Chris's e-mail about the Inca Trail

Chris, Ana & I on the Inca Trail
Originally uploaded by Jane Rubio.

I had meant to write this yesterday when I got back from the trail, but it ultimately spread out over a number of days due to slow internet and a slow brain. Unfortunately, the memories and experiences are piling up faster than my fingers can type and I am overwhelmed. But I will take a deep breath (harder than you might think at 13,000 ft altitude) and try my best to string together an entertaining and nominally truthful summary of the last few days events.

First off, I should make clear that I didn't die, as two other hikers did last week. I honestly had a great time despite what some might infer from what follows. (It is too early for the twin colossi of selective memory and revisionism to turn an utter fiasco into a life-altering experience.)

So the trip began with a bit of an inauspicious start, as if the forecast of rain, nighttime lows in Cusco that were in the mid to low 30's, and a pack that weighed north of 40 pounds were not bad enough. We were picked up at 6:45 AM (sneak preview, this is the latest I was able to sleep the entire trip) and were promptly shuttled to hotel of the eight other members of our Andean Life-organized sortie, namely a group of four asian-american couples from the Bay area who turned out to be extremely cool. More on that later though.

Upon arrival at their hotel, we learned that one couple had gotten violently ill from food/drink consumed the night before, and would be unable to join us on the trail. (Sadly, these six remaining poor souls did not realize that this was only the beginning of their woe, which would include diarahea, bloody noses, constant nausea, and vicious altitude-induced headaches. From the evidence presented to us, the three of us deduced it was likely the discount bottled water the SF crew had purchased that got the other couple ill, thereby prompting their entire group to drop toxic iodine and MicroPur tablets into anything that would touch their lips for the next four days, even as our group was drinking the very same things with reckless abandon. Would have been frustrating for me, but they were Christians and likely much better persons than I :)

After about an hour long drive, we stopped in a cute little town called Ollantaytambo (yeah, all the names are a total bitch to remember) where the group bought walking sticks and stocked up a bit more on water. We finally got to the checkpoint, KM 82 as it is called, and after all the paperwork was taken care of, began the hike.

For the uninitiated, I will take a second to explain what the Incan Trail experience actually consists of. It is a 43(?) km hike through the Andean mountain range spread over three-nights and four-days. The first day is viewed as easy, and is mostly, and I do use the word mostly quite loosely, flat. I believe it measures 7.5 miles long. The second day is the big climbing day in which you scale over 4,000 feet and reach a maximum altitude of 4,215 meters or 13,800 feet (I don't have Excel on this computer so I am absolutely lost on how to do the math). The third day consists of a long walk through the Cloud Forest, followed by crossing Dead Woman's Peak and climbing down (I kid you not) the "Gringo-killer". The third day is death on the knees and the day that I feared most, given my experience with Hong Kong's infamous Trailwalker. Finally on day four, after waking up at 3:30 AM, you march the final two hours, arriving at Macchupicchu ideally by sunrise. Then you spend the rest of the day oohing and aahing over how you finished the trip, convincing yourself it wasn't that bad, and utterly ignoring Macchupicchu.

Along the hike, the trekkers are accompanied by a team of porters and the cook, who we later learned is the behind-the-scenes alpha and the omega of the tour. Let me tell you these porters are something else. None are taller than 5' 6" or so and they RUN up and down the mountain carrying 60+ pound packs laden with our tents, kitchen supplies, foodstuff and other personal items (you have to pay extra for that). They really act as a double-edged sword, on one hand providing the starving trekkers with life-saving food, while on the other hand taunting them with the speed and non-chalance by which they run around the trail. One of the porters on our team was 53 years old!

As part of the trip, which starting last year became heavily regulated by the Peruvian government, the tour company is required to give a tour guide for each group of eight people; therefore, our extended group were given two guides. One was a guy named Washington who spoke better English than I did and never ceased to amaze us with his in-depth knowledge of Incan history and rambuctious American sense of humor. The other guide was a walking zombie by the name of Coco, a humorless young Cusqueno who had difficulty grasping the concept of language, whether it be Spanish, English or Quetchen. As luck would have it, Jane, Ana and I were assigned to be part of Coco's group, while the other six were given Washington. By the end of Day 1 we had remedied that by effectively merging with the other group, who had decided that we weren't so bad after all. Smartest move that we ever made tricking them like that.

