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Other entries in Machu Picchu

The Inca Trail

it was an amazing experience and it was wet.

doing the inca trail was a big challenge for me. i even thought about taking the train to machu picchu and do the lazy tourist thing but finally decided that i am not too old to do it.

robert and me booked the trekking tour with "sas travels", it's the best known agency in cuzco and a bit more expensive than others, but i think it was worth it.

the first day is commonly described as "easy". a beautiful walk along a river, through a valley. it was like that, walking, looking around, admiring the landscape and seeing the first inca ruins.

ozzy, our guide, told us how to use the cocaleaves that we all bought from the women in the streets of olantaytambo. we also got bamboo walking sticks there (for five soles). the coca leaves taste strange, like hay, but the effect is really there. after ten minutes of chewing, your tongue and lips get limp and you feel better. it's like a little energyrush, nothing like a drugeffect, you stay completely normal but it helps a lot with the thin air and i think it has a motivating effect as well.

after walking a couple of hours we reached the place where we had lunch, the cook was a genius, just magic what he prepared with the most primitive cooking facilities. after this break we walked up another valley and reached our first campsite much sooner than i expected, that was a pleasant surprise. after five o'clock tea with fresh popcorn and cookies we had dinner and went to bed straight away. the second day is described as the hardest, so we tried to get a solid amount of sleep. sleeping was not that easy, the matresses were thin and the ground underneath is not straight. it's a hard life in the mountains. 

waking up the second day: julian, our second guide, "knocked" on the tent, gently waking us up with a cup of cocatea and coffee. some basic hygienic actions followed- brushing teeth with water out of the bottle (there was a "bathroom" but i don't want to describe the look or smell), then breakfast: pancakes, toasted bread, porridge, lovely.

after everything was packed, we started walking. from the beginning it was obvious that today would be different: up, up, up, nothing else - we had to get from 3.000 to 4.200 meters this day. i was surprised by myself, it was not as hard as i thought, i found my rythm and walked my own speed all the time, i arrived at the peak as one of the first of our group and:  i could have walked on!

the harder part was to walk down those thousands of steps after "dead womans pass" - nothing for people with weak knees... 

well, to mention the weather: it was a nice mix of sun (you start to melt instantly as the sun comes out), fog ( i like fog because it makes everything look very mysterious) and a combination of wind and rain (goretex gives up after 20 minutes).

the third day, after a rainy night in the tent, started foggy but got better. in the morning i was completely exhausted, my deepest point on the trail. i had a cold and the weather was not a big help to get healthy. i literally forced myself to the campsite where we had lunch and i could not enjoy the inca ruins i saw that morning. i was shivering and in a bad mood.

at lunch i ate as much as i could, tried to dry my damp clothes and drank lots of tea. obviously it helped because the walk in the afternoon was great. i felt much better and enjoyed the beautiful landscape.

we were walking through the high andean forest, a vegetation which is green in every variation, i loved it. for a couple of hours i walked alone and  got this special feeling of "being there", that's hard to describe but it's the best feeling i can have when i am at a place i have never been before and i really like it and enjoy the fact that i am there and nowhere else.

after about 20.000 steps more ( my left knee was already hurting so bad) i reached the last campsite. that's a place where finally you can take a shower after three days. the following night was the worst. rain pourred down, i was freezing although i was wearing all my clothes and filled a water bottle with hot water and put it in my sleepingbag. we got another tent that night and it was too short, so i was stuck in this embrio position and always slipped down against the wall of the tent ( the ground was not straight...). as soon as you touch the wall of a tent, it's not waterproof anymore, in the morning everything was damp... the good thing was, that the night was short anyway because we were woken up at four in the morning. we started our last part of the trail after breakfast at 5.30 a.m.

the walk was not pleasant for me because everyone was in such a hurry to reach the machu picchu, people got mad and reckless. it was still raining when we reached the first viewpoint of the machu picchu and after ten minutes the whole site was covered in fog and there was nothing to see anymore. that, somehow, had a positive effect on the people because the next and last hour walk to the ancient site was much more relaxed then the start.

when we finally reached machu picchu, the clouds got less and we had a fantastic view. i think no one, no matter how exhausted, can say that it was not worth it. this place is magic. the mountains around it... breathtaking. pictures can't tell how it is, sorry.

the last part of our adventure was yet to come: the rain was so strong that landslides blocked the railwaytracks back to cuzco, there is no street, just the railway. we finally arrived a couple of hours later than planned, doing the trainride of our life. in europe this would not have been possible.

back in cuzco, i booked a hotelroom for two nights, with a hot shower and a room of my own.

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