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Published: October 27th 2008
Koricancha
The monastery from outsideOdd to be back in Lima for the night after the craziness and heat of the jungle, but great to be picked up at the airport by our lovely hotel and returned there about 10 hours later to fly to Cusco - hectic! Enjoyed getting photocopies of le Monde and the Herald Tribune at the airport - literally the only English language papers we have been able to find in S America - we are really missing the news and papers! M also enjoyed palming off her counterfeit Peruvian note at the airport coffee chain: you have to check your change here and apparently ATMs are the worst culprits for false currency!
Arrival in
Cusco a bit of a shock - Land of Gringos! Seems a bit like latino apartheid with relatively expensive cafes etc. for travellers and distinctly local eateries for Peruvians; lots of hassle from women offering massages and photos with their llamas all the time... The amazing views of the Andes from the plane gave us an idea of the temperature to expect at this altitude (3500m) - actually 16 degrees C but feels freezing after the Selva. The "soroche" (altitude sickness) we had been warned
Inca Door
Not much left of the Inca site in Koricancha... about didn't strike us but we both enjoyed feeling light-headed and decided to forego the oxygen on offer at the arrivals lounge in favour of giggling and feeling dizzy!
Meet an Israeli guy at Jacks Cafe and traipse about a bit with him looking at hotels he thought were good then beaten by the altitude, settle for Anita Hostal - a beautiful run-down colonial house with rooms around a central courtyard, in the peaceful and pretty
San Blas area. They offer us mate de coca as soon as we come through the door - we must look rough! Mate de coca is the local cure for Soroche, and is drank all over the Andes as British drink tea!
Next day: unlucky - we get the room apart - huge and therefore freezing cold, and next to the giant open-air laundry pumping out Andean music all day and evening and interfering with our hot water supply! So we head out early morning after our fix of coca tea and are struck by the beauty of the streets with their walls built on Inca foundations and stunning Spanish buildings. The Cathedral is again built on Inca stone with ruins to
be seen in the 2 adjoining churches, and for us is a good respite from the torrential rain. Loz then stuck by soroche - falling asleep, headache :-( so we return to Anita Hostal with BBC news on cable TV. Ah, the adventurous life of we travellers!
After a couple of nights we can't take it any more and move to Koylla Hostal up the steep hill - far better. Visit
Koricancha complex - once an incredible gold and jewel-encrusted Inca temple and now a Catholic Convent built on the remains of what the conquistadors demolished, some of which can be seen. InKa Museum is an impressive collection of pre-Inca and Inca relics. Loz still quite unwell and M seems to have painful sinusitis - combinations of altitude, dry air, flying and my crap sinuses and ear-tubes! Pharmacist insists I need antibiotics but I don't fancy them whilst doing the Inca Trail so decline... Guide comes to hotel for our Inca Trail briefing and we discover we need to borrow a bag as well as hiring sleeping bags coz it's gonna be freezing at night, and various other odds and ends, so we spend next day sorting our sleves
Km 82
Starting point of the trail out in preparation. "Cerveza de Coca" keeps us going (but tastes as quite rightly pointed out by James, of wee).
Next day up at 5 for the Inca Trail. Of course we are then picked up at about 7 - Peruvians have a very flexible concept of time. As our group bus slowly fills up with Spanish-speaking bods we start to get concerned that our promised English-speaking guide might be a little compromised. There is also a Brazilian, Marcus, who humourously just speak loudly and constantly in Portuguese to everyone, but hey, it's pretty similar to Spanish and he doesn't speak English. After filling up at Ollayantambo village with coca leaves and walking sticks, we mak Spanish conversation over lunch with our trail companions, who we discover are all Argentinian.
And the trail begins, at KM82. After making a salutory offering of coca leaves to
Pachamama (mother earth), we set off to Willkarakay ruins. We walk 11 kms today and its pretty easy but there are a few steep climbs and we are please to have porters for our main rucksacks so we are left with only day-packs. Strangely though, everyone else seems to be carrying their stuff
and we are confused as porters came as standard with the trip we booked. The camping is not in the site we had expected but outside a small cottage at
Wayllamba (3,100m). The guides warned us to close our tents properly coz their are black widows and tarantulas about and we entertain everyone with our photos of such from our Iquitos jungle trip; the 3 Peruvians have never been to their jungle and are really interested, and jealous!
