December 18
OK – this is it! This is the day that we’ve done all our training for… oh yeah – we didn’t do any training. A lot of people who do this trek train for it. They do stair steppers and challenging hikes to prepare themselves for this day. We did none of that. I woke up in a near panic about it. Michael was not concerned. We were woken up with coca tea at 6am, had breakfast, packed up our bags and were on the trail a little before 7am. On the first day, Michael spent much of the hike forging ahead, setting our pace. It’s not my favorite way to hike, but it was ok. Typically, on our hikes, we stay right together. It’s good for me because when a portion of the hike is tough, Michael will often give me encouragement or just directly tell me to keep going or to pull it together. We were not 20 minutes into day two and I was melting down. I was completely overwhelmed by what was coming our way that day and every time I got to the top of an incline, I was greeted with more hills, but no Michael. He was putting too much space between us and I lost it. Quickly. Seriously, I’m not sure we were even out of the camp site and I was in tears. The next time I caught up to him, I yelled and felt much better. I think more than anything, I just needed to get some of that anxiety out.
Now that we had that out of the way… I spent a lot of time trying to forgot how hard it was. The scenery was beautiful, thankfully, and Michael documented it for your enjoyment:
There were two stopping points along the first uphill battle. Reminder that we started the day at 3000 meters (~9800 feet) and are heading up to 4200 meters (~13,800 feet) to Dead Woman’s Pass. In case those numbers mean nothing to you, as they had previously meant nothing to me, that’s a huge uphill hike and the altitude could make it much more difficult. Thankfully we’ve been acclimating for about a week, so the altitude wasn’t that much of an issue.
The first rest stop was suppose to be about 1.5 hours into our morning hike. The second rests stop was another 2 hours after that. Then finally we had the hardest stretch to the top which was suppose to be another 1.5 hours. So about five hours to hike to the first pass. We had a total of 11 kilometers to hike that day. I don’t remember how many were in that first uphill stretch. Maybe 5?
So Michael and I were trekking along. Ruban had been hanging back a bit, letting us take our own pace. He caught up to us after about 2 hours or so and I asked how much further to that first stop. I was swimming in some serious self doubt since we should have hit that first rest awhile ago. Ruban told us it’s as another 30 minutes to the rest. Now I was really panicking. How could it possibly be another 30 minutes. We were screwing up. We hit the rest stop about 15 minutes after that and were subsequently informed that it was the second stop. We had somehow missed that first rest stop. Despite my pessimism, we were dominating the hike and had cranked through about 3.5 hours of hiking in just over 2.5 hours. You cannot imagine my relief. Just a few more hours to the pass.
Dead Woman’s Pass. Here is a picture as we approached. It is called Dead Woman’s Pass because you can see the profile of a woman laying down. The pass is over her throat in the lowest point. Her face is just to the left (distinctive nose) and her chest is to the right.
As we hiked up the mountain each day, I spent some of the time saying a rosary… ish. Jane’s version of a rosary. I got the 10 Hail Marys per decade and the Our Father and the Glory Be. Now that I’m googling it, I did the prayers out of order and I can tell you what I missed: The Apostles’ Creed. Also, with the mysteries – I roughly know what the mysteries are (joyful, sorrowful, and glorious) but I don’t totally know which go in glorious and which go in joyful, so I just best guessed on my day 1 hike. By this second day instead of mysteries after each decade, I just sang Godspell and Christmas songs at the mysteries time. Apologies to my religious scholars.
I also mixed in some prayers to Pacha Mama in there… Mother Earth in Quechua.
You know that we made it eventually, because I’m blogging from a hotel room now. It was amazing:
This is definitely one of those moments where I felt a ton of accomplishment. Once at the top, we relaxed for a bit. Ruban played his traditional flute in honor of and thanksgiving to Pacha Mama.
We met a few people on this hike up today. We met an Aussie couple who we think may have broken up before the trip was over and we met a mother/daughter pair from New Zealand, Patsy and Alexa, who we ended up hanging out with a few more times before leaving Peru. Super cool women who dominated Dead Woman’s Pass and were a blast to spend time with. Hopefully we’ll get to meet back up with them either in New Zealand or when they come to visit New Orleans in 2019!
It as all downhill from this point for the day.
A few things we learned: the potato is the only plant that the Incas could grow over 4000 meters in altitude. Natural lupins grow out here but are toxic – they have to be washed for a week in the stream before they are ok to eat. There is a similar process required of natural quinoa that grows here.
We saw a bunch of plants along the way and Ruban pointed out which plants are used to cure colds, which are for flus and fevers, and which are used “for the lungs”, whatever that means.
I was promised 400 varieties of orchids on the second half of day two. So I’m not sure if this was an Inca story exaggerated or if we were just unlucky. We did see some beautiful sceneries and flowers despite the lack of orchids.
So all in all it was a really tough day. It was supposed to be. We knew it was going to be, but I definitely struggled today. We arrived at camp pretty early – maybe 2pm – and had the afternoon to explore the campsite and nap. We hiked a little further along the trail and took this picture of the campsite:
We came down that mountain to the camp site and as you can tell from this picture, our day three hike was going to start with an uphill battle as well.
The camp was at Pacaymayu which is still about 3600 meters in altitude. We arrived before the rain which was great, but it rained on and off for the rest of the afternoon and night. We got some water in the tent and I “slept” with wet feet. Not ideal. Despite the beauty and the wonderful food and cool people, I was ready to keep moving on this journey.