The Trail of the Inca - or how I missed Machu Picchu altogether

A tree against the sky
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Day 1 - the start of the Inca Trail

We woke up at 4:30am because the tour agency bus was supposed to arrive at 5am to pick us up. We left our big bags in the hostel storage and gave the hostel night attendant our computer bag with the money belts to put in the safe. I counted the money in front of him, put one of our wire locks on the zipper and gave him the whole. Before we could have some breakfast, our contacts arrived and we headed on a freezing cold bus to pick up 14 other passengers and drove to kilometer 82 of the valley road, where the trek begins. We stopped in Ollantaytambo to have breakfast and as soon as we got off the bus we were attacked by local vendors - walking poles, hats, gloves etc. I negotiated with them but they were tough nuts and keep saying “for my family”. After breakfast we headed off for another hour or so down a dirt road to the beginning of our hike.

The first hiking day wasn’t too hard, it’s sort of a warm-up day and there are water and candy sellers all along the trail. The longer you walk, the higher the water prices get. Basic economics, I guess… Our sleeping bags worked well that night; REI didn’t lie to us about the quality of their products...

The group was a fair mix, with a slightly higher ratio of males, ages between 20 and 36. The young people (Angela kept calling them “The Runners”) - about 6 of them, were always ahead going fast, including one Canadian girl who just couldn’t stop talking, whether she was walking up the hill, sitting down for dinner or having just woken up. There were 4 Norwegians who mostly stuck to themselves, fast goers as well, and a few other couples from the US, nice people, and usually as slow as us.

Our guides - Max and Gladys – proved quite helpful from the beginning and our porters, about 20 of them loved to play card games at night and were always first to the scene with their 40lb packs, literally running by you on the trail, smiling all the time. Don’t even think to compete with these people…

Dead woman's pass - 4200m

Day 2 - Inca Trail Hell

On the mountain waking up is always before dark, usually around 5am. There’s nothing wrong with this since we’ve been sleeping since 8:30pm the previous day, but Angela started to come down with a bad cold which only got worse during this day and the next and ruined her trip.

Day 2 is the toughest day of the trip: the trail ascends up to about 4200 meters and then goes down for 5 or 6 hundreds. Going up wasn’t easy on Angela with her cold in the frozen morning air; as for myself, I discovered that I was sufficiently in shape for this endeavor, but I took it easy nonetheless, knowing that I haven’t taken a serious hike in a long time. Of course, “the runners” made it to the top way ahead of us and had to wait there for a while until everybody made it for the group picture…

Finally we had to descend for hours on the ancient Inca stone stairs and Angela’s walking pole came in very handy but her knees started to hurt. I know very well the sudden pain jolts caused by long downhill walks and I have felt like that in the past, but surprisingly and luckily, this time my knees were just fine all the way. Maybe the many hours of walking I’ve added up during this trip and the short hikes up and down so many ruins have helped.

We made it to the tents around 2:30pm and almost immediately went to sleep until dinner time. In total we hiked 9 hours. 3am rolled around and Angela ran out of the tent and didn’t come back until 45 minutes later, having taken over the bathroom with terrible diarrhea. It just kept getting better...

Lunch at 3600m

Day 3 - Inca Trail and sick people

By the time 4:30am came around Angela’s cold has gotten worse, but the diarrhea was under control. Some other people were sick with stomach issues while others were perfectly fine. It must have been the food or the water they used to cook and make tea and juice with. The water was supposed to be purified with iodine and boiled but you never know how long they were boiling it…

At breakfast (and every other meal), the cook gave Angela a special plate omitting eggs and dairy products. This usually creates a little embarrassment at the first meal, when everybody around the table has to find out about her stomach issues. But there’s no shortage of people interested in hearing about this and ready to share their own digestive problems with you.

Within 1½ hour after departure we were at the “top” (meaning the highest altitude we were going to climb that day) happy to be done with the hardest part of the trek (we thought). Even Angela made it uphill like an Energizer bunny, taking sips of coca tea every few steps.

The next part of the trail was relatively easy, going a little way up and down through the cloud forest, but the day ended with a thousand-step descent toward the night camp which was very hard on Angela’s already weaken knees; she limped but nevertheless we made it safely together. Her bronchitis however didn’t seem to show signs of relief.

Day 3 was when we were supposed to tip. The instruction sheet given by the company was complicated and useless and I had to stop people from trying to find exact bills and coins to divide the money into 20 equal parts for all the porters, as they initially thought it had to be done. I tip - I don’t want to have to divide the money to make sure all recipients are happy. As I correctly anticipated, the head porter gets the money and divides it, but it gets it from us in front of the whole gang, so everybody knows what the sum is. If anybody feels cheated, they can always kill the head porter, their business, not mine.

There wasn’t too much money gathered and I’m sure some people tipped at the low end, but that’s a personal decision so I wasn’t going to try to change people’s minds. I’m usually not a very generous spender and I tip a little above the middle, but this time I felt quite guilty for the small total sum and added more money to the pot than I would have liked to. Thank god Angela was sick in bed and didn’t get up to insult who she may have thought tipped badly…

Dawn at the lost city
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Day 4 - How it can always go worse than you thought

Because every group wants to be the first at the checkpoint and of course, at the ruins, we woke up even earlier than usual, around 3:30am. As soon as I got up I knew that my stomach had been taken over by a bug – the stomach chills, the cramps, the sulfurous burps… it had to be Giardia – sometime in the past days, or maybe even earlier in Cuzco I had some water that was infested (it has been all cured by now with a fair does of Flagyl, but I didn't have any at the time). It all went downhill from here.

