Hunched on wobbly stools around the wobbly dining table someone asks our guide: hey what happens if somebody gets seriously injured on the Inca Trail?
He slurps his soup and mulls it for less than a second before responding: then they are weak, and we sacrifice them to the mountains.
But let me introduce you to the cast:
Sammy Swankles — a known entity; your author.
Georgie the Explorgie — also familiar. Outstanding leg composition; loves dogs; loves soup; worries a bit too much that the sleeping bags haven’t been washed.
Saul — our Peruvian guide throughout the four days; sweetest man born in the past 100 years but, as highlighted, a chronic liar; ushers and encourages us with serious prowess; gives us a detailed breakdown of Inca history and current flora and fauna; infectious smile.
Gianfranco — an accountant by trade, but runs a business importing and selling tiles from Europe/China etc. Consistently hilarious. Italian heritage, lives in Brisbane. Has a remarkable bout of dry skin on his neck that gets markedly worse throughout the hike.
Melinda — also has Italian ancestry, also lives in Brisbane, with Gianfranco actually, who is in fact her husband. Equally hilarious. Mel’s a radiographer so naturally I ask for some all-time horror stories and reel at the response.
Kevin — a spiritual Belgian; leads a team of mechanics back home but is also into crystals and the likes; fascinating juxtaposition. Patron saint of loud laughter; doing a 4-day Ayahuasca retreat following our trip; sets the pace for the group.
Y-e — another Aussie, an architect based in Sydney; has climbed Everest base camp which is gnarly; paces herself sublimely and chips in with great value stories throughout.
Zac — her boyfriend, originally from São Paulo but now in Sydney; works in landscaping: renovations, innovations and the sorts. Mighty big guy but gentle as anything. Fantastic company.
L-R: Gianfranco, Mel, Explorgie, Swankles, Y-e, Zac, Kevin. Here's Saul below look. Ledge.
What the hell are we all doing?
We’re hiking a stretch of the Inca Trail.
Why?
Why not? Needn’t justify myself. These are my words. Mind your own business.
Machu Picchu — being as it is a ‘new’ wonder of the world — is a potent draw for many to visit the east of Peru and Cusco. We decided to do it via the old knobbly route the incredibly impressive Inca people traversed. This (we did it with tour company Inkayni, could not recommend them more) is among the dearer options out there. We met and spoke to several people who opted for alternative hikes and ways to the great citadel, including the Salkantay tour, which comes in cheaper and sounds pretty damn grand n all. Anyway here is a hotch-potch account of what amounted to four of the most incredible days of our young, silly lives.
Day one starts lovely and early. 5am or so. This is par for the course for the mornings that follow, if not a genuine lie-in. Once the bus has picked everyone up it snakes something lovely into the Sacred Valley, and we halt for brekky just shy of Ollantaytambo; not heaps to say about the pit-stop bar its exceptional cat tower and the loved up parrots shimmying hither and thither on a thin branch. Ollantaytambo — where we pick up the team of porters — is an Inca town, itself very pleasant, filled with quirky cafes and architectural heritage. Soon enough we’re at ‘km82’, the starting point. Seven fiery minutes to become friendly with the aforementioned cast, sort out our backpacks, rub sun cream into our shnozzes, and ready our passports for the initial checkpoint. No pressure. Then we’re in and we’re on it, stepping over the train track that ferries day visitors to Machu Picchu, papping the Camino Inka sign, and crossing a rickety bridge to kick things off.
Look yep I’m acutely aware that we’re about 55 steps into the trek right now and we’ve already got ourselves a sexy chunky paragraph. Forgive my prolix prose; I’ll try to be semi-brief. Photos are better than words anyway everyone knows that, so I’ll just lump a bunch of those in here and work around ‘em. Smart.
Fine. TLDR:
Day 1: A spectacular sunny number. Valley vistas to die for. Comes with soup.
Day 2: Sun’s out again. How about it. Uphill is a famously tricky direction but let’s hear it for these valleys and this soup and this group.
Day 3: Honestly someone should’ve given me express warning about these valleys. And the soup. And the proliferation of remarkable Inca sites. Sun is out up there n all. Couldn’t write it.
Day 4: Machu Picchu is a fairly impressive centrepiece complemented by side dishes of soup, lovely valleys, daylight, heat, kindness, laughter and a sense that everything might actually be ok after all.
