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| Before Day 2 |
On Day 2, Michele and I rise and shine with coffee in the
tent (delivered by mom and one of my favorite porters) and start to mentally
prepare for what everyone says is the hardest day of the Inca Trail: hiking to
Dead Woman’s Pass, anywhere from 12,000 to 14,000 feet up, depending on your source.
(Spoiler alert: Day 2 is not the hardest day by a long shot. I would do a week
of Day 2s to avoid a single Day 3.) I brave the outhouse toilet situation and
see adorable guinea pigs running around in a hut on the way back to camp; I try
to ignore the fact that humans will soon eat them. When I get back to the tent
Michele apologizes because she kicked over my coffee and it all went on my
sleeping bag. She tried to clean it up with the little bit of toilet paper she
had, but my bag is sitting in a coffee puddle. At least I love the smell. I
ring it out, roll it up, and pack it along with the rest of my non-daypack gear
in my duffle bag. All fourteen of our group gather in
our fancy-pants meal tent for a breakfast of champions while dad gives us the rundown for the day, then Michele
and I take our “before” picture, and IT’S ON.
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| Happy me on Day 2 |
Day 2 is certainly challenging, with lots of strenuous
uphill hiking and rock stairs, but I don’t mind it. I like cardio and I’m
getting a good workout in some gorgeous scenery. Plus I’m getting my money’s
worth out of my rented hiking poles and my new boots. We stop for lunch on a
bitter-cold, blustery outcrop in the mountains, and we all rave about having a
tent to eat in rather than having the brave the wind with food. Lunch is extra
warm and delicious, and when we’re done everyone seems excited but wary to keep
going up.
I’m still pumped and excited about the trail in front of us,
more so than most people in our group. Turns out I like cold and altitude and
uphill challenges more than the average person. It’s exactly what I wanted out
of the Inca Trail and to this day I don’t see why people think Day 2 is so
difficult. I mean, it was a good hike, but it never seemed unreasonable to me.
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| We made it to Dead Woman's Pass! |
Michele is enjoying it less than I am, but she comes up with
a good strategy to deal with the uphill: no long breaks, but short water breaks
frequently. Just keep walking up. We make it to the pass and take some photos. I’m
happy and I feel good. It’s cold but exciting. It’s exactly what I imagined the
Inca Trail would be. Unfortunately, the other side of the pass awaits us….
Downhill
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| The downhill and my trail anger start here. |
This is where the Inca Trail stops being a hike and starts
making me angry. We have about an hour and a half or two hours of sheer
downhill clambering over giant rocks. No trail. Rocks. Each step is about 1 to
2 feet down. With every single, step my joints are slamming into themselves. The
longer we go, the angrier I get. Michele told me later that she stopped turning
around to check on me because she could tell by my gruff exhales and continual
“fuck this” mutterings that I was still alive. I fell once. It hurt.
But eventually we make it to camp, somewhere in the middle of
the pack, and everyone who already arrived is huddled in their separate tents,
nursing wounds, I assume. I’m so mad at this unexpected joke the Incas
are playing on me that I smoke a cigarette, despite saying I absolutely would not smoke on the trail (R had been smoking already, so I feel emboldened). But it at least gives me a chance to get to know a few porters better, because we instantly become buddies while they share my
cigarettes. I can’t understand how they’re happy and joking despite having
hours of work ahead of them and knowing what they just went through (sort of,
but not really because I didn’t have 30+ pounds strapped to my back as I
stumbled down rockslides).
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| Mish and I after Day 2 |
Dinner
My soup tastes weird so I don’t eat much of it, but the rest
of dinner is nice. The bathrooms do nothing to ease my anger, but the group
commiseration on our experiences of the day help a little. (I wasn't the only one who fell!) Then it’s bedtime
and luckily, before I can dwell on how tomorrow is all downhill, I pass out.
Day 3: Sick
I wake up the next morning feeling a little queasy and tell myself it’s just nerves about an entire day of downhill. It has nothing to
do with the weird soup last night. We go to the breakfast tent and when the
food comes I realize it’s not nerves. I feel like I’m going to throw up just
from the smell of breakfast, but I know I need fuel for the day ahead. I offer my
plate to Mama Darwin and walk outside the tent with my water and a little mug
of quinoa porridge. It seemed the least offensive of the options and I know
it’ll at least give me protein. I try to choke it down but only get
through about half of it. It’s going to be a rough day.
