Drum roll please...

Machu Picchu! We dragged ourselves out of bed at about 4:30 to get ready and to make sure that the innkeep got us the taxi we asked for. One cannot catch a train for Machu Picchu in Cusco, though there is a train station there. You must go out to Poroy, a town 20km from town with nothing but the train station. (Or, to put it in other terms, it is 30 soles away in the morning and 40 soles back to Cusco at night, especially when your train is late. And there are only taxis there by arrangement.) We had heard from other travellers that the track was closed by a recent landslide and that we would have to take a bus about half way before getting on the train. Fortunately the engineers at Perurail decided to go for it and we got the whole train ride experience. (That landslide was no joke, we drove through the site and saw that it was still sort of sliding. The trench that had been dug for the train was up past the windows. There was a posse of engineers and heavy equipment operators there watching us go through at a snail's pace.) The train was beautiful and the Vistadome afforded us views of snow capped peaks and the rural countryside.
The train disembarks at Aguas Calientes, a charming little village created entirely for tourists to Machu Picchu. The way out of the train station to the bus station is through a giant tchotcke market - subtle! The bus ride was truly special. The views were truly spectacular as we wound our way up the steep mountainside on the one lane road. The turning radius on every vehicle in Peru has been incredible! These enormous touring coaches whipped around hairpin turns like nobody's business. The real excitement came when another bus approached from the other direction. I'm not sure if the two continuing on there respective ways, all but scraping the paint off eachother, or the pulling over of one to the crumbling lip of the mountain road to allow the other to pass, was more heart-stopping. Whatever, we arrived with our hearts racing. We checked our fleece jackets since it was much warmer here than in Cusco what with having lost about 4,000 feet of elevation.
We passed through the ticket booth and walked down a short path and then there it was, just as it looks in the postcards, Machu Picchu. First we climbed up to the to the building known as the watchman's hut. From there one has a sweeping view of the whole site. And there were llamas up there! It is immediately obvious that this is no American park from the lack of safety rails along the edges of drop offs hundreds of feet high. It is difficult to come up with words that do the place justice. Nothing seems adequate to capture the awe inspiring nature of the site. Impressive, amazing, breath taking, astounding; they all fail to convey the immensity and the majesty of it all. It took us about 3 hours do do a walk around the city. We noticed that the masonry was nicest on the temples and ceremonial building and less so on the other constructions. The temples were made entirely of the kind of well cut stones we saw at Sacsaywaman. The other buildings had walls composed of an inner and outer layer of stones with earth inbetween. As we walked along we saw lizards, llamas and the elusive chinchilla. Chinchillas, though well camouflaged with Incan stonework, are extremely amenable to being photographed once you find one. We ended up with about 20 photographs of the same chinchilla in the same pose. It was in all ways a perfect day.
The train ride back was long and soporific as most return journeys. And then we were late. Fortunately our faithful taxi driver, Enrique, was there to meet us. He took us to the Plaza with his entire family squeezed in the back. Then we had the absurdity of trying to find dinner. We ended up at the McDonald's (seriously) for french fries. Obviously we were too tired to care much about food. Anyway, that was the primary goal of the trip and it was wonderful.