Hiking on Soup

The first day of the Inca Trail, and we were all raring to go, kitted up with bamboo walking sticks, bottles of water, waterproofs and cameras charged and at the ready. We'd also bought the corner shop out of every single Snickers bar it had, and most of the biscuits. Snickers bars are surely bought in purely as fuel for Inca Trail walkers - their price compared to anything else in the shop is the equivalent of walking into Sainsbury's and paying a tenner for a chocolate snack bar.

Being on a tour, you get a list of what you should be packing - one day pack that you walk with, and a duffle bag which is carried by porters - your overnight things. There's a strict five kilogramme limit on what you can pack in the duffle bag, and officials even weigh the porters to make sure they've not been overloaded. This is all a good thing when you always take too much stuff, wherever you go, like I do. Without guidelines I'd likely have packed enough to spend several months on the Inca Trail, and set up my own camping store at Machu Picchu. I was doing this before I came away on this trip, its a bad habit that has followed me - much like head-spinning mood swings, spending too long on the Internet, putting too much food in my mouth at once, and being rubbish at talking to women I find attractive.

The porters, who we were all introduced to before starting the trail, were to be referred to as Cuchiwattos, not porters. Cuchiwatto roughly translates as 'studmuffin' or 'hunky fella' and is a more flattering name. There's this, and the fact that calling out 'Cuchiwatto!!' as any porters passed us on the trail brought grins to their faces. This is doubtless what every other tour group coming through here does, but they don't seem to have got bored of it. We may have had to weigh the luggage they carried for us, but the amount they carried, at altitude, was staggering. An average Cuchiwatto would walk the trail with at least twenty-five kilogrammes strapped to their back - duffle bags, gas bottles, chairs, tents, food and equipment. They carried everything strapped round their shoulders in blankets, where us tourists had padded day packs with soft, sweat-absorbing straps to carry our digital cameras and pac-a-macs.

The first day was easy going - at least compared to the second and third. Gentle slopes, lots of stops to note interesting cacti, and still some oxygen in the air as we hadn't got up too high yet. During the day, the group spread out until everyone was walking at their own pace. The busy chatter of the group as we left the first checkpoint eventually became the sound of the river in the valley below, the occasional rain, and your own breathing or humming. My attitude to walking has changed since I've been away. I used to think that going downhill was always better than going uphill - now going downhill is worse because it knackers your knees and ankles and requires more concentration to make sure you don't tumble apex over tip down a crevice. I used to want to stop continually for little breaks - now, it gets to a point where you just want to keep moving because after a point you've developed an almost autonomic rhythm, where you just breath at the right times and your legs take care of themselves. I used to want to go the least distance possible, now I want to go further if I'm enjoying it. I hope I don't forget this in six months and start complaining about having to walk down to the shops for a pint of milk.

On the first night, we camped at the base of Dead Woman's Pass, in the meeting point of three valleys, where clouds meandered by in the distance or crawled up the hills towards you. Cows and horses perched on the sides of the hills hundreds of meters up, grazing on slopes that looked so steep they should have just rolled down the mountain, and Inca ruins sat in the middle of it all, next to a football pitch and the campsite. By the time I got there, the site was fully set up, all tents erected, dining tent up, table and chairs out, knives, forks and napkins laid. The porters left after us that morning, heavily loaded, and still got to the campsite and set it up before most of the group. Even though we were hiking through remote countryside a long way from any roads, we still ate in a remarkably civilised fashion, and the food was incredible for where we were and what resources it was prepared with - in the middle of nowhere, thirty people ate three-course meals of good, hot, fresh food. The starter was always soup, usually quinoa soup - by the end of the trail I was sick to death of soup.

The food in Peru, and Bolivia, generally isn't much to write home about, unless you're writing home to tell the folks how crap the food is. Chips and rice are usually served at the same time, with virtually everything. Chips sneak in all over the place, often stirred in with lomo saltado (beef fillet fried with onion, tomato and pepper), hiding in sandwiches, and sitting around in salads. I got quite paranoid that chips were going to spring out at me from puddings and under napkins. I never quite figured out if this was actually because Peruvians and Bolivians like chips with everything, or they think tourists do. Sadly, in many foreign places, when they try and prepare 'Western' food, it's a disaster - when the local dishes are usually cheaper and better quality (and then some places are just plain bad at everything). I remember one of the worst examples being Indian baked beans (tiny little things in a nasty sauce mixed up with chopped pepper, it looked like some sort of showbiz ready-mix vomit). I can also categorically say that tea, bread, bacon, and sausages are rubbish virtually everywhere outside the UK, Heinz tomato ketchup in Australia and New Zealand is just plain wrong, and muesli is far better in most other places where it is usually served with masses of plain yoghurt and fresh fruit.

