(Pics: 1st, Beginning of the trail. 2nd, Taking a break. 3rd, Oh, the mud! 4th, Lunchtime. 5th, The Salkantay Glacier. 6th, Campsite, night 1.)March 23, 2009...
The following is straight from my journal, so please forgive the randomness or non-fluidity…
Day 1:
Awesome. We ascended 400 meters today. Tough hike with our packs, but worth every wearied step. The first two days are supposed to be the hardest and coldest, and yea, it’s pretty cold. We woke up at 4:00am to be picked up at 4:40am by the minibus. Rode two hours to where we’d have a breakfast of bread and jam and begin our trek by 9:00am. It was a three and a half hour walk, mostly through ankle-deep mud, until we reached the lunch place…behind a shack in the middle of nowhere, served at a table and benches made from piled stones and slats of wood, beneath a straw-grass roof. Surrounded by tall green mountains with the rain pouring down around us, it was a beautiful lunch.
We left the lunch place at 1:30pm and walked another four hours to where we would camp and eat dinner. It continued to rain sporadically the entire time, even when the sun was shining. I eventually stopped taking off my blue plastic poncho and just left it on…it kept me warm anyway. By the time we reached the campsite I was exhausted and ready to take off my awesome, eighteen-dollars-at-the-black-market hiking boots and relax. It was a tough day and tomorrow is supposed to be harder; steeper, higher, less air, a further distance. I’m a bit nervous about it, but I know I’ll make it. Even if I have to crawl.
Dinner inside a tiny, tin-roofed shack, beneath the most incredible starry sky was amazing and everyone else on the trail seems really cool. There are eleven others; five loud, boisterous guys from Argentina, two guys and a girl from Belgium, a guy and a girl from Saint Louis, Missouri, and a guy from Israel. And our guide, Darwin, from Peru. During the meal, all kinds of languages were flying around like balls on a tennis court. I felt like a spectator at Wimbledon. While fascinating, it also makes me feel discouraged. Tyler’s Spanish is so good so the Argentineans were mainly talking to him and ignoring me. I don’t know how I’m going to get better with him around. I sort of lean on his Spanish like a crutch. Gotta stop doing that. And hearing these people switching from Flemish to English to French to Spanish faster than I can spell Hola makes me feel so inadequate. It really makes me question my desire to go back to school. Would I rather get my M.A. or become TEFL certified and travel the world, teaching English and learning new languages and cultures? I don’t know. But I have a big decision to make since I know I could start at SFSU in September (I got accepted a few days ago). I have a lot to think about…well, we wake up early tomorrow for Day 2, so I better get some sleep…
(Pics: 1st, Starting out. 2nd, At the highest point of the trail! 3rd, Lunchtime. 4th, Campsite, night 2.)
Day 2:
Looking at pretty mountains is so much easier than climbing them. Ascended over 600 meters today. The “hardest day” was really hard. We woke at about 5:30am, breakfast of pancakes by about 6:30am, on the trail by about 7:30am. It was steep and cold and there weren’t many good hiding places to go pee. But it was incredibly beautiful. Salkantay, we learned today, means “Powerful” in Quechua. No one has ever climbed to its peak and lived to tell about it.
At the start, on your left is the rushing white river, descending thousands of feet to bubble past you. All around are reaching, green mountains and on your right is another, climbing, stretching toward a clouded sky. Before you, between the distant pointed gullet of two touching foothills, you can see a towering wall, glowing white between dramatic steaks of gray-black. It is the face of the Salkantay glacier. As we ascended, the air got thinner, therefore, my breath shorter. Two hours later we reached the tallest point of the climb…4,653 meters (over 15,000 feet) above sea level. At this point, I was baffled as to why it wasn’t snowing. However, there was a heavy mist that began to soak through me. This mist turned into a constant downpour over the next five and a half hours as we crossed over countless different landscapes. We descended down muddy slopes (the mud was just as obnoxious today as yesterday) and rocks, in between boulders the size of houses, over rivers and across waterfalls, through swampish flatlands and into tropic-like forest. By the end, though I feel immense love and appreciation for my eighteen-dollar hiking boots that I bought at Molino (because they are sturdy, comfortable, and stayed pretty dry considering the land and weather), my shoes, pants, and sleeves were totally drenched. Like, dripping-drenched. Though it would seem I followed a sudden and unwise compulsion to dip my extremities into the river, this was not why my shoes, pants, and sleeves were soaked. It was because a bright blue plastic poncho has its limits and can only cover so much.
