The Inca Trail is the traditional walk to Machu Picchu, which takes three days for tourists (although there is a race every year, and one of the porters usually wins in about 3-4 hours). There is some palaver to go through first of all, since only 500 tourists are allowed to go on it every day (which means probably triple that number of actual people when you factor in all the porters carrying every piece of food for the trek, along with all the tents).
It was to be several days of early starts, with our guide Mayra and assistant guide Enrique (“like the singer”). Flood damage is still evident, and we had to get a minibus along a semi-constructed road instead of the train – the tracks next to the river had been washed away. On the Nepal trek, we were able to take 15kg in our duffel bags to be carried by the porters, but then they didn’t have to carry anything else except their own necessities. This time around, the limit was 6kg – and when you consider that the bag itself weighs about 1.5kg, that’s not a lot of extra stuff you can take. I managed to crowbar my waterproof layers, camera, sunscreen, insect repellent, coca sweeties (which sound dodgy, but aren’t) and other essentials into my day pack, and had my water bottle hanging from my shoulder in a brightly-coloured knitted cradle with fabric straps. They sell a lot of those in the markets.
Day 1 of the trek was reasonably gentle, with time to sit and look at various Inca ruins along the way. Some of our group suffered at various points with stomach problems, probably exacerbated by altitude, and impromptu toilet stops were fairly frequent for a few folk. The trek started with a passport and ticket check, then across a newly-built bridge (to replace the previous one which was washed away in the floods). There were some steep-ish bits, but luckily my legs still remembered how to walk up hills.
We stopped for lunch in a couple of large tents, complete with tables and chairs and all the places set. There were also bowls of clean water and soap for us to wash first. I didn’t realise at first that the tents weren’t there permanently, the porters had arrived ahead of us (of course) and had put them up for us to eat lunch. Among the porters are a cook, assistant cook and a waiter, and our food was pretty tasty most of the time. Soup, various chicken dishes, bread rolls, popcorn, hot water with which to make tea/coffee/hot chocolate… considering these people race uphill for hours, carrying 30kg each on their backs, then prepare everything, it makes one realise how spoiled one is.
After lunch on the first day, there was a little more uphill to negotiate before arriving at the campsite. The campsites themselves are huge, with upwards of 20 individual plots for the different groups. The porters had set up a lot of two-man tents (they themselves slept in the dining/kitchen tents), and a man had run up from the shop with a bucket full of bottles of beer he was selling for 5 soles each (just over £1). By the time it got dark (by 8pm) everyone was pretty much ready to sleep, since the starts would be getting earlier every day.
Day 2 is the mammoth one, it’s a constant uphill trek to Dead Woman Pass (4215m above sea level). This took the entire morning, having left before 7am. The group had naturally spread out by this point, and it was lucky for those of us who were nearer the front that we got to the pass just before the rain started. For the first time in five months, I got to use my waterproof trousers! Finally justified carrying them around all this time. I had been cursing them, since most people had cheap plastic rain ponchos, but I stayed a hell of a lot drier than them. Clambering down wet rocks is fun, and I got to the campsite while it was still raining and shrouded in mist – although of course it wasn’t mist, it was a cloud.
The third day has more up-and-down hiking to do, which wasn’t so much fun for the middle-aged bloke in another group who had a heart attack and had to be carried the rest of the way by porters (we saw him being stretchered away the following day in Machu Picchu itself). There were more illnesses in our group, although thankfully nothing that serious, which gave me some opportunities to try and take pictures of the hummingbirds that pop up along the way.
Our final campsite was next to a “hotel”, which had a “bar”. The inverted commas are because it’s a shack with a filthy-looking dorm with triple or quadruple bunk beds, and the bar didn’t have any beer. To buy a drink, you had to pay the borderline insane woman in the cash office, get a ticket, take the ticket to the bar, and then wait for your drink. That evening we had a ceremony for the porters, giving them all their tips and any odds and ends people could spare. The reason for doing it that night was that most of them would be heading back first thing the next morning, running back along the railway tracks.
We were woken up at 4:30, and started walking while it was still dark – and we were still among the last of the groups to leave the campsite. The sun was getting into the swing of things when we climbed up the massive stone steps to the Sun Gate, for our first view of Machu Picchu. Or it would have been, had the valley not been completely obscured by a huge cloud. We sat at the gate and waited for the sun to rise over the mountains and clear the cloud, and Machu Picchu slowly appeared before us.
While we were twiddling our thumbs, the Bosnian-Australian couple of the group sidled off and Alijen proposed to Aida. She said yes, thankfully. (Later we discovered that the other Australian couple, Shaun and Jodie, had got engaged the previous day. I’m not sure what the porters were putting in the food, but it clearly works.) The cloud had nearly dispersed when we started walking down to Machu Picchu, and our first port of call was the cafe at the bottom for a 9am burger and to meet up with the two non-trekkers of the group, who had come up by train and bus. Then Mayra took us around the ruins and told us what various parts of it were probably used for.
Hiram Bingham, who brought Machu Picchu to the attention of the world after being told about it by a local farmer in 1911, turns out to have been consistently wrong about almost everything he said about it. Never mind, though, it’s still a massive and intricate construction. It was probably abandoned when nearly completed, when the Incas realised that it wasn’t exactly safe from earthquakes (some of the stone walls are buckled and cracked by previous tremors).