The second day's hike up to Dead Woman's Pass (so named as the profile of the pass looks from below like a recumbent, large-breasted woman) was, we were told, the worst of the trail. This involved a climb of over 1300 meters, the height of Ben Nevis, to the top of the pass at 4200 meters. The height and likelihood of altitude sickness was one thing, the fact that the entire path to the pass was uphill with very little respite the other. With the benefit of well-recovered legs, writing this at just above sea level, I can say that it really wasn't that bad - but at the time, I was supping on a cold bottle of coca tea, trying not to look uphill, walking very slowly indeed, and occasionally muttering 'come on, you bastards' at my legs. As you got higher, a hundred steps became fifty, which became twenty, and then ten, between each break. The path really may not look that difficult, but the altitude just forces you to slow right down. Still, I made it, we all made it, and the sense of accomplishment was undeniable.

The third day was worse than the second. No huge climb this time, but the cumulative effect of yesterday's walking, i.e. knackered legs, as well as absurdly steep steps and a dodgy stomach from too much soup - or maybe it was just the altitude. By the time I got to the camp at the end of the day, after a frustrating series of bends downhill into the campsite, I crawled into my tent feeling utterly pathetic. We were told that beer was available at the camp site on the last night, so looking forward to enjoying a few drinks, I bought four. After one I was out cold. At this point I want to apologise, profusely, to my tentmate Trevor. I had the very worst case of the farts through most of the Inca Trail, and the poor lad had to share a tent with me when I was practically lifting the thing off the ground. He deserved better.

The next morning, after a night of solid rain (we camped the last night in rainforest), we walked the final five kilometers to Machu Picchu, ignoring aching legs to reach the sun gate just after dawn. The view of Machu Picchu was beautiful, and it got better the closer you got. The citadel was swathed in cloud one minute, and the just as suddenly as it was covered, the clouds disappeared and revealed the ruins. This is a very well-known view - photographs of Machu Picchu are all over the place, and thousands of tourists come here every year - but we got there early enough to see the place without crowds of tourists (most come by bus from nearby Aguas Calientes, choosing to forego the three-day hike), and the scale, beauty and mystery of the place was still stunning, made all the more memorable as this was the pay off for three days hard work. Buses bring people up from the nearby town of Aguas Calientes now, and there is an expensive hotel looking out towards the citadel, but it was fascinating to imagine what it must have been like when Hiram Bingham 'discovered' Machu Picchu in 1911, the citadel apparently abandoned, cooking utensils and household items lying around (the Peruvian government is still trying to get several artefacts back from Yale University that were taken by Bingham). There are other hitherto undiscovered Inca cities further out in the jungle, at least as impressive as Machu Picchu, and it's a bit sad to think that they too will end up with buses ferrying tour groups to them through the trees.

From Machu Picchu we went to Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, via Cusco. Puno was yet another place we were told was dodgy. Presumably we get told everywhere is dodgy for the benefit of the people that were thinking of walking around with their cameras hanging round their neck, passports sticking out of their back pockets, waving wads of cash in the faces of the locals and shouting 'MUG ME!!!'. In Puno we went for a meal, and were treated once more to the standard Peruvian dining experience - panicked looking waiters, more soup, only partially correct orders, and a band with pan pipes and guitar playing traditional Peruvian hits which always include El Condor Pasa. CDs are also available for sale, with phenominally badly designed cover photos of the band looking rather uncomfortable. I can only assume that all Peruvian towns have a 'hit squad' of pan-pipe players, who are tipped off by restaurant owners as soon as tourists show up - because they're always there. I don't, I hasten to add, want to knock them or deprive them of a living - most of them are really good, and the singer in Puno had such a powerful voice he could make your quinoa soup shake at ten feet.