We reached the campsite around 5:30pm and I washed the crusted layer of mud out of my socks and pants and hung them out to dry along with my jacket and sweatshirt. The campsite is adorable. It is so much less than a tiny village that I don’t even know what to call it. There are four tin-roofed shacks here, some chickens and pigs, and a wooden fence surrounding. Lunch and dinner today were both riquisimo; I really like our cook. And now, at approximately 9:00pm, I close this entry by saying that I am vastly thankful for clear night skies in the middle of nowhere.
(Pics: 1st, Starting out. 2nd, Crossing a waterfall. 3rd, Part of the river. 4th, Quick little monkey! 5th, Campsite, day 3. 6th, Hot springs!!)
Day 3:
The landscape is indescribably, unfailingly beautiful. I wish you could be here to see it. Because words and photographs cannot do it justice. The rushing rivers, the waterfalls bubbling over red and gray stones, the rickety wooden bridges that you slightly fear might collapse while crossing. The endless green in thriving jungle and sprawling mountains. The variety of beauty contained within a ten-mile distance is beyond dreaming. I wish you could have hiked it with me. To witness God’s astounding work while yet whispering to him secretly that if he erased mud from existence you would still die happy. Same as Day 2, we woke up at 5:30am, breakfast of omelets by 6:30am, walking by 7:30am. We only walked five and a half hours today instead of the usual seven or eight. After lunch, we went by van to the campsite. It was a fun, fast, slightly frightening ride through the winding mountains, driven by Darwin. When we arrived at the site, a tiny, chirping monkey was there to greet us. He was a ham. He sprang up through an open window and into the van, jumping around from seat to seat with wide, hyper eyes. Once we had chosen our tents and put our stuff down, we changed and headed for the big treat of Day 3…hot springs!!! They were like a resort paradise. In the midst of more mountains and waterfalls, three large pools to relax in and soak up the heat while drinking a beer from the onsite tienda. My muscles needed that, so sore from days of walking. And today my left knee began to cry out in powerful objection. It was screaming for me to stop for the final two hours, even as I limped to lighten its load. Anyway, the springs felt great. I felt like a limp noodle afterward, ready for dinner and sleep. The bus from the hot springs back to the campsite was like a discotec. The Argentineans are some of the rowdiest, funniest, merriest bunch of boys I have ever met. Constantly clapping their hands and belting out sing-a-longs in Spanish. Hearing their laughter makes me smile, even though the clapping kind of hurts my ears. I am so ready to sleep. We get to sleep in until 8:00am tomorrow! Need a good sleep-in for sure.
(Pics: 1st, Scary bridge. 2nd, The high jungle--banana tree to the left. 3rd, Coffee beans. 4th, Lunchtime! 5th, Tyler and I found a giant centipede friend.)
Day 4:
Today we didn’t have to wake so early. We got to choose our rising time, so we collectively picked 8:00am. Breakfast at 8:30am. The Argentineans were lagging like always, but especially because they’d all (basically everyone but me and Tyler) stayed awake until about 2:00am drinking and dancing. So we finally got walking at around half past ten. It was a hot day, walking first on a rocky, desert-like terrain. My knee had started really hurting on Day 3; enough to make me unable to really walk on it. So by Day 4 it was quite painful. I limped my way up and down and over the boulders. Eventually we came to the high jungle. This was extraordinary. Along the way you could find avocado, passion fruit, and banana trees all growing wild. And you could find tiny wild strawberries and coffee beans everywhere. We hiked through the high jungle for a long time, until we at last came to our lunch place. And by that time, my knee was in such pain I couldn’t bend it at all. So Lionel, one of the Belgians, lent me his spare knee brace. It seemed to help, along with a couple doses of Advil. It took three hours to hike to where we had lunch; on the second, open-air floor of a cute little restaurant. We had palta (avocado) and veggies, which was delicious. Then we walked the last three hours, over train tracks scattered with really annoying rocks, to Aguas Calientes—the small tourist town at the foot of the Machu Picchu mountain. Here, we settled into our hostel, took our first showers of the week, Tyler and I used the internet, and we all met at 7:30pm for dinner. We ate at a local restaurant and it was like a Thanksgiving feast! With trout, rice, yuca, pasta salad, fried cauliflower, and veggies. Great final meal with a celebratory beer to top it off! Tyler and I are going to bed immediately. We’ll be waking tomorrow morning by about 4:00am to begin the final climb to Machu Picchu by 4:30am. Eeesh!!
