Although most consider the second day of hiking on the Inca Trail the hardest I would say without a doubt our hardest day was day 3. This is mostly because of the alternative option that our guide gave us. We were given the option to hike 4 hours longer and actually arrive at the Sun gate into Machu Picchu and view it from above before it closed in order to visit the ruins with less of a crowd and to avoid long line ups the next morning. This also meant we had two opportunities to see Machu Picchu.

We took the option which meant we woke up at 4 am and started hiking by 5:30am. The terrain itself was not that difficult, but we ended up hiking a total of 21km in the day and did not get to our final camp until 6pm. The only stops we had were for lunch, a ruin site and the viewing of Machu Picchu briefly before it closed. Although we were all exhausted it was worth the effort.

You might assume that hiking up hill is harder than going down, but after doing a significant amount of hiking you would know that hiking down is much more difficult and harder on the body. My knee was pretty sore after the long day with quite a bit of downhill and more steps than I can count.

We said goodbye to the porters after dinner as most were heading out that night or early the next morning to go home. Although we couldn’t communicate with them too much because of the language barrier, they helped us through the trek and always cheered us into camp when we arrived.

As usual it was early to bed to prepare for another early wake up the next day.