Machu Picchu - Part 1

Hello Hello!

I officially have 12 days left in this country. That is exciting and extremely saddening at the same time. I start listening to Christmas music on Thanksgiving - and not a day sooner, because I have a feeling it will make me far more eager to come home than I already am, and don´t want to do that to myself any sooner than is necessary. (Good luck figuring that one out.)

But in the meantime, I´m overcoming daily the lingering fear of public speaking in Spanish, because Peruvian professors almost never assign a paper without making us give a speech at the same time. But the end of the schoolwork is near... hooray!! And with it, the end of all the adventures I´ve had here in Peru... Bittersweet transitions, as always.

Last weekend, as most of you know by now, I got to hike Machu Picchu. I´ve wanted to see it for a long time now, and it turned out to be worth every minute. Actually, I think my favorite part was the three day hike it took to get to it - making for a four day trip in all. I hiked through some of the most beautiful mountainous country I have ever seen - and most of it was almost a tropical rainforest. I think the highest point we reached was about 7,000 feet above sea level (I think?), and that was the only time we broke treeline - a dramatic switch from almost a tropical jungle to windswept highlands. It was weird.

The mountains around us were very deceiving - around noon the clouds would come in and completely cut off the tops. Often we would go to sleep underneath clouds and surrounded by what looked like soft rolling hills, only to wake up in the morning and see that the clouds had cleared to reveal towering jagged snow-capped peaks. A lovely 5 a.m. surprise, I thought.

The hike itself wasn´t too challenging; the strange part was that it was made almost entirely out of stone stairways reconstructed from the days of the Incas. It was supposed to make the going easier, I think, but in the end it probably didn´t. The stairs were so big that it took a lot of effort to pull yourself up in some cases, which is weird because the Incas (and most of the indigenous people still living in the area) were extremely small due to malnutrition. The men often come no higher than my shoulder. However, they outdo us in strength by gigantic proportions, and while we carry all our own stuff, they carry all the stuff to feed us. Each meal was a huge event (of course), and the many porters would carry tents, utensiles, tables, chairs, stoves, and enough food for the entire four days up the mountains faster than we did. The record time one Peruvian had done that four day trail in was four and a half hours. They´re superhuman, basically. 

Early in the morning on the fourth day, when we were supposed to hit Machu Picchu at 8:00 a.m., things got interesting for me. We had been going straight down the steepest mountain stairwell I had ever seen (actually, the only mountain stairwell I had ever seen) for three hours that day and the majority of the day before that, so I´ll pull in the excuse that my ankles were tired - or something like that. Coming around one of the corners, I tripped, and turned my ankle rather badly. My ankles are shamefully unreliable and twist all the time anyways, but this one was worse than the others right from the get-go. May I just say now that God is pretty cool, because he decided to send a Swiss couple on this hike with us, who turned out to be very handy. The woman was a doctor who rapelled out of helicopters to do emergency medical work in the Swiss Alps, and her husband was a mountain guide in the same area. Immediately she had my ankle temporarily splinted, wrapped, and slathered with some Swiss cream. She produced two pills which I immediately swallowed without questioning, and she gave me her walking sticks. (Side note - being from Switzerland, they thought chocolate was the answer to everything, and fed it to be by the kilo when I couldn´t eat the bread in the mornings for breakfast.) The Peruvians had no idea what to do; they offered me their sandals to relieve my ankle of the support it receives from my boots.

Then, although I thought I was hobbling along fairly effectively after that, her mountain guide husband decided I was not moving fast enough. Handing his pack to our guide, he said "I sink it vould be faster if I carried ze Nikki," and up I went! He put me on his shoulders like a little kid, handed his walking stick to his wife, and started running down the trail. The other people in the group had to work hard to keep up with him. People along the way frequently stopped to stare at the man who, after four days of hiking, could put another person on his shoulders and literally run to Machu Picchu. 

"Did you rent that?" Asked one breathless and weary woman as we trotted past.

Later, I'm sad to say, they put me in a stretcher, making my pride the only thing truly wounded. 

Although I was slightly embarrassed to be such an encumbrance to the poor man, the fact that he refused to let me walk made me feel better. That and I cannot complain about getting my first glimpse of Machu Picchu from the shoulders of a Swiss mountain guide, picturesquely surrounded by a herd of llamas that decided to accompany us for a little while. 

For the rest of the day, I wandered around the ruins, watched my friends climb the other mountain of ruins, Wayna Picchu, and then enjoyed a train ride back to Cusco.

Highly recommended adventure. Except don't sprain your ankle, because I can't guarantee that there will be any more Swiss angels in disguise hiking the trail anytime soon. 

Hope that every day is an adventure, and Happy Thanksgiving!