The final push to the top of Dead Woman’s Pass is the toughest part of the trek. Each step is slow and deliberate. We rest every couple of minutes, sitting on a rock or on the trail for a quick break. Then we keep moving. When we take the last few steps to the top, it is nothing short of empowering. Everyone on the summit—our group and other groups—breaks out into applause and shouts congratulations. At this altitude, it takes me a long time to catch my breath, but that doesn’t stop me from smiling at everyone around me. We take pictures at the top, hugging and jumping and sitting and screaming and snapping whatever other photos we can think of.
It takes thirty minutes for all of us to assemble at the top. We are one of the last groups to ascend, and Mike waits until the other groups leave. We are alone, and it’s getting late. We have two more hours of hiking to get down to our campsite for the evening, but Mike holds us up. He leads us to the top of a small mound that offers absolutely no protection from the relentless wind, and he begins whistling. An old Incan spiritual song. Some of us are shivering, but no one cares. There is a feeling of unity and harmony up here. For once, Mike is not telling jokes. He is committed to this moment and this ceremony. So are we.
Mike passes around three small coca leaves (I can’t help but notice that he holds them up in the shape of the old Adidas logo). He asks us each to make a wish for Pachamama, the Earth Mother, then blow on the leaves three times. He hands each of us an individual leaf and asks us to make a wish for ourselves. Standing up here, with Cassie by my side and my disease under control, I think, I need not, and I want not. I am in the middle of nowhere, far away from medical care or even a decent shower, and yet I don’t feel that I am lacking in any way.
We place all of our leaves together under a small stack of rocks—one of many small stacks on the surrounding mountainside, each hiding its own set of wishes—and start down toward camp. We walk in silence, savoring the ceremony and the quiet company. We went up the mountain a group and came down a family. Mike was right.
At night, the temperature drops below freezing. Certainly it’s cold, but still a far cry from the frigid weather we experienced every night on our Himalayas trek. We huddle together in the blue tarp tent as the chasquis serve us dinner. Mike entertains us with ghost stories about the lonely woman—”She haunts a lagoon we will see tomorrow; her husband drowned her before turning himself him in”—and about the poncho man.
“One night I heard a noise—a scraping—on my tent. Like someone pushing against it. I yelled at the person to stop. And it did stop, for a moment. It started again. I opened my tent and looked out. I saw a poncho floating in front of me. A red poncho. But there was no body. The poncho was floating in midair. My assistant saw it too. Then it vanished. A few minutes later, we heard a woman scream like she was being murdered over by the bathroom. She saw the poncho, too.”
Mike, always laughing and joking with us on the trail, is absolutely stoic as he steps out of the tent. Some of the girls are absolutely terrified. Even the prospect of going to the bathroom—a two-minute walk away—horrifies them. They start planning their bathroom trips together, just in case they meet the poncho man. They find strength in numbers.
Suddenly we hear a scream outside the tent, and someone—or something?—is pushing frantically against the outside, scraping it with terrible claws. Trying to get in. Or maybe trying to get us out.
The noise and the scraping stop, and we hear Mike’s maniacal laughter outside. I start cracking up—the perfect practical joke to follow up a ghost story. Without the need for a tedious vote, the group unanimously hates him this evening. If this were an island, he would be voted off of it in short order, with or without a life raft.
We all go to bed that night having formed new bonds with a group of strangers. On the road, it’s that easy to make friends, especially when we’re all on one big, brutal hike together.
The third day brings another early wake-up call and two hours of climbing to the second pass. We are refreshed after sleeping, but everyone is walking on tired legs. The trail is taking its toll on our bodies. In the Himalayas, Cassie and I hiked four to five hours a day. Never more than six. Now we are hiking eight to twelve hours. It’s exhausting.
We stop at Sayaqmarqa, an archaeological site on the way to Machu Picchu, whose name means city in the clouds. It is an apt title, as thick clouds obscure parts of the site.
“Smells like rain,” says Edgardo, one of the other guys on our hike. After lunch, he is proven correct. The rain is light at first, but it picks up as we get moving. The flashbacks to our third day in the Himalayas are hard to push aside. Between my undiagnosed diabetes and the miserable weather, that day came very close to breaking my spirit on the hike. Maybe it did a bit. At least it’s above freezing. For now.
The rain gets so bad, we are forced to take shelter near the third pass, waiting under a tin roof at a small Ministry of Culture outpost, standing together to stay warm. We may be out of the rain, but the wind seeps through cracks in the walls. Now that we’re standing still, our bodies cool down quickly.
