We saw Machu Picchu yesterday. It was really exhausting. The previous day (2 days ago), we went out to see the Sacred Valley which is full of (big) Incan ruins. We took a little van to a place called Pisaq, got there around 7:30 am, and took the 4km steep climb to get to the ruins. We got lost going up, and we got lost going down, but we saw the ruins all the same. 
Going up, we started to realize after a while that we were seeing the ruins on mountain that was not the one we were on, and not until we met a water sanitation worker hiking back from another town that we paid to lead up through the bushes and over a stream did we actually find the trail.
That took about 2 hours, and once we got up we saw that there was just a parking lot right behind the ruins so that even the old people and tour groups could get up. Then on the way down, we just somehow ended up on a close-to vertical muddy face constantly slipping though cactusy ruins overgrown with grass and plants that were obviously not a part of the trail, and we made a good 30 minute scary descent like that until we landed on a trail.
Then, in order to get to one town that our train to Machu Picchu left from, we had to get a bus from Pisaq to Calca, from Calca to Urubamba, and from Urubamba to Ollataytambo, where supposedly our train left from. In the bus terminals, we found that there was one side for real busses that took the tourists around, and another side with little vans for the locals, the two having a price difference of about 500%, so we figured out pretty quickly that as a bus began to pull into its slot, we could just jump in (because they drive with the doors open) and the grab seats before like 50 school kids crammed in to about 300% of the reasonable capacity of the bus. Thus we got seats.
We climbed up the ruins in Ollataytambo (which looked slightly similar to that great big city that gets attacked in the last Lord of the Rings), then hiked down to the 'train station,' which we found out upon getting 'there' was about 20 km away, so we took another bus to catch out hour and a half train ride to the base town for Machu Picchu, Aguas Calientes, which is disgustingly resemblent of Disney World.The next morning we woke up at 4 to get up to Machu Picchu early enough to get tickets for another part of the ruins to which they give out only 400 tickets a day. We didn't get the tickets, because we didn't realize until after and hour of waiting in line for the busses that you had to go to another booth to actually buy the tickets, but the good thing about South America, kind of the flip side of the fact that there is no organization here whatsoever, is there are no rules either, so we just went and waited by the gate and they eventually let us in.
If you look at a picture of machu picchu, the hike that we did was climbing to the top of that mountain behind. The hard and deceptive part of that is that its base does not start level with Machu Picchu, but rather you've got to go quite a ways down before going up, and the result is an incredibly steep and long climb up rock stairs carved into the mountain in which you've got to pull yourself up the mountain with a cable bolted into the rocks for a good 2 km - zig zagging back and forth, but point up the entire time. That was not easy, but there is an entire other Inca City built in there that not many people get to see because it is so freaking inaccessible. Getting up there really makes you wonder how supposedly primitive people could ever build something like that. Houses and buildings were built right into a vertical cliff and they've stood strong for 500 years. They built stair cases about 1.5 feet wide that went up a good 30 meters straight along the cliffs. Those were scary.
After that we went down off the mountain (an equally scary trip), and took the long long long trip down into the jungle at the level of the river to see the temple of the moon, which fills the entire inside of a cave. It was cool, but compared to Machu Picchu and Wayna Picchu (the mountain), it was probably not worth the 2 hours we spent walking back up out of the jungle and into the mountains on a horrible steep path, going up more of those cliff-side stairs to get back. After we got back up to the big ruins at around 2, we took George's parents up on an offer to buy us a nice dinner for his birthday (which was Junbe 8th), and each ate a 30 dollar buffet in the Machu Picchu restaurant (which is again a lot like Disney world).The actual ruins of Machu Picchu are interesting because of all the people you find there. Everyone from large dorky American families to old cripply British people who get in way over their heads just trying to climb a stair, to Asian couples decked out in North Face gear like they were going to climb Everest, to really young hip Europeans sporting faces that just beg to be hit with a rock.
So after that, we went down at 5 when the ruins closed (we were there from 6 am to 5 pm), and walked around Aguas Calientes until 9:30 when our train left. We went by train an hour and a half to the station, took a bus another hour to Ollataytambo, then took another bus another two hours to Cusco, where we got a hostel, and slept until 11 this morning. That was the story of how Machu Picchu was exhausting.
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