I came, I saw, I conquered...

...I passed out.

Somehow, despite doing absolutely no physical preparation, I completed, unaidded, the grueling four days that is the Inca Trail. AND, I wasn´t even the slowest in my group!  I probably came about fourth out of the nine in our group, not that it was a race (everyone knows it is a race...).

But before getting to the start of the Inca Trail, it was time for Alice and I to don our authentic Inca attire, and get to know some locals in the Sacred Valley.

Yeah we wear this all the time....

This was the first of our activities that really involved ´becoming part of´ the way of life of the indigenous peoples of Peru.  ´Senior´ Alice is mistaken at first for a boy (this is actually the second time today!) and given a poncho.  She corrects them, and is rewarded with that skirt and very smart yellow hat, which could easily double as a lamp shade.

Basically, this activity is an excuse for the farmers to dress us up, and make us do their work for them. I am pretty sure these are not the clothes they are using for their daily farming activities.

Here we are, wearing our brightly coloured garments, working the fields.

Not entirely sure what the objective is, I randomly swing my pick at clumps of dirt.  After doing potentially irreversible damage to their soil, which will probably take weeks for them to undo, they decide that working the field isn´t for us.  Time to get some barley off the stems.  How? By standing on it of course...

Once again, pretty useless at this.  Also slightly disturbing because earlier today, while wearing those same shoes, we visited a llama farm.

Here I am sure we stood in an untold amount of llama and alpaca poo.  Which is now marinating the barley they will later serve us as part of our lunch...

They serve us a traditional lunch of soup, potatoes, and guinea pig (cuy or guy in their language).  We are served in a very simple room, with a basic table and chairs and very humble decoration.  Oh, and an authentic indigenous Samsung TV, DVD, and satellite television box.

I decide my guinea pig looks a bit dodgy and leave it alone.  Alice eats hers, giving her a delightful bout of gastro just in time to start the Inca Trail! It´s apparently of a good vintage, so manages to last her all the way through the trek.

Here we are with our Inca Trail group.

9 trekkers, (7 Australians, 1 Brit, 1 Irish), and our 15 or so porters.  Porters outnumber the trekkers because we are fat gringos and need 4 hot meels a day, and each meal needs to be three courses, and no two meals should be the same, and meals should be gourmet.  This means our porters must lug a stove, a gas bottle, tables, chairs, a dining tent, and a heap of food.  Feeling mildly guilty... but no time for those feelings, we set off.

I hate camping
This won´t come as a surprise to many, and didn´t come as a surprise to me.  I have long known that I have hated camping.  People have tried to convince me it is because I have never been ´proper´ camping, I haven´t had the right equipment, I haven´t been to the right places.

Well, what I have just done is as close to 5 star camping as you get, and I still hated it.

I present my case.

Comfort
Tents, and camping mattresses, are unbelieveably uncomfortable.  You can feel every rock in the ground digging into you all night.  It is freezing cold, even though we are in sleeping bags apparently made for sub zero temperatures.  Further, because there is a chance of rain, they have to set the tents up on uneven ground so the water will run underneath the tent.  You are in a tiny, enclosed space, so when Alice accidentally (on purpose) decides to let one rip just before we go to sleep at night, there is no escape.

Hygiene
Camping is a filthy habit.  For four days I did not have a shower.  For four days, none of my group had a shower.  In fact, for four days, the 500 sweating, dirty people walking the Inca Trail did not have a shower.

Further, there are 500 people a day using the scarce toilets that exist along the trek.  These toilets are all squat toilets, which, despite the presence of well marked foot grates, appear to be invitation for people to just shit wherever they like.  They smell disgusting, and when you get within about 20 metres of them the smell is almost unbearable.

I actually chose not to go number 2 for three days.  Unhealthy? Possibly.  But not as unhealthy of exposing any of my orifices to one of these toilets.  Alice was not this fortunate due to the afforementioned guinea pig.  She had to brave the toilet known as the ´explosive bano´, where someone had managed to spray their business everywhere.  The flush mecahnism is no help, as it basically spreads the mess further around the cubicle.  At another bathroom, someone has managed to place a well formed stool NEXT to the hole, rather than in it.

