to keep the door closed. I'm pretty sure this a yoga move as well ;)

Sunset was quite spectacular over the mountains, and then the night was topped off with the 'tipping of the porters' ceremony after dinner. To thank us they belted out a tune and went around the dining tent shaking all of our hands which was a nice way to end our last camp dinner.