Zip lining over The Sacred Valley

This morning we left the hotel at 8am and took a 2 hour minibus ride to The Sacred Valley just outside of Cusco. We knew we had signed up for a trek and some zip lining but were a little surprised when we arrived. The minibus pulled up by a 300m vertical rock face that we unknowingly had to climb in order to reach the zip line platforms. We thought they were joking at first but then off we went up the cliff in a single file. We started off on a ladder and then used a clip on wire system to climb up the metal handles. It was pretty scary and exhausting, give us a cliff in Rio to hang glide off any day!

After a few hours of climbing we reached the first zip wire, it was about 130m long and was set above the side of the cliff. The views of The sacred Valley from that high up were beautiful and we could see the train line that we took up to Machu Picchu yesterday. We all successfully completed the first line with quite a few screams and woohoo’s from the group. The only problem was that there were 11 of us in the group so we had to wait around for everyone to get on and off the wires.

The second line was the longest, over 500m and we were allowed to go in pairs which was nice. We then completed 3 more zip lines totalling over 2000m – the longest zip line system in South America. The final wire was more of an abseil which took us back down to the minibus. An achievement yes but more a relief to be back on the ground! The trip was about 5 and a half hours in total and we were all knackered.

We arrived back at the hotel about 6pm and decided to go out for dinner in the main square, we have been so busy during the days that we hadn’t actually been out into the town in the evening! We went to a nice restaurant called the Inka Grill where there was a band playing traditional Peruvian music.