Day three started early, with an alarm call at 4.30am. My phone shows a text sent at 5.37 to the girl, just before we were leaving the hotel. I’d already been up for an hour, and it was another hour before sunrise.
This was to be day one of the proper trail: no more hotel beds, no gentle walks across countryside, instead we were going to be camping in the mountains with no mobile reception for three days. The next time anyone heard from me would be after Machu Picchu, whether I made it on foot or not. We piled into two coaches for the 3-hour drive to the start of the trail, known as “KM 82”.
I slept a lot of the journey, and woke up shortly before we stopped in a town called Ollantaytambo. The town itself was still waking up, but the people eager to sell to the tourists were already up and waiting — people selling scarves and hats and walking poles and any number of things. The walking poles were beautifully carved and painted, I started to wish I hadn’t brought my hiking poles from home with me — but I’d needed my poles for all the walks back in England, and they were adjustable to different heights, making them suitable for both uphill and downhill, which you couldn’t get with the wooden ones.
We spread out through the town square, some people were buying agua de florida — a kind of cologne that you splash on your hands, clap together and then inhale deeply, which was meant to help with altitude sickness. I was more interested in finding a scarf, less for the cold nights and more for protecting my neck from the sun, it was something I’d forgotten to take along. I walked from one traditional shop to the other, giving a bueans dias to the shop keepers and just smiling politely if they tried to make any further conversation. In each shop there would be shelves from floor to ceiling with ponchos and sweaters, blankets and scarves. I found a scarf I liked and bargained, although only briefly, with the shopkeeper for a good price.
It was still early and so still cold in the town. I was wearing my beanie hat for warmth, and my wide-brimmed hat on top of it as much for convenience as anything else. Occasionally, someone would stop me and try to sell me a hat. I knew they couldn’t speak English, but just the same my response was always the same: I’m already wearing two hats, do I look like I need a third? I think they understood the gist of it, even if not the exact words.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a parade appeared. There was men banging drums and playing trumpets, and most disturbing lots of men in scary-looking masks that resembled devils. They marched through the town holding their banner and banging their drum and then they were gone again. We never did find out what it had all been about — none of the locals seemed to pay any attention to it — but apparently the masks date back to the time of the conquistadors. We were told that the conquistadors had forbidden any traditional celebrations, and so people wore these masks to hide their identities.
Soon, we all piled back into our coaches for the rest of the journey to the check point at the start of the trail.
The Peruvian authorities are very cautious now about protecting the Inca trail, so numbers of people walking it are very tightly controlled and all groups have to be authorised. It wasn’t enough to just be a registered group saying how many people you were taking on the trail — everyone was listed by name, and had to provide their passports at the check point so they could cross-reference the names on the list with the names and pictures. You did get a stamp in the passport for it, though.
The train to Machu Picchu runs alongside KM 82, and everyone turned their noses up at the idea of being “a tourist” and just riding the train to the lost city — where is the challenge in that, where is the adventure if you haven’t hiked for days to reach the goal? Just the same, I think all of us felt just a little, tiny bit jealous. Nobody there would have chosen the train, even if given the option at the last minute — it was about the trail for us, not just the destination — but seeing it there made you stop and think about what lay ahead.
This first day of walking was still, by the trail’s standards, gentle. We crossed the Urubamba river and followed alongside it for several hours, until lunch. The rest of the day was a steady climb, looking down on terraced hillsides and the ruins of Patallacta.
I spent most of the day at the back of the group, as you might expect from my injury so was one of the last to arrive at the camp. At camp in Wayllabamba, the porters had put up all the tents for the group — neatly separated into the three sub groups, named Condor, Puma and Pachamama. Not only this, but they were already busy preparing the evening feast, and had set up the three communal tents with hot drinks and bowls of popcorn.
As was to become the standard, the evening meal was a carb-loaded three courses, starting with bowls of soup, before offering plates of white rice and chicken and potatoes alongside more traditional dishes and vegetarian options. After the early start and first day of walking, we all went to our tents fairly soon after dinner — besides as soon as the sun went down at 6pm it became very cold in the mountains, and I was glad for my poncho. The group leaders laughed at it, but I was warm and that was what mattered. It also made a very good improvised pillow for sleeping in the tent.
The sleeping tents we all shared with a tent mate, who had been previously assigned as our hotel room mates, too. I got a young guy called Joe who was a musician. He was nice enough, but strangely reminded me a lot of someone I had gone to school with — except almost ten years younger than we are now. It wasn’t long that we were in the tent that Joe mentioned not feeling great. I told him he’d probably feel better after a trip to the toilet — that I’d felt a bit off colour myself for a little while earlier, and it would be OK.
And so it was that our first night camping in the mountains of Peru was punctuated by Joe frequently getting up to loudly vomit outside our tent. If he wasn’t actually being sick he would be asking me what I thought he should do, should he see the doctor again or just leave it. After my initial mis-diagnosis, I generally told him that he should let them know. He’d see them, get a shot or some tablets or whatever, then go back to bed, only for the whole thing to repeat again.
It went on all night, and I genuinely felt more sorry for him than I did feel any annoyance at not getting sleep. We’d been advised before we went to bed that if you needed to get up in the night to unzip the tent and leave it open until you returned: that way the whole camp wouldn’t be kept awake by the zip-zip, zip-zip of you opening it, and closing it and the zip-zip, zip-zip when you returned again. Nobody needed to worry about that when there was a guy being very loudly sick in the camp.