Letter from Aguas Calientes: It is the last stop for tourists on their way to see Machu Picchu, the famed lost city of the Incas, but this week Machupicchu Pueblo - or Aguas Calientes, as it is more widely known - looks more like an angry ski resort.
Nestled in the foothills of the towering Andes, the Urubamba river courses through the town beneath pretty footbridges. Hanging from these bridges, flapping gently in the breeze, are huge cloth posters that say "Vote No to disorder and chaos in Machupicchu town", "Vote Yes to bring respect and honour to this town", "Don't allow our enemies to put an end to the works underway in Machupicchu - vote No".
Last Sunday, the people of Aguas Calientes voted on whether or not their mayor, Oscar Valencia Auca, should be thrown out of office. In a result described by one local hosteller last night as "very surprising", the blatantly corrupt Auca held onto his chair with white knuckles as just 32 more "No" than "Si" votes were registered.
Now the Yes camp is protesting against what one described as "ballot box trickery".
The staggering incompetence of the municipality in the aftermath of last April's landslide, which claimed the lives of 11 locals, was expected to see Auca forced out by a significant margin.
According to tourists who were trapped here when floodwaters and debris cut off the railway track, the only access route out, last April 10th, he forbade Peruvians access to rescue helicopters and accepted bribes of $150 (€120) to get richer tourists out first.
It is safe to assume that Auca never received crisis management training; heckling from more cash-strapped backpackers about his dishonesty reduced him to tears.
President Alejandro Toledo's efforts were no more fruitful. By coincidence he was in the area at the time, acting as a tour guide for US cable station Discovery Travel Channel, who were shooting a special on Peru.
Toledo briefly showed up in Aguas Calientes wearing jeans and a white shirt, posed for pictures atop a boulder, promised tourists he would provide them all with helicopters, before jumping back into his own and whirring off.
The devastating landslide, which caused an estimated €3.5 million worth of damage in the town, must have given a certain grim satisfaction to geologists in the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University, Japan.
For the past three years they have warned that Machu Picchu itself is in grave danger of similarly falling off its mountain perch. They claim that the soils beneath the 2,250-metre-high city are sliding at a rate of one centimetre a month.
When you add the stress of the 300,000 tourists who visit the site every year, they insist, it equals a catastrophe waiting to happen.
And then there's the cable car. The shelved plans to construct a cable car up to the ruins from Aguas Calientes have been dusted off again only in the past few weeks.
This, despite the fact that UNESCO has decreed that the project would "seriously affect the values, authenticity and integrity of the citadel and the surrounding landscape". According to José Luis, our Machu Picchu trek guide - who pronounces it "pick chew", not "pea chew" like we learned in school - "there is not a single person in Aguas Calientes, Cusco or anywhere nearby" who is in favour of it either.
Money-hungry Toledo has his eye on the dotted line: easier access to the ancient citadel by cable car would see an estimated increase in tourist traffic of 400 per cent.
Well, it would certainly be an easier option than the four-day trek.
Twenty of us - all middle-class professionals, aged between 25 and 32, terrifyingly well educated, set out on the 45 kilometre trail through jungles and over rivers, reaching an altitude on the second day of 4,198m. (The highest mountain in Ireland, Carrauntoohil in Co Kerry, is 1,038 metres.)
We drank coca tea to stave off altitude sickness and were asleep most evenings by eight from sheer exhaustion.
Twenty-five porters carried our tents, food, cooking utensils and the rucksacks of those who had paid for the additional service.
As we were led around the ancient city on the last day, we noticed a chunk missing from a corner of the famous sun dial. Turns out, a mechanical arm operating a camera during a beer commercial shoot a few years ago fell on top of it.
Oops!