Fresh air
Unlikely... Most of the way along the trek there are countless donkeys and alpacas and llamas, who do not have the courtesy to move off the track to do their business.

Practicality
There are 500 people walking this trek every day.  Most of the people in groups about our size, with  numerous porters who run ahead, set up tents and tables and chairs, cook food, before disassembling it, and moving onto the next stop.  What is the point?  Seems remarkable impractical and inefficient.  Given everyone stops at the same spots each time, why not just assemble fixed buildings and avoid people having to carry the buildings and appliances from place to place.

Never one to be satisfied with just pointing out the problems, I have even gone that step further and identified the solution.

Build resorts
As I said, there are 500 people walking this everyday.  It would open the trek up to a whole market of wealthy, fat, lazy westerners who want to walk the trail, but would still like to have a soft bed, a hot shower, and a clean toilet.  I am pretty sure Sheraton or Hilton or any chain of hotels would be more than willing to establish these.

Anyway, that is enough of my whinging about camping.  Onto whinging about the trek.

The Trek
Somehow, and I am not sure exactly how, I managed to make my way over the entire 45km journey. This includes a hike at one point up to 4200m above sea level.  To say I was exhausted at the end of each day is an understatement.  When it started raining on the second day of the trek, I was very tempted to turn around and go back and catch the very comfortable, drink serving, air conditioned, train.  In fact, we could hear the train whistle blowing as it carried its smug, satisfied customers on the comfortable 2 hour journey to Machu Picchu.

This is Alice and I after reaching the highest peak of the trek, on the second day.

Getting up to this point was hard work, made even harder by the rain, and our crappy ´eco-poncho´s.  I´ll let you in on a secret, the word ´eco´ in front of any product, is code for ´doesn´t work properly´... at least it is recyclable I guess.

There was some pretty stunning scenery along the way, and a lot of ruins to explore.  Here, Alice and I battle for supremacy on top of some ruins.

I win, giving me the right to do whatever I please with my new territory.  Best to mark it as mine before someone else does.

On day 3 we decide to walk down to waterfall.  This all seemed like a good idea, until we realised that walking down for 10 minutes, means walking all the way up, which takes about 45 minutes with our weary legs.

We walk each day for between 7 and 9 hours.  Always either walking up, or down.  Flat ground is very hard to come by.  Walking up is exhausting.  Walking down absolutely kills your knees.  It is hard to know which is worse.  Special thanks goes out to my cousin Amanda Turner for advising me to get shoes one size too big to make the downhill walking easier!  The rain made all of the stones very slippery. Most of our group take a tumble at some point on this day. This is supposed to be the dry season, so I would hate to see what this is like in the wet season!

On the last day, we have to wake up at 4am to commence the final walk to the sun gate.  We look great.

At the end, it all seems worth it when we finally make it to Macchu Pichu.

Until you realise that there are another 1000 people there, who just caught the train that day, and do not smell like an alpaca´s anus, and have hair that is so greasy and dirty there is no need for styling product, and whose legs are not about to give way beneath them.  I hate each and every one of those people, they don´t deserve to be there!

Stupid gringos
I cannot imagine what the porters think of us.  It takes us a whole day to walk, slowly, carrying only water and snacks, what they manage to run in a couple of hours, each one carrying 25kg of our ´necessities´.

Further, it is clear that when the Incas were building this network of roads and cities around 500 years ago, they were at the cutting edge of technology.  This was the best they could do.  However, I am pretty sure that if they saw us still doing it now, they would think were complete idiots.

Basically, what we need to do is install a giant 45km escalator/travelator, with Sheraton resorts all along the way.  That is my kind of Inca Trail.

But, after all that whinging, I did make it, and I am glad that I never have to do it again.  There are stamps in my passport to prove that I did it.  The most rewarding thing?  Getting back to a hot shower and a clean toilet!

That is about for now.  Tomorrow we head to Lake Tits (that is what we have nicknamed Lake Titicaca. Not overly creative, but funny to say) for two nights of homestay in mud huts with no hot water or heating and shared drop toilets...

A quote from Liz Bastable, who has come this way before, has set our expectations for this part of the tour:

¨Greg and I arrived to see dinner hanging on the clothes line... dinner was meat.¨

Dear God, help me survive this!