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I am just back in Cuzco from an amazingly hard, life-affirming type 3 day trek in the Sacred Valley to Machu Picchu. I think we trekked about 35kms in all, what´s that, about 22 miles? And doesnt every single muscle, ligament, bone and fibre in my body know it today. Which is why myself and one of my trekking buddies, Libby, were in the local biker bar drowning our pain in Blue Curacao yesterday, and are shortly to continue tonight, as I bus out to La Paz tomorrow and will go back to work at Los Tiempos for another month. I tried to leave today - I still really miss Bolivia and I cant take any more of this high altitude shit - but due to some big road blockades down south I have to wait until tomorrow night now. I also was due to stop in La Paz for a while on my way but I will go straight to CBBA as I am tentatively pencilling in an amazon river trip from rurrenabaque with my friends from El Puertito, Alexis and Jonny, which means going to Ruure from La Paz, so I may get a chance then. And I need a break from this lack of air.
First off, I think Cuzco is a great city but spoiled by the tourist scene, and there is far too much coke here too. I cant understand why people pay all this money and spend all tihs time to come all this way only to sit in an Irish bar and then snort coke off their bedroom floor with teenagers from posh boarding schools. Though I have been drinking in the irish bars with my friends here which is fun, but not constantly.
In Cuzco you can see lots of astounding original Inca walls that have withstood several huge earthquakes due to their amazingly clever - yet simple - construction (the Lord Of The Earthquakes is Cuzco´s patron saint - he is black and he hangs in the Cathedral surrounded by colourful lillies) and conquistador-time churches, and my favourite, lots of conquistador-time religious art. I visited the museum of religious art and had a free tour, and the tour guide even let me sit in one of those old fashioned wooden throne thingys carried on peóple´s shoulders, which was only ever used by SÃmon Bolivar, the guy who liberated Peru and Bolivia from the Spanish. What an amazong thing to sit in his chair (the guide wasnt allowed to let anyone sit in it but I had been helping him with his english so with a bit of, "por favour, para su profesora", he gave in.) But it is hard to enjoy Cuzco with all the bastard tourists hanging around with their North Face trekking coats and llama jumpers. Also, at this altitude, the air is thin, so I have not been able to catch my breath and this is mildly distressing. However, I had a good time hanging around with Jesus again and Gali and Libby, with whom I went to Machu Picchu with and endured the scary as fuck trek with, so even though we part soon, probably forever as they´re from good old Melb in Oz, I´ll always miss them.
As the Inca Trail , the original and best trek that most people want to do to get up to Machu Picchu which is at very high altitude and covers some of the actual Inca Trail built by the Inca themselves, was fully booked until October, I found an alternative trek, the Inca Jungle trek, 4 days and 3 nights for USD170 including board, food, entry to Mapi and a proper guide. I booked with Libby and Guli, my friends who I met through Jesus in the hostel here in Cuzco, and we´d spent a few days hanging out together and I discovered two true kindred spirits (albeit two fucking dirty smelly pottymouthed badly behaved ones... exactly my type of friend!!) with excellent taste in music and generally fabulous personalities, so I was sure we´d have fun on the trail. But I somehow didn´t figure on how physically and mentally demanding it was going to be, probably because our guide, Raymer, told us it was all at under 2500 feet, more than half the altitude of Cuzco, so I just thought, if there´s air, it will all be fine.
The trek involved walking 7 or 8 hours the first day, covering about 23kms uphill into the mountains along the river Urubamba to Santa Teresa to a hot spring in which we were going to soak our aching bodies. The second day more of the same (covering about 16kms in about 6 hours of walking) but on slightly flatter ground, between valleys and along the river through tropical terrain. The third day involved walking for about 6 or so hours again, along train tracks (avoiding the trains) through the jungle up to Aguas Calientes, and the last day involved an "easy" hour or so walk up the machu picchu mountain to the lost city itself. I think in all we must have walked about 60 miles or more!!
On the night before leaving for the trek, we met our guide, the fabulous Ray, with whom we were all a bit taken largely because of his rather pleasing face and his gentle manner. He made it sound easy - he likes to use the words "flat", "not far" and "not long" but I soon discovered that Ray, lovely as he is, divides everything in his head by three before telling us. Therefore, if he said we were only walking for an hour, we were walking for only 3 hours. Solo tres horatitas. Qué facil!
