OK, when last we visited in Blogsville we were about to embark on a 4 day hike through the Andes mountains, ending up in MaChu Picchu on the last day. Obviously we survived the journey (or perhaps this is a ghost writer), but holy goddamn crapfest it was a tough hike. Let the wussery commence...
As a possible foreshadowing of things to come, we had a couple dubious encounters with our travel agency (Andina Travel, for anyone who´s thinking of heading to Peru...). We met the staff once to pay the balance of our trip and, suffice to say, they knew pretty close to jack shit about what was going to happen on our hike. Us: ¨How many people are going?¨ Them: ¨Uh...err....umm....duh....let me....err....well....¨ Us: ¨Yeah, ok, forget about that. What, specifically, do we need to bring in terms of cold weather gear?¨ Them: ¨Well, some clothes.¨ Us: ¨...uh, WTF?¨ Them: ¨Yeah, here´s a list of stuff to bring.¨ (They rummage through their office to find us a pamphlet that repeats the same extremely vague information on their website.) Us: ¨Well, we were hoping for something a little more specific and maybe you could just......ah, screw it, we´ll just talk to some other folks who´ve done the trek.¨
So after arranging for them to come to our hostel the night before the trek, we are on our kinda-sorta-a-little-less-than-merry way. A guy comes to ¨brief¨ us nearly an hour late and less than 10 hours before we´re to leave the next morning. The briefing consisted of two (2) maps of the hike and one (1) tersely voiced ¨Any questions?¨ Well, yes, we still had the same questions as before, namely what the hell we needed to bring. We end up having to purchase a couple last items at the last minute that we had no idea we needed, which was fine but left us a little low on the sleep-o-meter.
Day one of the Inca Trail - We were picked up at 5 in the morning and boarded a bus that picked up the rest of our group. We drove a total of about 2.5 hours and grabbed a quick breakfast at the coldest open-air restaurant in the world. Judging by the way my boogers were freezing under my nose, it was going to be witch-titty cold in the Andes. We met our guide on the bus, a nice fella named Rolando, and a couple other of the crew members and porters. We ended up at our starting point, the beautifully named ¨Kilometer 82¨. It has some other name that is something like Ollyantambo, but that´s its scientific name or something. After queueing up and giving the folks at the checkpoint our passes, we collectively roll on and up through the Andes. The first day starts off pretty easily but also has some pretty hard uphill climbs that take their toll.
Let me pause briefly to explain what an ¨Inca Trail¨ really is. It´s not your normal, average, run-of-the-mill dirt path that winds through stuff on its way to other stuff. It´s mainly big ol´ cobblestones. There is no such thing as flat ground for the Inca people. ¨Flat¨ means ¨not as soul-crushingly steep as some other parts.¨ Also, the Inca people averaged about 3.2 feet tall. This fact belies the other fact that most of the uphill climbs were actually stairs that, coincidentally, averaged about 3.2 feet high each. Seriously, the stairs are big ol´ m´fers. I have no idea how these people climbed these things. (Told you the wuss factor would be turned up to 11. You were warned!)
So, yeah, we´re climbing the equivalent of cobblestone ladders built for 8 foot people. The first day was hard. It was hella hard. (¨How hard was it?¨) So hard that....nah, I´m exaggerating. It was difficult because it was strenuous and it was difficult because the day was very long, but it was doable. I mean, we did it, right? We ended the day at our first campsite after 10-ish miles and around 8 hours of hiking. Food was delicious (really fresh and delicious stuff the whole trip long, honestly) and our tents were solid. Slept on some mattress pads and inside some North Face sleeping bags we´d rented. Oh, another thing that ramped up my wussification was the fact that I had to carry my stuff with me and it was heavy. It was heavy for me despite the fact that we had porters, the oldest of whom was an impressive 59 years, who carried more weight than any of us and literally RAN up and down the trek in order to set up camp before us. These dudes, Quechua locals all, are crazy freaks of nature with apparently no need to consume oxygen or anything. They were carrying bags bigger than their bodies and they do this run every single week. I bow in wonderous admiration to you, Inca Trail porters of the world.
Day two of the Inca Trail - We´d been warned repeatedly, both by trek-finishers that we´d met and by Internet postings, that Day 2 was the ¨hard¨ day. Saying day two is kind of hard is like saying that Rick James kind of liked cocaine. It was really long and had two serious uphill treks, the first of which started right at the beginning of the day and lasted for 4 straight hours. The initial ascent up to ¨Dead Woman´s Pass¨, so named because of a rock formation that looks a little like a female body, was rigorous to the max. At the top our group celebrated a bit and took some pictures together, which was pretty cool and allowed for an awesome, awesome view, and then began the descent (La Bajada, for you New Mexicans out there). The descents are like rock meat grinders for human knees. They´re steep and they´re incessant. Making me feel like an even bigger tool was the fact that hordes of tiny little porters were RUNNING down the descents at near full speed with their body-sized packs on their backs. One more tip of the cap to these amazing guys (and, impressively, one girl porter who is also a cook). Toward the middle of the second big ascent, we got hit with some serious rain for a while, increasing my personal wuss factor tenfold and making the path a little more slippery and treacherous than it already was. However, eventually we all made it and bunked up for the night.
