How you get somewhere can make a big difference.  Here’s what I wrote two years ago after my first glimpse of Machu Picchu:

I just can’t imagine any better way to experience Machu Picchu.  Even if I’d been able to hike the Inca Trail again (only a limited number of people are allowed on the trail each day, and the spots usually book up months in advance), I’m guessing it would have felt like a disappointing shadow of those unforgettable four days in 2009.  So this time I mixed it up by taking the easier but less rewarding approach.

I left Cusco in the late afternoon on a bus to Ollantaytambo, where I caught the Peru Rail train to Aguas Calientes.  Making the trip with me was Matthias, a 28-year-old German engineer who’d stayed at my hostel in Cusco, and, like me, had used the hostel’s travel agency to arrange the bus and train tickets.  Matthias was near the end of a three-week vacation.  He’d been hit with some serious stomach problems in Arequipa and still hadn’t fully recovered, but he was determined to see Machu Picchu before flying back to Germany.

I couldn’t resist pestering Matthias with every American’s favorite question for Germans:  “Why was David Hasselhoff so popular in your country?”

Like all the other Germans I’d asked, Matthias bristled humorlessly and paused to collect his thoughts before responding.  He assured me that he himself did not like, nor ever had liked, David Hasselhoff.  “And I do not know if he was really so popular.”  Well, tell that to the hundreds of thousands of Germans singing along in Hasselhoff-induced bliss at the remains of the Berlin Wall on that magical First Night 1990.

Matthias and I checked into our Aguas Calientes hotel rooms and agreed to meet at 4:45am the next morning.  Buses don’t begin leaving for Machu Picchu until 5:30am, but the line starts forming at 3am and I wanted to be among the first to go up.  Most of the early birds were intent on claiming one of the limited number of passes for hiking up Huayna Picchu (also spelled Wayna Picchu, it’s the steep mountain that rises behind the ruins in most of the classic views of Macchu Picchu), but I just wanted to take photographs in the morning light.  The sky had been perfectly clear on my first visit, and I hoped this time there would be pre-dawn mist floating across the ruins.

The weather, unfortunately, refused to bend to my will.  No streaks of mist adorned Huayna Picchu and the sky was a uniform, washed-out gray.  And yet, despite being disappointed about the photography conditions, despite doing hardly any work to get there, and despite the fact that I’d seen it before, standing in front of Machu Picchu was a powerful rush.  Not nearly as intense as the first time, but still an extraordinary feeling.  At the risk of sounding New-Agey, the place has a unique energy.  “In the variety of its charms and the power of its spell, I know of no place in the world which can compare with it,” said Hiram Bingham, the American academic who rediscovered the site in 1911 and brought it to the world’s attention.

Machu Picchu (Quechua for “Old Peak”) somehow went unnoticed by the Spanish conquistadors.  When Bingham found the site it was completely overgrown and known only to a few of the highland farmers who lived nearby.  There isn’t complete agreement among archaeologists on why Machu Picchu was originally built, but most believe it served as a sort of country estate for Pachacuti, an Inca emperor who ruled in the 15th century.  Due to disruptions caused by the Spanish it was then abandoned in the late 16th century.

Matthias and I spent the morning wandering around the ruins.  After a quick lunch I made the short hike to the Inca Bridge, something I’d missed in 2009.  Leading west from Machu Picchu is a trail that in some stretches is cut into the face of a cliff, and along one especially vertiginous rock wall the Incas had to pile up stones to form a narrow bridge.  I tried and failed to capture in a photograph the alarmingly precipitous drop-off from the bridge to the Urubamba Valley below.

That afternoon Matthias and I took the bus back down the steep switchbacks to Aguas Calientes, where we caught the train to Ollantaytambo and then another bus to Cusco.  It had been a long day and I wanted to sleep late, but I forced myself to set my alarm for 5:30am.  On my second day in Cusco I’d overslept for no good reason and ended up missing all but the tail end of a spectacular sunrise, so on my last two mornings in the city I woke up early and climbed to the viewpoint at the Iglesia de San Cristobal.  Both times, of course, the sunrises were duds, but I reminded myself that there are worse ways to start a day.