El Camino Inca to Machu Picchu

Hi Everyone! Did you miss me? :) I would have written earlier, but I was in an internet cafe next to an Irish girl having skype issues with her boyfriend and I thought I was going to go mental! But I´m in a nice spot now...so let´s do this! I have so much to tell you!

Yesterday morning the porters woke us up in our tents at 4am. It was dark and wet, from raining all night. I had completely given up on not being disgusting, and had opted to sleep in my outfit for the day...which was a LOT like my outfit from the day before :) Yummy!

Typically we would get ¨tea in tent¨, but we needed to get breakfast and hit the trail early to beat the crowds. The last day of hiking was relatively easy, the only real problem was that I thought if I took one more step downwards my calves were going to explode! But the goal was in sight, so we hiked an hour to the Sun Gate (check out the view here), and then another hour or so down to Machu Picchu.

I have to tell you that when we first arrived I definitely wasn´t ¨basking in it`s wonder¨, as I had previously predicted on my travel itineary. In fact, there was so much cloud cover, that in our ¨postcard-view group shot¨ you can´t see anything but 11 people that look they smell with a white backdrop. Sweet dude!! Then my spirit was further sucked out of my body as I waited in the line for the bathroom for 30 mins! I was like, ¨WTF? I hiked 4 days in the beating sun and pouring rain to get to a glorified Kings Dominion - lots of buses and awkward-looking people with fanny packs, buying water for 5 times the reasonable price!¨

But by the time our trail guide had taken us around the grounds and helped us understand what life may have been like in the time of the Incas, the clouds had completely cleared. Which meant one thing...I needed to walk all the way back up to the view point to get the ¨real deal¨ view I so desperately needed (see here). So I wheezed myself back up to the top, turned around, and then...then I was blown away. I took a bunch of photos with my friends and once they went to catch the bus I just sat there for 20 mins staring. I didn´t want to leave. I wanted to keep enjoying that brief moment of complete contentment and peace - letting go of all that´s happened in the past and not worrying about anything that might happen in the future. It´s funny how a place or a song or a sunset can do that. And for an over-thinking, crazy person like myself, this is a rare and wonderful occurence! Ahhhh....

Now let´s rewind a little. I skipped to ¨the good part¨ because Machu Picchu is the part we all know. But I must say that the Inca Trail and journey to get there was just as beautiful, fun, and rewarding. Some of my groupmates might argue with me on that one, but I do come from the philosophy of ¨no pain, no gain¨. I´m a jock...If I don´t believe that, then I´m pretty much an idiot for all the hellish things I´ve done to myself over the years. :)

So a little about El Camino Inca...As I said before it´s a 4 day hike, with Day 2 being the most challenging by far! In total we hiked about 28 miles, reaching the highest point in the middle of Day 2 (Dead Woman´s Pass) at an elevation of 4,200 meters or 13,776 ft. We started at 8,502 ft, so it was quite the hike upward. (Random note: I´m the only person in my group that´s not on the metric system, so I never really know how much anything weighs or what temperature it is. I know, I could easily learn the conversions, but I´m lazy and really don´t care! :P)

I have to say that I underestimated the physical challenge of the hike, but we stopped many times to catch our breath along the way, and the lunches and dinners were so amazing (I can´t stress that point enough) that it gave you extra motivation to get to the next campsite. So about this camping and eating...You may be wondering, ¨Are there sites already set up with restuarants. etc?¨ NO! For the 11 hikers in our group, we had 2 guides, 2 chefs, and 16 porters that accompanied us through the Andes. And what did they bring? Well, all our clothes, sleeping bags, and air mattressess (up to 12 lbs per person)...all the tents we slept in...the tents we ate in, the tables we ate on, the chairs we sat on, the cooking tent, food for 3.5 days, a stove, an oven, the list goes on. The point I´m trying to make here is that the porters - farmers, age 21-57, from nearby cities that do this to make about $50 US dollars plus tips, ARE AMAZING! They woke up early to make breakfast, and once we ate, they cleaned up the entire site and then passed us on the way to the next one. They would beat us there by 1-2 hours and have the entire site set up with lunch prepared. And once we were done stuffing ourselves beyond belief with fresh veggies, rice, soup, quinua bread, stuffed chicked with spinach and cheese, stir-frys, curried chicken, beaf, lemon cake, crepes, poached pears in red wine, tea, hot chocolate...I can´t even begin to list all the wonderful food we ate over the 3 days, they would do it all over again for evening tea and snacks...and then dinner! They worked so hard that the last night when we did introductions and I tried to thank them in my broken Quecha and Spanish, I almost started to cry. I´m sure that´s no surprise for anyone that´s seen me speak publically before (God I´m annoyingly sensitive!), but it was really sad to see how hard the people outside the cities have to work, and at the same time, so inspiring to see all that they could accomplish...and with the biggest smiles you´ve ever seen.

I feel like this entry could go on forever...and I know you all have lives and work, but the scenery is definitely worth mention (I´m sparing you the bit on the toilet situation, which was very colorful to say the least. And apparently the older I get the smaller my bladder becomes, so I had a lot of fun crawling out of my tent and using the natural bathrooms in the middle of the night with my headtorch on!). Oh yea, I was sparing you that part...The scenery was different than what I had imagined, and extremely diverse. We started on a dirt path lined with cacti and rocks, which turned into stone steps and bush covered mountains. Once we got to the other side of Dead Woman´s Pass we were in hardcore rainforest, walking through rain under canopies of lush greens, and walking down stone steps with water trickling around your feet. On Day 3 and 4 most of the trail was original and was like a cobblestone path with stone steps. It was all so breath-taking. I took 300 photos in the 3.5 days (and that was only because I was being conservative because I lost one of my camera batteries). I think the most beautiful vista was when we arrived at the camp after our tough Day 2 around 5:30pm. We were getting organized in our tents as the sun began to set behind snow-capped mountains in the distance. So gorgeous...

So yea, I´m kind of puttering out here. I knew this would be a hard entry to write because there is SO much to tell, but the bottom line is that I had a WONDERFUL time and am almost certain that the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu will in fact be the highlight of my trip. A guy that couldn´t go on the trek because he fell ill asked me if I´d do it again. I hesitated before answering yes because at the time I was running on hardly any sleep and couldn´t feel my body, but my answer one day later (with 3 hours sleep and a hangover, mind you...happy halloween! haha) is a very enthusiastic YES!