The Road to Machu Piccu

Right now Seth and I are somewhere in Ecuador waiting for our night bus to Quito to meet our aunt. Our first impressions of Ecuador are that the cars are newer, the buses are smelly, and the ice cream isn´t that bad. For those of you looking for life advice, one liter of ice cream on an empty stomach in 95-degree heat is a bad idea.

Before we bring the blog up to current times, we felt the need to recount a little bit more of our hike to Machu Piccu, which by the way I´ve finally figured out how to spell correctly.

The morning of the second day hiking was the most difficult, consisting of a 3 hour hike up to the Dead Woman´s Pass, the highest point of the trek. DWP has an elevation of about 13,770 feet and is literally in the clouds. When Seth and I finally made it up, we could barely see anything--which was fine because the wind cut right through all our clothing. We took a group picture, broke up our 1-kilo chocolate fish to eat in celebration, and started down the other side.

By the time we meandered our way down through rainshowers and countless picture stops, the whole group was dead tired. We have a hilarious photo of everyone sleeping with their heads in their arms on the table in the lunch tent. No one really wanted to hike the second pass, even though it was less of an uphill climb than the last one.

Ironically, the views from this part of the hike were probably the best of the trip. The clouds constantly moved up and down the valleys, so a white wall would become a gorgeous view and then disappear in a matter of minutes. At the top of the pass we climbed along the mountain ridge taking pictures just as the sun came out from behind the clouds and we saw blue sky for the first time--it was absolutely breathtaking.

We watched the sun set from one of the Incan´s old guard posts overlooking the trail and heard yet another story from Incan history from our guide, affectionately known as "Uncle Alex" for his friendly and earnest way of telling his stories. Apparently, the Inca´s wanted to guard the existence of Machu Piccu from the Spaniards, so they destroyed the roads leading to MP and abandoned tell-tale guardposts, like the one we visited.

We hiked down to our campsite in the dark, which gave us all the satisfaction of using the headlamps we´d packed along with us. Snack time and dinner .... and the end of day two.