20: the final adventure (part 3)

I woke at some despicably early hour to the sound of someone stamping up and down the hotel stairs wearing a pair of giant concrete boots. After a lovely cold shower (just what was needed after two days of hiking and no sleep) we headed down to breakfast, where Fernando was already there nursing a cup of coffee, also having had no sleep.

The bus took us on a winding road from Aguas Calientes up to Machu Picchu. The site was breathtaking. Fernando gave us a pretty comprehensive history of the site as we sheltered from the sun, before taking us on a walk up to the famous viewing point. Somehow, after this, I got lost.

just some llamas and an old wooden bridge...

I could have sworn Fernando said that we would now be walking to the Inca Bridge, and I trundled up some steps after him and the others. As I looked behind me, I saw the rest of the group preparing to set off, and carried on, taking my time to get up the steps. When I got to the top, no one was there. It was almost as if aliens had landed and taken everyone away. In the hope of catching them up, I followed the signs to the Inca Bridge, telling a lady along the way that I had lost my group and had she seen them. "They went that way!" she said cheerfully. So I continued on, on my own, on a narrow path round the side of the mountain. I saw a few people along the way, but nothing like a group. I realised I had reached the end of the path. There was no one there, apart from three llamas. I realised that it had been nearly an hour since I had lost them, and so I turned back.

I returned to the place where I had last seen everyone, and sat on a long flat stone overlooking the view. As places go to wait for someone, it wasn't a bad one. I sat for another half an hour, looking over the site and thinking about my trip; where I had been, who I had met, and what would happen when I got home.

After a while I found them, using my zoom lens as a telescope, and we walked back to the cafe at the site entrance for an amazingly expensive lunch, before heading back into Machu Picchu for some free time. Amy took me round the bits I had missed and we climbed back up to the viewing spot. The light had changed as the afternoon wore on, and it was the golden hour for photos. Pete appeared from behind us, having climbed up to visit the Sun Gate, and we all walked back down to the cafe for Pisco and passion fruit cocktails.

cuy!

That evening we celebrated in a local restaurant, all warm and aching and pleased with ourselves for having made it. This far, at least. There was still the small matter of getting out of Aguas Calientes with no transport, as the trains were now on strike.

High spirits meant most people had hangovers the next morning, so we enjoyed coffee at a late-ish hour at a street cafe while Lola inflicted on Mark some punishing stretches. Our only option for getting out of the town was to walk down the train tracks, so we set off at about 11am and followed them along the river, stopping very occasionally but basically marching as fast as we could. By this point, we were really very tired, I could hardly lift my boots; but we carried on, buoyed by the scenery: the roaring river, the butterflies and the giant smooth rocks.

After a break on a bridge to eat our sandwiches, we finally came to our destination point, where we were to be picked up by bus and taken back to Cusco. There was some sort of mix up with timings, and we waited for what seemed like hours for it to turn up. Lola suggested we play a game, so we all wrote names of famous people on a piece of paper and stuck them to the forehead of the person next to us. The idea was you had to guess who you were: I was Michael Jackson, which, for reasons I won't try to explain here, brought me down a bit.

the terror begins

Finally the bus turned up, clearly too small to take all of us, but somehow we all crammed in, with Fernando and Henry jumping on the top with the bags. Now, I'm usually quite relaxed when it comes to taking risks and throwing myself down holes etc, but this was to be the beginning of what I can only describe as one of the most hair raising journeys I have ever been on. The roads were blocked along the direct path back to Cusco, so our only option was to take the mountains, round the back and to the north of where we were.

Our tiny bus shuddered along a mountain path hewn out for lorries, teetering on the edge of a giant, thundering chasm, at the bottom of which seethed an enormous river. The road was still under construction, and at one point we found ourselves passing a JCB at a non-existent passing point. We eventually made it to a small inconsequential town where we changed buses for a larger and much more comfortable one.
We eventually got back on a mountain road, sometimes not much better than the quarry one we had begun the journey along. There were occasional signs denoting landslide danger, and a few points where the weight of our bus caused rocks and dry earth to come tumbling down the mountain walls that were very close to the road.

For six hours we wound up and down the mountains, at our highest point reaching Abra Malaga at 4,300m, into and above the clouds. The moon was full, and it created a very strange atmosphere, being so high up, and so far away from everything and everyone else. As we neared the end of the journey and passed from the mountains on to a flatter road, we passed through roadblocks made of giant smoking tree trunks and boulders. The mountainside at Ollantaytambo was still on fire.

our last, happy, day in Cusco

After the longest shower ever taken, the rest of our time in Cusco was spent eating giant late breakfasts, shopping for alpaca hats, and treating ourselves to a massage. We said goodbye to everyone at an appropriately Irish pub (specifically chosen for Amy) and headed back to Lima, where we visited the Museum of the Inquisition, to get us into the spirit of coming home.

