Blogcoven

Up, dressed and fed we headed off down the mountain. Today was a lot more on the level than yesterday which meant it was just nice. The other group went off on some super-hardcore jag up and up into the high mountains but even Sarah ‘I feel no pain’ thought that was a bit much, though Robyn defected and headed off.

The trek was through mountain that were… weird. While the Amazon had been just out-of-context, these were really similar to home; or at least at first look they were. A second longer look showed no signs of people… until you came to road but the main thing that struck me was no powerlines or the other peripheral hardware thats strung all over and across the countryside in Europe. There were signs of human habitation but it was all old and well fairly run down. Overgrown cottages, all tumbledown stone like you find in the Wesht of Ireland and some odd things like graveyards. That was something that really struck me as different – no tombstones, just cairns. Y’all’ve seen the mountain photos, it was to me just like walking around in the Ox mountains, except stretched vertically.

We wandered around and along and chattered, mostly with Sarah, Farah and Naoko, listened to the guides and had a long hike which was very enjoyable. We arrived at the hot springs coming up on lunchtime to find the place half under construction with some seriously ropey looking safety standards – plank of wood bridge anyone? – a lot of the locals using the hot-springs and non-plussed at us turning up and our forwards party having set up tents. Kick ass. (Ddescription of springs later, patience grass-hopper) We broke for lunch and left the most ill to recuperate and soak while the rest went on a local walk. This local walk, unplanned, random and off-the-cuff nearly got me killed in the most ridiculous way.

We wandered off, this was a much more densely populated place – there were signs of people and trails and potato plots and llamas, stone walls and such – even a road. We took a stroll off down one of these roads, past a house like your typical small farm in Ireland circa 1920 and off up into the hills a bit. A handful of us had been questioning ourselves over not volunteering for martyrdom the uber-hike the other group had done, but this hill walk scrubbed any and all notions of that from our brains. Sarah and I were on point, chit-chatting when we notice the rest of the party had stopped – we went back to find they had been buttonholed by two women and a baby, looked like grandmother, mother and daughter. There was banter going on in very patchy spanish from some of the americans until the guide showed up – and it went something along the lines of:

Locals: Come have a drink with us!
Us: Where?
Locals: Name-of-Town?
Us: Wheres that?
Locals: Over that way. *points*
Us: How *far* over that way?
Locals: About two days over the mountains.
Us: Um… thanks, but no.

Sarah and I were mostly watching this from the periphery and at this stage we started off again snickering and were walking down the trail when there was a noise behind us. The trail here was just wide enough for us to walk side by side, maybe three to four feet? I’m on the right and to my right the hillside drops steeply quite a ways. There were some scrubby looking bushes, not much else. On the other side, the hillside sloped up, more scrubby undergrowth – gorselike hedges and such. Anyway, we hear a noise, we turn, and I see horses pelting it along the trail towards us. There’s no where for me to go. Sarah flattens herself against the up-slope, but I’ve got nowhere to go – slope is too steep for me to even plant my walking stick and balance out on that… so I step to the edge and thats it. I haven’t time to get across its path to the upslope. I’ve just got time to think ‘horse body mass > mine’ – if it nudges me, odds are it will keep going, I’ll get a big kinetic push back and out. The lead horse steps, looks at me – and here we’re in cinematic slo-time, since this is between the hoof-beats of a galloping horse – steps, looks at Sarah, steps, and I see it make the decision to go through the middle, and its gone through and past, then its mate follows it and the horse behind that with the two bloody kids who were driving these horses at a gallop along the trail. They’re past and gone before I’ve even time to get an adrenaline surge.

I look at Sarah, and I’ve no idea what I said to her. I hope it was something witty and blaze, but it was probably either stunned silence, or a hugely original ’shit’ or the likes. We turn to look up the trail again and one of the kids is on his ass having fallen backwards off his horse. Call me a bad man, but I did not run to help him as he picked himself up and buggered off up the trail. The freakiest thing about all this was I didn’t physically react. No cold-sweat soak, no heat-rate spike, it was too damn quick.

Horses. I went to the fucking Andes, and nearly got killed by goddamn horses.

We walked and talked a bit more until the guide said we ought to start heading back so we did. This was the same guide as got Ronan down off the mountain. When we came to a fork and he said ‘this is the way back’ when we’d come the other way, I trusted him. Turns out I oughtn’t've. We had encounters with piggies – real, hairy, sprinting pigs, geese, ducks and llamas and managed to wander through the local big town while missing everything that was big about it before we made it back to camp. We also found hallucinogens and the guide told us all about how to prepare it and what to expect using it and how he was going to get blasted out of his tree the day we left.

We made it back to camp to find Ro and Fi telling us how wonderful the hotsprings were, so Neil and I went for a dip before dinner.

My god… it was glorious. The hotsprings were pretty much the only bit done at that stage, everything else was work-in-progress, but they were flagged with stones – there was a big warm swimming pool, but that was drained by the time I got back, and three others – a kids paddle pool, a deep pool which was warm, not hot and I would say most pleasant during the day. Then there was the actual hotspring which was as hot as a humans can stand. Sliding in at first was like going into boiling water, but then shortly afterwards it was wonderful. And the showers – hot water spouts just cascading out of this wall, like redirected hot streams… oh it was so, so nice. The water smelt a little funny – not the strong sulphur I had been expecting but a sort of swampy smell? Very slight, some people didn’t like it, I thought it was fine. We chilled out in the cool pool for a while until food was called, then headed to the mess tent, ate and played Gin for a while. Mike from Penn State had rustled up rum and so there was rum! Lots of the Americans stayed on to play cards and I played through a game of gin, then went back to the springs with Naoko. The moon was filtered through clouds at this stage, so everything had this sort of phosphorecent glimmer to it. Very nice impressive.

After a while more of the Americans joined us and after a final broil in the hot spring, I showered and went to bed, absolutely glowing. The heat from the springs was such that I could stand in the night breeze, towel off and get dressed without feeling even vaguely cold. Kept me warm until I got to sleep.

Next day we’re all up, there are a few sore heads, but not I. We pack up and pay off the guides, cooks, porters and others then trek down to Lares to catch our bus to Ollantetambo. This was mostly limbo-drivetime, chatting with Sarah, then arriving back into the ‘no gracias’ tourist geared part of the Inca trail. From arriving at Ollantetambo we’re very much back on the Lonely Planet trail and there are touts, taxidrivers and peddlers of everything, everywhere.

The train trip was incredible – was in fact what I had signed up for. I thought to myself the one thing I really wanted to see was cloud-forests and here I got a train rid in a glass roofed carriage through towering gorges full of mists and cloud forests. This rocked, was seriously impressive, very new, very other. At the end of the line we’re in the town below Macchu-Picchu, which is a town of tourist stalls, restaurants and hotels. We all went out that night for food which was delicious alpaca with intricate carved carrot for me. No guinea pig on the recommendation of our guide, and anecdotal evidence suggests this was probably as well.

Next day, to Macchu Picchu…

Listening to: Denial – Sevendust