(Pics 1st, Early morning hike up the mountain from Aguas Calientes. 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, Machu Picchu!!!! 6th, The hillside of Waynapicchu. 7th, View of Machu Picchu from the top of Waynapicchu.)
Day 5:
Machu Picchu day! It was rough waking up, but well worth it. The climb up there was so steep. Over 2,500 steps total, but not quite as hard as I thought it would be. Especially with my objectionable knee. We made it up the mountain in about an hour and twenty minutes. Early enough to ensure entrance to Waynapicchu, the neighbouring mountain with the best view, on which they only allow 400 people per day (the number allowed into Machu Picchu each day is unlimited). It was raining when we got up there, and then it was clear and sunny for a bit, and a few hours later it really started raining again. But Machu Picchu was impossibly stunning.
The name, in Quechua, means “Old Mountian.” And while the ruins do look old, with ancient crop terraces and pathways carved out of the mountain and built into gray stone temples, houses, walls, stairwells…they still appear brilliant. New in the way that they make you marvel, command you to stand still and try—try—to take it all in. The vivid contrast of spring-green grass and wild orchids in a centuries-old ashen world is like a collision of what you know and what you couldn’t have ever imagined. Surrounding mountains point high and disappear at their peaks into the misted white sky. These same mountains, their yellows and browns and reds all melt together and cascade down in innumerable patterns, until finally dripping into the brown river below and rushing east.
It was a marvellous place. The view of it from Waynapicchu was astounding. I wished I could have taken a piece of it with me; more than pictures and more than what is left in my memory…due to fade. I wished I could bring it home and show you what they built; the unfathomable world they created on that Old Mountain.
The following is straight from my journal, so please forgive the randomness or non-fluidity…
Day 1:
Awesome. We ascended 400 meters today. Tough hike with our packs, but worth every wearied step. The first two days are supposed to be the hardest and coldest, and yea, it’s pretty cold. We woke up at 4:00am to be picked up at 4:40am by the minibus. Rode two hours to where we’d have a breakfast of bread and jam and begin our trek by 9:00am. It was a three and a half hour walk, mostly through ankle-deep mud, until we reached the lunch place…behind a shack in the middle of nowhere, served at a table and benches made from piled stones and slats of wood, beneath a straw-grass roof. Surrounded by tall green mountains with the rain pouring down around us, it was a beautiful lunch.
We left the lunch place at 1:30pm and walked another four hours to where we would camp and eat dinner. It continued to rain sporadically the entire time, even when the sun was shining. I eventually stopped taking off my blue plastic poncho and just left it on…it kept me warm anyway. By the time we reached the campsite I was exhausted and ready to take off my awesome, eighteen-dollars-at-the-black-market hiking boots and relax. It was a tough day and tomorrow is supposed to be harder; steeper, higher, less air, a further distance. I’m a bit nervous about it, but I know I’ll make it. Even if I have to crawl.
Dinner inside a tiny, tin-roofed shack, beneath the most incredible starry sky was amazing and everyone else on the trail seems really cool. There are eleven others; five loud, boisterous guys from Argentina, two guys and a girl from Belgium, a guy and a girl from Saint Louis, Missouri, and a guy from Israel. And our guide, Darwin, from Peru. During the meal, all kinds of languages were flying around like balls on a tennis court. I felt like a spectator at Wimbledon. While fascinating, it also makes me feel discouraged. Tyler’s Spanish is so good so the Argentineans were mainly talking to him and ignoring me. I don’t know how I’m going to get better with him around. I sort of lean on his Spanish like a crutch. Gotta stop doing that. And hearing these people switching from Flemish to English to French to Spanish faster than I can spell Hola makes me feel so inadequate. It really makes me question my desire to go back to school. Would I rather get my M.A. or become TEFL certified and travel the world, teaching English and learning new languages and cultures? I don’t know. But I have a big decision to make since I know I could start at SFSU in September (I got accepted a few days ago). I have a lot to think about…well, we wake up early tomorrow for Day 2, so I better get some sleep…
(Pics: 1st, Starting out. 2nd, At the highest point of the trail! 3rd, Lunchtime. 4th, Campsite, night 2.)
