Inca Trail – Oct 2025

We ummed and ahhed for a long time as to whether we should do the Inca Trail. It’s not our style of walking – 500 people (300 porters & guides/200 clients) start the trail each day so it’s definitely not a quiet walk. In the end we decided it was *the* iconic way to enter Machu Picchu and to go for it. My expectations were set fairly low so it wasn’t hard to exceed them. We had rolled the dice with the weather going in October and we did end up with a fair bit of rain, fortunately most of the time it was overnight and not while we were walking. I’m glad we did it.

After our 3 days in the Sacred Valley we got picked up from Ollantaytambo which turned out to be a good strategic call, as it meant we were picked up around 6am instead some ghastly pre-4am pick up in Cusco.

We were the only regular hikers in our group of 14 (you have to do it guided), with a couple it was their first time camping. Given the toilets were the some of the worst I’ve experienced it maybe wasn’t the best first camping experience! Though we did get amazing meals, coco tea delivered to our tents as a wake-up call, bowls of hot water to wash with, and most of our gear carried by porters so maybe that offsets the toilets…

When we started on day 1 it was chaos – there were people everywhere, and as it was pouring with rain a bit harder to keep the groups together. But, as there are several options for camp sites on night 1 everyone ends up a bit spread out by then. So, after day 1 the track never felt quite as busy. You did have to look out for fast moving porters coming up behind you!

Day 2 for some people is the hardest day as you have to ascend to Dead Woman’s Pass – the highest point on the trail at 4,215m. The approach to Dead Woman’s Pass is also the last opportunity for encounters with civilisation. On day 1 and up to mid-morning on day 2 there are locals with toilets you can pay to use, and stalls selling gatorade, beer, snacks, toilet paper etc. You certainly don’t feel like you’re in a particularly isolated environment.

On day 1 I was not feeling at all acclimatised and while not quite bringing up the rear I wasn’t far from the back of our group. Most people seemed to be chomping at the bit to power on – admittedly day 1 was fairly flat and we didn’t get that high. Day 2 I felt like some acclimatisation was coming back to me and even with the 1,200m climb I felt pretty good. The climb was split into 3 sections of roughly 400m each where we had a break in between each section. Unsurprisingly, as this happens at low altitudes as well, the ascent really sorted out the fitness levels of the group.

I was surprised to find myself at the pass ahead of everyone else in our group. I think we learnt a lot in the Huayhuash about pacing at altitude, and I was able to stick to a slow but steady pace. This wasn’t all good – I spent a good part of the morning constantly leap frogging 4 young guys who would push themselves hard for a few minutes, blow up and have to rest, and then go again. I would go past them while they recovered then they’d blast past me, and then we’d repeat the same sequence. It would have been less annoying if they weren’t blasting music (which I really didn’t like) as they went. At one point I got the classic backhander from one of them: “If you’re able to do this then I definitely can”. Hah! Eventually they either ran out of energy or realised their strategy was rubbish as I didn’t see them again.

Unfortunately the pass was completely in cloud. When I first arrived I got a bit of a view back the way we came but it didn’t last long at all. By the time the majority of our group was up it had started raining, and was quite windy. Since there wasn’t much point to photos we set off down the other side as soon as we had everyone (except the slowest couple who were with our other guide).

Fortunately almost as soon as we dropped we could actually see stuff! Excepting day 1, the rest of the Inca Trail has a lot of stairs in it. We had done a fair bit of stair climbing before we left Australia in anticipation of this, but regardless we were very happy to have walking poles – particularly for the downhills.

At lunch on day 2 we had been presented with the, permissibly dodgy, option of combining day 3 & 4. The rationale being that since the rainy season had started we were unlikely to have a clear morning on day 4, so if we wanted to get views we were better off going through the sun gate in the afternoon of day 3. This unexpected option caused quite a lot of tension in our group.

