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The bed you fall into after the pass — a scatter of tin roofs, tents and grass-thatched huts at 2,900 m, where the walk to Machu Picchu drops out of the ice and lands in the cloud forest.
Chaullay is not a town. It is a handful of families, a few campsites and trekker lodges strung along the Río Santa Teresa at about 2,900 metres, west of Machu Picchu. Almost everybody here arrived on foot that same day, over the Salkantay pass some 1,700 metres higher up. Between breakfast and dinner the world changes completely: frozen grass and thin air in the morning, warm wet green by evening. You unlace your boots to the sound of running water, loud birds, and rain starting somewhere in the trees.
The second day of the Salkantay trek is the one everyone remembers, and Chaullay is where it stops. From the pass at 4,630 m the trail goes down all day — about 20 km and some 1,700 vertical metres — first across the puna, the cold tawny grassland of the high Andes where nothing grows tall, then past the lunch huts at Wayramachay, and then into trees. This is cloud forest: wet mountain woodland at the height where cloud sits permanently in the branches. Ferns unroll, moss hangs, orchids appear, and by mid-afternoon the temperature has climbed well above what it was on the pass. Walkers describe it as landing in a different country without changing borders.
What waits at the bottom is small. A dirt road just about reaches it, a river runs loud beside it, and the buildings amount to a scatter of tin roofs, a few dozen at most. There are campsites, simple hostels, an alpine hut built the local way from ichu — the tough Andean bunchgrass — over wooden poles, and, across the water at neighbouring Collpapampa, a lodge and some glass-roofed domes that operators pitch for guests who want the stars through the ceiling. Signs spell the name Chaullay, Challway or Challhuay, more or less at random. A hot shower costs a few soles. It rains most nights, and the river never stops.
Below here the valley gets warm and productive: smallholdings growing coffee, avocado and granadilla, the orange passion fruit you crack like an egg. Santa Teresa, the district town at 1,550 m, was buried by a landslide in 1998 and rebuilt; the road along this valley still slips in heavy rain. In January 2010 storms tore out the railway to Machu Picchu, some 2,000 visitors had to be lifted out, and the back road through Santa Teresa became the way in. That is why the trek ends the way it does — hot springs at Cocalmayo, zip-lines across the gorge, and a flat ten-kilometre walk from Hidroeléctrica along the railway tracks into Aguas Calientes.
The making of Chaullay
Ice to jungle in one day
About 20 km and 1,700 metres down from the pass, out of the bare puna grassland and into cloud forest — wet mountain woodland where the cloud never leaves the branches.
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Where you sleep
Campsites, small hostels and a hut thatched with ichu grass on wooden poles, at about 2,900 m beside the Río Santa Teresa; a lodge and glass-roofed domes stand across at Collpapampa.
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Coffee, avocado and granadilla
Below Chaullay the valley warms into farmland: family plots of arabica coffee, avocado and granadilla — the sweet orange passion fruit you crack open like an egg.
Cocalmayo hot springs
Stone pools of naturally hot water, roughly 38–44 °C, built beside the river a few minutes below Santa Teresa — the standard reward on the day after the descent.
Zip-lines over the valley
Cables strung across the gorge near Santa Teresa, around 2,500 m of them in seven runs, offered as the optional adrenaline afternoon of the trek.
The last day, along the rails
From the Hidroeléctrica power station it is a flat ten kilometres beside the railway to Aguas Calientes, the town under Machu Picchu — about two and a half hours, or half an hour by train.
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