Barefoot and Crazy

This morning, Kiley and I road a train from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes (the town at the base of Machu Picchu). It is sort of amazing that we actually made it because the hotel missed our wake-up call and instead woke us up when our driver was already waiting for us. No worries though because when we got to the cute train station we had to wait about 30 minutes for a locomotive so they could actually put the whole train together. Never had that happen before.

Finally, an eager Disneyland-like Amerian woman´s voice enthusiatically invited us to board the train. We grabbed our smiles and settled into our seats with our much too big bags (how did all the other passengers know to only bring a tiny backpack). After a stop to let all the hikers doing the Inca Trail off, we got closer to our destination. We started to enter more of a lush jungle which I was expecting Peru to look like all along. It was beautiful. However, the town Aguas Calientes was not. Trust me, you never need to visit this town for any other reason than to quickly walk through it to go to Machu Picchu.


We found the best restaurant in town, Indio Feliz, for lunch and marveled at the over-the-top decorations inside (http://www.indiofeliz.com/francais/indio-feliz.html). The first room was plastered with business cards of satisfied customers, but the second room where we dined was right out of some brightly colored sailor´s dreams (the second time today we felt like we were in Dineyland). The room was painted by hand (by the owner) with yellow, coral, green and gold scenes of mermaids, sailors, and ships. The crown jewel of the room was the large granite fireplace with two larger than life mermaids (one each side). Gaston, the friendly French owner (of course his name was Gaston), was more than eager to tell us all about the place and show us the unfinished (but sure to be equally amazing) 2nd and 3rd floors.


Next, we walked out of town a ways to the Machu Picchu museum and prepared ourselves for the assault on Machu Picchu tomorrow. We learned about the discovery of Machu Picchu, theories about daily life there, and saw several artifacts.


The real highlight of the day was our visit to the hot springs (hence the name, Aguas Calientes). We knew it would be an adventure when as we were leaving our hotel with their white towels the receptionist told us we couldn´t take the hotel´s towels because the water at the springs is yellow. Ugh, what?! Seriously, yellow? I looked at Kiley with a bit of a grimace and we thought,"surely not." Oh no, we saw it with our own eyes and confirmed it about 10 minutes later. Sure enough, yellow! There were about 6 square pools with white tile surrounding them (see picture I found on Internet to right). We had to walk through the bar area to get down to the pools. The interior "designer" of that place must have been some cross between a pot-smoking Native American and some 1970´s Peruvian native. It was amazing! (I knew I should have brought the camera!) We rented our towels and luckily had our own swimsuits on so we didn´t have to rent one of those (yes, they had swimsuits for rent). We stripped down, took off our shoes and barefoot and maybe a little crazy we headed toward the pool. Everyone was in one pool, but I had to test them all...first one, warmish; next one, freeeezzing; third one (where everyone was) nice and warm. When my feet touched the bottom of the pool I suddenly figured out why the water was yellowish. The bottom was sand and gravel so the dirt kept getting stirred up into the water (and that´s what we kept telling ourselves). After about a 45 minutes of relaxing and soaking in the water we headed out. As I got dressed, I looked around with smile and thought, "this is the stuff adventures are made of!"

Barefoot and Crazy, Jack Ingram