I don't normally relish rolling out of bed at 4:30, but today was different. Today was slated as my Machu Picchu experience, my journey to the tourism pinnacle of South America.

I'd booked a combination of tickets that would allow me the maximum amount of time possible at the site for a one-day trip, and my Vistadome train was scheduled to pull out of Cuzco's San Pedro station at a bright-and-early 6:05.

It didn't.

At 6:40, we got the word. Or, at least, I got the word in pieces, strained through the sieve of my inadequate Spanish. Strike. Stones on the tracks. Delay. Wait. Wait in the chilled closeness of the train car.

Just the day before, I'd seen evidence of local discontent with the tourism machine on my bus tour through the Sacred Valley. Strike. Big stones in the road. Fortunately, the road had already been made passable, and the tour was unaffected. Now, I was caught in the middle of it.

My brilliant scheduling was for naught. I might as well have reserved a seat on the cheaper 6:50 train. Of course at that point, no one had any idea if either of the trains would be moving.

They did.

We pulled out of the station about an hour late and slowly began crawling up the switchback tracks to get out of the Cuzco valley. Near the top, I looked back to see the cheaper train following not too far behind us, belching black smoke onto the adobe and thatched-roof homes of the hill dwellers.

The train is slow; I don't think it ever topped 30mph. A three-hour journey brought us to the town of Ollantaytambo, last stop prior to Machu Picchu Pueblo.

And there it stopped.

An hour passed. We waited. Waited in the now oven-like closeness of the train car. There were fits and starts, the train buckling now and again, that gave us hope. But it was false hope.

Finally the word came through. Strike. People on the tracks. Police powerless. Return to Cuzco.

More waiting. Then backwards through the same rural landscape. Sweating. More stopping and waiting. And finally back over the mountain, down the switchbacks, more black smoke into the adobe homes, more children squeezing shut their ears, dogs howling at the cacophony of the engine.

***

After talking to the staff at my hostel and doing a little research, I learned this occurrence was not out of the ordinary. British-owned PeruRail's trains are frequently prevented from reaching Machu Picchu by collective action in protest of the government's failure to support local farmers and allocate some of those myriad tourist dollars to improving infrastructure and services in rural areas around Cuzco.

To me, these seem like legitimate claims, and the halting of the cocoon of wealth—the shiny blue tube of deep pockets and camera flashes that is the PeruRail Cuzco-Machu Picchu train—seems an effective means of nonviolent protest.

I would be angry too at a train that thundered through my village, leaving behind a thick, poison haze of black smoke and nothing else. A train run by a company enjoying a monopoly, charging such exorbitant rates as to limit access to South America's pinnacle of tourism to the foreign and well-off.

I bear no ill will towards the strikers. (After all, I received a full refund from PeruRail, all $119 of it). They've given me the perfect reason to revisit Peru, to try again for my Machu Picchu experience.

And when I do, I WON'T be taking the Cuzco train.