Salkantay & Machu Picchu: Part 1

Our Machu Picchu adventure started the last Friday of our volunteering. My good friend and super intrepid traveler, Susannah, joined us in Cusco to hike to Machu Picchu. We had a fancy dinner (I had alpaca!) overlooking the Plaza de Armas to welcome Susannah and celebrate our time in Cusco. After dinner we met up with Mariluz and her daughter Gabi who I worked with at the clinic along with a couple other volunteers and went dancing at a local bar.

Saturday saw us (unsuccessfully) trying to track down Susannah´s luggage which was hanging out somewhere in Mexico City, booking our bus to Bolivia for when we got back, and getting things organized for the trip...complete with a brand new Peruvian wardrobe for Susannah...yay llama socks!

And now, go to the bathroom, get a cup of coffee, snuggle up in a comfy chair, because this is gonna be a long one. I give you ¨Survivors of the Salkantay¨.

DAY 1

The trek officially started on Sunday morning at 4:30am when we got picked up outside our house. We hopped in the van, slightly bleary eyed, as the van swerved around the narrow Cusco streets picking up 13 other equally bleary eyed passengers. We had a 2 hour bus ride to our jumping off point, Mollepata, full of nodding off, hairpin turns, and looking at the beautiful sunrise. In Mollepata (2830 meter elevation) we had a half-awake breakfast trying to get to know the other 13 people in our group, plus Eduardo and Mariluz, our guides. We purchased our (much used!) walking sticks, some last minute supplies, and started what we would be doing for the next 4 days...walking! The hike started through a forest with fresh air that felt like an early summer morning in Georgia, and it was good to be free from the choking exhaust of the city. We stopped a couple of times to take off layers, drink water, apply sunscreen, or learn about local plants. We had one temporary mishap of losing our main guide Eduardo for about an hour, but reconnected and stopped for lunch with a pretty stunning vista. We had porters who led the horses that carried our tents, sleeping bags, etc. And cooks that led the horses that carried our food and somehow conjured full meals, complete with soup and tea, out of what was on the horses backs.

After lunch we kept climbing in altitude. We were well above the tree line at this point, working our way through some very Lord of the Rings-esque landscapes. Mountains hid in clouds with glacier-fed rivers running down them all joining together to form a tumultulous Rio Blanco barreling through the valley. Susannah started to struggle a little with the altitude. Cusco is over 11,000 feet and we were headed up to over 15,000 feet at the base of Salkantay, which is higher than any mountain in the continental US. So with only 2 days of acclimatization, it was a super human feat for her to even be walking up a flight of stairs, much less up a mountain. She was a trooper though, and we just kept trekking. About an hour and half before we made it to our camp for the night, it started to rain. Like "it´s rainy season in South America" type rain. The kind that soaks you even though you put on the $2 plastic poncho you bought that morning. We finally made it to our camp in Soraypampa (3700m) and all crammed into the lean-to´s trying to find our bags with dry clothing, hang up the wet clothing to dry, and generally control shivering (did I mention it´s cold at high altitude?).

We got our tents situated for the night during a brief hiatus in rain, then crammed back under the lean-to´s for hot chocolate and popcorn, which we scarfed down like pack of ravenous dogs. Then we waited...and got cold...and waited some more...for dinner. To Cate´s credit she tried her best to buoy the group by getting everyone to tell where they were from, what they did, who their boy/girlfriend was at the age of 15, but we were a pretty miserable, cold, hungry, tired group. A couple gave up on dinner and headed to bed. When food did come 2 hours later, it was devoured in silence and then we all crawled into our tents praying for them to hold against the rain.

DAY 2

I´m not sure how much anyone slept that night. Most people´s sleeping bags got wet and Susannah was fighting the effects of altitude sickness all night (i.e. nausea and vomiting, because someone must always be hurling at all points on our trip :), but the morning was beautiful! It´s something else to wake up and upzip your tent and find yourself face to face with snow capped peaks settled in a valley with a running stream and wandering horses. Plus we got pancakes for breakfast! We packed up and Susannah opted for riding the horse, as today was our toughest hike up to the base of Salkantay. And they weren´t messing around. Our first 30 minutes were straight up hill, but it took us to a plateau where we got our first glimpse of Salkantay. It means ´savage mountain´in Quecha and it looked pretty savage indeed...craggy and imposing and covered in snow about to avalanche. No one has ever successfully summited it.

We kept going with the uphill through some pretty intense switchbacks which when coupled with the altitude meant lots of stops, chewing on cocoa leaves more than a redneck chews tobacco, and just putting one foot in front of the other...slowly. The scenery was amazing though. Eventually we planed out into a grassy meadow strewn with huge boulders and a glassy, serene little pond. We stopped for a while so we could regroup and eat something, then started the final push to the base of the mountain. We finally made it to the last of our uphill walking! The base was a jumble of rocks looking up at the huge, snowy monolith. Our guide hadn´t been able to see the top of the mountain for the last 5 months of leading this trip, but the clouds cleared and we got some stunning views. We took pictures with the elevation sign and left our offerings to the god of the mountain (all praying for no more rain!) and headed down (blissfully).

