Day 48 – Sunday, March 15, 2026

To sum up my previous day, it was not a roaring sucess. Plus I hadn't had a good sleep for like three days - especially not on this last one, with the departure being at 4:30 am.

So my destination for the day was the Rainbow Mountain - I did not have too much information about it, only knew that there would be a long bus ride, a hike, then a nice spectacle - and then we would head back.

The bus came even earlier than indicated - as the first passenger, I got a good seat with plenty of legroom. Two hours into the trip, we stopped at a huge restaurant where buffet breakfast was served. Other tour buses also stopped there, this place served as a hub to feed all the adventurers going to the mountain. Until then, the road was relatively level, the crazy part started then, with a pretty major elevation gain - this on a pretty rough, unpaved road.

Pretty rough road...

...with a tunnel...

The bus ride ended at 9:30 (yes, five hours of just getting there), then we got briefed for over 30 minutes for this relatively straightforward, 4 km hike. Four kilometers is really not much - but this was at 5,000 meters! This was lama territory - plenty of them.

Lamas, lamas everywhere...

...not only far away, close to us too

...they even khiked alongside us

I must admit it really got to me, the elevation. The further up I got, the harder it was to make yet another step. My pulse was around 120 beats per minute. Many other hikers literally flew uphill, while there were quite many obviously suffering, some even turning around. The lazy ones did the distance on horseback.

Hike up on a steep road

It was worth the extra effort. What we saw was a geological wonder, with strikingly colorful mineral layers that create a surreal, striped effect. A glacier and other peaks of the Andean Mountains surrounded us.

It was worth the effort...

...amazing nature!

Beauty all around us!

There are a number of glaciers in the Andean mountains

After days of little sleep, my body was not appreciative of this altitude. I had a headache and felt nauseous - especially knowing that 5 hours of a bus-ride awaited back to the hotel. To make matters worse, an outright horrible music was playing in the bus - a chanting, rather, of shouting between a man and a woman. And it played again adn again.

The sight of the flowers made matters a bit better

We got back to Cusco at around 5:30 pm, I fell straight to bed.