The Inca Trail: Day 4, Finally

Not the view from camp, but close enough 

I slept like the dead after Day 3. I curled up in my sleeping bag and rested my head on a pillow of my dirty clothes as a sick, sore, exhausted, unhappy human but somehow I awoke renewed … at 3:30 am. That’s when you have to get up on Day 4 of the Inca Trail. Mama Darwin came by to rouse everyone at that unnatural hour without coffee (we had been warned that there would be no coffee delivery this morning), and I sat up in the tent pleasantly surprised. I was hungry again and I actually felt like I could keep food down. I felt rested and capable of smiling. I felt like a real person again.

It was an awkward morning, though, trying to pack up with my headlamp in the cold. Our campsite was on a narrow cliff ledge, basically an alley of tents with a wall of mountain behind and a sheer drop five feet in front of the tent doors. Not the best spot to make a bunch of worn-out hikers pack up before 4 am, but we were all moving too slowly to be in any real danger. Unfortunately, my refusal to visit the toilets the night before had created a situation that I couldn’t ignore anymore, but I still wasn’t feeling the hike to the nasty toilets. I headed over to the breakfast tent to see if anyone else shared my trepidation and if maybe we could come up with a solution. Thank goodness for Justyna!! She instantly knew what I was getting at and offered up a plan: We’d find a spot by the mountain behind the tents (almost all of which were packed up already; the porters are that fast), she’d cover for me, and then I’d cover for her. Everyone else who had already been to the bathroom strongly supported the idea. Apparently these toilets were the absolute worst of all the ones on the trail, and I’m so grateful that I never saw them. Stuff of nightmares, I heard.

My Time in the Spotlight

Amped up on rebellion and my overwhelming need to pee, I grabbed some toilet paper and headed out to find a good spot with Justyna. It was trickier than we anticipated, though. Almost all the tents had been cleared and a porter with a headlamp was standing guard. I’m pretty sure his whole job that morning was to keep people from peeing outside, but seriously? It was going to take way more than one dude with a flashlight to deter me at this point.

We found a tiny bush in between us and the porter, and Justyna generously offered to let me go first. Oh lordy, it was glorious, but halfway through the porter spotted us and started yelling in Spanish. He shined his headlamp directly on me and kept yelling, but my Spanish is pretty much limited to what I learned as a waitress from cooks and busers. We never covered, “You can’t urinate on a Peruvian national park, entitled American bitch.” So I just shrugged at him from my squat and kept peeing in the spotlight. I’m truly sorry, Peru, but you didn’t leave me many options. It was rainy and I threw away the paper, if that counts for anything.

But poor Justyna said she couldn’t go after that. The porter was starting to walk toward us. So we went back to the breakfast tent to eat and wait him out. Long story not-so short, she was successful and we all started out for our last day on the trail. I’m not going to lie to you, dear reader (obviously); I couldn’t wait for this stupid hike to be over. I enjoyed a full breakfast and was confident in my ability to get to Machu Picchu without hurling again, but I was so over the Inca Trail. Mish wasn’t doing so well. She ate a little but she was still feeling as bad as the day before.

I Did Not Sign Up for This

Day 4 is weird. What all the tour companies fail to tell you is the guides from all the different companies compete with each other to be the first group on the trail in the morning and the first to the Sun Gate (a stunning spot about an hour uphill from Machu Picchu where, in theory, the groups gather to watch the sun rise over the ruins below). Which is why all the groups (I’d guess there were four or five others of similar sizes pacing us) camp at the same place on Night 3—it’s as close as you can get to the checkpoint we all have to cross at the beginning of Day 4.

But the checkpoint doesn’t open until 5:30 am. So that 3:30 wakeup call? It was done entirely so we could pack up, eat, and be first in line at the checkpoint. I was so angry when we walked for two minutes and then lined up to wait AN HOUR for the checkpoint to open. I wouldn’t have hesitated a single second if Raul had given us the choice to sleep an extra hour and be last through. But there we were, first in line, with trekkers from all the other groups piling up behind us and doing that obnoxious, persistent line-shoving thing that all crowds of people inevitably do.

When the checkpoint finally opened, people started shoving in earnest and we were all sausaged through the gates and out to the trail beyond (foul, unwashed human sausage wrapped in fleece). Raul was doing his best to block other guides from passing us, but he finally accepted that he had a rag-tag group of sickies mixed with chill hikers who couldn’t care less about rank. After about 30 minutes on the trail, we went from first place to last. Now tell me again why I didn’t get to sleep an extra hour, Raul.

