Here's the latest idea to get flushed down the pipe.
Apparently some high ranking idiot in the Peruvian government got the brilliant idea that tickets to Machu Picchu should be limited to 3 hours. The problem, of course, is that the government currently only allows 2,500 people to see the ruins per day, and during the peak tourist season, that means occasionally people can't get in.
Therefore, in order to allow 4 or 5 thousand people to pay their $42 for the Machu Picchu entry fee, some dude decided that the ticket time should be limited to 3 hours.
Although that would actually be just fine for the vast majority of tourists who show up, get a shot for their Facebook and then turn around and sprint to the nearest restaurant/bar, the proposal would totally suck for anyone who is really there for the Machu Picchu experience.
For my part, I like just hanging out at the place, just sitting around and enjoying the atmosphere. It's the pinnacle of a long trip for most people. You travel all the way from your home country, then you have another trip to Cusco, then another trip by train and bus, and you finally arrive there after battling an untold number of TSA agents, customs agents, not to mention the altitude and your lack of familiarity with the culture and language. I think you kind of deserve to hang out at the ruins, take a nap, and lose yourself in time for a while. This would be totally impossible if you were constantly looking at your watch to make sure you weren't going to overstay your three hour ticket time.
Screw that!
Besides, at three hours you wouldn't have time to hike up the sun gate and see all of the lower ruins, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of things to see at Machu Picchu. I generally recommend that people spend two days exploring the ruins.
Sigh...
There was a time when Machu Picchu was kind of this hidden little gem that nobody knew about, but it's becoming so commercialized that it's almost unrecognizable. I remember when you'd pull into Aguas Calientes and there was nothing there. Now it's this ridiculous bubbling metropolis...and the change I've witness has only happened over the last ten years or so. I wonder how much different the place seems to people who went there fifteen or thirty years ago.
The only silver lining is that there are still places like Choquequirao which are a total pain in the butt to get to, so almost nobody goes. If I were ever to set up shop in Peru and guide people, I'd build a hotel in Cachora and make Choquequirao my destination (and I'd fend off developers with a machete in one hand and a shotgun in the other).
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