Day three of the Inca Trail - This day was the ¨easy¨ day, something I could not take issue with even though my calves were essentially useless lumps of painful meat hanging off the backs of my legs. The day wasn´t very long and had some really spectacular views of the Andean mountains, some great ruins, and generally breathtaking nature everywehere. Leann and I both had pretty beat up legs at this point which made, strangely I guess, it even tougher to descend than ascend. Jeebus as my witness, I actually preferred trekking uphill. Day three was only a few hours (like five instead of the usual 8-9) and we covered a lot of ground. We hit the sack early so that we could wake up at the ungodly hour of 3:00 AM the next morning to prepare for the final jaunt into Machu Picchu.
Day four of the Inca Trail - We started our hike in the absolute dark, using head lamps to guide our way. The sun rose in the mountains and gave off a very neat mist on the forest for a little while. We had to wait in a queue for the final checkpoint, still in the dark, but once we got moving it was only about a two hour hike to the deservedly famous Sun Gate. At this point, you´ve pretty much sealed the deal and completed the Inca Trail. The Sun Gate´s vantage point looks right down on the big city of Machu Picchu, which has around 140 stone buildings, along with expansive rock terracing for farming, and the coolest big ol´ prayer rock you´ll ever see (if you look at our pictures, look for the picture of the hands nearly touching a big ass rock). A small 40 minute hike down to the city itself and WE´D DONE IT! WE FINISHED! WOOO!!!!!
Some hippy and his woman standing at the Sun Gate with Machu Picchu in the background.
Here´s our whole group just about to walk into Machu Picchu.
A couple notes that I thought I´d pass along. First, if you really want to enjoy Machu Picchu without the bother of corpse-like exhaustion, I´d suggest arriving via train instead of via 4 day hike. Once we got there, we were collectively almost too tired to take the whole huge place in. Second, and this one is crucial, make sure you acclimate yourself to the high altitude first. It´s really high up there. How well you deal with the altitude has very little to do with fitness level (case in point was a barfalicious French Canadian kid who looked to be in pretty good shape....he, sadly for him, had to turn all the way back an hour or two into the second day....bummer) and very much to do with how much you´re used to it. Also, you can chew on coca leaves and drink coca tea to help deal with the altitude. It does help. Chocolate also helps, to the delight of chocolate lovers like my sweet wife.
Our joy at finishing was slightly tempered by the insistent fuck-uppery of our travel agency, who didn´t make changes to our train departure as promised, leaving us to stay the night in Aguas Calientes (small tourist town next to Machu Picchu accessible ONLY by train). We had to haul ass in order to make our overnight flight to Madrid, Spain but we made it. We even got a little laundry done the night before so we didn´t have to smell like the walking dead on the long, long flight.
We´re now happily hanging out with my wonderful cousins in Madrid, Spain. We´ve seen a cool flamenco show starring Joaquin Cortes, the mega superstar of the flamenco world. We even saw the Pope. Yes, THE Pope, not one of those lesser popes or demi-popes or whatever. He was in Madrid for World Youth Day. (Insert joke about Youth and Catholic here.) There were seriously two million people in town. I´ve never seen anything like it. The believers weren´t as stoic as one might expect. I even saw a spontaneous conga line looking thing that had multiple nuns in full habit get-up conga-ing the afternoon away.
We also went to The Prado Museum the other day and spent something like 7 hours there. It wasn´t even enough to see all the stuff. That place is awe inspiring. From Raphael to Velasquez to Goya, The Prado has it all.
We´ve had some great food and drink here so far and look forward to grubbing on some paella tomorrow (finally!).
I have also now shaved off my beard and no longer look like a serial killer / hobo.
Like I said, some more pictures are posted, so please go to and check out what we´ve got!
Hope this entry hasn´t been too long and tedious. Feel free to berate me with your con(de)structive criticisms and let me know what you think!
Til then, hasta luego! Good luck to all of you that are about to deal with Hurricane Irene. Stay safe and check you soon.
Hey - When you get back you'll have to read Paul Theroux's travel book titled "The Old Patagonian Express" _ written in 1979. Lots of adventures you've now had, as he took trains from Boston to Patagonia over weeks and months.
ReplyDeleteAlmost Fiesta here - they are building Zozobra in the old sound stage at College of Santa Fe's film school. Que Viva! Connie