We eventually agreed on night 2 that we’d give ourselves every opportunity to try and achieve this, which meant starting walking even earlier than usual. We were a bit late getting away – only walking at 5:20am not the intended 5am. Some people think day 2 is the hardest, but we were dreading day 3 – and that was before the prospect of combining it with day 4. With 1,100m of descent (and an extra 400m once you added day 4), much of it on stairs, we knew the pain that was capable of bringing.

By mid-morning it became clear that not everyone in the group was going to be able to keep up the required pace, so we split into two groups. One which would stick to the original itinerary and the other which would combine day 3 & 4. The latter group, which Tom & I were part of, was under a bit of time pressure by the time we got to the (original) day 3 campsite where we would have lunch. For the plan to work we needed to be through the check point just after camp at 2pm. We had a delicious, if rushed, lunch, and then through the gate we went.

The main selling points for us on the new itinerary were:

• Tom had been suffering from gastro since before we started on day 1. The toilets were pretty average so getting to a hotel on night 3 was attractive.
• The usual itinerary has everyone getting up at 3am on day 4. I was well aware of that, but it was only when we got the briefing the night before we started that I realised we wouldn’t be walking after our early breakfast. Instead you have to sit for 2 hours at the checkpoint until they open it around 6am. The 2 hours of sitting around in the cold (and likely rain) was not something I’d been at all looking forward to. [Why does this happen? Because the porters need to be get the earliest train out of Aguas Calientes, so the get up time is to allow everything to get packed up and walked out in time to meet that train]
• And then of course – the reason that was actually being put forward – getting views when we arrived at Machu Picchu rather than being in cloud (or rain)

Our guide had promised ‘on his life’ we would get views that afternoon – so fortunately for him we did! I was a bit surprised at how many other walkers we encountered, but as I discovered the so-called ‘2 Day Inca Trail’ walkers are all on that section in the afternoon. But, compared to what it would have been like in the morning, it wasn’t overly busy.

With our revised plan we had to buy bus tickets down to Aguas Calientes and pay for a hotel – so a bit more expensive then just doing the original plan. I found us a local restaurant not far from our hotel where, despite being in a complete tourist trap town, we managed to have a decent dinner for 12 soles each (A$5). While I hadn’t suffered overly while we were walking that wasn’t the case overnight – waking in the middle of the night with a cracking headache and barely able to move. Some quite painful stretching and ibuprofen allowed me to get back to sleep, but it was a reminder of how tough the day had been.

The next morning the queues for the bus up to Machu Picchu were very long, but eventually we were on our way back up. The other guide sent a photo from the sun gate where they were in cloud (though not rain), so we all felt good about our decision to push on the day before.

Tom and I, along with 3 others from the group, bought the Huayna Picchu tickets as an add-on – to allow us to climb Huayna Picchu which is the hill behind Machu Picchu. I would highly recommend doing Huayna Picchu if you’re ever considering it. It is a very steep climb, but nowhere near as death-defying as some of the reports you read on the interwebs.

A somewhat interesting return to Cusco on day 4 – not long into what is meant to be a 1.5 hour train trip our train had a mechanical problem. We sat there for a while and a couple of trains went past (we were on a double section of track at that stage). When the next train approached suddenly a whole bunch of people swarmed the track and stopped it. It wasn’t clear what was going on. There had been protests only a few weeks earlier where the trains had been blocked so we thought that was what was happening. There were no updates from the train company so we sat there for 2 hours. Eventually a new engine arrived and then the people cleared the track for the other train and we were off. As it turned out the people on the track where all the guides from the tour companies (who travel in a ‘locals’ carriage separate from the foreigners) – including our guide. They had concluded that unless they stopped the other trains running we were just going to be left there forever, presumably they had a better idea of how things roll in Peru!

We eventually got into Cusco about 9pm, where we were too tired to try and find dinner, so we made do with a packet of chips and a cup a tea.

 

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I was going to pull out the times/distances/vertical but the GPS seemed to have a few difficulties in the mountains, so I’ll just include the picture which reflects our itinerary. There are several different options for where you overnight so the distances can be quite differently distributed over the 4 days. As you can see we did about half the track on our third day!