Day 2:
Looking at pretty mountains is so much easier than climbing them. Ascended over 600 meters today. The “hardest day” was really hard. We woke at about 5:30am, breakfast of pancakes by about 6:30am, on the trail by about 7:30am. It was steep and cold and there weren’t many good hiding places to go pee. But it was incredibly beautiful. Salkantay, we learned today, means “Powerful” in Quechua. No one has ever climbed to its peak and lived to tell about it.
At the start, on your left is the rushing white river, descending thousands of feet to bubble past you. All around are reaching, green mountains and on your right is another, climbing, stretching toward a clouded sky. Before you, between the distant pointed gullet of two touching foothills, you can see a towering wall, glowing white between dramatic steaks of gray-black. It is the face of the Salkantay glacier. As we ascended, the air got thinner, therefore, my breath shorter. Two hours later we reached the tallest point of the climb…4,653 meters (over 15,000 feet) above sea level. At this point, I was baffled as to why it wasn’t snowing. However, there was a heavy mist that began to soak through me. This mist turned into a constant downpour over the next five and a half hours as we crossed over countless different landscapes. We descended down muddy slopes (the mud was just as obnoxious today as yesterday) and rocks, in between boulders the size of houses, over rivers and across waterfalls, through swampish flatlands and into tropic-like forest. By the end, though I feel immense love and appreciation for my eighteen-dollar hiking boots that I bought at Molino (because they are sturdy, comfortable, and stayed pretty dry considering the land and weather), my shoes, pants, and sleeves were totally drenched. Like, dripping-drenched. Though it would seem I followed a sudden and unwise compulsion to dip my extremities into the river, this was not why my shoes, pants, and sleeves were soaked. It was because a bright blue plastic poncho has its limits and can only cover so much.
We reached the campsite around 5:30pm and I washed the crusted layer of mud out of my socks and pants and hung them out to dry along with my jacket and sweatshirt. The campsite is adorable. It is so much less than a tiny village that I don’t even know what to call it. There are four tin-roofed shacks here, some chickens and pigs, and a wooden fence surrounding. Lunch and dinner today were both riquisimo; I really like our cook. And now, at approximately 9:00pm, I close this entry by saying that I am vastly thankful for clear night skies in the middle of nowhere.
(Pics: 1st, Starting out. 2nd, Crossing a waterfall. 3rd, Part of the river. 4th, Quick little monkey! 5th, Campsite, day 3. 6th, Hot springs!!)
Day 3:
The landscape is indescribably, unfailingly beautiful. I wish you could be here to see it. Because words and photographs cannot do it justice. The rushing rivers, the waterfalls bubbling over red and gray stones, the rickety wooden bridges that you slightly fear might collapse while crossing. The endless green in thriving jungle and sprawling mountains. The variety of beauty contained within a ten-mile distance is beyond dreaming. I wish you could have hiked it with me. To witness God’s astounding work while yet whispering to him secretly that if he erased mud from existence you would still die happy. Same as Day 2, we woke up at 5:30am, breakfast of omelets by 6:30am, walking by 7:30am. We only walked five and a half hours today instead of the usual seven or eight. After lunch, we went by van to the campsite. It was a fun, fast, slightly frightening ride through the winding mountains, driven by Darwin. When we arrived at the site, a tiny, chirping monkey was there to greet us. He was a ham. He sprang up through an open window and into the van, jumping around from seat to seat with wide, hyper eyes. Once we had chosen our tents and put our stuff down, we changed and headed for the big treat of Day 3…hot springs!!! They were like a resort paradise. In the midst of more mountains and waterfalls, three large pools to relax in and soak up the heat while drinking a beer from the onsite tienda. My muscles needed that, so sore from days of walking. And today my left knee began to cry out in powerful objection. It was screaming for me to stop for the final two hours, even as I limped to lighten its load. Anyway, the springs felt great. I felt like a limp noodle afterward, ready for dinner and sleep. The bus from the hot springs back to the campsite was like a discotec. The Argentineans are some of the rowdiest, funniest, merriest bunch of boys I have ever met. Constantly clapping their hands and belting out sing-a-longs in Spanish. Hearing their laughter makes me smile, even though the clapping kind of hurts my ears. I am so ready to sleep. We get to sleep in until 8:00am tomorrow! Need a good sleep-in for sure.
