Trekking with the Incas

Peru

It all started with the Chinese tax rules.  Apparently as a foreigner, if you spend five full years in China, then you qualify to be taxed on your global income.  This year is my fifth year in China (believe it), and as you may know, I like a bit of property here and there, so a thumping great tax bill was not an idea that I was particularly keen on.  The solution to this is that as a full year is calculated as you not having left the country for 30 consecutive days, it has become quite a common practice for foreigners every fifth year to spend 31 days working in an office outside of China, so as to reset the clock.  Basically, you get out for a month.

                Since about the end of  2012 this issue was on my mind, and accelerated in the summer this year when I changed roles in Shanghai.  The new job was keeping me in China for a few years to come, and so I would complete my five years in 2013.  Which meant that just as I started my new job, it was time to leave.

                Initially I had visions of taking the whole month off as sabbatical and travel for the entire time, but that deserved to be filed somewhere between ‘unlikely’ and ‘delusional’.  Looking at the calendar I still realised that with the help of a handily placed Chinese public holiday, I could manage three weeks holiday, and then work the final two from whichever office I managed to end up near.  But where to go?  Go back to London for five weeks?  I suppose I could have, but you know me – where would the fun be in that (sorry Mum)?  Hong Kong?  It would have made sense work wise, but I go back often enough anyway.  No this was a unique chance to do something different, even three weeks out of the office was an opportunity to put some miles under my belt. 

                If I was really going to do something different, then Asia was going to be too close to home. I wanted the chance to see something out of the ordinary, and one thought kept coming back to me – Machu Picchu, the lost Inca city high in the hills of the Andes.  I had only been to South America once before, Brazil back in the ‘90s, so Peru was completely new to me.  It was a distant place but one of the Wonders of the World, and up there as one of the sights everyone should see in their lives.  This was the one.

                “Heidi, sign this visa form.  We’re going to Peru”

                “Ok.”

Of course the first thing that you realise is that Peru is a long, long way away from China.  Fly 14 hours to New York, have a break for a couple of days, and then you have another 8 hours to Lima.  New York is hardly the worst place to have a stopover though, and in just a few days we managed to cram in some shopping, plenty of eating and drinking, and a Broadway show featuring a bloke off Doctor Who, before we went back to the airport for the overnight flight due south. 

It was a grey morning as we touched down in Latin America, and at Lima International the guy from the car hire company was nowhere to be found.  A few frantic phone calls, some arm waving at the guys on the desk, and finally we were all set.  He handed me some keys, pointed us in the vague direction of ‘over there’, and away we went.

                Driving proved to be an interesting experience.  Motorways were fine, but the side roads tended to be a bit more haphazard.  This was not really helped when I wasn’t always sure what rules I was supposed to be obeying.  I managed to jump at least one red light through not knowing where the lights were, but got more bullish about overtaking cars down single track roads as the trip went on.  When in Rome and all that. 

We started the trip in fairly relaxed circumstances, staying for two days in our friends’ house just outside Lima.  Beautiful house out in the countryside, the main problem being trying to communicate with their housekeeper Senor Luis, as our conversations tended to deteriorate to just us both waving our arms around a lot, while I kept a respectfully large distance away from his mean-looking dog.  Once fully rested, our next destination was the town of Nazca, in the south of Peru.  This meant a long drive down the ‘Pan America Sud’, the highway which seems to run pretty much straight down the whole length of the western coast of South America without any turns.  My sort of road, makes map reading easy enough anyway, as we ran all the way down the coast before heading up into the mountains, and finally through into the desert of Nazca.

                Nazca is famous for being the site of large carvings in the sand.  These were done hundreds of years ago, and given the lack of rain in the Nazca desert, having been drawn in the sand the lines have stayed there untouched ever since.  These are not just a few casual drawings either - there are numerous huge animals, including a whale, a monkey, and a cheery looking spaceman.  There are also a number of very, very long straight lines and polygons, which run as far as you can see off into the distance.  The common thinking behind these is that they were done for religious reasons, as offerings for the Gods.  Another school of thought was that they line up to the stars, and represent an astronomical map.  Or are they lines a landing strip for aliens, with the creatures signals?  The spaceman is just saying hello to his mates?

