It’s a simple plan, really – down one side of the valley, up the other side – all so we can visit some significant Inca ruins not accessible by road. And as the title says, you can see the finish from the start – see red arrow in photo. But the valley is 5000 feet deep and the trip there and back is quite a production, taking 4 days and involving a guide, 2 chefs, 6 horses and their 2 handlers.

To reach the starting point of this trip, we left Cusco at 4:30 AM and drove the winding mountain roads for more than 4 hours in the pre-dawn dark to the trailhead at Cachora.

It’s hard for the eye to make sense of the scale of these mountains. Looking down from our first overlook we could see the Apurimac river far down below and it didn’t seem so far away. Yet, hours later after descending thousands of feet, we still hadn’t reached it!

We reached the river’s edge campsite in time for a late lunch and the end of the Argentina/Nigeria World Cup game playing on a tv powered by a solar panel. The food was amazing and we’ll say more about it another day.

Since we still had daylight left, we made the decision to cross the river and begin tomorrow’s upward climb early, camping partway up. Dinner was in a one-room adobe schoolhouse featuring artwork by the local kindergartners. Our tents were pitched along a flat ledge with views across the valley and, as darkness set, the Milky Way above, mostly washed out by a lustrous near-full moon.

The next day’s wake-up wasn’t until 5 AM so we got to sleep in!