Everyone will tell you that you cannot do Machu Picchu without a guide, a tour, a package booked months out. Most of that is a business, not a rule. You can reach the most famous ruin in South America entirely on your own, and doing it that way, on your own clock, is a fair part of the reason to go. What it takes is a flight, a train, a bus, and a little planning done in the right order.
It starts in Cusco. You fly in from Lima, over the Andes, and land at eleven thousand feet, which your body notices within the hour. Give it a day, ideally two, before you go anywhere: walk slowly, drink the coca tea the hotels leave out, and let the altitude become ordinary. Cusco is not a waiting room. It is a beautiful Inca and colonial city in its own right, and the acclimatising is really just an excuse to spend time in it.
Machu Picchu itself has no road to it. The only way in, short of a multi-day trek, is the train, and the train does not leave from Cusco. It leaves from Ollantaytambo, an hour and a half down in the Sacred Valley, so first you get yourself there: a colectivo, the shared vans that run all day for a few soles, or a booked shuttle, or a taxi. Two companies run the line, PeruRail and Inca Rail, and the cheapest seats go first, so book the train early, second only to the entry ticket for the ruins themselves, which is the very first thing you buy. There is also a longer budget route for those with more time than money, a bus to Hidroeléctrica and a two-hour walk in along the tracks, but the train is the way most people go, and it is the better story.
The train is the best part of the getting there. It runs along the Urubamba as the Sacred Valley narrows, and the dry high country gives way to green and then to actual cloud forest, the mountains closing in and the river going white below the windows. An hour and a half of that, and you arrive at the bottom of everything, in a town that exists only because of what stands above it.
The town is Aguas Calientes, officially Machu Picchu Pueblo, and it is a loud, steep, likeable place wedged into a gorge with nowhere left to grow. The train tracks run straight down the main street, between the hostels and the pizza places and the market stalls, and everyone here is either about to go up the mountain or has just come down from it. Stay the night. The whole point of staying is the next morning.
From the town to the gate is a last five hundred metres more or less straight up, and you have two ways to cover it. There is a bus, run by a single company, that switchbacks up the mountain in about twenty-five minutes, and there is a footpath of steep stone stairs that takes a fit person a little over an hour in the half-dark. I took the bus up and walked down. Buy the bus ticket the day before, from the office in town, because the queue at first light is long, and the first light is exactly what you came for.
The rule that you must have a guide is a myth. You can stand here on your own.
And then you are there, on the terraces at the postcard angle, with the whole green world falling away and Huayna Picchu standing over it. You are here at all because months ago, before the flights, before anything else, you bought the entry ticket, which is the first thing anyone going to Machu Picchu should do. It comes from the government site, tuboleto.cultura.pe, the only place that sells them at face value, and in high season the good dates and the popular circuits go as much as six months ahead. Miss your date and there is a slim chance of a last-minute ticket from the culture ministry office in town, but it is a real gamble, and not one to build a trip around. You chose a circuit, and for a first visit Circuit 2 is the one, the loop that gives you both the famous view and a walk down through the ruins. You brought your passport, because the name on it has to match the name on the ticket, and they check. And you did not hire a guide, because you did not have to. The guides are good and the history is deep, but the idea that one is compulsory is a myth. You can stand here alone, having read a little beforehand, and let the place do its own talking.
Machu Picchu is one of the most visited places on earth, and by mid-morning it can feel like it, so the entire trick is the first entry window, the six o'clock light, before the day-trippers arrive up from Cusco. Go up early, walk your circuit slowly, and be back down for a late breakfast. It is a lot of moving parts, the flight and the van and the train and the bus and the ticket bought on the right website, but you can hold all of them yourself. There is a particular satisfaction in it: arriving at the most guided place in the Andes entirely under your own steam, and a llama on the lawn to see you off.
