The highs and lows of the Inca Trail...

Day 30
The long-awaited day had arrived - I was starting the Inca Trail today! Linh and I had booked through Loki Travel at a base cost of $400USD each plus a porter to carry our belongings for an extra $110USD for the four days. There are many tour operators offering packages for the Inca Trail but this one seemed to be the cheapest plus it had great reviews. I guess a downside though was that it was a pretty big group (22 people) so it wasn't as intimate and personalised as some of the other groups I saw on the trail. Nevertheless, it was a good group of people to spend four days trekking with!

Day one of the trail was pretty easy. A quick breakfast at Ollyantantambo and then we were driven to Piscscucho at Kilometre 82 where we were to begin hiking. The registration takes place here, just remember to bring your passport.

As we walked, our guides pointed out the flora and fauna on the trail as well as the numerous ruins along the way. They also pointed out that most of the trail we were walking had actually been reconstructed and wasn't original. What a shame. At least there were still some sections where we could walk in the footsteps of the Incans on the later days.

 

After very gentle inclines and stairs, we eventually reached our lunch spot. I didn't expect to see a lunch tent pitched with tables and chairs inside - now I understood why we had 20 porters with us! I would have been happy to just sit on the ground but instead a porter had carried chairs up the mountain (and would continue to carry them for the whole trek). The lunch was better than expected (I came in Ruth low expectations). Most meals generally consisted of soup, some sort of meat and veg, and a rice or pasta dish - it was enough to keep you going.

After lunch, we continued on, winding through the mountains and past beautiful ruins until we reached our campsite for the night at Wayllabamba around 4pm. That was it for the day. Spent the rest of the afternoon and evening chilling and playing cards with the group. Pretty easy day in preparation for the arduous climb the day after!!

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Day 31
After a really restless night of being surprisingly hot in my tent, I awoke in the morning at 6am with a horrible pain in my stomach. I'm not entirely sure what caused it (I suspected a stomach bug but I had had the same food as everyone else on the first day). I was nauseous and my stomach was constantly cramping - not in the best condition to be hiking the hardest day of the Inca Trail! Neverthless I had to push on. Luckily the pain subsided slightly as I started hiking, but every so often a wave of pain would roll over me causing me to stop and take a breather. Just something I had to get used to.

The second day of Inca Trail is supposedly the hardest. You're ascending 1,100m from the campsite up to Dead Woman's Pass at 4,200m above sea level, the highest point on the Inca Trail. The steepness of the trail burns your legs and the altitude and lack of oxygen burns your chest. If my stomach pains weren't already slowing me down, my breathlessness certainly did (and this was after I had spent three days acclimatising in Cusco). As hard as the ascent was though, seeing the peak in the distance definitely made it easier to keep pushing on. As the photo below demonstrates, it's definitely not all smiles on the way up.

 

As I neared the top, I found a new surge of energy knowing that I was so close and was able to walk slightly faster. As I came over that final step, a wave of relief rolled over me - I had made it! Definitely a strong sense of pride and achievement, as well as disbelief almost that I had made it up there while I was feeling so ill. So many times during that ascent, I was cursing myself for signing up for this. It definitely wasn't easy. Perhaps if I had been fully healthy I wouldn't have struggled as much though. However the feeling of achievement at the top overshadowed my earlier doubts and I was definitely glad I pushed through. The hardest part was over!

 

The rest of the afternoon was downhill which you would think would be easier. It's not. It's a killer on the knees and ankles. So glad I had hiking poles to soften the impact. After about 90 minutes of downhill, we eventually reached our campsite at Paqaymayu in the early afternoon. After a long day's hiking, soaking my feet in the river felt amazing (only for a few seconds though since it was glacial in temperature). Despite my best efforts to stay awake and socialise, I ended up crawling into my tent and conked out for the rest of the afternoon.

Ended up emerging from my tent for tea time and games with the group. When you've got so much time to kill while at camp, you need to keep yourself entertained. The guides were great at creating a fun atmosphere and initiating simple yet fun games which got everyone involved. But I guess it also depends on the group. Luckily we had a good group of people who enjoyed socialising.

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Day 32
The thing you should know about the campsites on the Inca Trail is that there are very few toilets. For the entire campground which catered to several hundred people, there were about five toilets. They're also quite a walk away. I discovered just how far when I had to make several trips to the toilet in the dead of the night in the rain while stumbling over rocks and crossing rivers (so glad I had my headlight). My stomach bag was wreaking havoc on my me. That was a very long night.

Morning came, exhausted, I began walking. Due to extreme nausea I couldn't eat anything at breakfast so I was running on empty. The first part of the day was uphill which was fine, I was able to keep the pace at the front of the pack surprisingly. However once we reached the second peak at 3,950m, the constant downhill after that ruined me. Every step down caused a spasm in my stomach which made it almost unbearably painful to go more than ten or so steps at a time. I would try and brace using my hiking poles on every step down but it hardly helped. I eventually made it to the Sayamarka ruins (last of course) but was in too much pain to really appreciate how awesome they were. The mist and fog over them were pretty cool though.