The bus ride to the first village we were staying at was stunning and death defying in equal parts. First, the road the bus usually takes there, through the mountains, was on divert due to a recent landslide, so our route on a crowded public bus took 14 hours instead of 7. It was supposed to take ten. I love riding the bus so I didnt mind the time really, but what I did mind was the bus racing along the cliff edge as we ascended into the mountains - no, you dont understand, ALONG THE CLIFF EDGE, AS IN, THE WHEELS WERE ON THE EDGE - as we clung to hairpin bend after hairpin bend, crunching to a halt to let oncoming juggernauts or camiones full of people pass. I was sat on the window seat of course, giving a unforgettably, breathtakingly beautiful widescope view of the sacred valley in all its mysterious, sun drenched, colourful glory, but concurrently making me promise God I would hand over the rest of my days to his service if he would just carry me and my friends to our destination alive. Looking down was like looking out of a plane window from 30,000 feet, and the windows opened so the wind and dust blew freely into my face. I was sweaty of palm and shitty of pant. For the duration. I was praying we would get there before dark but we had to keep stopping to let trucks pass so the last half was in pitch darkness. Which would have been sweet relief (not to be able to see out) except that our driver then had to reverse round the cliff edge and haripin bends, in the dark, to let more trucks pass. REVERSE AROUND THE CLIFF EDGES AND HAIRPIN BENDS IN THE DARK. IN THE DARK. IN THE DARK. CLIFF EDGES. CLIFF EDGES. HAIRPIN BENDS. HAIRPIN BENDS. CERTAIN DEATH. CERTAIN DEATH. Ive ridden a lot of buses in South America, in many countries all over the planet: I love it and even the cliff hanger ones in Bolivia never made me feel unsafe. But this one did. However, I was repaid for my brass bollocks with picture postcard, national geographic channel views of the lonely altiplano mountains, farmed for thousands of years for quinoa, maize, corn and other things, with huge scars from crop rotation and zig zagged inca trails now traversed by llamas, and later as we descended into cloud forest and amazon rainforest (I think its the amazon... need to check), huge bamboo stands along the road brushing my face as I hung my head out of the window, and low hanging banana trees bearing green fruit as we followed the course of the rushing river below, flanked by rock towers bigger than any mind can imagine without seeing in person, covered in lush green jungley stuff, with heavy clouds clinging to the tops. We passed the occasional hut by the roadside where I spied the odd jungle boar, with tusks and speckled fur, running around chasing a dog, itself being chased by a couple of tiny dark skinned kids in mucky tracksuits, who when they saw us coming, fled to the safety of the hut and then peered out from behind frightened, curious eyes, one head on top of the other. The raod was bumpy too and I felt for Libby, who is carrying a broken arm and for whom every single bump is transferred straight into her cast and into the pins holding her arm together. She never complained. Eventually we reached our destination, the village of Quillabamba deep in the Sacred Valley, and after Ray kindly hunted down a late (11.39pm!) dinner of fried eggs and green rice, and TEA! we crashed out to one of my all time favourite sounds - tropical insects chirruping and crickets outside. After freezing to death in Cuzco, I felt so much more happier to be in the tropics, feeling the humidity settling on my skin as I fell into a deep sleep.
I am proud to say that I was the first to wake up and get dressed at 5 am, and after a quick breakfast in a local cafe (and a lot of staring from the locals) and our last wee stop for several hours, we set off to walk into the ancient tropical jungle mountains, alongside the Urumbamba river, on what we thought was a piss easy flat dirt road. At that time in the morning it is still cool, though humid too, and the clouds were draped low over the village, dispensing a light drizzle. Then we reached a pretty much derelict village (still inhabited) which Ray told us was washed out by the last El Niño, in 1997. Then we walked into lush, dense jungle, passing through coca plantations with morning dew drops hanging heavily from every leaf, and began a seemingly gentle, but ever more punishing ascent into the high passes on a rough and rocky path. We rose with the clouds.
