Machu Picchu

For my next trick, I´ll attempt to use the word "unutterably" for the third post in a row.

Done.

Too much to cover here so will do some summarizing.

Reasons why the 5-day trek to Machu Picchu via Salcantay Glacier should have been an absolute unmitigated catastrophe:

1) 24 hours of intestinal warfare leading right up to the jagged edge of a 5am wakeup call to leave on a 4-hour busride (with no bathroom) to the trailhead.

2) Rain on muddy roads gets said bus stranded halfway up mountain pass, impervious to the efforts of guides and porters to free it using pickaxes, stones, and dead shrubbery.

3) Alternate bus is an open-air cattle car which is only slightly more mobile -- horizontal railing running down middle of passenger area appears ready to snap at any given moment. Vertical distance between road and valley floor increases exponentially as width of road decreases.

4) First day of hiking cut short due to #s 2 & 3, stomach continues to gargle, eating is difficult.

5) Day 2 ushered in with fog so thick you can´t see to your eyelids. 20 km of ball-busting hiking over 16,000 foot pass (yup...the pass was 16,000 and mountains on either side over 20,000) yields little in the way of reward as Salcantay Mountain and Glacier are completely obscured due to aforementioned fog. Beautiful views are replaced by freezing temperatures, rain, high elevation huffing-and-puffing, and best of all an even denser-than-the-fog snowfall. We are informed that had we arrived hours later the pass would have been snowed in and we´d have been turned back.

6) Trail descending into valley becomes river. Easy to follow, difficult to stay dry. Day 2 is delayed by various elements of nature and final 30 minutes are negotiated in near pitch-blackness.

7) Day 2 ends, mercifully, with camping at a small jungle homestead with beer for sale. Glorious nature of situation is soon undercut when we realize the guy we´ve been buying beer from is actually running an operation which competes with sales of the guy whose benches we´re sitting on. It becomes apparent there are as many bars as people on this homestead (two). Situation reaches Herculean levels of hilarity when the cheated bar owner discloses, in a heated tirade directed at those of us using his benches but not buying his beer, that the owner of the other bar (20 feet away) is his brother.

8) Multiple members of group succumb to intestinal problems of various types and intensities.

9) Day 3 introduces mosquitoes which have appear to have been genetically altered to suck every drop of blood from any object less dense than a piece of granite, possessing supernatural ability to penetrate cloaks of body odor, insect repellant, sunscreen, and other assorted funks so thick as to be visible while aquiring their targets.

10) Can`t stress enough how brutal #9 was.

11) Arrival on night 3 in La Playa is coordinated perfectly with a major blackout in the small town upon whose outskirts we are camped. Fortunately, the bars stay open and we are marched through town by our guide to a small back room which is opened up by a very sleepy townsman who very graciously allows us to drink by candlelight in his tavern with vintage Def Leppard and Guns ´n´ Roses posters on the walls. This would appear to be a positive experience, but after a few rounds our cook finally caught up to announce, somewhat furiously, that we were nearly two hours late for dinner. Fortunately, the usual situation where two or three bad apples misbehave and get reprimanded is augmented due to the fact that *everyone* is late, including our guide, so there is no one to do the chastizing.

12) Day 4 begins with temperatures spiraling into the upper registers of "too brutal to deal with." Short trip in cattle car results in two more episodes getting stuck and one game of chicken with another bus on a very narrow road. After game of chicken (and short scuffle with forces of gravity, inertia, and common sense) is very skillfully and terrifyingly won by our 14-year-old driver we encounter enormous boulder in middle of road. Boulder could not have been skirted by the other bus in game of chicken. It becomes evident that boulder has arrived in middle of road quite recently.

13) 5:15 am bus to Machu Picchu overheats.

