Aguas Calientes is the nearest town to Machu Picchu. The only way to reach Aguas Calientes is walking several days or by train (2-4 hours from Ollantaytambo or Cuzco). Once you get to Aguas Calientes, be prepared to walk up and down hills. The distances aren’t that far but they are fairly steep.
The people of Aguas Calientes have done an amazing job of making this a pleasant place to stay near the iconic Machu Picchu. The town is almost Disney Land clean. They have cute recycling containers like in the posting for Ollantaytambo. They also have dozens of beautiful stone carvings in the huge boulders and rock hillsides of the town. Here are a few of the carvings. Most of them are at least 6′ high and 4 or 5′ across!
Just as there are no roads to the town, there are no roads in the actual town. There is one very short paved section at one end of the town where the Machu Picchu buses load (and turn around). This means that everything comes in one the train: people, food, water (remember the water isn’t potable!!!), materials, etc. Once they arrive, they are manually unloaded from the train and put on small carts and hauled up the hills. The men who do this (I didn’t see any women hauling carts) must be very strong since they are loaded down. Many of the pedestrian “streets” are sloped or have ramps along the side of them for the carts.