Machu Picchu, Without Roughing It
LIKE so many avid hikers, Mary Narrod had always put Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca citadel in Peru, high on her wish list of places to visit. She planned to someday take a hike to get there. But her husband, James, was not fond of the idea of camping along the way. “It’s not that I won’t do it,” said Mr. Narrod, an active traveler himself, whose recent vacations have included hiking and heli-skiing. “But I like a shower after a day or two.”
What is your ideal luxury adventure vacation?It’s long been possible to avoid roughing it by taking a train ride to Machu Picchu from the southern Peruvian city of Cuzco. But travelers like the Narrods who wanted to reach Machu Picchu the traditional way — on foot — had only one option when it came time to bed down for the night: pitch a tent and roll out the sleeping bags. Until now, that is.
Mountain Lodges of Peru, a new trekking company, just opened four lodges along an old Inca pilgrimage route in the Cordillera Vilcabamba, which lies on the west side of the Urubamba River Valley. Trekkers begin their hike at the 12-room Salkantay Lodge, located in the Andean valley of Soray Pampa at 12,000 feet and about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Cuzco.
From there, they hike four to seven hours a day through stunning landscapes toward Machu Picchu, staying in a different thatched-roof lodge each night. Each of the three lodges along the route has six rooms, a whirlpool, a fireplace and dining areas offering Peruvian cuisine. Rooms typically have down comforters and 400 thread-count sheets. The final leg of the journey includes a train ride to the village of Aguas Calientes, where guests stay a night in any of several hotels and the next day take a short bus ride to Machu Picchu.
The Narrods have already made their reservations. “It was kind of a nice compromise,” Mrs. Narrod said. “I get my hiking in. We see a beautiful area, and he doesn’t have to camp out.”
Several adventure travel companies, including Wilderness Travel and Mountain Travel Sobek, have booked space at the lodges as far out as 2009, and will use them for tours intended to attract new customers and help retain their aging clientele. “It taps perfectly into these baby-boomer clients that want an active day but a comfortable night,” said Nadia LeBon, director of special programs for Mountain Travel Sobek. “We see the trend going more in that direction.”
The new lodge-to-lodge option is yet another example of a larger trend in active travel tourism; companies are increasingly offering ever more luxurious experiences and softer adventures. Just last month, Backroads, the Berkeley, Calif., bicycle-tour company, introduced several new so-called Insider Trips that do away with any strenuous physical activity and instead focus on cultural excursions. The tour companies are responding to a growing interest in adventure travel from a broadening audience with wide-ranging tastes. At the same time, as tourists have begun traveling to largely undeveloped regions, hotels and transportation links have been built to support them.
As recently as five years ago, said Barbara Banks, the marketing director of Wilderness Travel in Berkeley, Calif., the company’s trips to Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonian Chile were based only on camping. “It was very Motorcycle Diaries-ish,” she said. But over the years roads were paved and luxury lodges popped up, many of them in the very spots where the company had previously pitched tents — incidentally dispelling any feelings of pure solitude. “It’s hard to sell them a camping trip when you’re in the glow of a nice-looking lodge,” Ms. Banks said. Now, the trips to Patagonia in both Chile and Argentina are purely lodge based.
Of course the increase in tourism creates concerns about conservation. To help protect the most popular trekking route to Machu Picchu, what has become known as the Inca Trail, the Peruvian government is strictly enforcing its limit of 500 trekkers starting the hike each day by requiring that tour operators submit the names and passport numbers of their clients to purchase permits.
And although there have been other attempts to introduce new ways to get to Machu Picchu in the past, many have been stopped. A proposed cable car project was put aside several years ago. More recently, the nearly completed Carilluchayoc Bridge project, which would connect the small village of Santa Teresa to Machu Picchu, seems to have been stalled. And Inkaterra, a Peruvian ecotourism company that started helicopter service from Cuzco to Machu Picchu in May, was forced to suspend its flights after concerns were raised about their environmental impact.
The Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu is a Unesco World Heritage cultural and natural site. It was recently chosen as one of the new seven wonders of the world by public respondents to an invitation to vote in a survey by the Zurich-based New7Wonders Foundation, which works to raise awareness about cultures and monuments. But the attention the contest has drawn to the site has worried Unesco, which awards World Heritage status to historic sites and then helps countries protect them.
Mountain Lodges of Peru’s locations are on private land outside the protected zone of Machu Picchu. Travelers can book its $2,500 six-day guided trek, including meals and lodging, (www.mountainlodgesofperu.com) or take a tour offered by adventure travel companies like Mountain Travel Sobek (www.mtsobek.com) or Wilderness Travel (www.wildernesstravel.com), which typically include extracultural excursions.
THE PRICE
Guided camping trips along the Inca Trail can range from $365 a person for a four-day trek (www.perutreks.com) to $3,390 for a longer trip in Peru (www.mtsobek.com). Other tours follow alternative hiking routes. For an easier trip, travelers can take a train from Cuzco for as little as $120 round trip. For information, see www.perurail.com.
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