We headed out onto Lake Titicaca from Puno in a boat with only just enough space to swing a cat, though I believe cat swinging is prohibited on most boats. Lake Titicaca (Titicaca means grey puma) is the highest navigable lake in the world at over 3800 meters above sea level, as any tour guide will be more than happy to tell you - and it is massive. Peru sees Lake Titicaca as a major tourist draw and source of Peruvian pride, and says it owns about sixty percent of the lake. Bolivia sees Lake Titicaca as a major source of Bolivian pride, and also says it owns sixty percent of the lake. Bolivia's navy also use the lake for exercises as Bolivia has no coast - it lost control of its small stretch of coast in a war with Chile in the late nineteenth century and has been trying to get it back ever since, but the Bolivians are obviously optimistic people, so they still have a navy.

We visited a couple of islands on the lake - Taquile Island, where the men knit hats and clothing rather than the women, and Amantani Island, where we stayed overnight with local families. These places, where Quecha (the Inca language) is the first language and traditional dress is still worn, felt that much further removed from the trappings of the modern world, though tourism was obviously very important to the islanders, who were canny enough to ask for money to be photographed knitting or doing anything picture-worthy. Our 'mother' for the night on Amantani Island cooked for us in her tiny kitchen by the light of one candle, smoke filling the top half of the room. I babysat the four sons, if you look at being jumped on by four giggling terrors as babysitting. Trevor's wish for a guinea pig for his dinner was granted, and a black guinea pig was duly stunned, decapitated, skinned, gutted and spatchcocked. I couldn't eat guinea pig, having been close to a few in the past. We headed to the village hall for a dance with the daughter of the family, the traditional dance here resembling just managing to restrain your partner from punching you in the guts. After the dance we went to beds with Empire Strikes Back duvet covers and mattresses stuffed with straw, where I farted myself to sleep.

Enough for today - next, Bolivia and the journey home through the scariest country yet - America.

Darkest Peru

I actually left off, before the last few 'try and keep the readers happy and disguise the fact that I've been utterly useless at keeping the blog up to date' type posts, at the point where I left Chile for Peru. I decided to book a tour with Tucan to do the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, on a friend's recommendation - the Inca Trail is one of the main reasons to go to Peru, the food certainly isn't, but more of that later. I needed to book with a tour company to do the Inca Trail as access to the trail is (fortunately) restricted, so getting permits to walk the trail independently can apparently be tricky. Quite apart from anything else, I looked forward to the company I'd get on a tour, liked the idea of not having to work out where I was sleeping every other night, and figured that slogging up hills at four thousand meters would be better done in the company of people who could carry at best an encouraging word, and at worst a tank of oxygen.

Lima is one of those places that, when mentioned, gets a reaction from many people along the lines of "Oooh, [sucks through teeth], it's dodgy there, best be careful". They'll often happily recite the tale of the friend of theirs (or more likely the friend of a friend of someone they got talking to in a bar once) who lost something, had something stolen, or had a gun held to their head (I think people just enjoy the idea of knowing someone who had a gun held to their head). You therefore go expecting every stranger to be a thief, or worse. People have said similar things about half a dozen of the places I've been to, and I've been cautious in all of them, but no more cautious than I've been anywhere. Not wanting to sound too smug, I have had nothing stolen from me during the last year, lost nothing, if you don't count getting shafted on the occasional taxi fare. Places like Lima certainly do deserve caution, but not nearly as much if you know not to be in dodgy places late at night, not to get drunk with dodgy people, not to leave your bag, wallet or camera in plain sight, and not to invite robbery by looking like a rich tourist. You can't help looking like a tourist if you're one of only five white people in a nightclub, but confident body language, inconspicuous dress, and absence of shiny things seem to go a long way towards avoiding the wrong kind of attention. Besides, a lot of people would say that they had about the most fun, met some of the best people, in the places that get a lot of people sucking through their teeth - and I'd be one of them.

Peru is poorer than Chile and Argentina, that much is obvious from walking around Lima. It felt much more like I expected a South American city to feel, compared to the European feel of Chile and Argentina. Chile is the richest country in South America, and Chileans give the impression of feeling superior to their neighbours, going as far as to declare animosity towards Peru and Bolivia over long-running border disputes, and being quick to boast about their wine being the best in the world.

