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.