The Incan language is Quechua. This is in fact a family of languages but we’ll chalk it up as one for the sake of ease. Saul (our guide, remember) was taught it by his grandparents. He speaks it fluently, as well as Spanish and English. All our porters — farmers by trade — take on the gruelling hike with absurdly large packs to earn extra money; they all speak Quechua, too. I can honestly say I’ve never heard anything like it. Remarkably fluid for the most part, but with some jagged edges and curious syllables.
The first day’s gentle and glorious. We walk parallel to the Urubamba river for a few hours, an ancient and hypnotic marker of crystal blue and overturning froth white. When we’re not glancing down at this we’re turning back to look at the glacial peaks in the distance, and the astonishing rockfaces that rise around us. This is pretty much the flavour of the entire trip. Saul tells us fascinating things like some of these cacti are used to create a mortar-like substance for construction and others are used to connect with the gods. The tics on the cacti are used to dye alpaca wool and other clothing.
We stop for lunch at Taray Village for a couple of hours. Here, we bask in the sun, glimpse dozens of guinea pigs cooped up in a wooden shack, and watch chickens and their young flicker about for goods in the grass. So commences a quality of food that makes absolutely no sense given the confines of its creation. Over the course of the four days we are treated to standout, buttery guacamole, fragrant soups with bases of quinoa, potato, corn and semolina, tender beef lomo saltado, spaghetti and meatballs, brocolli and cheese fritters, bean ceviche, saucy trout, flaming bananas in local liquor, and a god damn bloody cake. THERE’S NO OVEN! This sweet glorious chef of ours — Nosario, a quiet and somewhat awkward man when we exchange with him — manages to pull out a fluffy sponge cake with sweet icing on our final night.
But I’m jumping ahead.
But you get the idea.
The thing about this route and this tour is that it’s rich and remarkable with Inca history. You’re not just slaloming through passes and then being jabbed in the throat by Machu Picchu at the end. It’s a continuous story of Inca migration, trade, development and dwelling. Day one we also pass the archaeological sites of Kanabamba and Llactapata, one of which is loosely known as the ‘mini Machu Picchu’. But it’s still ginormous and full of architectural specialisms that catered the community to its remote and rugged terrain.
For half-hour we stop at this sort of haven pasture and revel in the view down the valley. Get me a glass of gloopy chicha. It's strange but sweet and refreshing.
After 12 kilometres plus, we climb a final stretch to Wayllabamba, our first campsite. There are some more ruins right next to us. It’s a spectacular view as the sun falls behind the impressive precipices and the bulbous white clouds that accumulate there. Before long we can see the Milky Way in the staggering, clear night sky. The food is once more outlandish — Saul tells us the chicken legs are ‘baby condor’, a gem in a long list of mostly harmless falsehoods. Gianfranco and Mel have some sort of episode in the bathroom which results in eight-and-a-half minutes of wild giggling; I’m brushing my teeth and waiting for sink access the whole time.
Day two we’re up and out by six. It’s mostly ascent, and it’s fine until the sun comes out. Through a stretch of rainforest rich with mossy trunks, we step up and on. I try a porter’s bag for maybe three minutes until my spine misaligns and my breath takes off for some neighbouring nation. Saul tells us that the Black Lake (Yanacocha) is just over the mountains to our left, and recites some of the findings of National Geographic’s investigations and excavations over the years. Spot of tea then. After this it’s scorchio and we’ve all eaten too much salted popcorn so it enters the realm of slog as the incline becomes more dramatic and we reach Dead Woman’s Pass in waves. Saul told us at the start of the day that ‘the nipple you see up there, yep, right up there, that’s where we’re headed’. Cold air and spectacular views greet us. This is our zenith: 4000m plus. The next day we see why it’s named as such, glancing up at the horizontal silhouette of a lady that’s never worn away.
Now I’m not here to bemoan any element of a life-affirming excursion, but steep downhill stints can honestly do one. Not good for the ol’ patellas. For a couple of hours following the pass we were downwards to the campsite. Worth noting here that Zac and Y-e — proverbial preservers of energy during the ascents — truly come into their own as we descend. Zac is my spirit animal insofar as he has to have music in his ear to feel the pulse of progress. We weave through the valley and conk at camp. The rest is scripture: high tea on wobbly stools and gravelly ground, divine gastronomy and a clear-cut V for view. Here it is look.
