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012905
For the third straight evening it rained in the night, but for the first time on this Inca Trail trek it was still raining when we got up.
Time and time again during the previous three days, usually when he felt that one of his pumas needed a moral boost, our relentless guide Al would tell us of the wondrous sight that lay ahead of us. Again and again he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a worn postcard featuring a photo of Machu Picchu taken from above. “When you stand in this place and see the sun rise over the lost city of Machu Picchu,” he would say with a touch of awe in his voice, “you will know true beauty.” He showed us that postcard twenty, perhaps thirty times over the course of our journey and when – following a brief, almost non-breakfast in the dining hall – we set out for the very same perch from which the picture on the postcard was taken I realized it had all been a long con to pre-whet our appetites for an otherwise wholly unreasonable 4am hike through the dark, in the rain, over slick, narrow stone paths.
I almost lost my footing a few times, missteps that could have plunged me hundreds of metres down the side of a mountain. These close calls elevated my ever-present walking stick from a cane to a trusted friend.
After an hour of clamouring through the damp and the dark we reached our mystical, magical destination. Days of heart-thumping struggle enduring thousands of arduous steps up mountain after mountain had finally delivered us to the point above Machu Picchu where we would join the envied few lucky enough to bear witness as the sun crested over one of the most remarkable and picturesque creations in the history of mankind.
Only it was cloudy. Or foggy, take your pick. And just to rub it in it was still a bit rainy too. In fact it was so cloudy that we couldn’t see a damn thing. Nothing, nada, zippo. Machu Picchu was down there somewhere but we’d have to take our guide’s word for it because all we could see was dense fog. Mute with disappointment, Team Puma shuffled around the small plateau shrugging our shoulders at each other and dripping a blend of rain and sweat, when suddenly an idea struck me.
“Hey Al,” I blurted. “You still got that postcard?”
“Of course,” our guide answered, patting the outside of his inside pocket.
“Pull it out, would you?”
When Al produced the postcard I asked him to hold it where it would exactly mimic the view were weren’t seeing. “I got up at four o’clock in the stupid morning and risked my freakin’ life walking up here in the rain,” I mock-grumbled. “I’m getting my damn picture.” Laughing, Al held out the postcard while I and the others each snapped a shot. And you know, it’s probably my favourite picture from the whole trip.
Somewhat buoyed, we pumas began our descent and before long, despite our “mist” opportunity on the plateau, we were treated to a remarkable sight when the lost city of Machu Picchu began to emerge out of the foggy murk before our very eyes. To watch something so extensive and so outrageously picturesque gradually come into focus like that was really quite incredible. It was like peeling layers off of a Monet until it became a Rembrandt.
As I’d mentioned before, after all the amazing ruins we’d experienced along the Inca Trail these past few days I had grown concerned that I wouldn’t find Machu Picchu that big of a deal, but I was pretty wrong about that. Machu Picchu is a very big deal.
You’ve seen pictures of Machu Picchu and you’re about to see some more, so I think you’ll believe me when I say that mere words simply cannot distill the awe of wandering freely through the lost city. Whether close up or from a distance, every angle, every sight, and every view takes your breath away. Especially when the whole place is shrouded in an ominous mist, and most especially when the site is almost entirely devoid of other people. Entrance to Machu Picchu was restricted to only Inca Trail hikers before a certain time in the morning, and even then only a small fraction of those 200 souls were foolish enough get up extra early for the sunrise hike (probably even less so when it’s raining), so we were among literally fifteen or twenty people sharing the entire site, and the site is rather extensive. I wandered and wondered and wandered some more until I simply couldn’t bear the beauty any longer. My jaw was sore from hanging agape when, after a couple of astounding hours exploring one of the very pinnacles of art and architecture, I bid the other pumas goodbye and started down the mountain.
I was now very close to the end of my vacation and even closer to the bottom of my very limited funds. Things were getting so dire that rather than paying the bus fare for a ride from Machu Picchu down to the town of Aguas Calientes I opted to travel by foot instead. I think it’s pretty rare for people to walk but that’s a shame because the path was smooth and well-marked, it went solely downward, and it did so at a reasonable grade. So all in all it made for an easy stroll. And best of all, because the walking path was straight, every twenty or thirty metres it crossed the switchback road that the buses used, so there was simply no getting lost.