Walking up to the hut at the top gives the postcard view, and it’s worth it even if your legs have had quite enough of steps just now, thank you very much. While walking away towards the Inca Bridge, I kept turning around to see it from slightly different angles. It is a stunning sight. Mind you, several Peruvians have told me that there are plenty of other Inca ruins which are at least as impressive (if not more so), but Machu Picchu is the famous one. It sounds like Angkor Wat, which I didn’t find as impressive as some of the lesser-known temples in the jungle around it.
The Inca Bridge itself is a few logs linking a path which winds its way precariously around the mountainside. The path is an average of about a metre wide, and for most of it there is no protection from falling to certain death in the valley below. All very nice, but by this time my legs were rebelling and wanted to go down to the town below. This meant a bus journey along a winding road down the mountainside, with frequent reversing to allow uphill buses to pass. The train wasn’t until later that night, so a few beers were consumed.
We arrived back in Cusco at about 1:15am, and while some of our number were flying off to the Amazon jungle for a couple of days, most of us had a few days to relax and catch up on sleep. I got a taxi with Erik and Kim to see a few holes in the ground and some salt flats, and walked from the hotel up to Sachsayhuaman and Q’enqo (sexy woman and Kenco, if you prefer), two Inca sites within a couple of miles of Cusco. Both nice, and at least you don’t have to walk for three days to get to them.
Puno next, on the shore of Lake Titicaca – at 3812m above sea level, the highest navigable lake in the world. Apparently. Apart from the thinness of the air, you can tell how high you are by the fact that the clouds are so close – a lot of the time, they look like they’re just above the lake. We had a leisurely boat ride to an island for lunch, before a chance to jump into the lake from the top of the boat. I was first, and completely failed to come to the surface wrestling one of the metre-long frogs which apparently live there. It was nice and refreshing (i.e. bloody cold).
The evening’s accommodation was a home stay in a little village on a peninsula. I was put into a house with Ronnie and Damelza, with our new brother “Richard” (I suspect the English-sounding names are for the tourists’ benefit), four of his sisters and his dad. The youngest girl Katy is two years old, and there are four more sisters who have left home to work in various cities. The mother of the family died a year ago, and the older daughters still at home have had to adopt mothering duties to the younger ones.
The guest room was a newly-built house with three beds and a toilet, which is rather fancier than the house the family actually lives in. We made a token effort to help chop potatoes before the rain started, and we were ushered into the guest room to entertain the younger children. Dinner was vegetable soup followed by a vegetable stew, and we made some attempts at conversation with our sheets of useful phrases in the Aymara language. The family also spoke some Spanish and Richard had a few words of English. Then they dressed us in Peruvian clothing (I had a poncho and a fetching multicoloured handbag with tassles, along with a hat which was far too small for my head) and marched us down to the village hall for some dancing. The villagers danced first, and then we had to copy them. It put me in mind of nothing more than being forced to do Scottish Country Dancing in first year of high school.
After saying goodbye to our host families the next morning, the boat took us to the floating Uros islands. These artificial islands are made of floating reeds, and are quite amazing. If there is a dispute between neighbours, they can lift their anchors and move somewhere else. The islands are covered with mats of reeds which have to be constantly replenished, and have watchtowers and huts to act as homes and schools. There is a seperate island for solid human waste, which is apparently called “shitty island”. There are elaborate reed catamarans which appear to have muppets for figureheads (they’re probably supposed to be pumas, but they look like Kermit the Frog) with raised platforms for fee-paying tourists to sit on while being rowed around for half an hour.
One more night in Puno, and then a trip to the Bolivian border. Kim had bought a few packets of salt from the salt flats, and I wondered about the logistics of carrying several clear plastic bags of white powder across the border, but the crossing was uneventful. We had to leave the bus to go through Peruvian immigration and then walk across the border to Bolivian immigration before getting re-embarking. It would have been ridiculously easy to just walk across the border and get back on the bus without going through either set of customs, but then you wouldn’t get the relevant stamps in your passport (and of course it would make leaving Bolivia a little tricky).
Lunch was in Copacabana, and set the standard for Bolivian food by being cheap, extremely slow to come and pretty awful. Then another bus ride to a ferry port, with the humans getting one small launch and the bus being transported across the lake on a precarious floating platform. All the buses being ferried across were perched at alarming angles, looking like they were about to disappear into the water with all our luggage. Luckily, they didn’t.
La Paz is the highest capital city in the world, and although everyone is reasonably used to the altitude by now, the pollution makes it harder to breathe. The city is located in a valley, and the elevation ranges from 3000m to 4100m. The next stage of the trip through Bolivia loses a couple of people and gains some new ones – I now have a roommate, having been lucky enough to get a single room so far.
We had our last dinner in a French restaurant, and my meal conformed to previous experience by taking a lot longer to appear than everyone else’s (even those who had ordered the same thing). After that, a few of us went to a bar in a nearby backpacker’s hostel before ending up in the “Hard Rock Cafe” (which isn’t a Hard Rock Cafe at all). Hangovers all round today, great preparation for the next leg of the trip to the Uyuni salt flats…