We get going on the trail and amazingly we go uphill for a
little while. My spirits rise a tiny bit until we stop for a water break and
some porters run by. I know we all stink at this point, but in my sensitive
state the rush of odor as they speed by exceeds my coping abilities. A
particularly pungent porter passes me and my porridge is coming back up. Before
I really know what I’m doing, I’ve rushed over to some plants on the edge of
the trail to feed them my quinoa. So much for my protein for the day.
Poor Michele is also feeling sick, but she has the toilet
paper and somehow my water bottle. I make her bring me both and she tells me
later that coming near me and my after-gags almost made her hurl too. (Travel
buddies!) I clean up and we keep going. I still feel like vomiting but I’m
empty now. My trail friend Danielle kindly gives me some Emergen-C packets to
put in my water and they make a world of difference. (If you hike the trail,
definitely bring some.)
Misery
The rest of Day 3 is horrible but it is also the most
beautiful part of the trek. We are cutting through mountains with breathtaking
vistas and passing Incan ruins and I wish more than anything that my knees
could handle the brutal steps (they call them the Gringo Killers) and that I
wasn’t feeling so sick.
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| Beautiful and horrible |
I also have to pee, which makes my nausea about one billion
times worse. The toilets are horrific. Smells, sights, sounds (the sounds are mostly
made by my shoes as I walk over things nobody should have to walk over in an
attempt to find a toilet)—everything is enough to make a healthy person sick…and
I’m not healthy. I keep thinking they should just let us do our business in
nature and bag it out, like when I walk my dog. The whole trek would be so much
more pleasant that way.
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| I'm scattering unrelated Day 3 shots throughout rants |
Somehow I make it back to fresh air and rejoin Michele in
staring at the horizon. Mom comes out to see how we’re doing and brings us
special tea that he promises will solve all our problems. I love Darwin with my
whole heart, always and forever, but his tea is worthless. Dad comes out with
some weird-looking bottle and says, “You’re going to put your face in my
hands.” Thank goodness he’s looking at Michele and not me when he says this—she’s
too nice to argue. He puts some of the liquid from the bottle in his palms,
rubs them together, and then shoves his hands around Michele’s face while I try
not to puke-laugh all over everyone. “Breathe deeply,” he says, over and over.
Finally he lets her go and she pulls her head up. She looks dazed for a second
and then starts smiling and nodding noncommittally. (You need to understand
that Michele is super-humanly polite.) Raul says, “Better?” Michele smiles
bigger and says, “Yeah, actually, that really helped.” She turns her smile to
me, vindictively, as if to say, “Your turn, pukey.”
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| My face smelled like Raul's hands here |
Before I know what’s happening Raul’s hands are surrounding
my face and he’s telling me to breathe deeply. I need air, so I obey. His hands
smell minty, but I can’t help wondering when he last washed them. He smothers
me for a good minute so I’m forced to breathe in his minty-germy hand cocktail
multiple times, and then he finally releases my head. “Better?” “Um…sure.
Thanks, Raul….thanks?” I am not better.
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| Hating life right about now |
Lunch is over, I have no food in my stomach, I still feel
like I’m one weird inhale away from throwing up again, we have about five more
hours of downhill joint torture to go, and my face smells like Raul’s hands. I’m
not at my best. My pace had been snail-like on Day 2’s downhill, but today it’s
pretty much a crawl—maybe a baby who is just learning how to crawl and keeps
stopping for naps. I’m dragging Michele down with me, and we’re now
the slowest people in our group, other than poor D who had bronchitis and had
to be carried on a stretcher for a spell. And I’m still cursing like a sailor
with every giant step down.
Hours go by this way until we get to a point where the group
has gathered to wait for us, because there’s a fork in the road. Go left, and
you get to see glorious Incan ruins that only trekkers get to see. If you take
that route, it’s “an hour” to camp. Go right, and you go straight to camp, no
extra sights, and you’ll be at your tent in “30 minutes.” I really want to go
left, because I chose to hike the goddamn Inca Trail. I want to see it all! And
I can tell Michele really wants to go left as well. But there are so many
stairs that way. And I am so sick and weak and frustrated by the world I’m
living in. I would swear that my knees are both broken. I keep looking back and
forth between the two trails, and I feel like such a failure of a human being,
but I finally say it out loud, “Michele, I’m really sorry, but I have to go
right. I just can’t go left.
