Pre-Trek Panic in Cusco

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Let's just say that our first impressions of Peru didn't exactly get much better anytime soon. Straight from the bus, we checked into a hotel called the Niños Hotel - a very pretty (and quite expensive in Peruvian terms) hotel run by a Dutch girl who uses the profits to provide street children and orphans with food, school supplies, sports lessons and healthcare. The woman has already adopted about 25 children and we thought it was a good cause so in the end it was money well-spent and a good place to have a nice sleep before supposedly setting off on the trek on Sunday morning.

Two representatives from the trekking agency arrived at 7pm South American time (ie 7:45pm) and we sat down to go through the route, what we needed to bring and to ask any 'last minute questions' to our guide. Once our guide arrived (stinking to death of garlic, I might add) he opened up the map, looked at it for a while, pointed out where Cusco was in relation to the rest of the map (this position would then change several times during the trek briefing) and then tried to find the route that we would be taking on the map. Great start.

After vaguely showing us a range of places that we may or may not go (yeah, er it depends, if you want then yeah, no problem), the hours that we may or may not walk each day (yeah maybe 5,6,7...maybe 3 hours) and the possible campsites that we may or may not want to stay at (yeah i think so, there is one here (points at one place on map) and one here maybe too (points about 10 km away on map)) we were getting a bit worried and politely stressed that we'd be happy to go along with what he thought but we'd kind of like to be sure that he knew the route and wouldn't get us lost! We had chosen an 'off the beaten track' trek which is only offered by this company (Apus Peru) and one other so there was a chance that we wouldn't actually see any other groups for 5 days and would be lost with this hopeless idiot for 5 days in the middle of nowhere. Oh and to add to that, we'd seen on the website that there was snow on the route and so asked about equipment that we needed and he wasn't sure whether there was snow or not (he changed from 'yes a little bit of snow, yes' to 'no, no problem, no more snow there' in about 5 minutes) so then the possibility of dying from hypothermia in some random with a guide called Felix (ironic?) also became a possibility.

Needless to say, we were really regretting shedding out nearly 500 dollars for a private trek but as we couldn't discuss it openly in front of him and because we were late to meet the Greek guy from the bus for dinner, we went along with him when he said 'Don't worry I'll decide for you, you are coming no problem!'

The next day after quite some mocking from the Greek guy and a really restless night for me i woke up at 7am and decided that there was no way I was going with Mr Idiot Felix El Gato (yes his nickname is apparently the Cat). So I got up and tried to contact the lady I had reserved with, an Australian lady who was, very helpfully, back in Australia for a month and uncontactable! So then I tried calling Felix and the other administrator (who was actually his sister!) on their landlines and mobiles (the 4 numbers I had) and found that the numbers were invalid.

Needless to say, when he turned up ready at 1pm we refused to go and told him that after his briefing there was no way that we were going with him on that trek. Incidentally, his sister had apparently also asked him what the hell was wrong with him the night before and he maintains to this day that he had been killing cockroaches and thinks the spray went to his head. So, they offered us a part-refund or to change to a more touristy trek where there would be other groups and we would at least have no worries about getting lost. After all the warning signs, you'd have thought we'd have run but it was something about a mixture of his sister crying telling us that 'she had been in charge of organising it and hated to see tourists having a bad time in Peru', Felix saying sorry and talking about cockroaches and us not wanting to lose money that made us decide to leave with him at 4am the following morning on the Salkantay Trek...

TO BE CONTINUED!!!

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