You can board a bus up the winding road from Aguas Calientes, but there's a better way. First take an early train from Cuzco into the mountains and ask the driver to stop at Kilometre 82 railway siding. When he does, you'll find yourself in a breathtaking valley rimmed by snow-capped mountains.

To walk the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, one of the most breathtaking places on earth, you'll need to make arrangements in advance. The point of this diversion appears on the fourth day.

You slog upward until, on the skyline, you see a wall with two high pillars framing the path. It's the Sun Gate. As you step between the pillars, one of the most famous views in the world of adventure lies below you - Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas.

Behind it, like a finger in the sky, the peak of Huayna Picchu (Young Peak) rises while on all sides but the ridge of the trail the cliffs fall away into the deep valleys of the Urubamba. The only sound is the whirr of hummingbirds.

Machu Picchu was known to only a handful of Peruvian farmers until 1911, when an American historian, Hiram Bingham, stumbled upon it. It's a place of dizzying verticals. Way beyond circle the snow-clad summits of the Andes.

There are ceremonial baths with water still cascading through them. There's the Gandalfian Temple of the Sun, stepped and carved tombs, the Sacred Plaza, a rock-carved condor, its wings visible only when you step back and realise they are the cliffs behind it.

Why the Incas built Machu Picchu and why they left it nobody knows. It's a city of mystery.

Afterwards, take the tourist bus down to Aguas Calientes - a village of crowded stalls and eateries crouched beside the wild Urubamba - then head back to Cuzco by train.

Getaway guide

Roughly translated from Que-chua, the language of the Inca, Machu Picchu means "Old Mountain Peak". It was built for Inca ruler Pachacuti more than 500 years ago.

It lies in the jungle of the Urubamba Valley - known as the sacred valley of the Incas - in the Andes of Peru.

At its height in the 1520s, the Inca empire stretched 5 600km from what is now Colombia to central Chile and incorporated portions of Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru.

Although the Inca people numbered only about 100 000 they ruled more than 15 million people from dozens of ethnic groups.

Machu Picchu has 150 buildings including palaces, baths, temples and storage rooms, carefully carved from the grey granite of the Andes. The city was once filled with magnificent treasures. Many of the building stones weigh 50 tons or more yet they were sculpted so precisely there was no need for mortar to hold them together.

Published by arrangement with Getaway magazine. For the full story, see the April edition.