We descended into something that felt like a sacred valley. Flanked by mountains reminiscent of the Scottish highlands with rivulets of water running down them, it looked as if a group of giants had left in the middle of a game of marbles with the biggest boulders I´ve ever seem lying around the soft green valley in what seemed like casual significance. We (and our knees) worked our way down to the valley floor and walked along a river, by llamas grazing, to the lunch spot. Having already done a good 6 hours of hiking, we all napped in the sunshine as we waited for the rest of the group and I stuck my feet in the icy cold stream.

On the way down we´d noticed that Susannah had fallen behind a little with Marilu, the guide, as she´d decided to walk the downhill section. However, unbeknownst to us, altitude sickness doesn´t care if you´re walking uphill or downhill! And poor Susannah had pretty much passed out at some point and then had to lean on Marilu the rest of the way down the hill. Luckily once we saw them from the lunch spot, the guide sent one of the porters off with the horse to fetch them. Unfortunately, when Susannah was riding back, the horse did not so much want to cross the stream and reired back knocking Susannah off! Somehow, I´m not sure how she did it, she managed to joke about all this during lunch. Recap: altitude sickness, nausea, vomiting, not being able to breath, passing out, bucked off a horse, and still social and making jokes. Like I said, most intrepid traveler I know.

After lunch we had 3 more hours of hiking as we got back below the tree line and into the jungle. At one point the trail was so muddy from the rainy season that for about 400 meters we were jumping from rock to rock in the sludge pit, kind of like that game you would play when you were little where you put pillows on the floor and jump from couches to pillows to chairs but can´t touch the ground or the alligators will get you. It was fun. :) Our assistant guide Mariluz kept assuring us that we were álmost there´and it was ´just around the corner´and the camp finally did appear just before twilight started setting in. We set up our tents on a green plateau that jutted out overlooking the lush jungle and waterfalls falling into the river below. The bathroom at this stop was accessed through the muddy (´that doesn´t smell like mud´) pig-sty, which provided lots of slippery entertainment after dark! As twilight faded into darkness, we realized that Susannah, her ´mighty´ steed, and Eduardo, the guide, still hadn´t made it to camp. Apparently they had to navigate the last part of the narrow path carved into a hillside on a finecky horse with only the help of a headlamp. So Sus can add that to her list! Once they made it though, we had our popcorn and hot chocolate ´happy hour´, waited for dinner, ate, and crawled into our sleeping bags, praising the gods of Salkantay that it wasn´t raining.

DAY 3

I´m not sure if I mentioned this before, but the organizers of this trip had ingeniusly realized that the only way to lure us out of our sleeping bags at 5:30 every morning was to have the cooks come around and knock on our tents (in as much as one can knock on a tent) and offer us piping hot mate de coca. Ingenius. After that we would rustle around, sometimes changing our clothes, mostly just wearing the same dirty things, and pack up for another day of hiking. Then, the only thing that would actually get us to emerge from the tents was the allure of a hot breakfast. They had me pegged I tell you. We all felt a lot better this morning after some sleep in dry tents at a much lower altitude, so Sus bravely opted for walking. The hike planned for the day was 6 hours through the jungle, which was gorgeous...lots of rivers, waterfalls, fruits, plants, butterflies. I´ll try to include a picture of the bridges we crossed. At one point there was a gorgeous new suspension bridge spanning a river, and then underneath was the Incan version we crossed, which was comprised of two big logs filled in with a bunch of sticks. The whole group had to stay together today because apparently with all the rains there had been some rock slides and a group had recently slid down the mountain (dear mom, please ignore that last sentence. love, your totally responsible daughter :) ), but it was actually really nice to have everyone together after we had fragmented the day before due to very different climbing speeds.

It was a relaxed, beautiful hike. The main excitement came when we reached a group of workers rebuilding a bridge that had been washed away by the rains. The river at this point was frothy and fast, so we couldn´t just cross it and the workers had only gotten to the ´put down two logs and about 4 of the sticks´stage of the Incan bridge building. So. We had to cross it. The best part of this whole endeavor was that no one said anything about it! Everyone played it totally cool and walked across the balance beam bridge pearched over the rushing river as if this was something they did every day. For me, it really underscored the whole endeavor of this trip...there was no other way across this river and I was responsible for crossing it, myself. There were no safety nets, no way to negotiate other options...

TO BE CONTINUED....

***We´re about to catch a flight to Morocco(!), but hadn´t posted in so long (largely due to a stint on a farm with no electricity) that we thought we´d leave you something to read. The rest of this epic post will be added as soon as possible! xoxo k+c