STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
Any way up, it’s spectacular. Abeer Hoque makes the trek of a lifetime on the Inca trail
I’ve never gone trekking before.Not the nine hours a day, cross-a-mountain-range sort of trekking. I’ve never done backcountry camping. Only car camping where my sister sets up the tent while I decide which tree to pee behind. I don’t own hiking shoes or a daypack or a breathable raincoat or a sleeping bag. None of those things made sense in Bangladesh where I’d been living the last two years. I don’t have those hip ripstop trekking pants that zip into shorts. Only jeans with holes in the bum that I reluctantly had patched after my father forbade me to leave the house thus attired. I’ve had knee surgeries on both knees, and one’s been inexplicably stiff for weeks. I don’t do well in high altitude, as recently proved in Bolivia’s alien surreal salt flats. I hate the cold.
So what’s the first thing I do after landing up in Cuzco, Peru? Sign up for a five-day/four-night trek to Machu Picchu: two days of hiking up and down snowy Salkantay mountain (4,600m at its highest trail point), two days of wandering through the Peruvian jungle, and the last day spent climbing up to and touring the newest named wonder of the world, the spectacular sky high lost city of the Incas: Machu Picchu.
Bright idea, no? Por supuesto. More than bright. It was brilliant. Really. Despite what the Oracle was telling me. All this after I got to Peru via the worst bus ride ever. 10 soles ($3.25) earned me seven hours on a rickety, marginally upholstered bus from Bolivia to the oldest city in South America, the first Incan city, Cuzco. Fifteen minutes into the trip, the engine stalled and the bus started sliding backwards. Our driver slammed on the emergency brakes and steered us backwards-sideways to the kerb. An hour of petrol filling and other mysterious mechanical work got us heaving forward again.
Two hours in, 10 large-hipped screaming Peruvian women swept past me to bang on the driver’s door to let them out. He unwillingly opened the door and the bus immediately filled with smoke. It seemed the engine was on fire. I grabbed my laptop and joined the rest of the passengers standing in the scrubby Peruvian desert. The driver doused the fire with water from a petrol station across the road. I took this opportunity to pee behind a scrub. Then, amazingly, we all reboarded the bus.
From this point onwards, every time we stopped (which appeared to be every 10 minutes), a crowd of small thin men would gather around our engine for an hour and discuss its state, while another crowd of small thin boys would heave sacks larger than themselves onto our already towering bus roof. Of course, this is nothing new if you’re from Asia. Maybe that’s why I arrived in Cuzco (only one hour late!) totally well rested. I am ever grateful for my ability to sleep in any conditions, no matter how dangerous or unstable.
Twenty-four hours later, I was marching on my first trek, alongside 10 intrepid travellers from Ireland, New Zealand, Canada, France and, of course, Israel. I think it would be fair to say that Israelis get around. I don’t know if it’s their mandatory military service that drives their nubile 20-nothing-year-olds into months, nay years of travel, but they’re catching up with those gypsy Australians in wanderlust bragging rights.
The ‘classic’ Inca trail to Machu Picchu is 33km long and takes four days and three nights to traverse. If you can get on it, that is. It’s booked solid, months in advance. In an effort to manage burgeoning tourist demands (1,000 visitors a day to Machu Picchu in the high season) and to contain environmental damage, the Peruvian government has levied heavy taxes and restricted the number of trekkers on the classic trail. Despite this, the classic trail is overcrowded and, of course, mad expensive. Like $500 (minimum) expensive—if you have your own sleeping bag and carry your own bags. Otherwise, it’s more. (Note to the less adventurous: you need not trek to get to Machu Picchu. There are (pricey) trains from Cuzco to Aguas Calientes from where a bus will ascend 45 jaw-droppingly awesome minutes to Machu Picchu.)
If your budget is less robust, or perhaps you decide you want to do a trek the day before you arrive in Cuzco (ahem), then your best bet is one of the ‘alternative treks’ which boast solitary Inca trails (there are many many others), pack horses to carry your bags, rented sleeping bags, and half the price tag of the classic package. And if you’re up for an intense, high altitude, sometimes freezing, difficult, beautiful, tremendously varied five-day-long walk, well then, Salkantay is the trek for you.
Six hours into our first day, I decided I was not a trekker. I was not only exhausted, but worse: I was bored. There was icy Salkantay looming ever larger before us (our first camp site would be at its base). Did I care? No. I was cold and hungry. Taking photographs only left me further behind the disappearing pack. There were four more days of this? |