El Travel Blog

Taking the guesswork out of Why We Didn’t Exactly Uhm “Fit In” With Our Fellow Hikers

(I think it also had something to do with our hour long discussions of Gossip Girl and straight out disgusting consumption of approx. 25 Snickers bars each).

Hikin’ Salkantay. Wearin’ a hat because my scalp got burned and I don’t know how to put SPF 70 on my hair when I know it won’t be washed out for several days. Carrying a walking stick because I have the ligaments of dead people implanted in each of my knees. (I’m a pansy, whatever.)

Peruvians like to make little ceremonial stacks of rocks on top of hills. Yeah. Rock stacks. 

So I’ve already written a bit about Machu Picchu. Here come some photos from our hike on the spectacular Salkantay Trail.

I will add one thing to my previous comments on old MP:

For anyone thinking of going, you MUST book the Inca Trail very far in advance. You need a permit, and its complicated and expensive. I’m talking like 6 months out or more. 

Since we weren’t on top of our shit enough to get that squared away in advance, we opted for an alternative trail, of which there are many. There is a jungle tour that involves downhill biking and a bit of trekking. Many backpackers choose this because its cheap, isn’t too difficult, is still cool, and you can show up to Cuzco and get on one the next day if you want. 

We opted for the Salkantay trek, which was five days total (four of trekking, one at the site), and while it was beautiful and amazing, it lacked one major element of magic that the Inca Trail had. It’s because we ended day four in Aguas Calientes, a tourist town at the base of the mountain. We stayed in a hostel and took a bus up the mountain the next morning. It felt silly to hike our weary asses all the way there while roughing it in tents only to cozy up in a hostel and ascend the mountain the next day on a bus like all the lazy asses who took the train in.

Those on the Inca Trail, on the other hand, decend down the side of an adjacent mountain to Machu Picchu just as the sun rises and morning fog parts to reveal the ruins. It’s got to be even more breathtaking and, I dunno, spiritual, than rolling up in a Mercedes bus. So, if you’re going, PLAN IN ADVANCE and INVEST IN THE INCA TRAIL. 

The Lima Mall

In Ottawa, Ohio, where I grew up, there is a nearby city called Lima, only it’s pronounced Lie-ma, not Lee-ma. It was a boring, crappy city but that was where the big shopping mall was.

That’s kindof how Lima, Peru, is too. We spent 4 days there, all of them cranky, bored, and anxious to move on. Lima is covered in a cloudy haze from April to January, so there’s no sunlight. It’s sprawling and bland and full of American chain restaurants. Even worse, we managed to somehow each day end up at a big flashy annoying shopping mall (Larcomar).

We wanted to go to the movies; the only titles playing in English were a vampire movie and Sex and the City 2. I am embarrassed to say we watched them both.

We took a mediocre tour of the city (ok the catacomb part was badass; I spent the rest of it half asleep). We went to a casino (seriously). We went to yet another market selling the same old handmade artisan craft fair hippie trinkets. After four days I was ready to get out from under the drab clouds of Lima.

The aforementioned Chicha corn beer. Why they do not have “para llevar” or “to go” cups in this country is beyond me, but here I am, drinking out of a plastic bag.

We have arrived at the most expensive and most touristy and most amazing part of the trip: Machu Picchu. Did you know you get a stamp on your passport just for going there? It seemed kindof like cheating. (You don’t get a passport stamp for, say, The Empire State Building, why should you get one for a big pile of old walls? It’s not a new country!)

We hiked for five days to get to Machu Picchu. I survived the trek, thanks, entirely, to the 28 or so Snickers bars I ate. I think I was propelled up the mountain by my own farts.

Day one required several hours of uphill hooving and heavy panting to around 4000m above sea level; days two and three were easy peasy three hour hikes. Day four was three hours up, two hours down, and two more hours flat. My feet were covered in blisters. We slept in tents and were woken up each morning around 4 or 5am with hot coffee by our guides. The coffee-in-bed service felt like such a luxury.

The food was almost as impressive as the landscape; the cooks managed three course meals for 15 people each day on the most humble little travel burner. They’d take off with their mules and somehow, each time we arrived at our campsite for the night, our tents were assembled and a hot meal was ready. We actually tipped them more than we tipped the guides.

So Machu Picchu was breathtaking as expected etc etc.

We arrived back in Cuzco to stay at Loki, the McHostel chain of the backpacking world. It’s got around 400 people staying in this refurbished old church. Each night the loud, smoky bar has 21-year-old British kids literally swinging from the rafters. The house band is named The Clusterfunks. I’m beyond caring that I’m beyond too old for this crap.

Instead I’ve spent the past week relaxing, getting massages, reading Hemingway, drinking wine and eating vegetables, doing yoga (in English!), and making friends with bar owners in the “bohemian” district of the city. We did some volunteering that involved playing with a bunch of Peruvian children displaced by the recent flooding. I tried the Chicha corn beer and cuy (guinea pig), although I’m certain they served us a rat.

Bienvenidos a Cuzco!

After a mildly stressful arrival, we found a crappy little attic room in a hostel off the main square of the lovely city of Cuzco. The roads here are shiny cobblestones, which are beautiful but slippery as hell. Which is to say I slipped down a flight of stairs wearing my pack. Moving on.

The city is SO touristy that we have resorted to very aggressive “NO!!!!!”s to get the solicitors to leave us alone. Sometimes a very aggressive “YES!” throws them off too. Last night, after refusing to buy necklaces from a little girl stalking us all over the Plaza de Armes, she, in the tiniest little voice called us “motherfuckers!” The nerve!

We rented a rickety old VW Beetle for 30 soles for the entire day (like 10 bucks). Mike was the only one who could drive a manual, so, even though he’d never driven on the right side of the road, he took the wheel. We cruised through the Sacred Valley for around five hours; we saw some of the damage from the January storms and resulting mudslides, as well as some breathtaking mountain scenery. When we rolled back into Cuzco I experienced some very sudden and horrible altitude sickness but felt better (and gassier) after about three bottles of seltzer water.