I leave Arequipa on a luxury night bus heading to Cusco. I go luxury because my legs have not taken well to my competitiveness on the Colca Canyon the day before, in fact the pain in my legs reminds me of the marathon. It really really hurts.
The only luxury is that the chair will recline to almost horizontal, but not quite. Which means that you almost get to sleep, but not quite.
On these journeys you have to have your Ipod quitely playing to drown out the engine and the poor quality DVD they happen to be playing, but tonight I have a different issue.
A woman in the seat behind me is trying to sing herself to sleep, and I can hear her singing over the soothing sounds of my Ipod. At first I don't quite understand what's happening, but sure enough, she's singing. The American couple alongside her eventually snap and shout,
"Por Favor, SSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHH, Por Favor SSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHH!"
The woman goes quiet, but I do not sleep.
Get into Cusco at 5am and head straight to my hostel and sleep. At around 1pm I head out to explore the city, and to buy a trek to Machu Pichu.
Trek's are around 70% of the business here, which is why there is about 400 people on the street trying to sell you a massage. It's so unrelenting that you find yourself actually thinking,
"I could do with a rub down as it goes"
So after I buy my Salkantay trek, hire a sleeping bag, and eat pie and mash at the local English bar, I agree to a massage. Well it's 6 pounds for an hour, even if she does it with Jeremy Beadle style hands, it'll still be worth it.
The street tout shows me to the 'spa' and I am ushered upstairs, the faint sounds of pan pipe music fills the staircase and I shudder, I can tell it's the pan pipe version of 'my heart will go on'
"Jesus, this is going to be a long hour" I say to nobody.
My slim, vain hope of a happy finish goes straight out of the window when I am shown to my table. The table is around 8" from another table, a bit like when you go to little restaraunts and they cram in the tables, so you may as well be having dinner with the people next to you, and you can hear them eat.
The tables are then seperated by a curtain, like in hospital. And lying on the next table is the silhouette of a fat German woman getting a rub down. I sit on my table watching the mountain like shape being rubbed like you marinade a chicken. A really big, fat, German chicken.
3 minutes of this I know that even if the masseuse does try to squeeze a wank out of me my knob will never come out of hiding.
I awake the next day with a cold but I still go on a bus tour of the local Inca ruins, Pisac and Ollaytamtambo. Again I am faced with these huge structures of brilliance that seem almost impossible to build, but they did, and they spent years doing it.
And for what? You spend nearly 10 years building a great big temple for the Earth Mother, and then some greasy Spaniard turns up, knocks it down, and rips out the gold you used to build it. Surely you must be thinking,
"right then Earth Mother, can you sort this please? and why all of a sudden do I feel a cold coming on?"
In the evening I head out with the guy who works in the hostel for beers, I tell him to take me where he goes, so I can immerse myself in the way the locals like to party. Ten minutes later I am sat in 'Paddy's Irish Pub', not quite what I'd hoped but he seems happy. I don't stay out too long as my trek starts at 4:30am the next day.
We get invited to see a local band play in a club nearby, they are all wearing poncho and native dress up, and the dread locks are flowing. They light a bowl of wood and start the sort of intro the Orb would be proud of, and finally, after 15 minutes of bongos and didgeridoo, the 'frontman' plays a recorder and starts wailing a bit.
I actually like it and the music is quite intoxicating, but that might just be the burning wood. But I can't relax because I look around and see maybe 6 Gringos, all dressed in native garb, with dreadlocked, dirty hair, smoking weed. They sway from side to side with looks on their faces like their so special and important for witnessing this sacred event......it's fucking 7 blokes playing 4 bongos, 2 recorders, a didgeridoo, and a couple of guitars! But this lot act like it's changing the face of music forever, it's fucking normal!
The Salkantay trek is a 5 day 4 night trek, walking at high altitude alongside the Salkantay mountain, then another days trek through the jungle to Machu Pichu, finishing with a day at Machu Pichu.
I get in the car and everyone is speaking French, and in total we are 13:
8 French
2 Spanish (one of whom speaks French)
1 Belgium (speaks French)
1 Swiss (speaks French)
1 Me
I am actually glad of this, it gives me time just to sit and listen to people, and not really speak unless spoken to. really quite refreshing.
The first day we walk solidly upwards, getting colder all the time, by the time we get to the campsite everyone is wearing all their clothes. Everyone's knackered and can't wait to get into their sleeping bags and go to bed.
I wander up to the guide and politely enquire about the sleeping bag I'd hired,
"What sleeping bag?" is the reply,
"the one I paid for, the one I have written on this reciept, just where it says 'sleeping bag'"
"right, let me look"
10 minutes of pointless looking around later and it's very clear, I have no sleeping bag.
"It can get down to -4/5 degrees this time of year" the warm looking Swiss informs me.