After thirty minutes, the rain lets up a bit, and we make a break for it. By the time we reach camp, it is well after dark, but at least the rain has stopped.
We can only afford the luxury of a few hours of sleep on this final night on the trek. The last day of hiking is the earliest wake-up call, so we have as much time as possible in Machu Picchu. We reach the Sun Gate after an hour of hiking. This is supposed to be the first view of the ancient Incan city.
Machu Picchu below you, the rising sun above you.
You’re supposed to feel something spiritual here, at peace with the world around you. Mike says it’s the perfect place to talk about the history of a marvelous city built in the mountains with an iconic view to take in.
But this morning, the Sun Gate does not live up to its lofty title. The whole area is covered in fog. All we can talk about is the condensation of water at high altitude and the resulting formation of clouds, and since nobody is particularly interested in that topic of conversation, we move on quickly.
We hike along the narrow path down to Machu Picchu, descending without any real sense of how far we are from the Sun Gate or how close we are to the city. Clouds obscure the trail behind us and in front of us, so gauging distance is nearly impossible. Suddenly, there it is. The clouds break, and Machu Picchu is visible.
There are certain places on earth, whether they’re landscapes or buildings or scenes, that take your breath away when you see them. In that first instant, they inspire a mixture of awe, wonder, and mystery. There is nothing to do but to stare and try to grasp the beauty of what you are seeing.
Machu Picchu is such a place.
After four days of hiking—you can tell who wasn’t used to this kind of living by how fast they reached for their wet naps to clean up at the end of each day—we descend into Machu Picchu.
How—or, for that matter, why—anyone would choose to build a massive stone city high in the Andes Mountains without benefit of forklifts, cranes, or the pneumatic jack is beyond me, when a similar city built at sea level would be both far easier to construct and far more accessible to everyone, including the tourists (though I doubt that profitability and return on investment from future travelers was a major concern during planning). It would be absolutely absurd now to attempt to construct Machu Picchu, given all the red tape and union restrictions, and it must have seemed even more preposterous five hundred years ago, when Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui decided to put his loyal subjects to good use. According to our tour guide, who has read more books on the history of Machu Picchu then I have, the Incas didn’t have a tax system. Instead, they paid their taxes through labor, which must have made the city significantly easier to complete. That still doesn’t answer the why question, but suffice to say it was built at the height of the Incan empire, approximately one hundred years before Spanish conquistadors, armed with new and deadly diseases, wiped out the local population with a dose of smallpox.
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br /> Mike leads us around the incredible city, explaining its history and its discovery. Amateur explorer Hiram Bingham discovered the lost city of the Incas in 1911, instantly becoming famous and eventually becoming the sixty-ninth Governor of Connecticut. Bingham’s name is all over the area, but he was not the first person to discover Machu Picchu, which would seem to be fairly obvious since a local guide led him to the city. He may not have even been the first Westerner to see it—there’s mounting evidence that a German engineer by the name of Augusto Berns mapped the city forty years earlier and tried to raise money to plunder it. At the very least, Bingham is supposed to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones, which is certainly a noteworthy accomplishment in my book.
After a few hours exploring the city, we have a late lunch in Aguas Calientes, the tourist town near Machu Picchu, before most of our group takes the train back to Cuzco. Only a few of us stay in Aguas for one more night. We signed up to hike Huayna Picchu the next morning, the mountain that towers more than a thousand feet above Machu Picchu.
We all take well-deserved showers and relax for a bit, drinking more than a few beers while watching whatever World Cup match happens to be on at whatever bar happens to give us a decent deal on drinks.
We wake up at eight in the morning—it feels like sleeping in—and make our way back to Machu Picchu for the steep one-hour climb up to Huayna Picchu. The view is magnificent, overlooking the city and the mountains. The sky seems endless, stretching effortlessly into the distance, and I admire clouds lazily drifting by in the wind. It is a cool, gorgeous day, and we take our time, enjoying what we have accomplished.
I sit on the edge of the mountain, ignoring Cassie’s screams that I am too close to a sheer cliff and that I have zero chance of surviving if I fall. I want to yell back that I won’t fall—that I can’t fall—but that makes far more sense in my head than it would to Cassie. I think it would only reinforce her point.