I was about ninety minutes getting down to Aguas Calientes but I didn’t care; after four days of hiking I felt like I could walk damn near anywhere and like I say, it was all downhill. As I strolled into the small town I found my French pumas on the patio of a fancy-pants restaurant. They invited me to join them for lunch but I knew the place was well above my budget so I begged off and did a bit of exploring. In no time at all I found myself a meal, a small soapstone Inca ruin (my only non-utilitarian souvenir of the trip), a shower and a sauna for less than what a single beer cost at their restaurant.
Well fed and significantly refreshed I was inspired to get a move on and in a stunning feat of rearrangement I managed to swap my train ticket for an earlier one, setting off a cavalcade of travel that ultimately allowed me an extra day in my favourite little oasis town of Huacachina. But I had some trials to endure first.
The two-hour train journey out of Aguas Calientes was no trial at all; in fact it was spectacular. The car had windows that curved at the top, offering unobstructed views of the incredible mountains that constantly drifted by. Definitely one of the most memorable train rides in a lifetime blessed with amazing train rides.
And so I was still in pretty high spirits for the taxi ride to Cusco – which took another two hours and was also not much of a trial – where I bought a ticket for the next bus to Ica, which departed at 6pm.
I booked the cheap bus which meant no bathroom and no limit to the amount of people, luggage, or critters they would pick up on a milk run through every mountain town in the Andes. An hour into the trip a family got on – mom, dad, and three kids – and I guess children must ride for free because they only had two tickets between them. Of course the entire quintet took the two seats directly next to where I was sitting in the back row.
Before we went anywhere the bus driver came back and started yelling at them, waving his arms around and pointing towards other seats, which boded well for me. The mother started straight into a high-pitched whine, identical to the droning, drawn-out whining the finger-puppet kids used whenever I didn’t buy their finger puppets (which was always), and personally this didn’t bring me over to her cause at all. In the end the dad and son were moved to a different seat while the mother and her two daughters remained in the seat next to mine.
Guess what? Three people don’t fit in one bus seat, even if the youngest is only about seven years old. And so it was the four of us sharing two seats, but as I squished and squeezed and tried to make way for two squirming kids the lady eventually rolled and stretched her way into having her seat all to herself, leaving the two kids and me juggling for mine. By the powers of Grayskull, I swear the ensuing fifteen hours was hands-down the most trying physical ordeal of my life*. It was much, much harder than any stretch of the Inca Trail had been, and more uncomfortable than getting forced through the rapids of the Urubamba River underneath an inverted raft. Crowded and cramped in that seat with them for more than a full half-day was nothing less than torture, and one that I endured in complete, defiant silence. No standing, no stretching, no toilet, no food, no sleeping…It was sheer hell. The sustained discomfort made my body ache and my mind swirl; more than once I had to hold myself from having a serious freak out.
Well I suppose that’s not entirely true. Even twisted like a pretzel in the back seat of a bus that was forever making hairpin turns on bad roads over sheer cliffs, I did manage to fall to sleep at least once. I can say that with certainty because I awoke to find one of the kids sitting on the floor with her head poking up between my knees, staring at my pained, squinting face with a bored non-curiosity that suggested that none of this was out of the ordinary for her.
Clearly, the whole situation was more routine for her than it was for me so I suspect she wasn’t at all surprised when our scheduled twelve-hour bus trip ran four excruciating hours late, but I sure was. Every tardy minute was another torturous surprise for me, until the bus finally and mercifully pulled into the Ica bus terminal at 10am. With only the briefest exception or two I’d been awake since 4am the day before, when I’d started dragging a body already more worn down than it had ever been up and down the Andes mountains in the rain, and literally half of the ensuing thirty hours had been spent in cruel and involuntary bus-seat yoga.
And all of this just so I could spend the last day of my Peruvian vacation at an oasis. Ah, here comes a taxi now.
*Curiously, the only thing that comes close was a slightly longer, much drunker bus ride I’d taken in Vietnam under similar financial conditions seven years earlier. That trip damn near killed me. Come to think of it, both experiences could have been avoided with a $2 upgrade.
Todd Man Out 