Now at this point I'm not sure which way to go, it's only the first night, so punching the guide and calling him a prick might hinder me for the next 4 days, however, I may very well freeze to death out here tonight. As I sit at the table swaying backwards and forwards like a bear in a Eastern European Zoo, a Frenchmen walks towards me and hands me his sleeping bag,
"it is no problem, I will sleep in with Anais, so you can take mine, better we sleep a little uncomfortable than you freeze"
Now, as I've mentioned before I've never disliked the French, in fact, bar the surrender monkey stuff in the 40s before I was born I've actually always liked them, and they made some of my favourite films. And I'd met 2 wonderful French in Brazil on this trip too.
But this was an act of kindness that stumps me. I stop swaying and give Alex a hug, then Anais, and then I give them my Mars Bar I was saving. Alex seems pretty happy, but I think that's because he's going to be in very close proximity to Anais for 4 nights.
Day 2
We climb to 4,800m above sea level over a 5 hour period, all around us are snowcapped mountains and bright sunshine. Eventually we reach the top of the ridge and get alongside the colossal and stunning Salkantay mountain. It's beauty and size humbles me and I feel very inadequate in the presence of its power.
Day 3
My cold has blocked my nose with concrete style bogey, and I can't breath, which makes it impossible to sleep. I am sharing a very small 2 man tent with a young guy called Jonas from Belgium. He's super nice, and fun, and good to be around. But after 2 days of sleeping in a tent with me his attitude has cooled,
"you snore Gareth, but you said that you don't. I do not sleep well when you snore" he tells me as we start walking at 5am
"I am sorry Jonas, it's the cold, I can't breath"
"then don't" says Jonas, but I don't know if he means just don't breath or something else.
Day 4
It turns out that only 3 of us are doing the trek in 5 days, myself and 2 wonderful Spanish girls called Marta and Veronica. We are all in the wars with blisters and bites but we all keep walking. When you walk with people for 8/9 hours a day you either really get along, or try to walk with someone else, with these two lovely people I could have walked for another 3 days.
That's not true by the way, my legs and feet were ruined, but I'd take a long car journey with them anytime.
We walk along the traintracks towards Machu Pichu and after a couple of hours we see it, high above us on the crest of a mountain, what looks like a small brick house,
"the guards observation room" the guide informs us.
We'd made it, and the next day we would be up there to see it all.
Day 5
Marta and I set off at 4am to climb the Inca steps up to Machu Pichu, we'd been told that you needed to be in the first 400 people to be allowed to climb Wanu Pichu, another mountain on the other side of the ruins. It's quite competitive and when we get to the locked bridge there's around 70 - 80 people waiting.
The man comes to open the bridge and a bottle necks starts, we all walk/jog across and get to the road, most people follow the road to the left, but I know that the stairs start a little to the right, I scamper past and get to the stairs first. And so my race begins, I am being tracked by a guy called Julien, and he's Swiss. The Swiss love all the outdoor stuff way too much and it quickly becomes a 2 man race. In the dark. We jostle up the 1,900 steps to the top, not steps like normal steps, these things are sometimes 2 feet high, it's a killer. But we get there in the end.
The doors open to Machu Pichu and I run to a vantage point to take pictures before it's fills with people. They let between 2,000 to 5,500 people in per day, so by about 10am it's like the first day of sales at Bluewater. But I have about 15 minutes on my own to take the place in.
I've fucked my legs and feet so badly that when the 3 paracetamol, 1 Diazapam, and adrenaline wear off I can't walk. But I battle on and get around as much of Machu Pichu as I can, it truly is a wonderful place. Breathtaking. Such a shame that I'm in so much pain that I have tears in my eyes, and people mistake me for being really spiritual.
I get back to Cusco a broken man and can't wait to get onto my posh Andean Explorer train to Puno. But there's a problem, everyone's on strike, and they've blocked the roads and tracks with boulders. And if you try to move the boulders the strikers throw stones at you.
I am stuck here.
Lately I've been missing home quite a bit, but I've only been missing the things that I know I'll be able to do a thousand more times in my life like see my friends, have a Sunday roast, eat a busaba, have a drink in a real pub, go raving. God, I am dying for a rave, have a laugh, watch English TV, and hang out with people, see some football, and stuff like that.
But this week I am missing something that I won't be able to do again, I'm missing the birthday of one of the most amazing women I know. A person that I have so much respect and admiration for, not to mention a genuine fear of, that missing her birthday has made me really sad.
She's raised 2 boys in very difficult circumstances, living in Torquay being the main one. She's also fought back from serious illness and now lives a perfect life, which is drinking booze and playing golf every day.
And while she still only refers to me as,
"that little Welsh twat"
and that's to my face, I love her loads.
Another reason I'm gutted I'm missing her birthday is because her idiot son has planned a massive surprise party with all her lunatic northern family, so I'm missing a party that will basically be a drunken punch up, and Jeremy Kyle style slanging match.
Gutted.
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