Perulog XIV: Ruined Again

012805

After throwing more than a dozen hours of intense sleep at a body reeling from protracted exertion at extreme altitudes I managed to greet the day with the eager anticipation that bursts from the adventurous soul of a young man awakening in the mountains with a bag of coca leaves at the ready.

After a happy brushing of teeth (at least thirty-two parts of me were clean) and a small but nutritious breakfast Team Puma set off for our third day hiking the world-famous Inca Trail.  The day started with two hours of up, but after the trial of Day Two this felt like a walk in the park.  And what a park!  No less stunning than the previous two days and equally dotted with amazing ruins.

It would be a lie to say that we’d been constantly walking past nifty Incan ruins during our daily hikes, but it wouldn’t be a very big lie, ‘cuz every day we walked by a whole lot of nifty Incan ruins.  So many that I began to worry that they would ruin me for Machu Picchu, pardon the pun.  Round ones, crooked ones, straight ones, curved ones, tall ones, wide one, you name a type of ruin and we walked by it.  One thing that they all had in common were those stylistically perfect and industrially precise stone walls that the Inca were so mysteriously good at.  After four days visiting ruin after ruin I didn’t see two stones that I could’ve fit a slice of paper between.  They were all – to a ruin – incredible.  No two sites were alike and each one had a story; some of which were known (or at least agreed upon) while most could only live in one’s imagination.

Which at times came easy.  Ascending from one of these notable sites only to almost immediately happen upon another, it wasn’t hard to project back a half a millennium and imagine the hustle and bustle of foot traffic along the misty, mountainous forest paths that ran between these eye-popping architectural wonders.  Back when Gutenberg was still working out the bugs of his printing press and young Christopher Columbus was just a stock boy working in his father’s cheese shop the Inca could boast a vast network of freshly constructed temples, bathhouses, abbeys, sacrificial sites, priestly dwellings and who knows what else?  But they didn’t.  Boast about these things, that is.  Or at least they probably tried not to.  

For if not for incursions by Spanish invaders these sites might be no more “ruin”ed than the still-inhabited castles of Germany that date as far back as the 13th century or the functioning cathedrals in France that are upwards of 800 years old.

¡Maldita sea!

Once again, after a long day of hiking upward through all of this wonder we finally reached camp.  But this time we were staying at an actual lodge, with showers, legit toilets, a rec hall and everything!  The porters even had real stoves to cook on.  

After three long, hard days of trekking through the sweltering, steamy Peruvian mountains with nothing more than a small washbasin at my disposal, I don’t think I had ever needed a shower more, and it was glorious.  Of course this was our last night with the porters and it proved to be their last opportunity to lobby up their trek-ending tips, and they did it through food.

Just like the night before, all 200 hikers were staying together, and we five pumas huddled around a picnic table sipping on our aperitifs and watching as the other tables in the dining hall were presented with mounds of chef-prepared food served on heaping silver trays, until finally it was our turn.  It was with obvious pride that our small, humble group of porters surrounded our table, each of them holding a large, domed serving tray.  At the head chef’s nod they all leaned down as one and, after a pause to ensure unity, lifted the covers off to reveal the wonders that awaited us.   

And I must say, everything was quite impressive.  And I don’t just mean because the food looked good and because there was a whole lot of it, though it did and there was.  But everything also came with a flash of pizzazz that could only have been learned in culinary school.  There were roosters made out of melons, anatomically correct llamas made from carrots and potatoes, the ruins of Puyupatamarca carved out of Spanish rice, and so much more.  As we oohed and aahed over each delicious art piece the porters snuck in more and more trays heavily laden with overly articulate food.  Eventually there was so much on the table there was hardly any room left for our appetites, and while it would have been humanly impossible for the five of us to eat even a fraction of all that food we did our hearty best, I promise you that. 

Though I gotta say, discovering how blatantly talented our cook was after three days of eating highly-pedestrian, mediocre-to-okay food didn’t inspire me to tip extra.  But tip we did – the French folks quite strongly – after giving our chef and the entire crew an enthusiastic round of applause.

After dinner I bought myself four or five frosty cold beers in fairly quick succession and man oh man, did I enjoy them.  But before things got too hairy I forced myself to hit the tent as soon as my unquenching thirst would allow for even after a day such as this, even after surviving three days hiking one of the planet’s most enviable trails, the wide-eyed wonder of a 4am pre-sunrise hike to the lost city of Machu Picchu still loomed.

The days are just packed.