The center of Lima is a bustling maze of streets filled with Peruvians queuing for helado and empanadas, with latin music blaring from every third shop. Tourists move between the crowds like panicked cats. In the central square, I was approached by a very confident, smily man who wanted to sell me cloth finger puppets, ostensibly to raise money for children with Down's Syndrome. His routine was the same as every other salesman I've met on the streets of poorer countries, starting with bright, breezy conversation you'd feel rude to ignore, moving on to an innocent question like had you heard of Down's Syndrome, and then going for the sale of the finger puppet, using lines like "it's for the children". This tactic incidentally seems pretty close to the one used by the charity muggers that hang around city centers in the UK. Repeated use of the word 'no' would elicit an ever more high-pitched and pathetic voice in the guy. Of course I feel bad, on the off-chance that he is a legitimate salesman, but in so many cases, I've seen children being used as emotional pawns to extract money from dewy-eyed tourists, when they actually see bugger all of the money their feeble appearance has been used to fleece. It was the same in India, in Cambodia, in Vietnam, Peru, and Bolivia - and it drove me mad.

One young child in Lima was sat begging by the side of the main street leading to Plaza de Armas, and I thought when I saw him that he was wearing a Hallowe'en mask. It wasn't a mask - some sort of deformity or burn had left his face melted, his mouth fixed downwards in a permanent, grotesque, upside-down grin. I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't know how to react, and avoided him - even though it was just a child. Being in places like this seems to have a knack of throwing things at you at random intervals, just to see how you'll cope - and I haven't coped so well a lot of the time. A man with an open, weeping tracheotomy stood in front of me once on a train in India, and when I looked at him with mucus running down his chest and a rattling noise emanating from the hole, I jumped backwards in my seat and handed him all the spare change in my pocket.

I didn't have too long in Lima - just long enough to see the church of San Francisco's crypts and beautiful library, and get pestered by the finger puppet man. After meeting the others on the tour at the hotel, we headed for Cusco, a place that we were again told by the tour guide was 'dodgy', but which again felt a lot safer than the tour guide would have us believe. Cusco is the tourist capital of Peru, so apparently is filled to the rafters with bad characters who are waiting to take your money by means fair or foul. I saw restaurant owners enthusiastic to get you into their establishments, no worse than a Friday night down Brick Lane, and young mothers trying to sell more finger puppets - not sure this qualifies as dodgy. Other than that, Cusco is a beautiful place, following the pattern for an Andean town by sprawling up the hill sides as far as the eye can see, the center of the town marked by the Plaza de Armas with its churches, fountain and flower beds. Taxis, the spitting image of Starsky and Hutch's car, rattle and cough around the streets, barely scuffing the heels of short women crossing the street, with wide brimmed hats and wider hips, their babies strapped to their backs in colourful blankets.

The church in Cusco, like most of the churches across Peru, Bolivia and anywhere else where the Incas used to run the show here, is built using stones taken from Inca temples. At Saqsaywaman, a major archeological site and home to Inca temple ruins, as well as at Tihuanacu in Bolivia, we were told how the Spanish, upon entering the Andes and 'introducing' Catholicism to the Incas, destroyed their temples, used statues for shooting practice, and took heavy stones from temples to use in the foundations of new churches, which were built with forced labour (the Spanish employed the delightful practice of sending home for a replacement if a family member died while working). The only reason the Spanish didn't destroy Machu Picchu, it turns out, is because they never found it. Having seen the mark of French, English and Spanish colonialism (and Catholicism) across India, Asia and South America, I can't help but wonder what these places would be like now if they'd been left as they were - how would the Incas have evolved, or would they have been wiped out another way?

As soon as I arrived in Cusco I could feel the altitude affecting me, and altitude sickness got the better of me for a few days. Cusco is at around 3400 meters above sea level, enough to make walking up a small flight of stairs or a gentle slope an effort. Altitude sickness is remedied by drinking lots of water and coca tea, so soon I was peeing more than a seven year old child after a birthday party. Coca, chewed or brewed in tea by Andean people for hundreds of years (ancient Inca busts and statues show characters with balls of coca leaf in their cheeks), widens the alveoli, improves stamina, and contains various nutrients and alkaloids, including cocaine, that make work and walking at high altitude easier. Coca leaf is widely available throughout the Andes. The Spanish tried to stop coca use in Inca people on their arrival, claiming it was diabolical - then realised that no-one was working without it, and changed their minds. It's precisely this harmless leaf which, processed with alcohol, acid and gasoline or kerosine, is used to produced cocaine - so a long-used natural ingredient and backbone of an entire ancient culture becomes a substance that makes stockbrokers from Chelsea become obnoxious tossers.