We were the first group at the checkpoint and we had to wait for 45 minutes for it to open, so that “the runners” could be the first on the trail. Angela and I lagged behind and I didn’t care much about it; my concern wasn’t at all to be the first since there’s no joy in taking pictures while you still have to carry a flashlight to see the way.

I made it somehow to Machu Picchu and I even thought I would get better, but once I entered the “city” I realized that I’ll have to abandon the guided tour that Max was giving us, say goodbye to climbing Wayana Picchu and spend the rest of the day close to the bathrooms. I gave Angela the camera and didn’t look back. So I can’t tell you much about the lost city of the Incas just that seeing it from afar as you cross the Sun Gate is an unforgettable moment.

That evening we made our way back to Cuzco feeling awful, but the trail of surprises wasn’t over yet…

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Get me out of Cuzco!

The Sacsayhuaman fortress
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For any pleasure traveler to South America Cuzco is a mandatory stop. And therein lies the problem: everyone comes here…

Cuzco is a very pretty high-altitude town with an impressive old center, a mixture of colonial architecture and Inca walls. Often, the colonial houses are built on top of the Inca stonework. With every earthquake, the Spanish houses used to crumble down but their Inca foundations would remain in place, attesting to the far superior building technology of the Andeans. And their stone workmanship is unmatched: blocks of stone of all sizes, from finger-sized pebbles to 50-ton gigantic boulders fit together perfectly with no space in-between, and no mortar was used to hold them together. Seismic resistance is achieved by building at an 8 degree angle (not straight up like the Spanish), by putting the larger stones on top of the smaller, and linking those stone bricks together with bronze keys to make them move as one in case of earthquake. I hope the pictures I took speak more than my words.

Yes, Cuzco is beautiful, but if you are like me and you hate being surrounded by throngs of tourists you’re in the wrong place… Just to give you an idea of how “touristy” this place is, let me tell you that for the last two months, ever since we have started our trip, I’ve been looking for a 58mm polarizing filter for my camera all over Central and South America. I looked in tourist-only areas and in large towns like Quito and Lima, without success; most photography shop employees hadn’t even heard of polarizers. In Cuzco every other shop has them. Regular and circular. All sizes, pick yours…

The Inca reenacted at Inti Raymi
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On the street, one is always harassed by locals trying to sell you massages, postcards, artwork and tours or to get you into a restaurant, sometimes all of them at the same time. But that’s the least annoying of all… On the old town streets you have a higher chance of bumping into a group of loud 21-year-olds than into a local.

One thing that irritates me beyond sky and earth is the fact that in this town of billions of restaurants, most of them pretty, good and cheap, there’s a place, Jack’s café, which always has a line of white people outside. What the hell makes this restaurant so popular? The food must certainly be good, but it is so in other places as well, and it’s not like you can be a regular customer when you’re a tourist. Is it the fact that the owner is an American and most American tourists would consider an American-managed place safer than locally-owned restaurants – giving in to the unspoken preconceptions that locals are dirty and only a foreigner would know how to keep decent hygiene in the kitchen? Or is it the fact that it’s in the travel books and it’s located in a busy intersection? No idea… anyway, there’s no excuse for the waiting line!

View of Cuzco
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Of course, I’m being unfair and a hypocrite, because I, as a tourist, am part of the problem. But that doesn’t prevent me from wishing the other tourists the one thing I always wish them: “Stay home, yo!” (in the translated words of my friend Mihai M. who long ago uttered this memorable sentence as we were trying to get on a full bus to a remote village in the mountains of Romania.)

What about us?

Despite the crowds here, we had a good time. But make no mistake, it’s not easy to adapt to 3400 meters of altitude: not even thirty minutes after getting off the plane I have been hit with the worst headache in the history of man, and weak as I was, I was barely able to reach my hotel room and crawl in bed – all this, courtesy of altitude sickness. I woke up 4 hours later feeling worse, if worse had a meaning by then – at least Angela seemed to be better. And then we discovered the miracle cure – “mate de coca” – infusion of coca leaves. Not only it made me feel better, but it immediately took the headache away and poured some fuel in my lifeless legs, enough to make me able to get out of the hostel and explore the town which was happily and colorfully celebrating the ancient Inti Raymi festival of the sun. Coca leaves are a staple around here and it’s no wonder the ancient Incas considered it a sacred plant. I hope the US government, focused on its misguided war on drugs, will never succeed pressuring the government of Peru into outlaw this plant, as they did in Ecuador. But let’s not turn this travel blog into a political forum; I have my other blog for this, although it’s been quite dry over at livejournal since I started this trip...

We met again with Michael and Mor, our friends from the Galapagos, and spent some days together in Cuzco and visiting the Sacred Valley. It was good to see them again. They got fed up with Cuzco fast (for the same reasons as me) and decided to spend a few days in the village of Ollantaytambo, in the Urubamba valley. Hopefully, we’ll meet again in Bolivia and Buenos Aires.

A last bit of trivia about this place: Cuzco, and much of Peru, seems to have been invaded by an army of young Israeli backpackers. More than anywhere else, you hear Hebrew spoken on the street; there are plenty of restaurants with Hebrew-written menus and Israeli food, and the Spanish keyboard at the Internet-café where I’m writing this blog entry has Hebrew characters glued on the keys. We got the drill from Michael and Mor (themselves belonging to the chosen people as well) – apparently, traveling to South America, and more specifically to Peru, has become sort of a rite of passage for young Israelis. As soon as they get out of the army, many spend a few months traveling this continent. The funny thing is that even those who don’t want to or couldn’t care less about traveling do it because of peer pressure…

Well, I still have to meet any Romanians on this trip…

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