(Pics: 1st, Scary bridge. 2nd, The high jungle--banana tree to the left. 3rd, Coffee beans. 4th, Lunchtime! 5th, Tyler and I found a giant centipede friend.)Day 4:
Today we didn’t have to wake so early. We got to choose our rising time, so we collectively picked 8:00am. Breakfast at 8:30am. The Argentineans were lagging like always, but especially because they’d all (basically everyone but me and Tyler) stayed awake until about 2:00am drinking and dancing. So we finally got walking at around half past ten. It was a hot day, walking first on a rocky, desert-like terrain. My knee had started really hurting on Day 3; enough to make me unable to really walk on it. So by Day 4 it was quite painful. I limped my way up and down and over the boulders. Eventually we came to the high jungle. This was extraordinary. Along the way you could find avocado, passion fruit, and banana trees all growing wild. And you could find tiny wild strawberries and coffee beans everywhere. We hiked through the high jungle for a long time, until we at last came to our lunch place. And by that time, my knee was in such pain I couldn’t bend it at all. So Lionel, one of the Belgians, lent me his spare knee brace. It seemed to help, along with a couple doses of Advil. It took three hours to hike to where we had lunch; on the second, open-air floor of a cute little restaurant. We had palta (avocado) and veggies, which was delicious. Then we walked the last three hours, over train tracks scattered with really annoying rocks, to Aguas Calientes—the small tourist town at the foot of the Machu Picchu mountain. Here, we settled into our hostel, took our first showers of the week, Tyler and I used the internet, and we all met at 7:30pm for dinner. We ate at a local restaurant and it was like a Thanksgiving feast! With trout, rice, yuca, pasta salad, fried cauliflower, and veggies. Great final meal with a celebratory beer to top it off! Tyler and I are going to bed immediately. We’ll be waking tomorrow morning by about 4:00am to begin the final climb to Machu Picchu by 4:30am. Eeesh!!
(Pics 1st, Early morning hike up the mountain from Aguas Calientes. 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, Machu Picchu!!!! 6th, The hillside of Waynapicchu. 7th, View of Machu Picchu from the top of Waynapicchu.)
Day 5:
Machu Picchu day! It was rough waking up, but well worth it. The climb up there was so steep. Over 2,500 steps total, but not quite as hard as I thought it would be. Especially with my objectionable knee. We made it up the mountain in about an hour and twenty minutes. Early enough to ensure entrance to Waynapicchu, the neighbouring mountain with the best view, on which they only allow 400 people per day (the number allowed into Machu Picchu each day is unlimited). It was raining when we got up there, and then it was clear and sunny for a bit, and a few hours later it really started raining again. But Machu Picchu was impossibly stunning.
The name, in Quechua, means “Old Mountian.” And while the ruins do look old, with ancient crop terraces and pathways carved out of the mountain and built into gray stone temples, houses, walls, stairwells…they still appear brilliant. New in the way that they make you marvel, command you to stand still and try—try—to take it all in. The vivid contrast of spring-green grass and wild orchids in a centuries-old ashen world is like a collision of what you know and what you couldn’t have ever imagined. Surrounding mountains point high and disappear at their peaks into the misted white sky. These same mountains, their yellows and browns and reds all melt together and cascade down in innumerable patterns, until finally dripping into the brown river below and rushing east.
It was a marvellous place. The view of it from Waynapicchu was astounding. I wished I could have taken a piece of it with me; more than pictures and more than what is left in my memory…due to fade. I wished I could bring it home and show you what they built; the unfathomable world they created on that Old Mountain.
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