The main thing to remember in reading this journal is that my wife, Kayte, and I are adventure travel amateurs in the strictest sense. Though we’ve been fortunate enough to see a good portion of the world, all of the long and short distances we’d traveled before arriving in Peru were courtesy of various technologies involving wings, wheels, and engines. When we received our “recommended gear” list in the mail we stood aghast and fearful, muttering questions like “What’s a North Face?” and generally feeling like we were in way over our heads. I’m not sure that feeling ever fully dissipated but, nonetheless, we had an extraordinary experience on the Salkantay Trek, the story of which is detailed below.
Arriving in Cuzco, Peru the day before our trek was to begin, our first impressions were of air that was worryingly thin and a city that was absolutely spectacular. Cuczo is in the Andean highlands, roughly 10,000 feet high, and was once capital of the famed Inca Empire. Its architecture is an interesting mishmash of intricate Inca stone work, narrow cobblestone streets, and giant Spanish Colonial churches towering overhead. The whole city is colored an ancient orange hue, familiar from cities along the Mediterranean, which contrasts nicely with the brilliant blue sky above. We giddily traversed the winding walkways, snapping shots of llamas (a strong new contender for the Ross’ favorite animal of 2008 award) and sipping warm coca tea in little cafes. Sound like paradise? There was just one problem. On a late afternoon walk back to our hotel, we encountered a little uphill terrain, thirty seconds of which left us nearly completely breathless. A general sense of masculinity was the only thing that kept me from taking a break 15 seconds in. This was not a good sign. In the next two days alone we’d be making our way to 15,000 feet. A little uphill city walk wasn’t supposed to have us gasping like fools. I tried to put thoughts of cardiac arrest and helicopter rescue out of my mind and after a satisfyingly dreamless nap set out for dinner on the town.
Dinner had more ominous foreshadowing in store for us. We ended up striking up a conversation with some fellow Americans at the table next to us, who’d just completed the Inca Trail. The Inca Trail is the more conventional, and much easier, hiking route to Machu Picchu. Let’s just say that we responded with a rather forced smile when, having heard our plans to trek Salkantay, our new friends expressed admiration in much the same way one might congratulate a fellow for enrolling in the Navy Seals. It didn’t help that compared with us, these two looked like they were pulled from the pages of a fitness magazine. I was terrified to make eye contact with Kayte, who’s youtoldmethiswouldbeeasy laser eyes were boring holes into the side of my head. On the way back to the hotel I made general insinuations about the questionable sobriety of our new friends while wondering to myself if a flight home could be arranged via blackberry.
We were to be collected from our hotel the following morning at 4 AM so before bed we crammed all of our trekking gear into our soft sided bags and said a little prayer for our trek and, all things considered, our marriage. Morning, as you may expect, came fast and was accompanied by a small foreign voice calling “rose andersen” into the still dark courtyard of our hotel. We hopped into a bus with our fellow trekkers and rode two hours to our starting point, a small Andean town called Mollepata. The town had a little Catholic church whose mass we attended for a few minutes, snapping pictures of the interesting paintings and wall reliefs. It was also in Mollepata where we first met our Guide for the trek, the inimitable Alfredo, a Quechua man in his early twenties. The Quechua people are indigenous to the Andes and are the descendants of the Incas who once ruled here before the Spanish Inquisition set about destroying the local culture and many of its people. Like the Sherpas of the Himalaya, Quechuas are accustomed to high altitude, a fact that can fill you with hatred and envy when you are sprawled out on a rock with your chest heaving and they are running up and down the mountain with smiling faces and bouncing ponytails. More on that later!
