Posted by 
012705
With a large and varied assortment of critters wandering loose around our encampment it’s no surprise that I was awakened early. It had rained in the night and though the small pup tent had leaked a little, the inconvenience proved inconsequential. To me at least; the young Hungarian fellow I was sharing the tent with seemed rather sullen.
I, on the other hand, was anything but! Outside the tent I found the sun basking down upon the mountainside with a radiant morning glory that had me nearly running around like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. But the poor Hungarian didn’t even eat breakfast; said he hadn’t slept well.
While the rest of us ate, our guide Al warned us that we were in for an extreme day of climbing. This will be the most difficult day of the Inca Trail, he said, explaining that in the next six hours we would be ascending from our current altitude of 2,700 metres to a peak of 4,200 metres. At this the four French tourists – who were outfitted well enough to summit Mount Everest, or perhaps hike through the Sea of Tranquility – all simultaneously looked down and poked numbers into their fancy-pants wristwatch altimeters. I reached for an extra piece of toast.
Soon enough we are off, walking steadily up up up through stunning scenery on a sublimely beautiful day. It was really and truly breathtaking in every conceivable way. And every step made it even moreso, until we finally climbed up through the clouds and into thin air.
All of us except the Hungarian, that is. It wasn’t long into the morning when our guide Al fell in step with me and mentioned that our youngest puma had turned around and was headed back to Cusco. Crazy. I couldn’t help thinking that my abundant personality and strong snoring must have played a part in his decision, but I assured myself that I could only have played a supporting role at best. Dude had plenty working against him. By the end of the day Al would report that two other hikers from other groups had also packed it in and gone home.
That amounts to a 1.5% quit rate, which isn’t too bad. New tourism rules were limiting the amount of tourists allowed to embark on the Inca Trail to 200 per day; I guess there used to be a lot more*. Still, with 800 people spread out along the four-day hike it was a somewhat rare treat to find one’s self alone on the trail and out-of-earshot of others. At one point in the afternoon I happened upon the British couple and Canadian girl that had almost been a part of our team and confirmed that yes, they were indeed very cool.
I wouldn’t necessarily say the same about my fellow pumas. They were fine, but not much more. We mostly stayed out of each other’s way and got on fine enough when we didn’t, and in the end I actually ended up being quite friendly with the lady and her husband. But I knew I was a fifth wheel stuck to their little group even though it was quickly obvious that the other trekking parties contained at least dozen if not twenty to thirty people, and now that we were down to just five, well, we had a pretty private hiking party.
And a pretty, relatively private hike it was too! I kept my sack of coca leaves and wad of llipta at the ready and tried my best to concentrate as much on the stunning scenery as I did on my plodding feet, my aching body, and my ever-straining lungs. When I did I invariably found that everything around me was continually astounding and constantly beautiful.
Including my encounter with a curiously large hummingbird, whom I met during one of my brief solo stretches along the path. I had been trucking along with my eyes on the trail when I heard the purr of little engine-wings and looked up to find a bird hovering just a couple of feet away from my chest. He was by far the largest hummingbird I had ever seen and he was very colourful, and though he flitted slightly to and fro he mostly remained still, flying-in-place directly in front of me. After ten long seconds I thought to myself, “I should dig the camera out of my bag.” But of course I waffled, thinking, “Nah, he’ll fly away any second now, just enjoy it.” And yet he remained. “I should really get my camera though.”
“No way, he’ll fly away as soon as I set my bag down.” The hummingbird hummed, unmoving.
“But my camera takes videos. Maybe I could get a little video of the guy…: Still, he hovered.
In a burst of confidence or perhaps boredom I finally did fish out my camera and managed a quick, out-of-focus picture before the little dude succumbed to his own boredom and disappeared in a flash.