But I Did Sign Up for This

Photographing while walking = blurry

The hike itself was amazing. We were still walking along a cliff with the mountain shooting straight up to the left and dropping away (hundreds of feet? Thousands? I’m terrible at distances, but definitely hundreds) to death on the right. There was a chain of mountains across the valley to the right and daylight was starting creep up above them as we walked. It was my favorite part of the trip so far and possibly as close as I’ll ever get to feeling genuinely spiritual. There’s certainly something to be said for physically, mentally, and emotionally wearing yourself down and then experiencing nature in such a raw and glorious setting when you’re waking up renewed. I felt so happy and at peace. And then Raul called over his shoulder, as if he was pointing out a cool Incan ruin, “And this is the spot where a girl fell to her death a few years ago.” Cheery return to reality. We all hugged the side of the mountain a little closer but I continued to marvel at my surroundings and my amazing existence at that exact moment.

Mish on the Monkey Bars

Then we came to the Monkey Bars, an infamous spot on the trail. It looks like a water-carved gully but it goes straight up through boulders, and we had to climb it. A few stragglers from other groups kept trying to pass people, which made it even more treacherous. 

But once we reached the top it wasn’t far to the Sun Gate. We were too late for the sunrise, but that didn’t diminish the experience for me in the slightest. I came up to a little pass and noticed people clustered in front of me, posing for pictures, before I saw what they were posing in front of. It was Machu Picchu!!! And it was breathtaking, spread out below us on a flattened expanse of a lower mountain. Michele agreed that it was stunning but she was trying not to throw up on the Sun Gate, so I didn’t push her for commentary.

The view from the Sun Gate

We got to relax and mill around the Sun Gate for about 30 minutes and take pictures to our hearts’ content. There were group shots, single shots, friend shots, couple shots, new-friend shots, nature shots, every kind of (photographic) shot you can imagine. There were hugs and kisses and couples wrapping their arms around each other while gazing at the ancient city and whispering to each other. There was Michele sitting on a rock not puking and me harassing her about drinking water. It was a beautiful culmination of a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and we hadn’t even gotten down to Machu Picchu yet.

Best rag-tag group ever

From there we walked down, crossed through Machu Picchu, and exited. I didn’t realize we had to leave the site to reenter through the proper gate, but Raul stopped on our way through the city to give a little talk and let us take some more photos before he made us leave. We also had to say goodbye to Mama Darwin here, because he was going to head into town and back home once we left Machu Picchu (for the first time). I tried to give him the rest of my coca leaves but he said he wanted to take the train home, not fly. Oh, Darwin, you’re lovely and I miss you already.

Heading down

By the time we exited to line up and go back in, the tour buses had started pulling up and Raul knew it would take a while to get back in, so he let us get food and drinks at the restaurant and use the toilets before we reconvened inside. I think it says a lot about my experience on the Inca Trail that I was more excited about pooping in a clean toilet than I was about touring Machu Picchu. But damn if that wasn’t the best toilet I’ve ever encountered in my life.

Machu Picchu

Hydrated, fed, and happy, we all met Raul back inside the gates of Machu Picchu and enjoyed a leisurely walk around the site while he explained various spots. We saw the tiered agricultural area, the residential quarter, and the quarry inside the city where the Incas got their building materials. We learned about their architectural techniques and saw the exact places where they stopped working on structures, for whatever reason, right before they disappeared. (Did one of their black-llama sacrifices actually provide a premonition of the coming Spaniards, as some people believe, causing the Incas to move deeper into the Andes to hide? Did a plague sweep through the population? Did they migrate to another city for some other, unknown reason? The mystery remains!) We peered inside the sacred temple and we put a modern compass on their compass rock to see how accurate their technology was so long ago.

Raul’s tour hit all the main points, and then he said he was going into Aguas Calientes (the town by MP) to wait for us at the café where we’d have lunch. We had a couple hours on our own to explore Machu Picchu before we’d have to catch a bus into town. Obviously Mish and I made a beeline to the llamas. That’s right, folks, there really are llamas hanging out at Machu Picchu. There was even a baby! We took a ton of photos, fed a llama, and then walked around for about another 30 minutes before shrugging and saying, “Well, I guess that’s it,” and heading to the bus stop.

Llamas!

And now comes the bittersweet reminder that the journey really is worth so much more than the destination. Machu Picchu was amazing (and I can’t recommend it more highly), but somehow after everything I’d just been through, it seemed like a footnote. It might be the most awe-inspiring footnote I’ll ever experience, but it was a footnote to the Inca Trail nonetheless. And I’m totally cool with that. I feel like I experienced all the glory of Machu Picchu to the same extent that people who take the bus or train do, but I had such a separate, heightened experience immediately preceding it that I saw the ruins from a different perspective. I saw Machu Picchu as an amazing city hidden away in the Andes, an astonishing feat of human ingenuity and determination, but I like to think I experienced it in a way slightly more akin to how the Incas did: as a welcoming place to poop comfortably after an arduous trek through unforgiving terrain.

Yes we did!