                The lines are so large that the only effective way to see them is from the air, and we boarded a small eight-seater plane from the busy hub that was Nazca airport.  No business class on this one & worryingly I couldn’t even see a potential drinks trolley.  Lack of comforts aside, once we were up in the air it was clear what all of the fuss was about, as we buzzed over the monkey and waved at the spaceman.  The pilots kept dipping the wing of the plane to show each side a clear view of the carvings, something that allowed me to take plenty of photos, and that contributed to pretty much everyone else being sick once the plane had landed.  The animal carvings were impressive, but for me more striking were the polygons that stretched off in perfectly straight lines for kilometres on end.  I still find it hard to accept that these were made with such accuracy by primitive civilisations.  I am not saying for sure that it was aliens, but you look at the pictures & tell me if it looks natural to you.  I want to believe!

A common theme of the early part of the trip was trying to make an effort to speak Spanish.  I have never studied Spanish, but could make a stab at understanding it from its similarities to a combination of English & French.  The only trouble was that my mind is wired in a slightly strange way (stop it), so that I can only try and speak one foreign language at a time, which these days is Chinese.  So if I hear a question in Spanish, I may well understand it, and then give the right answer back…in Mandarin.

“Hola!”

“你好!”

Anyway at least it made for one-way communication, which was slightly better than Heidi whose knowledge of Spanish stretched no further than Sangria and Cesc Fabregas.  She adopted the tried and trusted English-abroad method of JUST SPEAKING LOUDER.  In an attempt at education I decided to try and educate Heidi on all things Spanish, which I did by going on to YouTube and showing her highlights of the old TV program the Fast Show, in particular their mock-Spanish TV station Channel 9 News.  If you’ve never seen it then I recommend you check it out, it is of course completely bonkers with no proper Spanish in it whatsoever, but it is very entertaining.  By way of example, their most famous news quote is always “heth heth heth heth heth heth heth Chris Waddle” and the weather is always “Scorchio!”  Which became our new catch phrase whenever the sun came out.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t-qiewVlWuw

After a few more sketches nothing to do with Spanish at all (“Suits you sir!”) I realised I needed another plan, so I delved into the tried & trusted route of using Google Translate whenever I was stuck with a menu item that I did not understand.  In our first restaurant I saw a dish listed that read as I think something close to ‘arrogases’. Quick flick on the phone, and (genuinely) the translation that came back to me was…”smells like sweaty feet.”  Ok I’ll have the chicken then.

Whilst choosing carefully on the food, I was less conscientious about what I was drinking, as I early on plunged into a bottle of Inca Kola.  Inca Kola is indeed owned now by Coke, but bears little resemblance to it as it was invented many years ago in Peru for Peruvian tastes.  It is bright yellow, could well glow in the dark, is more chemical than water, and has a flavour that is a fusion of bubblegum and Sodastream that causes a sugar rush which makes you dizzy.  I liked it.

If not on the Inca Kola, then I was regularly on the coca tea, which is made from coca plant leaves, and seemed to be a Peruvian cure-all for pretty much every ailment you can think of - I still drink it at work now.  I am assured it is entirely legal.  In particular it was good for altitude sickness, which started to kick in when we reached Puno, a beautiful town up in the hills at 3500m.  Puno borders Lake Titicaca, the highest lake in the world, and we went on a boat trip out on the lake the next day.

                The first stop was to the ‘floating island’, where locals live in houses constructed on beds of reeds.  It was quite something to be standing on this natural base, out in the middle of the lake.  The local inhabitants tried to teach us some of their local dialect, quecha, but it went about as well as my Spanish.

                From the floating island we went to a more solid one, Amantani, where we stayed for a night with a local family.  The mother was very friendly, and chatted to us continually in Spanish, as she cooked us a traditional meal, and I played football with her kids.  Heidi made sure to smile & nod a lot.  Part of our tour on the island was to walk up to the highest point of the island, a hill up another few hundred metres.  This sounded easy until we remembered the altitude; I trudged wheezing up to the top, only to turn round and see Heidi sitting down halfway up the hill, hyperventilating like she’d been sprinting.  Which, I can promise you, she had not.

In the evening all the tourists on the tour were given ponchos to wear and brought into a hut where three of the local islanders played some local music.  They were keen for us all to perform a traditional dance – which seemed to be just walking round in circles – but most of the women kept breaking off to play with a little two-year old who had wandered in to see what all the fuss about.

                As we walked back to the family house, we looked up in the sky and saw something strange. What are those twinkly things?  Ah yes those are stars, I remember seeing them a few years back, probably at the last time we were well away from the Chinese fog.  In fact the sky was resplendent, the Milky Way streaming across the middle, and the stars were among some of the brightest I had ever seen.