14) Return train from Aguas Calientes to Cuzco nearly canceled due to a rockslide which has destroyed nearly 500 meters of track. We appear to be stranded in Aguas Calientes, but after several hours of waiting, three games of chess, 32 hands of Gin Rummy, a veritable Olympics of ¨throwing playing cards into a hat on the ground,¨ and a fist full of fraudulently photo-copied train tickets, we somehow manage to get on the train (albeit on the floor) and take it to the damage point. A tourbus somehow manages to pick us up (¨bus will meet you at kilometro ochenta y dos, ya...?¨ and we arrive in Cuzco, fithy tired and covered with horseshit, at 1:30 am.

Reasons why the 5-day trek to Machu Picchu via Salcantay Glacier will go down as one of the greatest trips of all time:

Not entirely sure how this worked out. Has something to do with the magic of Machu Picchu, but more with the amazing group of folks we got to go with. Disaster tends to breed bonds and no one was the slightest bit uptight or caused the tiniest riff. That´s not to say people weren´t stress-tested, but everyone handled it with humor and grace.

A brief catalog of the group as related in terms of offensively-reductive stereotypes: Two crazy Irish cousins who manufacture traffic cones, slender Canadien couple on honeymoon, French couple who kept to themselves but were nonetheless sweethearts, wise-cracking British finance guy, Aussie girl relocated to Aspen, somewhat crunchy Northwestern woman who now blows glass beads on an island off British Columbia, East Coast girl relocated to Seattle for oceanography PhD, South American/British couple who were dead ringers for folks I know back home and who gave me a phenominal lesson in S. African history by candlelight at the bar in La Playa, brakeman from Alaskan railway who´s about to move to Vegas and his girlfriend from California who´s now teaching English in Ecuador.

Our guide, Saul, was a whole chapter unto himself. I´ll pass over most of what could be told here and skip straight to our last night in Aguas Calientes, the evening before we were scheduled to visit Machu Picchu at 5:15 am. After several hours of reverie and merriment, the crew found itself stumbling out of a disco around three in the morning, trying to figure out what had happened, who was responsible, and whether there had really been disrobing involved.

Saul grabbed me in a headlock and, looking around to make sure nobody else was in earshot, said, ¨Chad...eef I go to seep now I weel note wake up. Weel be very bad.¨

I agreed with him. ¨Very bad,¨ I said.

¨Chad,¨ he said. ¨We must keep dreenking. I know a place. Weel be fun. Tell the others. Beer.¨

Later, the guy from South Africa related that Saul had also pulled him aside and said, ¨Tomorrow, I cannot talk about Machu Picchu. Es impossible. Andrew, *you* must do it.¨

The night ended with us arriving at the hostel only to find it locked and unattended, trying desperately find our way in while Saul pleaded with us to continue down the street with him. He gathered us together in a kind of football huddle, arms around each other´s backs.

¨My friends,¨ he said. ¨You have two options.¨ We all listened up. He was, after all, our guide, and he´d been fantastic up to this point. We were in a bit of a jam and we needed advice. It was beginning to look like tomorrow might be a problem.

¨One, we can sleep on the porch.¨ We all looked to see a dark figure hunched in the doorway of the hostel, fast asleep.

With this, the South African guy´s British girlfriend briskly left the huddle and made a beeline for the door to find a way to summon the hostel´s proprietor. The South African guy looked to the rest of us for advice and someone told him if he knew what was good for him he would follow her immediately. He did.

¨Or...¨ Saul pressed on, looking everyone in the eyes, studying the ground, checking over his shoulder as he contemplated option number two, working out the details in his head and growing more obviously pleased with himself as he cobbled together an ingenious method for extracting ourselves from this brownish, degenerating, mess of a situation: drunk and tired on the streets of Aguas Calientes just an hour before we needed to be up and packing. Option one hadn´t sounded so good and we were expecting something mystical and mindblowing out of number two.

¨Or we can go to dreenk more beer!¨

When people say they ¨fell down laughing,¨ they usually don´t mean they found themselves on the ground, rolling from side to side and clutching their their stomaches as they wept with laughter. That is, however, exactly what happened to us for about ten minutes before scraping ourselves off the cobblestones and staggering off to find a way into the hostel. The fact that we actually made it to Machu Picchu and navigated relatively cheerfully through the next day is proof positive that God does not always hate us. Which is good to know.