Inca Trail - Day 2

  Machu Pichu, Peru
Tuesday, September 12, 2006

We woke up to the treat of a cup of coca tea in our tents, but were feeling a little anxious on day two. The guy at the Peru Treks & Adventures office (the company we booked the trip with) had referred to day 2 as "the stairmaster", "buns of steel" and Steve´s favourite, "the Gringo killer". Tara had visions of her head exploding so hired a local to take her bag up to the next camp. Steve was a little more confident and chose to brave it out and carry his pack up over 1000 metres (3280 feet).

We started the morning by all gathering round to introuduce ourselves to the porters and vice versa. Very "Alcoholics Anonymous"!



You can see how high our camp was by the fact that the clouds in the background are below eye-level.

The 12km hike began at 7am at 3100 meters and we started our climb up to Dead Woman's Pass at 4200 meters.



We went slow and steady and, other than a killer headache for Tara, we made it 300m up to our afternoon camp unscathed! We were exhausted by lunch and felt we had climbed a great deal.



We were feeling a little smug until after lunch when the real climbing began!

The Incas liked their stairs and I think we saw most of them this afternoon. It made for a long old haul up the mountain and with the lack of oxygen (Steve: as well as the heavy backpack on my back!!) we were only walking about 50 steps at a time before we had to stop to recover. One of our porters went past us at one point, still smiley and cheering even though he had 27 kilos on his back. We asked him how much further it was to go until the top to which he cheerily replied, "Look, it´s only up there. About 10 minutes." We were overjoyed. We were not so pleased, however, when we got to the place he'd pointed at and discovered that he'd completely lied. He'd show us the "false pass" that the porters use to play a joke on the Gringos. When we got to the false pass, there was easily another 300m of ascent to go!



It was a great feeling when we finally reached the top, although in typical Inca mickey-taking style the steps got steeper!





Tara´s bag had gone on ahead of us along with the porter she had hired. A couple of people in our group did the same; one of them being Mark (a Canadian in his late twenties) who, upon reaching the top of Dead Woman's Pass, was quite surprised to find that his porter had run all the way up the mountain, down the other side, dropped his bag off at our camp and then run back up to the top in the same amount of time. All the more impressive given that the porter was 56 years old and had been doing this job for the past 18 years!



After posing for the obligatory group photo



we were a little disheartened when we then had to walk downhill for another few hours! We became even more disheartened when we saw the start of the trek that lay in store for us the next day!



We were once again happy to see our porter´s smiling face at camp and his welcome with buckets of fresh popcorn and biscuits! Steve had overexerted himself a bit at the altitude and felt horrible



but after a good night's sleep (as good as you can have in a cold tent which has been pitched on a slope) and a super-strength paracetamol he was ready and raring to go again the next day.

DAILY FACTS

- Tip of the day: We wished we'd had those water bottles you put in your backpack and have a tube coming out to drink from. We think we'd have drunki more that way and Steve might not have ended up felling as rubbish as he did at the end of the day. Examples can be seen at www.platypushydration.com.