Machu Picchu: An Idea, Nothing Else

It started as a simple idea. More of a joke, really. Nothing else.

Then slowly, but surely a conversation started to pick up and include a few texts, an email with a few articles, (we looked at the calendar), and then the excitement kicked in.

We were talking about a trip to Machu Picchu and now we have very little planned, but this much we do know. We’ll be trekking along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu from October 3rd to October 6th.

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The group we’ve got going is a bit random. But it could be the perfect pairing. My old childhood friend Tim, his good friend Tom, and me – the traveler and part time travel writer.

Three seems like the right number. We’ll be agile enough – able to hop along, swoop into a last minute hotel or hostel – but with three, we can keep the conversations going and avoid a disastrous feud or girly hiss fit. (If it was just two, a week would be the likely boiling point)

So what have we planned so far? The most important item was selecting the tour group we will entrust on our trek and make the proper reservations to secure our passes from the Peruvian government. There are plenty of horror stories on the web and in travel forums that detail how a group waited too long and tried to do the Inca Trail without realizing that passes can sell out up to 6 months before your desired date.

To give you an idea, we originally were brainstorming of doing the hike in September to join a few other British friends I know will be down there, but by April, the month of September was clean sold out.

So we grabbed the first week of October and put down a deposit of $300 per person. (Hey, nobody said this trek was going to be cheap)

When it came to selecting the tour group we could have used any one of a myriad of options to pick correctly:

1.) Ask friends and relatives who have gone before

2.) Search Google and TripAdvisor for the highest quality and cross with reviews

3.) Turn to Travel Books, Guides, and Websites

4.) Pick the funniest sounding name

Of course, no one with a functioning head mounted on their shoulders would go with option #4 right? Well we did. And we went with Llamapath! Yes Llamapath! You can check out their high quality website here.

Once we got the confirmation emails we then turned to planning what else we may do while down in South America.

To date, all we’ve added is a trip to Bolivia to drive through the dessert to see some salt flats and a trip to Colombia with the promise of coffee plantations, cigars, and of course, wild nights!

While the planning continues we have all been texting each other and checking items off our packing list. Thus far the group has been half jokingly going off an incredibly detailed packing list  but we can get serious once we book our flights and solidify where we will be going.

Alright, back to the planning. In the meantime:

#keeptraveling