Old Mountain, Big Adventure

Finally! Knocked a big one of my bucket list... Machu Picchu! We sure did it with a bang too... Eric, Randi, and I decided to do the Inka Jungle Trek which is a four day three day trip to the old mountain itself. Coming back it is really hard to summarize the range of physical and mental emotions we experienced. I guess I will start with day one:

The trek was kicked off by a windy bus ride (AB you would not have enjoyed this at all), where the bus dropped us off at the top of a mountain to ride our bikes down. This was such a freeing feeling, after I got over the fact that my wheel was making funny noises and might fly off at any moment. Riding down was never dull, full of pin turns and extremely muddy construction zones. When we got down you could literally measure our smiles with a ruler, we were all quite amused by the adventure. After we made it down safely we headed to get some grub, and rest up a bit for the next day. My dad would have been so proud of me on this trip. I pretty much turned into a carnivore and devoured two meals with a marinated steak. Easy the most red meat I have eaten in the past year. This served me well for day two.

The second day we woke up with the sun and stuffed our tummies before taking off for a 10 hour hike. It is hard to put a caption on the beauty and adventure of everything we saw. This day was easily the most satisfying part of the trip. We trekked up a part of the Incan trail that the messengers used to use to communicated between pueblos. These trails are no more than 2 meters wide and are located hundreds of meters over the canyon created by the Urubamba river. For good reason too, as we could peek over the edge to watch the river rush by at un-Godly speeds. It is pretty amazing thinking about the thought that went into everything we saw, hiked, and summited. One of the guys on our trek told me I was just like an Incan since I opted to do the hike in my Chacos. Seeing what they were capable of, I took that as quite the compliment. Day one continued to wear on and we finally reached some flat ground to give our calves a bit of a rest, but the adventure far from stopped there.... Mom you can skip the end of this paragraph if you wish not to have a heart attack.... Because it is rainy season the terrain is always a bit more difficult to maneuver. Like I said the river was really high, and quite crazy. But the rain also triggers a lot of rock slides. About an hour outside of our destination for the day we confronted one of these. Originally the plan was to descend again and go by the river to climb up to Santa Theresa to stay for the night. However, this did not workout. So we continued on, the rock slide had been a day or two ahead of us but they were still cleaning up the damage. So when we reached it our guides directed us to keep our eyes up on the hill and if we heard or saw anything to face our backs to the mountain and use our backpacks to protect our heads from flying rocks. So far so good..... we then met with a construction crew a couple hundred meters ahead. Here there was a lot of loose rock and they were working to secure the area in between some showers. So we waited a bit and then were directed to run through the rubble in pairs. When we were running through (mind you in my Chacos) I looked up and saw a good size rock flying behind Randi. Have no fear we all made it through. Eric had to get pulled against a ledge to avoid a few falling rocks, but the whole group made it completely safe. This is where I caption this story with: ¨That would never fly in America.¨ It really topped of the trip and gave us all the endorphin high to finish off the trek.

The next day was another day full of walking. This time there was very little up hill and we really got to see the power of the river as we walked by it with random splashes due to the force of the water. Not only that the afternoon was full of rain. By the time we reached Aguas Calientes, just outside of MP, we were more than ready for some dry clothes, a good meal, and a nice rest before waking up at 3:50 AM to hike up the Machu Picchu.

The early morning greeting us again with more rain. Loads of rain. We got up early and hiked up a mountain full of stairs to make it to MP before its 6 AM opening. By the time we all reached the entrance we were all soaked with a mix of rain and sweat. Lovely we all were for our tour. We spent the early morning learning about the relatively unknown Quechwa culture that populated MP in its prime, lucky the storm broke mid morning allowing us to dry off and for the fog to burn off for a few picture ops. We then set off to hike Huayna Picchu, the young mountain that overlooks the whole range we hiked in. Naturally, when we began our hike we were greeting by yet a another storm. The hike again was full of stairs, steep stairs, that made us feel like we were hiking the famous Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings. When we summited we hit the heart of the storm and got soaked through. We were able to get a break in between storms to get a small peek of MP from above. It was quite entertaining seeing all us tourists whip out their cameras when we spotted the bit of green and amazing constructions below. After that small window we decided to start our dissent since the stairs were unbelievably steep and we didn´t want to get stuck in the heart of a storm going down rocks that were constructed at the angle of a latter. Our dissent was rather timely, it started bucketing rain when we reached MP again so we decided we had got the chance to enjoy the majesty of MP and food was calling us.

We headed into town to enjoy a five star meal. I have never seen prettier nor tasted better food. It was a great place to warm up fire side and enjoy some time with our new German friend. We left Aguas Calientes on my first train ride ever, and headed back to Cusco while playing some word puzzles. It turns out I may be challenged by English word games, to do that with a second language is mentally exhausting. Props.

Randi and I were able to find late night hostal and get a solid night sleep. We were lucky enough to wake up to some Carnival celebrations in the streets. It turns out the Peruvinas do it right. Carival is full of dancing, foam, and water fights. It was a nice morning treat after four days of exhaustion and really brightened what looks like a typical febrero loco rainy day.