My toes were cold in the sleeping bag on this occasion.
In the morning I bathed my armpits in a freezing stream.
On day three a lot of walking and a lot of splendiferous vistas came and went. Go figure. We stop and peruse major Inca cities on their original path. The highlights had to be Winayhuayna and Intipato, the latter being the ‘sun terrace’ just shy of our campsite. All of us — bar Kevin, who had stomped ahead with remarkable vigour — paused here for a while to watch golden hour do its glorious thing. The river had once more made itself known to us, and we were told that so much of the Andean region we were passing through lent on hydroelectric energy, that there’s a cave under the mountain we were on, with water passing through turbines to generate power.
Not sure what else to say other than it included horrible steep declines and remedial upturns. It included astonishing accounts of idiosyncratic construction and a miserable woman peeing on the path. It included further camaraderie and more lithe lies from Saul. It typified our superb experience across the tour, and all 18 kilometres of it took us to a jovial final night with our campmates and the trek crew. So forth came the cake, which still blows my mind, and some speeches of thanks. Roll day three snaparoonies.
Here are some nuggets of knowledge you can take with you to your next first date:
All (?) the Inca sites we visited were developed in between the 14th and 16th centuries and abandoned not so long afterwards through fear that the Spanish would come and conquer them. The Spanish did overcome the Incas and suppressed several rebellions from 1532 onwards, but never ventured into the Sacred Valley to discover or pillage their remarkable cities
The fella that ‘discovered’ a lot of the ruins that we’d passed was called Hiram Bingham, a historian, explorer and lecturer at Yale. Obviously he encountered some indigenous people still in and around the sites, and worked alongside them to document the spaces. He stumbled across Machu Picchu in 1911, meaning it was abandoned for over 350 years
Prior to the Spaniard’s successful conquership, word spread from the Inca capital of Cusco to the more remote valley communities that these Europeans were not only in Peru, but were being decidedly pesky. Young men that went to fight either perished or returned with the unfortunate addition of Influenza. Mass wipeouts.
The Condor, Puma and Snake are sacred in Inca culture. In Peru’s rich spirituality, the Condor is a sacred bird with a close relationship with the sun god Inta; the puma represents life on earth; and the snake marks the underworld (to the Incas, this marked the opportunity and beauty of new life).
Here’s the hierarchy of Inca society: 1. King, 2. Priests, 3. Astronomers, 4. Engineers, 5. Farmers & workers. No mention of shoddy scribes whatsoever. I’d have been screwed.
Final day
This wakeup is so early as to be offensive, and once the park opens at 5.30 we’re hitting the track pretty fast. Some fools have been up and queuing since 2.30 hoping to get the first glimpse of the citadel, but Saul has other plans. It’s pretty frenetic and there are people everywhere and the overtakes are either fruitful or rebuked by sassy hikers. Didn’t really rate that stretch, but soon enough we’re scrambling up some monkey steps, sweating out our eyeballs in the early morning humidity, and stepping through the famed Sun Gate to set eyes on the thing. The big bloody thing. The great big bloody crazy thing.
Machu Picchu is extraordinary, there’s no two ways about it. The sun rises over the mountain we’ve just traversed and shines its sinuous light on the vast historic settlement, on its near-perfect walls and restored walkways. It’s still a kilometre or so away, but we stop to snack and take it in.
As we draw closer, Llamas graze the raised grass terraces and we stop to take photos of the famous overview. For two hours we walk around the citadel. Saul gives us a breakdown of its history, of its societal organisation and places of worship. Massive slabs of rock have been transplanted and carved to resemble the stunning mountains beyond. The temple of the Condor resembles giant wings and a prone body, a spot for sacrificial process. Until a decade or so ago the lush plains near certain residential quarters would play host to picnicking visitors, but the footfall has escalated to such an extent that the rangers and the preservers keep a keener eye on proceedings. The rest of the group have made the unenviable error of paying to hike up Huayna Picchu, so we leave them for a while and meander, tired, around the sun-soaked citadel.
Look — if you’re fortunate enough to have the means, pay this place a visit. Words nor photos do it justice.
Later, we get the bus down to Aguas Calientes for a bite and a beer. The trek is over but its entirety will remain vivid and vital until my brain fades. We catch the glass-roofed train back to Ollantaytambo, already reminiscing and falling silent at intervals to absorb the extraordinary mountainscapes beyond the glass.
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