Amy and I settled in with the lovely landlord and his lady in Lima, who looked after us brilliantly for our last couple of nights. As a treat, we took ourselves to the Rosa Nautica, a posh restaurant at the end of the pier. Sadly, while the food was good, the service wasn't - which was very surprising given our impression of the people in Peru until that point.

It's hard for me to work out how to finish this blog. I've written it more for me to remember everything I did rather than to go on to everyone about the wonderful adventures I've had. I needed to go away, to get away from problems I can't solve and to give me a chance to re-set myself. I can't promise it's worked, and I can't say I know any more now about where I'm going next. But I've reminded myself that I'm actually a bit of an adventurer... and you can travel down any uncertain path, as long as you've got a good pair of boots.

19: the final adventure (part 2)

It was an incredibly bad night's sleep. When we woke, everything outside of our sleeping bags was crispy with the cold. I put my walking clothes inside my sleeping bag to attempt to warm them before I put them on and got up before we were woken up. There was frost on everything, and all the dogs that had been hanging around the night before were still there to greet us in the morning. As Fernando came round and woke everyone with a cup of hot chocolate, the clear morning disappeared and we were enveloped with a cloud.

We had breakfast of omelette and coca tea and got packed up. The journey in front of us was to be approximately 3 hours uphill. Luckily my headache had disappeared, and I realised that the day before I perhaps had descended down the mountain too fast. Chris was not so lucky, having been sick in his tent that night and was feeling very ill indeed.

I felt I had learned something about pace from the previous day, and went very slowly, discovering that it was easier to shuffle rather than try and push yourself only to feel exhausted every few metres. Chris was really sick. He was shaking and couldn't warm up. Jasmine luckily had a heat pad which we stuck on his back, but everyone was pretty worried about him. Fernando gave him a rehydration drink which he insisted he was drinking (but didn't), and we ended up putting him on Kiki.

at the top, looking back over the path we had climbed

We walked from camp to the pass at Wacaywasicassa (4,600m) in 2 1/2 hours, and it was still a hard push, but much more manageable. There was also something psychologically helpful about the clouds hanging on top of us; it meant that we were unable to keep looking upwards at our destination and could only put walking goals as far as we could see them.

We spent half an hour at the top, eating floury red apples and cheese sandwiches, and our guides played some pipes which echoed through the mountains in an eerie but inevitably rather cheesy way.

Ahead of us was a beautiful glacial lake, and a path wound down the other side of the path towards it. I took a much slower pace to avoid the headaches of the day before. Beyond the lake, the landscape began to change from the rather barren dirt we had been used to to a mountain forest, cut through with rivers and waterfalls. We wound down the forest path to Miskyuno, our final camp (4,100m) for a delicious lunch of pasta and salad. By this point, Chris was really very sick, and he lay on the tarp with our bags almost unconscious. Luckly Lola was a doctor and kept an eye on him, but there was no question that we needed to get him down the mountain as soon as we could.

The final part of the journey felt endless. We wound down a very rocky road through the forest, endlessly twisting backwards and forwards down through a crack in the mountains. The rocks on the path were ankle-twistingly, neck-breakingly huge, and the impact of crashing your feet between them was, after several hours, painful. We finally reached our destination: what appeared to be someone's front garden in Yanahuana (2,900m) and lay on the grass playing with dogs and puppies. The cooks prepared a final meal for us and, and as Amy was poised to eat her well-deserved chocolate pudding, she looked over to see the big male dog peeing on her bag. Given this, she was surprisingly good-humoured!

Due to the strikes going on we were going to have problems with transport, so Fernando asked us to separate out the clothes we would need into our rucksacks; our larger duffel bags going back to Cusco that night. Beginning to freeze again, we finally got on our bus back to Ollantaytambo, where we boarded a train to Aguas Calientes. Because of the strike there were queues of people trying to buy tickets and to get on the train before everything stopped. There was a weird sense of Blitz spirit going on, and we found ourselves crossing the tracks with crowds of people, onto a train with no lights. The journey was slow, the power (or at least, the lights) kept going off, and the train stopped for long periods. I slid open the window to see what was going on and each time was treated to a thundering river dotted with giant boulders; a man wandering up and down the outside of the train shining a torch into hidden places. Aside from random lights inside the train and at various tunnels and wooden huts along the track, there was no light other than the moon, and the light on the river and the boulders was a weird sort of silvery grey.

