Machu Picchu

Cusco has a strange feeling, beautiful yet strange nevertheless. This colonial city was once the capital of the entire Inca Empire, and now millions of cheesy tourist from around the globe flood into its red-cob colored city to see Machu Picchu, selling hikes and tours like they’re newspapers on the streets of New York. A brief stroll through the main plaza will bombard you with everything from alpaca socks, cocaine, to Machu Picchu treks. People will come running out of nowhere, shoving lunch menus in your face, and tell you its happy hour. I guess it’s always happy hour because they always say that just to get you to come in their restaurant. One evening I went out to dinner with a large group of people, sat down in the fancy air, and we all ordered the local specialty – guinea pig (sorry Debby). His burnt paws were crisped and out stretched on the plain white plate; as I bit into its little body I couldn’t extinguish the sound of our old guinea pig making its cute little squeaks whenever you walked by his little home in the sunroom. The little guy didn’t even taste that good, but I gave him (or her) and all the other guinea pigs in the world a short little prayer of thanks and forgiveness.

On my birthday I started a 5 day / 4 night trek with 10 other people around the mountain of Salkantay reaching 13,500 ft and then into Machu Picchu. By far one of the most amazing (and strenuous) things I have ever done in my entire life. The first night in the tents we got snowed on, bundled in every article of clothing I had, huddled in my sleeping bag I smiled to the first day of being 24. We hiked along a pristine gorge, the river grumbled way down at the bottom of the valley. Every hour or so I’d have to just stop and look back at the breath-taking lower Andes sprawling on forever, up ahead the looming coke-white peak of Salkantay mountain beckoned our way. For 6 hours I sucked on a huge wad of coca leaves for energy and to help with the ever escalating elevation, and talked with all the exciting new people I was about to spend the next 5 days with in the wild of the Andes Mountains. That cold night everyone sang me happy birthday, mumbling when it came time to say the name because nobody really remembered it yet, the tour guide bought me a small pint of rum and the cooks surprised me with a cake they make from scratch. The second day we woke up before dawn, our guide served us steaming hot coca tea in our tents before we even go out of our sleeping bags, the hot cup was like a savior to my fingers, white and trembling from the below freezing temperature. This second day was the hardest, but most beautiful. We hiked for a total of 9 hours, 5 up to the base of Salkantay, and then 4 hours of a knee killing decent down into the jungle. The picturesque landscape changed drastically every hour, and every hour my knee felt more and more like it was broken. At the end of the day I was hobbling down the trail like a drunken pirate and flopped down on the grass at camp. Imagine walking through a National Geographic magazine article about the Andes Mountain and Machu Picchu, and then times it by 1000, and that’s pretty much what the trek was like. The next several day were slightly easier, lower elevation and warmer environment, and a well deserved stop at the most spectacular hot springs I’ve ever seem. I took hundreds of mental hand-camera shots; it’s pretty fun to make a circle of your hand and make shutter sounds while everyone around you is snapping away with their fancy-pants cameras, (and just for the record, 3 people’s camera broke during the trip, especially after the third day when its down poured all night and inside everyone’s tents looked like a miniature Lake Titicaca). Machu Picchu was cold, rainy and foggy when we arrived at 6am; our tour guide (just for MP, not the one we had during our whole trek) had the worst English ever and sounded like a drowning guinea pig after being barbequed on Super Bowl Sunday. The only thing I learned (or heard) was that the Inca people held the most respect for the sun; well shit, what else were they supposed to think of that huge, bright, christless, orange thing moving through the sky every day. I didn’t need the guide anyway, the mystical energy and deep power of the place was enough of a guide for me. I’m just blown away by the difference of this ancient culture building a marvelous city teetering on top of 1000ft sheer vertical cliffs, and the present times of our hummer humping, plastic dumping society.

Anyway, I left Cusco and headed for Lake Titicaca on the boarder of Peru and Bolivia(the highest navigable lake in the world). Took a 3 hour boat ride out to this island in the middle of the lake and spent the night in this local lady’s house, the name (Titicaca) itself was well worth the trip. My new friends and I walked about the peaceful, car-less island; the calm blue lake was laking on for miles where it laid asleep in the lap of far away bleach white mountains.


p.s. Feel free to make comments or say hi if you reads this so I know I'm not writting to the wind.