Salkantay trek diary: five days, four blisters, one extraordinary mountain

Why I chose Salkantay over the Inca Trail

I wanted to walk to Machu Picchu. That much was decided when I booked the flights. The question was which route.

The Inca Trail requires permits that sell out months in advance — often by January for the entire dry season, and I was booking in August for an October departure. The short Inca Trail was available but felt like a compromise. The Salkantay trek had no permit system, departed regularly with various operators, and by most accounts was more physically demanding than the classic trail in exchange for landscapes — glaciated peaks, high moorland, cloud forest — that are genuinely different from anything the Inca Trail offers.

I booked a five-day guided group trek through a Cusco-based operator. The total cost was approximately 480 USD including transport, accommodation in mountain lodges and camping, guides, cooks, and the Machu Picchu entrance. That is in the middle of the market range — you can do it cheaper in tents throughout, and considerably more expensive in high-end lodges with hot tubs.

Day one: Cusco to Mollepata (2,800 m)

The minibus left Cusco at four in the morning — a time that feels punitive until you understand why. The drive to Mollepata, the trailhead village, takes about three hours through the dark on mountain roads, arriving in time for breakfast before the walk begins.

Mollepata sits at 2,800 metres, already higher than most of the Sacred Valley. After breakfast of scrambled eggs and coca tea in a village kitchen, we began walking by eight. The first day is classified as the warm-up: a gentle ascent through farming land and scrub to the first camp at Soraypampa (3,900 m), with the glacier-capped summit of Salkantay (6,271 m) visible ahead for most of the afternoon.

The view of Salkantay from camp at dusk — the mountain turning pink against a darkening sky, its glaciers picking up the last horizontal light — is one of those landscape moments that makes you feel briefly but sincerely grateful to be alive.

Camp temperature: approximately -4°C. Sleeping bag rating required: at minimum -10°C. This is not a suggestion.

Day two: the Salkantay Pass (4,630 m)

This is the day that sorts the trek into before and after.

We were walking by five-thirty, in the dark, with headtorches, ascending towards the Salkantay Pass at 4,630 metres. The path rises steeply for about three hours through alpine grassland, then scree, then a final section of loose rock. At altitude, three hours of uphill walking feels like six. My pace halved in the final kilometre.

The pass arrives suddenly: you crest a ridge and find yourself between the Salkantay massif on one side and open sky on the other, with the valley dropping away ahead and cloud forest visible in the far distance below. The wind at the pass is fierce and cold regardless of season. I stood there for about four minutes before the cold forced me downhill.

The descent is long — about five hours — losing 2,000 metres of altitude from the pass into the cloud forest zone around Chaullay. By the time we reached camp, the vegetation had changed entirely: tree ferns, orchids, bromeliads, the air thick and warm. It felt like a different planet from the glacial morning.

Day three: cloud forest and coffee farms

Day three is the recovery day, and the reason the five-day itinerary is the right format. We walked through cloud forest for about four hours, descending further to the subtropical zone where coffee and coca are grown on terraced hillsides.

The trail through here is not dramatic in the way the pass was dramatic, but it is beautiful in a completely different register: narrow paths between coffee bushes, the sound of water everywhere, occasional views down to the Urubamba River far below. We stopped at a family farm where the woman of the house was drying coffee on a concrete slab and bought a small bag of beans for 10 PEN.

I developed two blisters during the cloud forest section, which I record here because the packing guide for the Inca Trail applies equally to Salkantay and its blister-prevention advice (specifically: two pairs of socks, worn simultaneously) is advice I wish I had followed more carefully.

Day four: Aguas Calientes

Day four is the longest day in terms of walking hours — approximately six hours — though the altitude drop makes it aerobically easier than days one and two. The trail descends to the Urubamba valley and follows the river towards Aguas Calientes, the town at the base of Machu Picchu.

The last two hours run alongside the railway line, on a track accessible only on foot, with the river loud beside you and the mountains closing in. There is something meditative about this section that I found I needed after three days of physical focus.

Aguas Calientes at the end of a four-day walk is the most satisfying meal of the trip: I ordered alpaca steak, chips and a cold beer, and ate it slowly on a restaurant terrace above the river.

Day five: Machu Picchu

We took the first bus up from Aguas Calientes at five-thirty. The Machu Picchu entrance gate opens at six and the first-bus crowd spreads quickly around the site — there are enough circuits and paths that even on a busy day you can find stretches where you are moving without being immediately surrounded.

Arriving at Machu Picchu at the end of a four-day walk, on foot from the mountains behind it, produces a different emotional register than arriving by train. The site is the same. But the context you have built — the glacier, the pass, the cloud forest, the long river walk — gives the final destination a weight that it does not quite have when you step off a bus at seven in the morning.

I spent three hours at the site, mostly in silence, and then went back to Aguas Calientes for the train to Ollantaytambo and the bus to Cusco. The five-day Salkantay trek is, without hesitation, the best walk I have done in twenty years of travel. The full Salkantay trek guide has everything you need for planning.

What I learned

The Salkantay is not an easy trek. The pass at 4,630 metres is genuinely hard and requires either prior acclimatisation in Cusco or Sacred Valley or, ideally, a fitness level above casual. But it is also not technical — no rock climbing, no rope sections, no specialist equipment beyond good boots, layers and a sleeping bag rated for below zero.

The Inca Trail vs Salkantay comparison makes the trade-offs clear: the Inca Trail has the archaeology and the permit prestige; the Salkantay has the mountain and the flexibility. Neither is wrong. Choose based on what you want the walk to be about.