Inca Trail and Machu Picchu

Sooo, just finished the 4 day Inca trek and we are both absolutely cream crackered! But what an amazing experience. We chose to carry our own backpacks rather than inflict them on a porter - well, you need a challenge dont you.

Theres always the worry that you end up with a group of eejits but we had luck on that front. We had a perfect group - a mixture of canadians and English, oh and 1 Slovack.

Our guide, Edgar, was fantastic. A man with such pride in his ancestry and his culture. He made the whole experience come alive.

Day 1 was a real grind, a gentle introduction to the trail before dinner but then after that - good God man - we climbed upto 4200m. Step after step after step. We both almost died. Though we appreciated the fact that we had been at altitude and acclimatised before we started. Some of the people who had only really flown in for the trek suffered from the altitude for the first day.

The food was amazing, i think we ate more over the 4 days than in the previous 2 weeks. 3 big meals a day, including 3 course lunches and dinners. How the chef prepeared them in a small tent over gas stoves is a mystery. We even had fresh pasta one day! The chef is the top man, he controls all the porters and demands respect. He also gets tipped twice as much at the end. Worth every penny though.

The porters are unbelievable. Each day they waited till we had had breakfast and then took down all the tents, packed them away, and then wrapped them, all the cooking equipment, all the sleeping bags, the food, and all the cooking equipment into tarps and hauled them onto their backs. They wont use rucksacks, partly because they cant get them high enough on their backs. These guys are phenomenal. They are all about half my size (Paul obviously, we were not travelling with midgets), yet their strength was immense. I tried to lift one of their packs and could barely hold it. We would leave the camp about an hour before them and they would soon pass us, some of them running. They would get to camp about 2 hours before us and set up all the tents and start dinner. About 95% of their body mass seemed to be in their calf muscles. You never saw them in a bad mood or complaining, they were all like little kids, always messing about and giggling. At the end we were encouraged (as well as their tips) to give them socks (all used and smelly) or t-shirts. When they got them they were like kids at christmas, showing them to each other. Its very humbling to watch a 40 year old man getting excited about a pair of smelly socks.

I wont bore you with details of each day, but we passed some amazing Inca sites. Its a great experience to walk some of these sites without hordes of people. The amount of work and design that went into these structures must have been unbelievable. Even more startling when you realise they had no written language.

On the final day we got up at 3am and hit the trail at 4am. The final days walk to Machu Picchu was much different then the other days as there were many more people on the trek all racing to get to the site as early as possible. It was quite misty when we eventually turned the corner and got our first glimpse of Machu Picchu, but even so it takes your breathe away. Because it was early there was not too many people around and it was quite eerie looking down on this site surrounded by cloud forest. Difficult to express but hopefully some of the photos give you an idea.

Edgar gave us a 2 hour tour of the site and i cant express the difference having such a knowledgable and enthusiasitic guide makes to the Machu Picchu experience. We were pretty shot after the tour, and by that time the site was getting full of all the lazy people getting the bus up to the site or getting in from the 5 star hotel adjacent to it!

Enjoy the pics. We are off to the jungle for 7 days tomorrow (Manu Biosphere reserve). DEET at the ready......

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