Crossing the Apurímac Valley

I set off on my own journey to the ruins with a muleteer in tow. There’s 45km ahead of me

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before I’ll see Cachora again, so it’s a relief knowing I won’t have to carry my pack, food and camping gear the entire way.Cachora lies in a bowl of terraced farmland, so my first objective is to climb out. Then I spend the remainder of the first day descending 1500m into the Apurímac Valley, walking ever closer to the orange-brown waters of its namesake river. I camp for the night at Playa Rosalina, along the Apurímac River's windy edge, and wake up early the following morning to cross over to the sun-baked side of the valley. It's here that I'll begin my ascent to the base of the ruins high up in the clouds at 3050m.It's a vertical desert of thorny cacti and dusty switchbacks for the first hours of morning light, but the landscape becomes exceedingly greener the higher I climb. By the time I reach the remote village of Marampata that afternoon, I’ve entered into a high-altitude jungle.