It wasnt long until I was totally knackered. Although the path was actually quite easy, it was a steady ascent on an uneven road and it was getting hotter. Even if I am kind to myself, I am in all honesty totally unfit and lardy, and my only trekking experience was last year when Hayley and I walked up to Seven Stairs Waterfall in Romania, which was long but not hard really. But this was hard. I could feel my chest tighten with every step, my throat burning as I tried to get more air into my lungs, and my knees beginning to moan. But we all kept going, steadily, though I had to take regular stops. Later on, my guide could see that I was struggling, and took my backpack for me (we had to carry all our stuff ourselves, which was not as hard as it sounds because I brought only my daypack and very little stuff, but with the compbination of lardyness, heat, and graviational pull, it was unbearable. It got better when Ray took my pack (I felt guilty but he insisted, and he is used to carrying a hell of a lot more when he works the Inca Trail treks, where porters have to carry huge backpacks, cooking stuff, and tents on thier backs for 5 days at high altitude), but it kept getting hotter and the shade from the vegetation eventually disappeared as we came onto the high pass on the very side of the mountain, with the full force of the elements on our faces. On our way we only came across one person, an old man called Alberto who can slumped in the middle of the path perched against the stone wall, picking corn from a blanket of cobs to be dried. He looked so cool - he was dressed in very worn clothes all made of patches, and had one of those national geogrpahic faces wrinked frrom age and sun. After a brief hello we were on our way again (myself and Libby wwre a good ten minutes behind everyone else) and we finally reached a miniscule hamlet perched on the mountainside called Q´ellumayu where we stopped for lunch, though I concentrated on recovering and taking photos of the beautiful flowers with the backdrop of the tropical mountains, trying out my skill with the extreme close up facility that allowed me to capture the morning dew on the plants.
Later on we came to the hardest part of the trek by far. We joined the original Inca Trail: that is, the step carved out of the rock face by Incas themselves, thousands of years ago. I think the Incas , if they were around today, would be the creators of the Extreme Olympics: they would have been leaders in all extreme adrenaline sports. These steps were built on the very edge of the mountain, and are well under one metre wide, clinging perilously to the egde with a sheer drop of I dont know how many hundreds of metres to the river valley below. Did I mention they are on the cliff edge? They dont really need to be there - they could be at the top or maybe they could be wider so you can walk further away from the edge. But no, the Incans in their wisdom, after doing a massive recce on their landscape, the terrain, the rock, and doing lots of calculations before building, decided it would be best to build the Inca Trail exactly and precisely flush with the FUCKING AIR. We were rock climbing with no equipment, in many ways. I didnt realise this would be part of the trek (what, then, DID I think would be meant by Inca Trail? A wooden escalator?) and I had forgotten my extreme vertigo which makes me want to jump off anything high, with a pull of such force that I can easily freak out. I just took it very slowly, clinging to each little jagged bit of the rock face that I could find and fixing my gaze on my feet, so as to take each measured step onto each measured area, literally at some points sitting down to do this. I have officially never been that scared before. I was frightened. Every so often my brain reauested recce information on my landscape status so my eyes automatically looked out to the view, to size up the rest of the work in front of me: they did this without my permission and every single time I had a tiny inner freak out when my brain took in the size of the landscape, the height, the drop, and the distance to go with the rest of the Inca Trail in front of me snaking round more perilous mountain passes that went on further than the horizon. I didnt know how I was going to do it but somehow my brain and my body focused on the job and I just powered on.
What made it a bit worse was the fact that, inexplicably, on this day of all days, there was a gang of roadbuilders working at the bottom of our mountain, blowing it up with successive and unrelenting TNT explosions. These not only threw up a huge cloud of dust but also made a huge sonic boom which reverberated around the surrounding mountains, doing a 360 around all our heads as we clung to the mountains and prayed for our lives. I cannot describe to you the feeling and experience of trying to climb a mountain on inca steps while youre being blown up by TNT. I just blocked it out and thought about other shit.
At one point I came to a stop when the path became impossibly narrow and the steps, worn with age, were so smooth they were almost round, so I was sure I could never make it safely. Ray took my hand tightly and practically ran across them, leading me at a similar pace as every single cell and amoeba in my body pulled sharply to the right (the wall side) and screamed STOP YOU STUPID EEGIT, YOU´RE GOING TO DIE, GO HOME, GO HOME. At that point, Ray was, and is, my hero. How that man has the cojones to run across those steps, with some english twat like me in hand, and then go back to rescue a second blubbering girl, I honestly cant figure it out. I felt like such a pussy needing his help there but I just couldnt do it without him. After that I did manage to walk the rest of it myself by just focusing in my feet and somehow I found myself saying over and over, wispering through laboured beathing, "ok, ok, ok, ok"...
