Four days hiking the Inca Trail to MACHU PICCHU
Strenuous trek stokes fear of hell on the body, but instead heights and nourishment prove heavenly
There’s a moment in every good heist movie when the plan is working almost too well. The vault unlocks on the first try and no siren alarms. And you just know there will be a comeuppance. There has to be.
I’m sitting on a stool, dipping a chip delicately cut into the shape of a llama into a heap of guacamole when I have that eerie feeling of ease. It’s the first in a four-day hike through the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, and this is too perfect.
Surely I’m getting away with something. And surely I will pay.
This trip has been on my boyfriend, John’s, bucket list for so long that he even brought it
up on our first date, during our hours-long conversation at a Houston coffee shop. I was a week away from a 17-day carcamping and hiking adventure across the American West all by my lonesome when we met. It seemed I’d finally found someone I’d be compatible with on the vacation front.
So it became an unspoken agreement that we’d do this someday. Then in March, it became spoken. The Peruvian government approves enough permits for just 500 hikers to begin the four-day trek each day, and about 300 of those are allotted to porters and cooks. So we had to book the hike through our tour group, Sam Travel,
about seven months ahead of time.
That meant seven months of imagining what this trip would be like. Steep mountains. Slippery rocks. A punishingly heavy backpack. And digging a hole to pee. Perfection. Yet here I sat on the very first day, a little winded from the beginning of the hike, sure, but largely feeling pampered. We’d booked a group trip, expecting six to eight others to join us and our tour guide, but the night before we departed, we learned we were the only two on the expedition. This meant four porters, a cook and a tour guide, all for us. Our bags were nearly bare, after passing 7 kilograms apiece onto the porters, as is usual.
And the cook made us llama-
shaped crackers for lunch. Too easy.
Then came the second day. We woke up at 5 a.m., when two basins of warm water appeared in front of our tent for handwashing, followed shortly thereafter by two steaming cups of cocoa-leaf tea, a natural remedy for altitude sickness. We’d slept overnight at 10,829 feet above sea level. But the morning would add bruising new heights, as we planned to climb four hours up to Dead Woman’s Pass, the apex of the trip, at an altitude of 13,779 feet.
Our tour guide, Wilber, said the Incans named the peak Dead Woman’s Pass because the shape of the mountains look like the curves of a supine woman. I have my own theories. “I think I’m the Dead Woman,” I huffed to John, about halfway through the climb.
I’ve hiked higher in the past without any issues. But no matter how many pauses I took that morning, I felt like I was breathing through a coffee stirrer. I’d hike up 35 of the rough-cut stone steps that make up the path and stop to catch my breath. Then lose it again on the next 35.
The counting helped me focus on something other than my pounding head and the tightness in my chest, which mimicked the familiar feeling of an anxiety attack.
I was in the mountains of Peru, where the swirling air is cleaner than just about anywhere in the world. And I couldn’t get it into my lungs.
This, I realized, as John and I pulled off to the side to allow a group of hikers from another tour group to pass me, was my comeuppance.
“Slow and steady,” Wilber
kept reminding me.
And slow and steady I went. Right through hell.
John’s Fitbit informs me that we covered 14.3 miles that day. My brain has blocked it out in what must be an act of selfpreservation. I do remember that by the time I finished the two-hour descent from Dead Woman’s Pass, my legs were shaking cartoonishly.
I spent the evening drinking chamomile tea in the mess tent and rubbing my elbows up and down my quads like a cheap masseuse. John and I fell asleep by 8 p.m., lulled by the sound of raindrops on the roof of our tent and sheer exhaustion. When I awoke at 5 a.m. on the third day, I used the personal toilet supplied by our tour company (yes, it’s rustic, but it’s not a hole in the ground), washed my hands, applied a couple of blister bandages to my feet and began walking again after breakfast.
We spent that day descending, from 11,800 feet to 8,792 feet, where we camped near the ancient ruins of Wiñay Wayna.
To celebrate our final night on the trail, the cook treated us to pisco sour cocktails — a Peruvian favorite — and somehow, without the convenience
of electricity, he even made a cake for dessert, 36.9 miles into the trek. “Feliz Viaje” the cook wrote in green frosting above a hand-iced image of a hiker climbing a mountain.
I felt almost guilty for being so thoroughly spoiled. Here, I’d told my friends and family that John and I would be roughing it for four days, hiking and camping. And though we’d slept in tents, we ate far better than my usual diet of Lean Cuisine frozen meals and boxed pasta. That last night, I was even treated to a (glacial) shower.
“I feel spoiled,” I whispered to John as we ate cake and sipped tea that last night.
And the next morning, when the clouds cleared and we laid our eyes on the sprawling Incan settlement at Machu Picchu, stretching wider than I’d ever imagined from the photos I’d seen online, I knew it was true.