Let me tell you, hour after hour of climbing up through the clouds can really grind a guy down. By the time I had the day’s pinnacle in sight I was drenched in sweat from aching head to blistered toe. And even then I was still at least an hour from reaching the peak, as close as it was. Of course, the ever-thinning air slowed things down tremendously; once you reach the 3,500 metre mark you officially enter the “Very High Altitude” realm, a zone characterized by significantly lower oxygen levels which can lead the altitude sickness. At these elevations, rapid ascent can lead to serious, potentially fatal conditions like High-Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE) or High-Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE), but I tell you, I wasn’t anywhere near “rapid ascent”. Even though we were continually waiting for the elder Frenchman, who was forever taking extended breaks punctuated with heavily-orchestrated photo ops, whereby he would pose confidently with his chest puffed out only to collapse gasping for breath the moment the picture was taken, the lack of breathable air kept me down to no more than five paces in a stretch before I would be forced to stop to catch my breath. At one point I asked Al about the canister of emergency oxygen he was required by law to have on hand at all times, maybe I could get a hit or two off of that? He simply asked me if I wanted to turn back like the Hungarian did and spent the rest of the day out of earshot.
When at long last I made it to the uppermost ledge of the highest point of the Inca Trail, staggering impaired with the dizziness and headache that come with the onset of altitude sickness, I barely had to time to enjoy the feat. Sweating prodigiously and clamouring for breath, I joined a smattering of other hikers sitting along the rim and gaped at the struggling hikers below. Wow, 4,200 metres…amazing! The peak of Mount Everest is just over 8,800 metres; I had just hiked halfway up Everest! The easy half, okay, but still.
Unfortunately my fatigued reverie was short, as Al had directed one of the porters to wait at the top and make sure that none of the pumas stayed at the peak longer than five minutes. Any longer and the health risks for the uninitiated begin to increase exponentially. The air was so depleted that my chest was still struggling for breath when the small smiling man tapped me on the shoulder and waved a Team Puma banner in my face, bidding me to begin the ninety-minute descent towards camp.
Though my soul is strong my knees are not. I’ve had surgery on both for different reasons, and by the time I started down from the pinnacle my right knee was starting to get pretty tender. I started leaning into my walking stick hard enough that it became a cane, and still the relentless gravity yanked my hulking torso down onto my fragile joints with little mercy. I had become exhausted to the point of collapse, and while the long slog up up up all day had been a genuine trial of endurance, the down down down encore turned out to be no picnic either. Frankly, I don’t think I’d ever voluntarily experienced a more difficult physical trial.
I tell you, at the end of it all Camp Puma was one hell of a beautiful sight. On night one Team Puma had camped alone but here all 200 hikers along with their porters and guides were crammed together in a sea of tents. Again, Al had installed one of our porters at the entrance of the encampment to watch for his pumas, and as I was led hobbling through the labyrinth of camps my body was literally raked with fatigue. The blisters I had acquired walking back and forth through Nazca had really come to the fore, and my rafting gashes were on the brink of infection. But oh my, everything was all so mind-bendingly beautiful. The whole way down from the peak I’d walked through clouds, only to emerge above our valley encampment enshrouded with an ever-shifting ceiling of mist. Everything was extraordinary.
After Tea-time-happy-hour I fell into my tent and slept like a dead man for two hours. I was awoken so I could eat supper and shortly after I went back down for another eleven solid hours.
Drifting coma-like between the dinner table and my sleeping bag I stopped for a moment and turned my head from side to side, struck dumb at the sheer wonder of the place I happened to find myself. Then I looked up and gasped. The clouds had dissipated somewhat and a break in the cover opened before my eyes, revealing the most impressive array of stars I’ve ever seen. The lack of light or even a sliver of moon combined with the thin air to create a shocking depth and breadth of stars, the likes of which I think I shall never see again. I gazed mesmerized, staring into the infinite eyes of an endless galaxy of gods; surely we were in heaven now.
Then the Frenchies came ’round and tried to convince me that Orion was the Big Dipper so I went to bed.
*In fact, I was amazingly lucky to have booked the final departure day before the Inca Trail officially closed for the rainy season. An embarrassing lack of research had me this close to missing the chance to hike the Inca Trail – something I left Canada fully intending to do – and it was pure happenstance that I’d caught the last possible departure day.
Todd Man Out 