After we descended off the trail, we walked a few more hours through lush forest by the river - crossing the river by an extremely cool hanging crate which is operated by a person at each side of the river pulling a rope with the tiny crate attached, and you in the crate passig high over the river - passing spectacularly beautiful folds of volcanic rock in all the colours of the rainbow, evidencing the pressure and stress the rock had been through as it oozed into its current shape, and eventually reached our oasis, the natural thermal springs at Santa Teresa, at nightfall. By that time, we had somehow forgotten the trauma of the day and I did something I havent done since I was a pre-teen - walked towards the spring taking off my clothes, with my bathers underneath, and simply jumped in, no prancing or preening, no does my bum look big in this, just a straight easy walk into the springs, which were georgously hot. As the sun had set, the full moon came out from behind the cloud, to luminate the towering mountains in front of us in the valley, and the stars blinked down as we splashed in the pool. It was magical. There was even a big hot rock on which I stood up and pranced like an eegit in my mix-match stripey-polka dot bikini, but stopped when the male contingent of the pool started whistling loudly at me and Gali started singing, "It´s raining mel, hallelujah, its raining mel, amen..." we rode home a couple of hours later in a camion, basically a big wooden truck with an open top which is used for transporting animals and humans, with the starts shining at us and thankfully no view of the probably staggering drop from the road. A friend of mine in CBBA told me that the trek was spiritual: this first day proved her right. In fact, scaling a sheer cliff face on the side of an ancient mountain range with no protection and the world´s worst attack of vertigo kind of makes a girl go into her head and think about a lot of big questions: que sera,sera? does my arse look big in this? when´s dinner? etc. I thought a lot about stuff, nothing Im willing to divulge here though, but I came up with no solutions anyway. You know when youre about to be hit by a bus and your life flashes in front of zour ezes in a few seconds? my life was not so much flashing in front of my eyes, more sort of oozing past as if time was slowing down and i was about to suffer a long fall and a slow death. But I was kind of busy focusing on putting one foot in front of the other on the perilously steep, slippery, at-right-angles-with-the-mountain-cliff-face Inca Steps to really be clear about things. But being in that situation did make me think about all the Incas that had to cross the whole path on their own, maybe in the wind or the rain, and having mountainside visions. I understood after that the concept of Pachamama, of the gods being the mountains and the rivers, being the givers and the takers. After that we all slept like babies and Libby, Gali and I bought ourselves bottles (glass not plastic! much tastier) of coke and twixes and got into our really cosy beds, stuffed our faces and passed out.
The next day we had another early morning leaving for breakfast at 7ish and then heading onto a path following the river up in to machu Picchu mountain. We had to cross the river again in one of those cool hanging crate things, but i crashed into the other side and have a spectacluar blue bruise on my leg as proof. As we started the incline up into the mountains again, passing more waterfalls, banana trees and trying not to get sunburnt by the strong high altitude sun, i saw peeking out behind the craggy horizon the peak of a huge snow capped mountain in the far distance. Much like in Monty Pythons The Holy Grail when graham chapman is running up the hill to the medieval wedding and they alwazs seem to be just about to crash it, but thez keep running and they never get there, well walking on this day felt like that: the mountain alwazs seemd close enough to touch but was always far off. After a couple of hours we came to the sidings end of the train track for the train that runs between aguas calientes and cuzco and stopped there for lunch. As we left, Raz told us to look up at the mountain we were about to climb... and we had our very first glance of the mighty ancient citadel, Machu Picchu, tinz in the high distance. I took a photo to magnify it and saw perfectlz square stone terraces and roofless houses that looked exactly like out of the photos. Then we walked about four or five hours directly on the train tracks, through dense jungle with lots of tropical flowers and fruits, sunlight pealing through the trees, passing rivers and waterfalls. After the first hour and a half treading the wooden sleepers foot by foot, I went into a bit of a trance and walked them automatically. As we approached a train tunnel that we had to walk through we looked up again and saw, through sweaty, knackered eyes, a tantalisingly close view of more of the Machu Picchu complex. Eventually, after narrowly missing being ploughed down by an oncoming train with only a tiny thicket to step into, we arrived at Aguas Calientes, the town that seems to have been created solely to accommodate the throngs of tourists who make the pilgrimage to Mapi, by foot or by bus, at the foot of the Mapi mountain. It was the first tourists we had seen since we left cuzco - a very strange feeling to return to civilisation after two idyllic, but at times difficult, days in the wilderness, just our little group of 6.
