Our journey begins with a knock at the door. “You guys up?” The answer was “no,” but really what came out was, “SHIT!”
The alarm didn’t go off at 3:30am as planned. Jason, Bridget, and I quickly grabbed our things and ran to the square for the bus to pick us up.
We were met with our first sight of about 16 porters clapping their hands. I thought they were clapping because we “finally” made it by being a few minutes late. But, this was a theme throughout the entire trail. Porters would cheer you in when you arrived at the camp, and we did the same for them when they passed us on the trail.
We had two guides, Roger, and his assistant Juan Jose (JJ). We ate breakfast at Ollantaytambo and then started our hike at Kilometer 82. Bridget had changed passports since we gave them her number, and had to pay a change fee for this, but we were set. And we began our hike!
The Beginning
At kilometer 82 the porters began to pack everything up. In the meantime, I was watching the locals play soccer above. I had even seen some kids playing soccer on a concrete yard at 4am. That’s love for the game.
We checked in at the park, and then began our hike. We walked over the Rio Urabamba river on a new bridge (the old one had gotten wiped out by the floods). This large river eventually feeds into the Amazon.
Day 1 we passed through a few different villages. You can definitely see why the locals fondly call the Inca Trail the “Gringo Trail” with the types of things the locals sell that are targeted towards tourist – Gatorade, soda, and the necessity, water.
Roger then proceeded to show us how to chew on coca leaves. Coca is good for high elevations as it’s similar to caffeine (except doesn’t dehydrate you), and keeps blood pumping through you, helping avoid altitude sickness. After chewing it for awhile, your lip goes numb… that’s how you know it’s really working!
To add to this, Roger was explaining the local flora. They found a frozen person, Juanita Mummy, who had a lot of the local hallucinogens (flowers, cacti, etc.) in her bloodstream. They used these plants in ancient traditions for sacrifice which anthropologists think may be related to the death of Juanita mummy.
We stopped at village, had our snack, and then kept trekking. It was neat to see the small villages and people. After about three hours of hiking, lunch was on the way. This was probably one of the most amazing sites. The porters, who hiked ahead of us, put up a tent, tables, and chairs for us. We sat down for lunch, and then they brought out the meal which was equally amazing. They even cooked vegetarian for Bridget and vegan for Chris. Nice.
We then began the second round of our hike, enjoying the beauty of the Andes’ mountains and local villages. We even saw from afar the Llactapata ruins until we arrived at our campsite for the night. The porters set up happy hour for us, which consisted mainly of popcorn, crackers, and hot chocolate. (It was pretty cold outside in the mountains.) We had dinner and then quickly went to bed. Day 2 was going to be our toughest hike – this was Dead Woman’s Pass and there was a 10 hour day ahead of us. The stars at night though were something that was a great site to see. We even on Day 3 were able to see the southern cross – pretty cool. We went to bed, and the hard ground, cool night, and upcoming hike didn’t set in well.
