#27 cusco, peru & the inca trail

It hit me that we were in Peru when our bus bound for Cusco was rocked by the sound of impatient passengers thumping the side of the bus and yelling, "Vamos! Vamos!" ('Let's go!) whenever we stopped for more than a minute. Farewell to the Bolivian laidback way of life. Not that their yelling achieved much - we still arrived two hours late to Cusco, at 1am.
Cusco is a beautiful city - lots of cobbled streets, ensconced in a ring of mountains - but its drawback is ironically also its biggest boon: tourism. Every second step we were accosted by somebody trying to sell us a painting, jewellery, a postcard, a tour, a massage, a shoe shine (when Kris told one 8-year-old kid he didn't want his dirty white sneakers shined, the boy shot back with, "Motherfucker!"). It got to the point where it made it almost unpleasant to walk the streets. It's a world away from Bolivia where hardly anyone hassled you (and Bolivia is a much poorer nation than Peru).
But Cusco's biggest surprise was yet to come. On the day before our Inca trail trip started, we found out that we had to carry our own packs - **shock, horror!** No colonial slaves to carry our sleeping bags or clothes (although we did have slaves - oops, I mean porters - to carry our tents, food and dining table and chairs - five-stary camping, huh). So we spent one day in Cusco running around hiring 40 litre day packs and sleeping bags. The biggest mystery, however, remained as yet unanswered: were we actually doing the "real" Inca trail, or had we been scammed into booking for an alternative trek? We were sceptical as just 6 weeks earlier Kris managed to find only one agency who still had spaces left for the real Inca trail, even though 20 other agencies told him that spaces were all booked out until September, and that he shouldn't bother trying.
But come Day One of our trek, and one of the first things our guide, Ruben, said was, "Welcome to the real Inca trail!" Woohoo - success! But the trek was not without its problems. The guide that travelled with us on the bus from Cusco to the starting point of our trek was turned away at the first checkpoint as his permit hadn't come through. So we were assigned another guide, Ruben, but he had to look after two groups - a massive group of 18 Danish people (including one lardass who needed special attention), and our tiny group of four people: Kris and myself, and Gerard and Francis - two men in their mid-forties from Uruguay (their English was about as good as our Spanish, so it made conversation a bit stilted). Consequently, our tiny group seemed to get shunted to second priority - culminating in us not getting a historical explanation of the ruins at Machu Picchu, which was a real disappointment.
Despite this, it was quite enjoyable to walk by ourselves for most of the time as we could set our own pace. The scenery was great (although nothing on the scale of Nepal or Tibet's monstrous peaks) and there were lots of ruins we checked out on the way (not to mention cactus plants from which mescalin is derived, and small rolly-poly insects which produce a deep red ochre when crushed, which the Incas used to paint their faces).
The first day of walking was pretty easy, but we'd heard about the notoriously hard second day. It was pretty arduous - stairs, stairs and more stairs. We set off at 7.30am at an altitude of 3000m. We climbed up to 3850m, then stopped for lunch.... at 9.30am. Seriously. And it wasn't just a sandwhich, it was a three-course carb-drenched feast: first we had an egg and tomato roll, then cream of vegetable soup, then finally meat, rice and potato salad (despite explaining to three different people that I didn't eat meat, they never seemed to get the message - oh well, not like I was lacking in sustenance). So with our bellies dragging on the ground, we heaved ourselves up the final 350 metres in altitude to get to Dead Woman's pass - the highest pass on the trek.
Now, up until that point, we'd been told that Dead Woman's pass was so-called because of a small hillock that distinctly looks like a nipply breast; but after reaching the pass Ruben told us that it actually got its name after an elderly woman carked it on the pass about 8 years ago. Oh, now you tell us.
Kris and I had bought a flask of rum to toast our crossing of the pass. We gave some to the porters and they tipped some on the ground first to offer it to the mountain and then took a sip themselves (we just guzzled the rum straight away, oops).