Inca Weekend – 4 Day Machu Picchu Tour

Your 4 Day Machu Picchu Tour begins upon your arrival in Cusco where your guide will be waiting to greet you. We recommend arriving to Cusco in the early morning, our guide will await you at the Cusco airport lobby holding a sign with your name on it in order to transfer you to your hotel. In the afternoon you will be picked up for your Cusco City Tour. ​The Cusco City Tour visits the most important sites in and around Cusco.

The Tour Begins at 1:45pm with it’s first stop being Koricancha, the temple of the Sun, the most important building in Cusco during Incan rule. Today a church sits atop the foundations of the magnificent temple, but you can make out the differences in architecture between the two buildings. The massive earthquake resistant rocks built by the Incas make up the temples walls while the Spanish church sits lazily atop the structure, having been rebuilt twice due to powerful earthquakes that brought down the Church.

You then head outside Cusco to the fortress of Sacsayhuaman overlooking the city. Here you have the opportunity to take some great pictures of the city and and valley below. The stones that make up the Sacsayhuaman complex are huge in scale and very impressive. From here you go on to visit the smaller sites of Tambomachay, Qenq’o and Puka Pukara.

At the end of the tour it is common for your group to be taken to shops to browse or purchase items from local artisans. These include artwork, hand made alpaca sweaters, blankets and souvenirs, these shops are outside of Cusco.

Today you embark on the Sacred Valley Tour which takes you to the center of Inca cosmology, visiting some of their sacred site located at the heart of of the Inca Empire.

The tour begins around 8:45AM as you begin to drive out of Cusco and into the fertile Sacred Valley. You will reach lookout points where the tour bus will stop and you will have the opportunity to snap some photos. Your first stop is the town of Pisac, a small colonial town where on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays there is an extensive market where you can barter for souvenirs and other goods. Surrounding Pisac there is also extensive Inca ruins, elaborate terracing and housing, it is said that Pisac was used for agricultural experiments.

You then continue to Urubamba where you will have lunch with the beautiful scenery surrounding you. It is then on to the town of Ollantaytambo and the fortress that overlooks the small Inca town. Ollantaytambo in fact was the only place where the Incas were actually able to repel Spanish attacks. The vast fortress ruins are an incredible sight too see and the valley itself is unique, making the recounting of its story come to life.

At 6pm you make your way to the nearby Train station at Ollantaytambo where you will board the PeruRail Expedition train to Aguas Calientes (Machu Picchu Town). Note that this train can be upgraded to an earlier Vistadome or Hiram Bingham Trains upon request, this change will have an additional cost and due to scheduling the Ollantaytambo tour will be unavailable unless booking a private Sacred Valley tour.

In the evening you arrive at Aguas Calientes, here you have a free evening to spend exploring the small town. You will also be met by your guides who will give you a short briefing on day 3 of your 4 Day Machu Picchu tour.

This morning you wake up early to board one of the first buses up to Machu Picchu. Once up at the ruins you’ll catch a beautiful sunrise over the site, your then given a tour of the ruins. After the tour you have the option of hiking to either Huayna Picchu or Machu Picchu Mountain for an overhead view of the ruins. afterwards you have free time at the ruins. In the afternoon you catch your train back to Cusco where you are transferred to your hotel for the evening.

​Today your guides will pick you up from your hotel depending on your domestic flight schedule to Lima. This concludes the Inca Weekend – 4 Day Machu Picchu Tour with Karikuy Tours Peru.