Finally we set out from Mollepata, walking uphill through the town and meeting some of its more colorful residents, including one plainly drunk gentleman who Alfredo distracted while urging us tersely to “keep walking”. I was overjoyed. I’ve always said that you can’t know a place until you know its drunks. Okay so i haven’t always said that but nonetheless we were all high off the local scenery. We were moving into an area buffeted by jagged mountains seemingly overlaid in green billiards felt. The increasing smells and sights of wilderness and the few small farms lifted our sprits and gave us the sensation that the trek, after months of appearing only in our imaginations, had at last begun. This sense of euphoria diminished quickly. This first day of trekking was to last 9 hours, 8 hours and 48 minutes (not a scientific measurement, was probably closer to eight hours) of which were uphill. As if the constant uphill were not enough of an indignity, a two hour shortcut suggested by Alfredo had us traipsing through terrain best negotiated with the use of a machete. This portion we called the “trail of sorry” because we so frequently had to apologize for sending a branch rubberbanding back into the face of the trekker behind us. Lunch was a quiet, desperate affair, as each of us in turn tried his/her hand at eating pasta while lying flat on his/her back. We reached camp just as our legs were threatening to lock up and declare themselves useless for all of eternity.
Our camp was at a small ranch staring right into the face of the Salkantay glacier. It was, despite the fatigue and sense of bewilderment that had washed over us, almost incomparably gorgeous. There was a small farmhouse situated on a sweeping moss green field that seem to stretch all the way to the horizon. I read once of the Himalaya being compared to jagged teeth shooting up from the jawbone of the world. The mountains here were just like that, craggy, their tops coated in a brilliant white whose gaze you couldn’t hold for long. In a romantic, exhaustion influenced moment I began to babble about wanting to live here forever. Dinner was served in a tiny windblown shack, a setting which sounds miserable but which actually added to the atmosphere. Alfredo told us the story of the 19th century indigenous revolutionary Tupac Amaru and then dutifully listened to our story of revolutionary slain rapper Tupac. He seemed amused and impressed that an American recording artist would take the name of a heroic ancestor of his. The food, while cooked under some questionable circumstances, was delicious. I drank four too many hot chocolates necessitating a trip to the “toilet tent” which is a fancy phrase for a shallow hole with a tarp wrapped half around it. This was to be my first and last trip to Salkantay’s many toilet tents. Thereafter we were content to wait for dark and slip away unnoticed with our headlamp and personal toiletries. Exactly three seconds after dinner I felt more tired then I have ever felt in my whole life. Luckily, on the way back to the tent, I chanced to gaze skywards to see a more stunning array of stars than I’d ever thought possible. The night sky was positively spackled with thick, glowing dots of white arranged in swirls and figures the likes of which made one see why the ancients were so enraptured with making legends out of shapes in the heavens. Truly sublime. Our wonderment lasted mere moments before the physiological imperative of sleep descended once again upon us. That I didn’t get the chance to lay flat on my back for hours at a time pondering the secrets of the Universe as expressed in that stretch of sky remains my biggest and only regret of the trip. We were asleep less than two minutes later.
I will say that in my 28 years here on earth I have cycled through a few different alarm clocks. I’ve had a beeping alarm clock, a clock radio, an ipod alarm clock, but what I hadn’t had until very recently is a Peruvian-thrusting-hot-coca-tea-through-the-freshly-unzipped-entrance-of-my-tent alarm clock. It’s a doozy. We were warned by many that this second day was the most difficult of the trek, mainly because it involved the ascent to the Salkantay pass at a whopping 15,000 feet. For those keeping score at home that’s higher than any mountain in the continental United States. Every time I say that it makes me feel like a bad ass. This ascent is accomplished via a hellish series of switch-backs, of which Alfredo told us there would be seven when in fact there were at least thirty. The scenery was to be our salvation once again. On the way up the lung-crushing, calf-incinerating switch-backs one’s heart and determination could be restored in a nanosecond by a quick survey of the surreal panorama. Ice and snow sat atop the peaks which seemed to shoot straight and smooth from the valley floor below. As we neared the pass our breaks increased in both frequency and duration. Full blown altitude sickness hadn’t quite descended upon me but there were symptoms at times. We came across a lake so pristine that I was sure i’d hallucinated it. A single cow stood drinking from it like a statue. After the lake we rounded a corner and stared down the barrel of a frighteningly steep final set of switch-backs, the sight of which almost seemed too much to bear. A while earlier a gal from our group had relented to the merciless Salkantay and hopped on a horse to make the final climb. From our current view she looked like a genius on par with Einstein or Newton. But we were determined…
Click here to see additional photo’s from their adventure.
Ross Anderson
outsideallday.com Contributor
