Hiking Peru

On a layover in Heathrow airport so it's time to finally write a post about my spring break trip with my parents....

Cusco was a small historic city with a main cathedral and plaza nestled among mountains plastered with houses that often had rebar still jutting from the top.  There were stray dogs everywhere.

My mom, my dad, and I spent one day climbing into the hills of Cusco via cobblestone alleyways so as to see more churches and views of the city, while eating street churros and drinking pisco sour, a classic Peruvian cocktail.

We spent one night in a youth hostel with a beautiful courtyard filled with people who partied all night. (Of course I was the only one in the family to sleep wondrously.)  The next day we took a van with our team of guides across the countryside into the mountains.

Eating tamales along the way

Traditional weather vanes found atop many houses in the mountains

From there we began our seven day hike that would culminate at Machu Picchu.  The mountains were so gorgeous, and we could often see rivers below us.  On any given day we would hike downhill for a while, cross a river, scale the mountain ahead, summit, and then hike a bit downhill to our campsite.  The daily elevation change that we could see before us was sometimes disheartening but being in the zone felt amazing.  For one of the more grueling hiking days, my mom did ride (and bond with) the mule, which was following us for that purpose.  She and our guide Marcos were constantly at odds; he would tell her we were almost there and then it would take us another four hours.  Often he would say today was a flat day, but he only ever used the word in the Incan sense.  Our highpoint was 4643 meters.  The landscapes reminded me of Kashmir, which followed by the Grand Canyon are the most beautiful natural places I’d ever been before.

We stayed at the most incredible campsites, arriving in the afternoon and leaving early the next morning.  Our guides made us delicious local Peruvian cuisine, vegetarian by request.  We had soup with every meal, as well as plenty of quinoa and local produce like tomatillos and passion fruit.

 

"Incan flat"

A couple days brought brief rainstorms, and we had to hike in “poncho plastic” as Marcos called the disposable rain ponchos, which trapped heat in a very stifling way.  Eager to keep us happy, he would always tell us to “please have a rest!”.

Choquequirao--
not sure my parents pronounced this correctly once despite trying all trip

I was blown away by how uniquely strong the indigenous culture still is in Peru.  Many of our guides didn’t even speak Spanish, only Quechua.  The Incan presence felt very much alive as we hiked through extremely small mountain villages right next to ruins like the amazing Choquequirao.

We did a final surreal descent through lush terraced fields into the mountain village where our mule driver lived.  After a final night in the tent, we caught a precarious van ride to Hydroelectric.

All the drivers blasted local Wayna music, which sounds vaguely like Beijing opera, rather shrill and whine-y, but I love it.

Partway along the road of switchbacks, there was a small recent avalanche making the road impassable.  This slowed us down more than the horde of cows of the road.  Luckily, there was another van stopped going the other direction, so all the passengers got out, climbed over the debris and switched vehicles.  Little did we know, we’d soon come to a much much larger avalanche.  We had to scramble along scree for several hundred yards to get across where we waited for another van to come along.  At this point, my period started since we’d stopped hiking for a minute, and I had to put in my menstrual cup while squatting on boulders around the corner from all the construction crews surveying the avalanche.

Machu Picchu under clouds, view from Huayna Picchu

By the time we reached Machu Picchu town (via a 5 hour walk rather than pay for the train), the number of tourists was suddenly overwhelming.  The ruins were a bit underwhelming when compared to the quite mountains from which we had just emerged.  We did an extra hike up Huayna Picchu mountain to get an aerial view.

(Photo of llamas)

The alpacas of Machu Picchu

Huayna Picchu Mountain

Huayna Picchu Mountain