Up at 5am of day 2 of the trail for the supposedly "challenging" day - it sure is. We climb from Wayllabamba (3100m) to Las Piedras ruins and the
Llulluchapampa, before climbing up up
Dead Woman's Pass (4,200m - phew!). Pass is so called because of the mountain formation, but also earned the trail the sobriquet of the Inca "Trial". Good job Alex, our guide, showed us all the best way to chew coca leaves to relieve the effects of the altitude, and we do so constantly. Loz stuns everyone by managing all the climbs and the pass in record time and M comes first place amongst the laydeez, but not without considerable swearing to self, sweating and general
Porters on the trail
Pretty loaded - the max allowed by law is 25kg and they are all weighted before entering the trail! Nonetheless, impressive and a little sad... effort! Even the descent to
Pacaymaya camp is a challenge - hours of uneven and steep Inca steps. Beautiful view of river and mountains with colibris flying amongst the trees by the tent, but pitched on lumpy grit. Coupled with the Quechua ghost stories which our 2 guides tell us that night (in Spanish - the whole trip has transpired to be... but we get the gist) , we don't get much sleep that night! We are starting to find it very exhausting speaking and attempting to understand Spanish all the time especially as everyone is exhausted and the trek is pretty hard work. Too much effort! Also, we have now realised, having seen the set-up with the overburdened and poorly equipped porters, that we are on the wrong trip. We booked an English-speaking, "ethical" (read, expensive) trip in the UK, and this is not what we are getting; we since have got half our money back as they admitted we were shunted onto a different group, but the experience still somewhat marred :-(
Anyway, day 3: up at 5 again for a long day's trek - 15km from
Pacymaya down to
Winay Wayna campsite (2,700m). Our guides
tell us they managed to sleep well with knives under their pillows to ward of the ghosts! Interestingly, they tell us that they and most of their contemporaries believe and respect the Quechua traditions and that Quechua is their first language; we hadn't really grasped this until now. Most of this path is the original Inca path and there are some impressive ruins on the route:
Runkarankay - a circular military post, uphill via 2nd pass to the Inca Town of
Sayacmarcka. From here the landscape changes as we descend into dense cloud forest where there are many types of small orchids and exotic vegetation, as well as amazing Inca tunnels through sold rock. Sadly, M's expensive sunglasses lost to Pachamama as Laurent leaned over to admire the dense vegetation in the valley, forgetting they were perched on his head!
L - M slightly exaggerating as I was leaning over to avoid a tree! The sun has been out during the whole trail but now we are in the forest, I can cope without! Down to the most impressive ruins of the day:
Puyupatamarca, where there are 5 stone baths and an amazing view over Salcantay (Wild Mountain: 6,000 odd
Dead woman pass
Can you see the shape? Forehead, nose, lips.. m)? Camping at Winay Wayna pretty crap - toilets all retch-worthy and restaurant with entertainment turns out to be just more rice and potato for us non-chicken eaters. Ritual bestowment of porters' tip makes us wince - our group are not the most generous...
Final day - up at 4 for trek to
Machu Picchu!The chekpoint is closed so there is no chance of seeing the much-antitpated sun rise at the
Sun Gate, but as it is pissing it down and foggy we don't mind too much. All trek for 3 hours in our ponchos and arrive cold and very wet, but suitably impressed by the citadel: dramatic and huge! We only stay about 2 hours as we are soacked and getting cold, but Laurent returns the next day, and impressively, treks up
Wayna Picchu too in 35 mins - whilst M chills in Aguas Calientes.
Various people have bemoaned the fact that Machu Picchu town has been infested by tourists, but early in the morning M finds it beautiful with the charming train line running through the main street, surrounding cloud forest and mountains and lots of decent cafes. Afternoon is spent in the murky waters of
Ruins of Runkarankay
Presumably a military post (Based on this sutiation with view on 2 mountain passes) and possibly a resting post for Incas the hot springs before a LONG journey back to Cusco by train, involing 1 hour of to-ing and fro-ing whilst shifting tracks to descend into the city at the end!
Back in Cusco, we visit San Fransisco Monastery (private tour and lots of bones!) before Laurent is gripped by a cold and temperature as well as the old headache, and M is up for 2 nights with terrible cramps to accompany the "turista" (runs - bad!) which have been slowly getting worse for 3 weeks now (I will forego the detail but suffice to say that fortunately, our friend Immodium was with us on the trail!). Finally M succumbed to antibiotics and now (a few days later) all is sorted - yay!
We buy our ticket to depart next day for Puno on Lake Titicaca and feeling rubbish, we can't wait to leave!
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Martin Shaw
non-member comment
It all looks spectacular - keep the news coming!
Photos look fantastic and it sounds like you're having a great time. It's really a pleasure to read this stuff as the weather and nights close in here in the UK. Just stop making me jealous!