When we finally arrived at Aguas Calientes, it was chaos getting off the train (not helped by the fact I forgot my walking sticks and got separated from the group as I went to retrieve them). Fernando had frantically tried to get us into a hotel and we sat in the lobby waiting to get our keys and desperate to have a shower, which, when we finally got into it, was cold. The next day would be our final adventure: Machu Picchu.

18: the final adventure (part 1)

the beginning

We had breakfast of a semi-warm pancake and some dry bread at about 5.30am. Some new members of our group, Mark and Lola, joined us for coffee, and our minibus hopped round a few more hotels to pick up a few more. We drove up about another 1,000 metres to Patacancha (3,900m), and hung around in an old football field while our donkeys trundled through the gates to be loaded up with our bags. Amy had brought some boiled sweets and we all bonded whilst attempting to suck the altitude out of our brains.

We set off, up what appeared to be a gentle incline at a gentle pace, only to be overtaken at speed by the donkeys and the porters. One donkey, Kiki, stayed behind with us, ready to help if anyone had any mishaps. We made our way up, stopping off at regular intervals to take a sip of water. On occasions small children with raw red cheeks and long trails of snot hanging from their noses would run up to us, and go away again satisfied with a piece of fruit or a biscuit. Our bodies didn't quite know what was going on. At points in the sunshine I was boiling just in a t-shirt, and then a cloud would roll in and I would scramble to put on a fleece.

an acceptable location for lunch

What had appeared to be a gentle slope was now presenting me with problems. Large strides were impossible, and it seemed I could only go a few metres without having to stop and catch my breath. The Korean ladies and Chris were racing ahead of us at the front and seemed not to be affected by the same physical constraints we were suffering from.

At 4,200 metres we spied in the distance a tent. As we approached, we saw that they had set up a tent for us to have lunch in. I had been ready for us to just sit around on the grass and eat sandwiches, but as I looked through the plastic window I saw a proper table, with cutlery and napkins all laid out. The chef even had a big white hat on. Given the circumstances, lunch  of spaghetti and vegetables was pretty amazing, and we had a very satisfied rest in the intermittent sunshine. We also had the pleasure of experiencing the toilet tent for the first time. The less said about that, the better.

After lunch we walked the remaining distance to Ipsaicocha pass, the highest point we would reach that day at 4,450 metres and 7km from where we had started. Pete and Chris decided it would be a good idea to climb up the hard way and scaled what I can only describe as a cliff face, while the rest of us ambled up the gentle way. Chris and Fernando raced each other the last few metres - something that Chris would live to regret.

Amy at the top of Ipsaicocha

At the top of the pass it was freezing. We raced to take some photos and headed a little further down to rest properly on a bit of flat green land. It was rather a magical place and reminded me of the lush mossy landscapes imagined in a fairy tale. The green was not grass, but some other plant that looked like thousands of tiny green flowers embroidered to the ground. The only problem was that when you sat on them, tiny unseen needles stabbed through your clothes, so people rolled on to the ground and then squealed as they were stuck with pins. That said, it was a lovely, peaceful few moments, laying in the sunshine and finally warm. I couldn't have felt further away from commuter trains or problems left behind.

Fernando promised us that most of the remaining day's journey was downhill. Going downhill was much more fun than going uphill, especially with walking poles, which essentially meant you could launch yourself downwards at speed without the fear of falling over. The earth on this side was very loose, and each footfall was at risk, as I found when a landed on my knees and nearly slid down the side of the mountain. We stopped to rest and felt the onset of dismay as we realised we were not as near camp as we had thought. We travelled a total of 3.5km from the pass to camp, the last part of that uphill. The atmosphere changed a bit between us, people becoming quiet and tired, and it was as we reached camp at Sandor (4,200m) that I started to feel the onset of altitude sickness in the form of most amazingly bad headache.

almost at camp

We all flopped into our tents to rest and warm up; I think I put on three layers of clothes. The food tent had been put up again and we crowded in to eat a dinner of trout, play cards and drink coca tea. My headache got so bad I could barely see, so I got into my sleeping bag, putting on more clothes, and attempted to warm up. Amy and I attempted to play Phase 10 but as she pointed out, I was "shit at altitude" so we attempted to get some sleep. It was about 7.30pm.