As we stopped for lunch, the heavens opened up and it bucketed down. Now I was really thankful a porter had carried the massive tent all the way up the mountain! As with breakfast, I couldn't eat anything due to my nausea but I did manage to stomach a bit of soup. It was very frustrating knowing that I needed to eat (and I wanted to eat) and yet couldn't.

After lunch we continued on despite the rain still coming down. At this point I was really struggling with the hike. I let everyone go ahead of me so that I wouldn't slow anyone down. Linh ended up staying behind to keep me company which was nice of her. Every downhill step killed me and more often than not, I was doubled over in agony. The guides were really nice and made sure I was ok constantly, even though there really wasn't much they could do about my pain. As the rest of the group pulled further and further ahead (one of the guides stayed with me), it was suggested that I skip the Winay Wayna ruins and go straight to the campsite via a shortcut. Great, I had no issues with that!

By this point in the day, I was completely drained. After eating nothing all day, it was taking all of my strenght just to keep walking. The shortcut ended up taking over an hour because of my ridiculously slow pace and once I got to camp, I discovered that the group had actually beaten me there! They had seen the ruins and made it to camp before me. I was spent. There were actually more ruins by the campsite but the word "optional" was all I needed to hear to crawl back into my tent and snooze until dinner.

On the final night of the Inca Trail is the tipping ceremony where all the porters and cooks were introduced and thanked for their services with tips. We got to meet all of the porters who had so diligently carried all of our equipment on the Inca Trail for the past few days, and we got to introduce ourselves to them in their native language of Quechua (I'm sure they were laughing at us butchering their language). It was amazing to hear that some of them had been doing this for over thirty years. I have so much respect and admiration for these men.

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Day 33
The final day. The last stretch to Machu Picchu. We were woken up at 3am for a 3:30am departure in order to stake our spot at the front of the line when the control point opened at 5:30am. Apart from the ridiculously early wake-up call, what was different about this morning was that I didn't wake up in pain. My stomach seemed oddly calm. Excellent - what a great stroke of luck that I would miraculously recover on the final day! As we approached the control point, we found that even with our 3:30am departure, we were still behind some people. The upside though was that they were only small groups so we would still be towards the front of the pack racing towards the Sun Gate and Machu Picchu when the gate opened.

At 5:30am, the gate opened, our tickets were stamped, and we were let through. Now it was a race to get to the Sun Gate (5km away) before the sun rose over the mountains and beamed onto Machu Picchu. I was so glad that my stomach wasn't troubling me at all. I actually had the strength and energy to go at a fast pace (even after not eating anything for the previous day). As dawn broke and the sky got lighter, our pace got faster. Once we reached the vertical wall of rocks (also known as the Monkey Steps or the Gringo Killer), we knew we were close. Scaling that wall was actually quite fun despite the name Gringo Killer. As I reached the Sun Gate at the top of the mountain, I could only just stare and marvel in awe at the sight of Machu Picchu in the valley below me. What was even more amazing was that I had beaten the sun and only now was the valley below starting to be illuminated, with the sun slowly inching closer and closer to the beautiful ruins below. As I stood atop the mountain at the Sun Gate, everything I had gone through in the last few days felt like it was worth it for this view and this feeling. It's something I will never forget.

 

After the sunrise, we made our way down the mountain towards to Machu Picchu where I could see hordes of tourists (who had taken the train or bus there) already lined up. After having walked the Inca Trail and in the footsteps of Incans long gone, I felt like I would have missed out on something special had I arrived by bus or train. Nevertheless, getting to see Machu Picchu up close and walk through it is something that is special in its own right regardless of how you arrived there. Words cannnot really describe it so I'll just put photos instead.

 

After we finished up at Machu Picchu, we made our way to Aguas Caliente, the nearby town. You have the option of walking there or taking a bus for $12USD. After all the walking we'd done so far, what was an extra few kilometres? In town, our group settled into a restaurant for lunch and spent the rest of afternoon celebrating our successful completion of the Inca Trail with very potent pisco and tequila shots. To go from two days of eating barely anything to downing shots, my stomach must have been going crazy. Anyways it was a great way to finish the trek and kill time before our 6:30pm train back to Ollyantantambo. After that it was a bus back to Cusco and a (really hard) uphill walk to our hotel.

All in all, I'm glad I signed up to do the Inca Trail, even if at times I was regretting it like crazy. It's not easy but at the end, the sense of achievement and the awe of Machu Picchu is well worth the struggle.

 

HBL signing out from Cusco, Peru.

Previously: Surviving Death Road to ring in Cusco 2016...