From Cusco, we went to Ollantaytambo, stopping at Pisaq in the Sacred Valley for a quick warm-up walk around the Inca ruins there. Ollantaytambo is a jumping-off point for the Inca Trail, a small town with a market selling walking sticks to prop up weary hikers. The biggest surprise about Ollantaytambo was the restaurant in the center of the town. In Peru, getting a decent cup of coffee is usually harder than finding an interesting sandwich in Boots - but this place, in the middle of nowhere, boasted fantastic Andean coffee, made with a proper old Italian espresso machine, and the waiter who served it even wore a creased white shirt with a black bow tie. It's almost as incongruous as the time Simon and I found a nutty Australian woman in China, running a cafe and walking around in her lingerie.

After a night in Ollantaytambo, we were ready to start the Inca Trail, even if the neighbours had been making a racket the night before. More soon.

Home

I arrived home yesterday after taking six flights in four days, starting in La Paz. My biological clock still thinks I'm in New York, my brain gave up somewhere around Miami and my guts haven't got a clue where they are any more so they are protesting loudly. My backpack only just got here today, twenty-four hours after me, because somehow it missed a connection at JFK. Honestly, I got on the plane fine, I thought the backpack could take care of itself by now.

Life in England is normal, feels unchanged, so much so that it's making me wonder if I ever even left. The state of my trainers and my bank balance tells me otherwise. I came back a month early because I felt that I'd seen everything I needed to see, wanted to get back home and try returning to normality, and quite frankly because I ran out of money. A three-day tour to Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia was my last gas, and I left just as La Paz was working itself up to Sunday's presidential elections.

I'll be blogging on the Inca Trail and Bolivia soon, but for the moment, I'm enjoying brown toast, good tea, warmth on cold nights, the occasional wagging affection of the dog, and the worrying feeling of not really knowing what the hell to do next.

Salt and dead trains

A quiet moment for me
Originally uploaded by Big Trippy Nathan.

Aaargh, I still have to update the blog with what happened on the Inca Trail, and also the visit to Salar de Uyuni, which I just got back from. Hopeless I know, but if I wasn't off having all these experiences I'd only end up writing about what I had for breakfast, and you don't need to hear that.

For the moment, see the latest photos on Flickr - including the stunningly beautiful white-out of Salar de Uyuni, thousands of square kilometers of salt flats, and the eerie train graveyard.

Thought for the day: if they ever made a movie of the story of my trip, how would they ever direct all the dogs?

Christmas appeal

I'm in South America, a long way from family and friends, and not entirely sure what I'll be doing for Christmas yet. It's not really important to me - I miss my mates and my family all the time at the moment, Christmas won't change that. I'm pretty glad to be out of the UK and avoiding what I'm sure will be a non-stop barrage of rubbish pop songs, TV advertisements for sales that end boxing day, tacky decorations and 'meaningful' messages from fusty old clergymen, along the lines of 'Most of The World is Having a Rubbish Time This Christmas So Just Think About That'. Christmas for my family this year will be a muted affair anyway.

Earlier this year, my cousin Kathy died of cancer, aged just 37. She was a gifted artist, a good friend and confidante, a gorgeous girl and great fun, with an infectious giggle. I managed to make it back to the UK to see her before she died, a very weird month I'd rather forget - her death left a gaping hole in my family.

One thing that made life a lot easier during this time was the St Elizabeth Hospice where she stayed at the end. The nurses were caring and patient (particularly with my entire family and several friends around), and Kate was well looked after. When she died, they were an amazing blur of hugs, trays of tea and sympathetic words.

You may not know me or may have another place to put your hard-earned this Christmas, but if you like you can donate a gift to the hospice that took care of Kate through this web site. Certainly don't bother getting me a present!

More soon - I'm in La Paz, Bolivia, after surviving the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, altitude sickness, copious quantities of soup and witnessing the death of a perfectly healthy guinea pig.