From Puno we had to take a bus to our next stop in Cusco.  The bus journey lasted all day, and so was broken up with a few tourist stops along the way.  Our tour guide had clearly been on the coca leaves as she rarely stopped talking for most of the journey, including giving us a fairly lengthy and detailed narration on sexual energy during our first stop at what had initially appeared to me just to be a museum of old antiques. 

                If I was unimpressed with her performance then I must have let it show too easily on my face; at our next stop, the ruins of an Incan temple, she asked me a question in front of the whole group.  I clearly hadn’t been listening, and so when confronted with a “so it is yes or no?” demand from the guide, called tails…and picked the wrong one.  Which she made sure to let me and everyone else know.

                Escaping from the clutches of the tour guide, we left the temple to look at the church outside by its entrance.  By the door to the church there was a band playing, and despite the somewhat muddy ground there were about 30 people performing a local dance in the square.  The women were wearing traditional costumes, as I assume were the men – only their costumes included knitted balaclavas, which gave them the slightly worrying air of bank robbers. I kept my wallet in my pocket and retired to the bus.

We arrived in Cusco the night before we were due to leave for a 4-day hike along the Salkantay Trek to Machu Picchu.  I had been reliably informed that the hike was an essential part of the journey, and that the camping involved was relatively painless. Given that I had made all of the arrangements for the trip, there was some debate about precisely how forthcoming I had been with these details when Heidi agreed to the trek, in particular that we were a) camping, b) hiking 70km in 4 days, and most importantly c) it might be cold. 

                Cusco is well stocked with outdoor gear shops, prompting a last minute shopping splurge on fleeces, gloves, and those headlamps you can strap to your forehead.  Back at our hotel, we met our tour guide for the hike, and he talked us through what was going to happen and what we needed to do.  When he had finished, I checked with Heidi on her reaction.

                “What do you reckon?”

                “You go ahead.  I’ll take the train and see you in four days.”

                “Are you sure?”

                “Yes”

                So I went on my own.

Even I had to admit this was not the sort of thing I had done for a while, and it was somewhat reassuring that as I boarded the bus at 5am the next morning, the people around me were looking equally nervous, as well as tired.  There were 16 of us on the hike, plus two guides.  Most people were also decked out with plenty of warm weather gear, hats, gloves, thermals, all ready to combat the worst that the weather could throw at us…which for the first morning turned out to be not much.  In fact it was verging on Scorchio!, and within 15 minutes of starting the hike, everyone was disrobing down to t-shirts.

                I was worried that there may be a wide difference in tempo and stamina between the hikers in the group, but we all seemed broadly level in our fitness, and generally were with each other as a group for most of the day.  That was apart from our three eldest members, two French ladies and one French gentleman in their sixties and seventies respectively.  They shot off at the front, and were later overheard to be complaining that the group was moving too slowly.

                As the day went on, we went higher into the hills.  Out in front we could see the mountain pass, which what looked like a generous helping of snow on top.  Maybe not t-shirt weather there.  Snow aside, the scenery was spectacular, and with the mountains all around I felt like Frodo on his march to Mordor, just with less Orcs trying to beat us with clubs or some bug-eyed reptile trying to grab my ring.  We reached our campsite for the night at the base of the pass, and sat inside glad of the rest, with the main topic of conversation being just how cold could it get overnight?

                The answer to that was pretty damned cold, and by 9pm everyone was wrapped up in thermals and sleeping bags.  I could hear the rain coming down during the night and I could not help but wonder if the next day was going to be all that much fun.  And also, given that we were miles out of range of any mobile phone signal, how were we going to find out the England football score?  Ok so Heidi was probably very cosy back in 5-star hotel with the roaring fire in reception, but where was the fun in that I ask you?

                Just for once, football was not the first thing on my mind when the alarm went off at 5am.  We had a long day ahead of us and apparently an early start was vital to give us the chance to get up and over the pass in good time.  The going was steep but once we got into a rhythm, this kept us warm, even as we climbed higher and the snow started to fall.

                This part of the hike was renowned as being the toughest, as we climbed 700m in altitude in the first few hours, taking us up over 4000m.  The group started to string out as fitness & altitude began to take its toll, and casual chat faded.  I resorted to plugging in some music as I made my way up over the hill, with my phone on random play.  I skipped through a few acoustic ballads looking for something more motivating, and then hit my stride as a more familiar tune kicked in.

                ‘Rising up, back on the street, did my time, took my chances’.

                This was more like it.  Started walking faster.

                ‘Went the distance, now I’m back on my feet, just a man and his will to survive’

                Faster, faster, this hill’s not going to beat me.

