Pictures of People in Front of Real Things That Look Like Backdrops

I've spent an unacceptable amount of time thinking about what to write about our trip to Peru.

We've been back over two weeks and I've sort of just been holding it and chewing on it in my brain like a piece of gum.  There's no way on earth I could ever fit all of our Peru trip into one blog post, and even though I wish I could have posted about it every day that we were gone, the fact that I couldn't access the internet easily was one of the best things about the whole trip.

The fact of the matter is that the trip to Peru, even with all of the hiccups and bad parts, was the best trip I've ever taken in my life.

Before we left I was pretty much not very happy about life in general. I'm pretty good at being unemployed because I'm the kind of person who never gets bored.  But I'm also the kind of person who needs a comfortable home to not-be-bored-in and for our first month in Uruguay I hated our apartment with a violent screaming passion. It started to wreak havoc on my self-esteem.  I felt like I wasn't accomplishing much, I felt stagnant, and I felt penned-in.

We've been planning for, thinking about, worrying over, getting in turns excited by and then disappointed by this Peru trip for so fucking goddamn long that finally putting our feet down in Cusco was like walking on the moon. And that wasn't even the most important part of the trip.

Our first day in Cusco both Tim and I slept pretty much the whole day.  This isn't really how you would think we'd react to something we'd been anticipating for so long, but we'd been traveling for over 24 hours, we hadn't eaten well, and we went from sea level to over 11,000 ft in altitude.  I had a migraine, of course.

However, as soon as we recovered, and within about twenty minutes of walking into the city, Tim and I both felt not only like we wanted to live there, but like we already lived there. I've never felt anything like that about a place in my life. Cusco has all kinds of faults and uncomfortable truths about it, but it also just felt like home. We both wondered, immediately, if there was a consulate, or any way Tim could get a job there (there's not).

Anyway, we spent the first four days or so walking all over the city, eating and getting lost, taking pictures and running out of breath.  We took a bunch of tours and politely declined our travel company's suggestion that we go white water rafting since it was freezing cold and, well, we can do that anywhere.

On the 9th (I think), we started up the Inka Trail.  Our guides came and picked us up at 6:30 in the morning and we drove for about an hour to pick up the rest of our group and have breakfast, and then drove for another 30 minutes or so to KM82 to start the trail.

Day 1: The easiest day of hiking, except for the rain and the fact that we didn't have enough porters, so we all had to carry more gear. Because of the missing porters we didn't end up eating lunch until probably 2:30 in the afternoon, which is difficult to manage when you haven't eaten since 7:30 and you're hiking with a big pack. Still, I was sort of relieved by the spontaneity of it because it meant that not every group has the same cookie-cutter experience. And we were too awed by everything to worry about pain or hunger.

At the top of Dead Woman's Pass

Day 2: The hardest day of hiking. Tim got really sick the night before and we had to hire a porter to carry his bag (and I got lucky that he took some of my gear too). The hike on this day is nothing but straight up for about five hours, up to almost 14,000 ft, with no stopping for lunch or to look at ruins. Then when you reach "Dead Woman's Pass" you hike down steep stone stairs for about two hours down to camp at about 11,500 ft. Tim looked like a ghost all day he was so sick.

Some of the ruins on Day 3

Day 3: This is the longest day of hiking: ten hours, but you stop and look at a number of ruins, and have a nice leisurely lunch break. You have to cross two passes this day, but end up lower than you started, at about 9,000 ft.  On this day you hike on the most incredible Inka road, where the stones are lined up perfectly like teeth, and the mountains are unspeakably gorgeous. It doesn't even matter that you've hiked for ten hours.

Day 4: Machu Picchu. We got up at 3:45 in the morning for breakfast and to gather up our things. There are no porters on this day so you have to carry everything yourself (which we had been expecting to do all along, but was a big surprise for those who had hired porters expecting them for the full four days).  It's about a 2-hour hike from camp into Machu Picchu. This was by far my favorite part of the hike. It was too misty to really see the sun rise, but it was incredible to watch the mist lift off of Machu Picchu.  There really aren't words to describe the feeling of accomplishment, or to describe the feeling of resentment you feel for the people who take the train, who have energy and smell nice and slept in beds and take up too much space after you worked so damn hard to get there.

For about 45 glorious minutes you get to look at Machu Picchu with hardly any people in it. And it's just breathtaking.  And then the trains start rolling in, and with them come literally 2000 people and it's almost impossible to walk from one place to the next and you kind of start feeling a little greedy and hating humanity a little bit.


But here's the thing, even with no Machu Picchu, I needed that hike SO BAD.  I needed so badly to do something hard, and painful, and dirty, and occasionally a little bit awful (the toilets y'all, OMG) and because of that awfulness actually pretty funny, and to meet some great new people, and to really just scoop my whole brain clean.  Every single minute of the trail, even the bad ones, was fun. It sounds terrible and hard, and none of us got to shower for four days and the entire time, at every single meal, someone talked about diarrhea, and Tim told me afterwards that on the morning of the second day he woke up and his feet were swollen so badly he almost couldn't get his shoes on and neither of us knows why... 

BUT: I also saw some of the most beautiful, mysterious and impressive things I've ever seen in my entire life, we played Uno every night with the tiniest deck of Uno cards I've ever seen, I ate the best trout I've ever had, I slept soundly and woke up refreshed even though we were getting up at 5:45 every morning (if you know me, you know this is insanity), Tim drank tea!


The day before we got on the plane to fly to Peru we had a moment where we were both so convinced something would go wrong, and almost convinced that we wouldn't even be able to enjoy ourselves, that we wished that it was already over. This should indicate the fever pitch of insanity we'd both reached before we even left.  But this sense of anxiety completely dissolved up on the trail, never to return.

The number one question people in Cusco ask when they hear that you hiked the trail is, "would you tell someone else to do the trail, or take the train?" or, "are you glad you did it, or do you wish you'd taken the train?"  The answer is that I would absolutely do it again and I don't even want to talk about the train. I know that a couple of hundred people do it every day and I'm supposed to be jaded and think it's touristy and somehow not "genuine," but all that muscle pain was certainly real and that was the best, coolest thing I've ever done. Period.