Actually the way we did it was another story. While our group might have been grossly unprepared in a lot ways. We didn't exercise, we didn't think to hire an additional porter to carry our stuff, we didn't know the length of the tour, etc. One member of our team, who shall remain nameless, did have enough sense to pack a healthy dose of medicine. And I'm not talking about any of that soft-core shit like Advil and Tylenol cuz they had all that. I mean our medicine woman had Valium, Vicadyn and other hard-core codeine-based products to relieve muscle ache and encourage sleep. That was the bargaining chip that I think sealed the friendship, besides us being fabulously interesting people of course :)

OK, so hear is the inauspicious part, literally fifteen minutes into the hike, unfamiliar as I was with my new color-coordinated EMS actionsuit, I mistakenly inserted my brand new Canon S410 camera into my jacket vent which is sneakily located an inch or so above the pocket instead of the friggin' pocket. From there, the camera promptly fell to the ground, cracking the LCD and leaving me unable to know anything about the state of the camera. I was still able to record pictures according to the sounds the camera made, but I was unable to instantly tell what the picture looked like; I had effectively rendered my digital camera into a normal film one with a 400 picture roll of film. (Fortunately, I picked a popular model of camera and literally every other person in our group had the same camera so I was able to check and see that the pictures came out fine).

In my backpacking ignorance, I didn't fully realize how annoying it is to carry a 40+ pound pack around you while you are hiking 2.5 miles into the sky across narrow cliffs with 700 meter drops. It was up to us to carry our own sleeping bags and our own sleeping mats, which the company provided. The sleeping bags were meant for balmy 60 degree weather which pretty much guaranteed that we would freeze at night. In addition, our "five" person tent described to us by the tour organizers turned out to be a two person dry tent. The three of course managed to cram ourselves into the tent for the sake of body heat and, of course, the coarse bed-time humor that only comes out late at night. I also didn't mind that all the porters on the trip thought I was quite a stud, since everyone on the trail fell in love with my two Spanish-speaking companeros.

Can't really write too much about hiking. It is fun for a while, then you get bored looking at the rocks. Then you find yourself strangely mesmorized by the rocks until you get dizzy and need to stop walking or risk falling off the mountain. At times, you get really cold so you put on your jacket. Then the sun comes up and you got hot, so you take it off. You feel a little nauseus after you eat too much food, then you feel better. You think the altitude is affecting you, so you down some coca leaf (in my case a lot of coca leaf), then you feel better. You grow to hate anything Power bar related, and look forward only to warm porter soup and other liquid sources of nutrition. You stop and see some neat ruins, but after a while you can only look at rocks so long without thinking, shit, this is just another rock. Thousands of these types of litte moments.

As for spiritual enlightment, we were on way too tight a time schedule for that. Up by 6:30 AM latest every day, and then it is dark by 6:00 PM at night. I guess my only takeaway in that regard is that my enlightenment requires a shower. One surprise outcome from the trip was that I accidently discovered a cure from my allergy to the cold. Cocaine. To be more specfic, in case JPM/MS monitor their servers, is that the coca leaf appears to possess a very broad set of performance enhancing powers that are not well-documented in medical journals. I was hiking in very cold temperatures wearing very little thick clothing, yet my hives were never an issue.

Sadly, my most clear memory of Macchupicchu, forgive me if I sound small, is that those fuckers took away my walking sticks. I had picked up these bad-ass poles that looked like they each weighed seven or eight pounds (real pimping sticks, but for the brightly-colored Latin knitted covering on the tops), but in fact weighed only a couple of pounds. They were made from some cool Peruvian timber whose name I never did learn. But the racket in Macchupicchu is that they require you to lose your big backpacks and walking sticks upon entrance to the ruins. However, while for the bags they provide free storage, the walking sticks are not allowed to be checked despite there being ample space. Instead they must be left outside the storage room free for any indigent local or shifty Frenchman to steal.

After 45+ (notice how the number has grown) kilometers together, those sticks and I had really shared some tender moments. They got me through some really tough times, and in a very real sense saved my life on a number of occasions. They were the most tangible part of my trail experience, yet the trail authorities required me to callously throw them away like some cheap little whore. I had fancied them hung up on the wall in my new apartment, as some sort of improvised modern-day coat of arms. The long and short of it was that when I returned to see if the sticks were there, only one of them was left, and I figured deprived of his brother, it would be better if he were left their alone. It honestly was the most angry I was on the entire trail.

So on overstrained ligaments relying on lactic acid-filled muscles but buoyed by spirited hearts, we found our way to Macchupicchu and then made our way back home again to Cuzco. We had a lot of fun doing it, we really bonded with the guys travelling with us, we became infatuated with one of our tour guides and frankly scared of the other (one of those psycho brooding types, you know).

Will give a final update later, though maybe I won't because I will soon be back at work and likely crushed under an avalanche of work.

Hope everyone is well,

CJ