Rising at 3.15am after the best shower I have had in weeks - a truly hot shower, amazing!! - we trundled out in the pitch darkness, the full moon shining down, behind Ray out of the town and into the pathwaz leading into the mountain, wihch Ray assured us was an "easy walk" of about one hour on some "stairs". Looking up at the mountain the night before, which was nothing less than a cloud-brushing stone colossus, I knew that was another of our guides white lies. And indeed it proved fucking hard: libbz in her cast and me in my lard state laboured at a snails pace up the many endless stone steps, at just about an awkward enough incline to make it extremely hard on my already shit knees, we heaved our asses up an unrelenting upward path in the dark for about two hours. By the time we got to the top the sun was rising and I was panicking that we wouldnt make it to Mapi on time to see the sun rise over the complex, wihch was the entire reason for the trek. And we nearly didnt: inexplicably, gali and the two other girls, initiallz powering ahead of Libby and I so far that we lost sight of them early on, were nowhere to be seen when raz, L and I finallz reached the entrance to the site. We waited for about 25 minutes and eventually they arrived but were pretty disgruntled to see that the lard arses had beat them even though we had been behind them, and there is only one path and we never saw them - and we never overtook them. Magic of the Incas maybe... but definitely not cheating as gali thought! As we surveyed the range and the complex from the top of the mountain, it was worth the work, gawping at the sight of whatever creators work from as close to heaven as i have ever been without being in a plane, seeing the shaves of sunlight slowly pouring over the mountains and directly into the ancient stone dwellings, illustrating some pretty perfect mathematical equations that the architects of this place had done before building.
As we walked round to the terraces, perfectly curved and geometrically pleasing to the eye, we perched on a high one with a range of snowy peaks to our left and gazed down onto Mapi from a distance as the sun rose. There were a lot of groups but it was very quiet, the only sound being that of people thinking to themselves, "fuck. im in machu picchu." (and gali thinking, "whats for lunch"). Pictures a plentz ensued of course, and ray finally let us stop and relax without his familiar, "vamos girlfriends!".
After chilling out a bit Ray was back on form and led us down into the complex itself for a tour. I feel I need to buy a book about it because the tour could only scratch the surface of the depth of history, science and culture that constitute the story of machu picchu. As we were led round the entrance to the citadel and around, and into, some of the dwellings, we learned about the technical brilliance - and mystery - behind their construction. The houses for ordinary people are made from hand siyed stones cut from a quarry near the site, and have room for livestock inside the house: the collection of religious temples around the site are distinguished by huge stones, as big as a small horse sometimes, beautifully and technically carved into perfect blocks with bevelled edges that fit into one another perfectly, and to save them from destruction by earthquakes, these stones are made in a sort of 3-d triangular shape - i dont know the technical term - then when laid press inwards against one another so that the outside of the building has flat sides but is slightly sloped inwards. This means the bricks press against each other and strengthen the overall construction. Genius. Other houses had doors that seemed far too tall for anz peruvian : these turned out to be houses of noblemen, soldiers that had defended the Incas and had been made into men of wealth and standing in Mapi, who seemed to always be unusually tall. Their houses even had en suites.
Throughoiut the complex, there were what seemed to the naked eye a collection of huge, randomly shaped stone carved monoliths. We learned that these in fact replicated the shape of the surrounding mountain ranges: standing back and taking in the background with the carvings, I was astouneded to see that this was exactly the case. This reflects the Inca belief in Pachamama - the gods being the mountains, the rivers, the skies. There was even an ancient sundial. And a sprinkling of llamas loafing around in various states of loafery.
I dont know yet how many kms we did or how high up we were, but I will find out and add the stats here for gloating purposes. After the end of this trek, I felt glad I could do such hardcore physical work, and I now worship my Vans, which took me through with no problem.
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danielsemper
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hey
So, are you back to Cochabamba in July 4th? PD.- I found an expertise Spanish teacher that knows english.