                ‘It’s the …EYE of the TIGER, it’s the THRILL of the FIGHT, rising up to the challenge of our RIIIIIIIIVAAAALLL…’ 

 Yep you can’t beat a bit of Rocky when you’ve got a mountain to climb, you don’t want to let the great man down.  Unfortunately though the song is only three and a half minutes, and even I wasn’t going to put it on repeat for the whole morning, but that time that it was on full blast for was undoubtedly my most productive 3 ½ minutes of the whole morning.

                It took a couple of hours, but we eventually made it up to the top of the pass. And what did we find there?  Snow. It was snowing.  Hard.  In fact we took a break by building a snowman.  For once all of the thermals had come in useful, such that the weather was manageable…although I have to confess we did not hang around for long.

                After lunch we spent pretty much the whole afternoon trekking down the other side of the mountain, more and more into the jungle, where the weather was much less snowy and progressively more Scorchio!  Not easy trying to pack for days like that, but the best news of the day was finding that unlike the first day, our campsite had a shower. 

Day 3 of the hike was pretty much all downhill, in a good way, as we progressed further into the jungle, and worried more about mosquitoes than snowmen.  It was a long day walking, with added frustration that we were still out of phone range and I still didn’t know if England had qualified for the World Cup, but in the end we had the promise of a good rest, as the final stop was at the hot springs.  I have no real understanding of the geographical occurrences that heat up a big pond to an extremely pleasant warm level, but much like cooking I don’t need to know how it works in order to be an enthusiastic user, and we spent a very pleasant hour relaxing in the warm water.

                Our camp site that night was still outdoors, but had the advantage of being in a small town.  And you know what small towns give you access to?  Alcohol.  After our group had polished off three bottles of Peruvian rum & had a disco round a bonfire, we found we all slept surprisingly well.

For day 4 I tried to work out which clothes to wear, selecting between those which were filthy as opposed to just merely dirty.  Before our hike for the day, we were going to go ziplining, which involves being strapped to a cable and whizzing from one side of a valley to the other.  It sounds good in practice but took ages, not helping when quite a few people got stuck in the middle and had to be rescued.  Er…all I can say is it’s not as easy as it looks.

                In the afternoon we completed our hike to the town of Ascar Calientes.  The walk took us around the foot of the hills, and we spotted one stone building at the top, a first tantalising look at Machu Picchu, which lay just on the other side.  On arrival I met up with Heidi again, weary from her exhausting train journey, and we had the luxury of a hotel room for the night.  It’s quite strange sleeping on a bed after three nights on the floor, even more so looking in a mirror for the first time in four days. 

Up, up, up the next day for a 6am bus to the top of Machu Picchu, in order to see the sun rise over the mountains and strike the first rays onto the ruins.  I have been very lucky to have seen many great sights in my travels over the years, but this ranked up with the best of them, as in perfect conditions the ruins sat resplendent in front of us.  The idea to come and see this had nestled at the back of my mind for a very long time, but this lived up to every expectation.  If you ever get the chance, then you should go.  (You can get the train if you want.  I won’t tell.)

                We spent most of the day walking around the site, learning more about the ruins.  They were discovered by an American explorer Hiram Bingham in 1911, having laid unused for almost 400 years before. Because the Spanish never found Machu Picchu when they invaded, the ruins had been left abandoned but not destroyed.  That was until on his travels through the region Bingham heard a rumour of a lost city, and with a couple of well-placed incentives (he paid 1USD by all accounts) the locals took him to see the place, and everything changed.

                As part of the tour, we also climbed Huayna Picchu.  You know when you look at pictures of Machu Picchu, there is another big hill behind it?  Yes that one.  Yes it is that steep.  No I won’t be doing it again.

After returning from the hills, we still had our final two days in Peru.  We took a guided tour around Cusco, which started somewhat ignominiously when the tour bus did five laps of the town square before finally going elsewhere, but eventually we went up in the hills and saw a fine view of the city, and the incoming thunderstorm that we rapidly ran away from.  Apart from that we wandered around the sights, whilst in highly predictable fashion, I managed to find Indian food for lunch, while Heidi went shopping.

                Time to go back then…well not really, in fact only as far as New York, where I had another two weeks of very busy work.  When not sweating away at my desk working really, really hard, I watched the annual Halloween Parade, caught up with old friends & colleagues I’d not seen for over 10 years, and managed to meet up with my Parents.  Only four and a half years to the 2018 tax break.  Scorchio!!