After the best night's sleep I'd had since coming to Peru, I bounced out of my tent raring to go for Day 3. Despues de another wonderful breakfast, we all made quick trips to the squat toilets and off we went. Being in the cloud forest made everyone a little happier. The air was moist, the scenery was much more interesting, and it felt good to be stretching sore muscles. I actually finally got the hang of walking down the mountain. The trick of it is to keep going, moving to a stair or rock with each step. I had been doing a step-together, step-together movement which took a long time, was quite jarring, and made me feel less rather than more secure on the precarious trail. Now that I had the hang of walking downhill, I didn't lose ground on the declines, and easily kept my spot near the head of the group. Best of all, we only had a short day of hiking and would be having lunch at our camp site. We hiked from around 7:30 'til 1pm and made a group decision to skip visiting Puyupatamarca and take the short cut straight to camp.
After the biggest lunch I've ever had in my life, we went off to see the final Incan site on the trail before Machu Picchu, Winaywayna. Amazing. In the side of an almost vertical mountain peak, those crazy Incas carved a huge concave amphitheater of terraces. There was a temple above, residential areas below, an amazing (still working) fountain system throughout, and terraces in a conical structure. The views were of waterfalls and the cloudforest. The whole place felt like a playground to us. I started the trend of taking pictures while hanging from odd bits of building, and then we were all giggling and exploring.
After thoroughly going through Winaywayna (Forever Young in Quechua), it was straight to the showers for me. Hot showers. Well, barely tepid actually, and coming as a drip that couldn't quite rinse shampoo out of my hair, but what the hell! I was clean! Hallelujah!!! Anyone who has ever been to Burning Man or for some other reason not bathed for 3 days, while sweating, in an extremely dusty environment, will appreciate my feelings. I was ecstatic. Especially as, a couple of hours earlier, Chris had taken a photo of me collapsed on the side of the trail waiting for the rest of the family to assemble. I had just commented on how disgusting I looked. He said that he was trying to zoom in for a close-up of me, but couldn't get the zoom on my camera to work. Perfect! I said, "Hah! Even my camera doesn't want to look too closely at me right now!" and laughed. That's when he snapped the photo. It felt great to no longer be revolting enough to disgust my own camera.
After the big shower, I bought a rum and coke at the bar. Oh, did I not mention the bar? At the last campsite, there's a restaurant with a huge terrace looking out over the valley, a bar, showers, a place to rent towels, a shop to buy little things like shampoo, and even pool tables. Civilization! Well, then I went back to camp intending to do a little Pilates, or something semi-productive. Instead, honeymooner Jason broke out a bottle of rum he'd been carrying for the last 3 days. The women all sat in our tents, with the guys standing around being manly in a huddle. We whiled away the afternoon in a tipsy haze.
After dinner, it was time for us to tip the porters. Apparently, this was intended to be something more elaborate than just handing over some cash. The tipping portion was easily decided. We determined that we had all had a great time and we didn't want to end the trip by arguing about how much each person should tip. Instead, we got two bags - one for the porters and one for the guides. The bags were passed around with each person putting in what he or she felt comfortable with and no one knew who put in what or even what the final amount was. That was the best tipping experience I've ever had. That also turned out to be the easy part. Next, we were supposed to come up with a song to sing to the porters, and were told that they would also sing to us.
All of those years at church camp finally paid off. I knew the words to dozens of campy songs. Unfortunately, no one else did and I was decidedly unenthusiastic about the idea of singing alone. For a short time it looked like "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.." was the winner, but in the end one person gave money and a speech to the porters and one person gave money and a speech to the guides. The guides told us what items each of them had carried, we then listed what we had carried. The contrast was interesting. A porter would say, "I carried 5 tents and a propane tank," then a trekker would say, "I carried my clothes." After that, the porters sang us a song about Sacsayhuaman and Emilia & I had the great joy of being dragged up by porters and getting to dance with them. Yippee! The excitement of being the only girls without menfolk present. Also, we were the only blondes. Hmmm...
The night was over, and we'd all voted to try to be first to the Sun Gate in the morning. This meant a 3:30am wakeup call. So it was off to bed and an attempt to sleep knowing that tomorrow we would be in Machu Picchu.
After the biggest lunch I've ever had in my life, we went off to see the final Incan site on the trail before Machu Picchu, Winaywayna. Amazing. In the side of an almost vertical mountain peak, those crazy Incas carved a huge concave amphitheater of terraces. There was a temple above, residential areas below, an amazing (still working) fountain system throughout, and terraces in a conical structure. The views were of waterfalls and the cloudforest. The whole place felt like a playground to us. I started the trend of taking pictures while hanging from odd bits of building, and then we were all giggling and exploring.
After thoroughly going through Winaywayna (Forever Young in Quechua), it was straight to the showers for me. Hot showers. Well, barely tepid actually, and coming as a drip that couldn't quite rinse shampoo out of my hair, but what the hell! I was clean! Hallelujah!!! Anyone who has ever been to Burning Man or for some other reason not bathed for 3 days, while sweating, in an extremely dusty environment, will appreciate my feelings. I was ecstatic. Especially as, a couple of hours earlier, Chris had taken a photo of me collapsed on the side of the trail waiting for the rest of the family to assemble. I had just commented on how disgusting I looked. He said that he was trying to zoom in for a close-up of me, but couldn't get the zoom on my camera to work. Perfect! I said, "Hah! Even my camera doesn't want to look too closely at me right now!" and laughed. That's when he snapped the photo. It felt great to no longer be revolting enough to disgust my own camera.
After the big shower, I bought a rum and coke at the bar. Oh, did I not mention the bar? At the last campsite, there's a restaurant with a huge terrace looking out over the valley, a bar, showers, a place to rent towels, a shop to buy little things like shampoo, and even pool tables. Civilization! Well, then I went back to camp intending to do a little Pilates, or something semi-productive. Instead, honeymooner Jason broke out a bottle of rum he'd been carrying for the last 3 days. The women all sat in our tents, with the guys standing around being manly in a huddle. We whiled away the afternoon in a tipsy haze.
After dinner, it was time for us to tip the porters. Apparently, this was intended to be something more elaborate than just handing over some cash. The tipping portion was easily decided. We determined that we had all had a great time and we didn't want to end the trip by arguing about how much each person should tip. Instead, we got two bags - one for the porters and one for the guides. The bags were passed around with each person putting in what he or she felt comfortable with and no one knew who put in what or even what the final amount was. That was the best tipping experience I've ever had. That also turned out to be the easy part. Next, we were supposed to come up with a song to sing to the porters, and were told that they would also sing to us.
All of those years at church camp finally paid off. I knew the words to dozens of campy songs. Unfortunately, no one else did and I was decidedly unenthusiastic about the idea of singing alone. For a short time it looked like "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.." was the winner, but in the end one person gave money and a speech to the porters and one person gave money and a speech to the guides. The guides told us what items each of them had carried, we then listed what we had carried. The contrast was interesting. A porter would say, "I carried 5 tents and a propane tank," then a trekker would say, "I carried my clothes." After that, the porters sang us a song about Sacsayhuaman and Emilia & I had the great joy of being dragged up by porters and getting to dance with them. Yippee! The excitement of being the only girls without menfolk present. Also, we were the only blondes. Hmmm...
The night was over, and we'd all voted to try to be first to the Sun Gate in the morning. This meant a 3:30am wakeup call. So it was off to bed and an attempt to sleep knowing that tomorrow we would be in Machu Picchu.
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