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| My coca-leaf prayer went unanswered. |
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| Still going downhill |
Dad said it would be about 30 minutes to camp going right,
but I figured that meant an hour at my pace. So we keep plodding along and it
gets to be about an hour and I still see no sign of camp. We turn a corner and
there are two porters. Turns out they are waiting for us because we are the
last people in the group. They follow really closely behind me. Then Raul
appears from behind them and tries to give me a pep talk about how close we are
to camp. But we are going down switch-backs (I kid you not), and every single step
is two to three feet down (for real), and I’m sick and exhausted and my kneecaps
are about to grind into dust and I have these three dudes breathing down my
neck to try to make me go faster. Literally, I feel their breath on my neck and
in my hair.
It’s just too much. I pull my headlamp out of my backpack
(because it’s dark at this point; we should be eating dinner right now), turn
it on, and start crying silently as I take giant, joint-crushing step after
step down toward a camp I can’t even see. My tears are blurring my vision, and
I’m trying to wipe them inconspicuously because I don’t want Raul asking me
what’s wrong. I’m so angry and sore and sick and tired and I think the Inca
Trail is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done (and I’ve done a lot of really dumb things).
Finally we see a camp … and it’s not ours. We have to keep climbing down
absurdly large steps to pass every single other camp before we finally get to
ours. It is the absolute last campsite. But oh my god there’s a tent for me. I
just have to find my duffle bag with my sleeping gear and I am DONE for the day.
I have never wanted to be so done with something in my entire life.
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| So lovely but I managed to hate it |
(Side note: you know you have a good travel buddy when you
stop thinking “I” and start thinking “we” because you know you are both
experiencing the exact same misery. I noticed I started writing that way
without even realizing it.)
We finally get our stuff and set it up in our tent and
change into PJs. It’s probably not even 8, maybe not even 7, but neither of us
has any concept of time. All we know is our own exhaustion and pain and
illness. We both crawl into our sleeping bags to “rest” before dinner, even
though we’re both too sick to sit in a tent full of people eating. But that’s
what we tell dad when he comes to see how we’re doing. I wonder if I’m going to
pee on myself in my sleep, but I honestly don’t care. The porters pointed out
the toilets as we descended to our camp, and they are a good five-minute hike
back up steps. I could do that, but there is no way I would make it back down. In my condition, I actually think that peeing on myself would be better, so I take the risk and
succumb to the joy of laying down on the hard earth in my sleeping bag. (For
the record, I didn’t have an accident.)
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| More scenes from Day 3 |
Dad comes back a little later to say dinner is ready and we
both tell him we can’t eat. He tells us that if we want to tip the cook and
porters, we have to do it tonight. There’s a tipping ceremony after dinner. I
ask him if he can come get us for the ceremony, because we want to tip but we
can’t be around food. He agrees, and comes back about an hour later. By then
I’ve given myself a wet-wipe bath in my sleeping bag and done various tent yoga
stretches, so I’m feeling slightly better. But Mish has been half asleep, so I
know she feels no better; I offer to take her tips to the ceremony for her. She
wakes up long enough to throw some money at me and I hobble out to the dinner
tent.
The lingering odor of dinner is almost unbearable, and I have
to breathe through my sleeve. Dad gives a little talk that seems to go on
forever, but finally I’m able to put money on the table for Mish’s tips and my
tips, and then I say my goodnights. It turns out I missed the actual ceremony
part, where the trekkers give the money to the porters and cook and say nice,
heartwarming things about gratitude and camaraderie and life-altering shared
experiences (you know, one of the main reason I did the trail in the first
place, but whatever). I feel bad that I missed it, but, given the opportunity
with the same circumstances again, I still would have gone back to my tent to
sleep. I was so miserable, you guys. So very miserable.
But it gets better. Machu Picchu is tomorrow! I promise
it’ll be worth it, so please stick around.
