Peru Day 4: Inca Trail Day 1–This entry was written on May 11, 2006
Today, we began out trek along the Inca Trail. Omar picked us up at the hotel. After an hour and a half drive through the tiniest villages and dirt roads, we eventually arrived at the trail head, kilometer 82.
Technically, the Inca Trail is actually a network of trails extending from Ecuador in the North down into Chile. When most people refer to “the Inca Trail,” however, what they really mean is the Royal Inca Trail, which is the 
stretch of the trail from Cusco to Machu Picchu along which the tourists typically hike. That starts at kilometer 82 of the trail.
From there, we handed our duffels, full of all of our personal gear and changes of clothes, to the porters and began our trek, carrying just our day packs. The first part of the trail gets going with a bang. We hike along the side of the Urubamba river, with brilliant green mountains to the side. As we round a bend, the hills turn arid, covered in cacti and bromeliads, with lush, green mountain visible just around the bend and frigid white ice caps off in the distance. Three distinct climates all within one view! The constrast was amazing.
When we got to our campsite for lunch, I found out just how spoiled we really are on this trip. First of all, we have the porters to carry all of our gear. For the four of us, we have our guide plus ten porters. The porters carry up to 10 kilos of stuff — changes of clothes, toiletries, etc, and all of our gear. We don’t need to worry about tents, sleeping bags, or any of that stuff. We need only to carry our day packs with any water, snacks, or changes of clothes we might need as we change climates along the trail.
When we arrived to the lunch site, the porters had set up a 
cook tent, a dining tent, and a toilet tent, and had set out bowls of hot water for us to wash our hands and faces. The dining tent had a table, chairs, tablecloth — the works! One of the porters even served as a waiter, complete with a “silver” tray (it was actually plastic), white gloves, and a vest. The meals were truly magnificent. They gave us three courses at every meal, and the food was better than I have eaten in many restaurants.
We even had the toilet tent, a portable latrine with a biodegradable chemical compound to absorb the liquid from the waste. Talk about luxury!
I really wish I could talk more about the trail, but it’s late and I need to sleep….
Today was the most grueling part of the trail. We started from our campsite at 9800 feet, hiked up to 12000 feet by lunch, then hiked to 14000 feet over the next kilometer and a half. That brought us to Dead Woman’s Pass. Once we reached the top of the pass, we hiked back down to our campsite on the other side, at about 12000 feet. That 2000 foot descent was mostly over some fairly steep Incan steps.
of it. Two of them got sick, and were seriously pale and weak all day. I’m pretty impressed that they made it through the day! Another of my traveling companions seemed to completely run out of steam by lunch. I had to help her up the last hundred vertical feet, because she has mentally given up. Then, on the way down, the sun was setting and she didn’t know if she could make it to the camp before dark. The porters ended up having to come and pick us up because of the dark. But she did make it. Things do always seem to work out in the end.