I stare at Machu Picchu below me and the Andes around me. Breathing in the crisp, thin mountain air, a thought crosses my mind, and I can’t help but smile.
I am at peace with my disease.
Chapter 23
July 7, 2014
25°06’42.5”S 65°30’33.2”W
Salta, Argentina
I have often wondered what kind of people plan vacations to places like, say, North Platte, Nebraska, a town of just under twenty-five thousand people that sprouted up a tiny bit southwest of the geographical center of the state. It is a relatively benign three-hour drive north from the geographical center of the United States, located in Lebanon, Kansas, and I find this bit of information nearly irresistible.
I don’t know that people do plan vacations to North Platte, but I assume they must, because North Platte has a tourism website. It shows the same five pictures over and over again, one of which is a railyard, which leads me to believe one of the top five things to do in North Platte is to get out of North Platte.
The key marquee on the site touts this rural micropolitan area as one of the premier worldwide destinations to watch the 2017 solar eclipse. This is incredible foresight. As of the time of this writing, that total solar eclipse will happen on August 21, 2017, which is one year, two months and twenty-eight days away. Either that, or there is nothing to do in North Platte between now and then, which, I’m sure the town is loath to admit, is an equally alluring possibility.
I learn the answer to my question—namely, why do people visit such strange places—in San Pedro de Atacama, an even smaller town tucked away in the driest desert in the world in northern Chile. San Pedro de Atacama boasts a population of almost four thousand people, and it looks like it was plucked from the same western movie as North Platte. By some incredible coincidence that I am unable to explain, San Pedro also has an astronomical claim to its fame. Situated at a particularly arid eight thousand feet, San Pedro is one of the best spots in the world to go stargazing, which is why I dragged Cassie with me all the way up here from more normal places like Santiago and Valparaiso. (Convincing her to sit on a twenty-two-hour overnight bus ride to spend a few nights in a budget hostel only to pay thirty dollars each for a good view of the stars certainly qualifies as dragging in my book.)
I have only one goal in San Pedro, and that is to take a star tour. A French man and his Chilean wife have set up a telescope farm, which, much to my dismay, is not a place where one grows fresh telescopes out of baby telescope seeds. Instead, twelve telescopes are lined up in neat rows, and we take turns looking through them at exciting cosmic things with equally exciting names, such as globular clusters, binary stars, and lunar landscapes.
Okay, the last one is just the moon, but seeing the moon through a powerful telescope that shows individual craters is far more exhilarating than it sounds. It looks so … close. You begin to understand how people in the 1960s looked at the moon, looked at their slide rule, looked at the person next to them, and said, with a confidence that is borderline egomaniacal, “Yeah, we got this.”
Unfortunately, close is not a word that would accurately describe our next destination. Since there is really nothing to see going north, we have just come from the south, and the Pacific Ocean is west, we decide to head east. We look at a map and pick Salta, Argentina. It seems as good a place to stop as any. The cheapest way to get there is a twenty-hour overnight bus ride, our second overnight bus of the week.
And there is the answer to my question. Occasionally, people must stare at a map of the United States on a cross-country drive, see North Platte staring back at them, and think, It seems as good a place as any, which is exactly what we do with Salta. And this must happen often enough to justify the existence and budget of a tourism board that presumably operates the tourism website.
We arrive in Salta late at night. As is often the case upon reaching a new destination, our immediate concern is to find our hostel and locate a place that serves recognizable food. It is this desire to instantly and unequivocally recognize our food and understand what we’re eating that draws us to McDonald’s for only the third time on our trip. The first was when we had extra euros to spend in Ireland, so I ordered six euros of McDonald’s at the Dublin airport before our flight to Hungary. The second was in Hong Kong, where we were exhausted, it was pouring rain, and the large, brightly glowing set of golden arches drew us hypnotically toward it. The third and final time is here in Salta, Argentina.
Of our three international McDonald’s excursions, this is perhaps the least justified. There are plenty of other food options, Cassie speaks fluent Spanish, and I speak enough to get by. But it’s late enough that we simply don’t care. What surprises us is that McDonald’s is not fast food here. It’s a decent night out.
Back at our hostel, we find ourselves wondering what I suspect many a traveler has wondered in North Platte, Nebraska. What on earth is there to do in this town? To be fair, Salta is significantly bigger than North Platte, with more than twenty times the population. But then again, Detroit has 150 times the population, yet that doesn’t make it a tourist destination.
Cassie spots a brochure for a horse ranch an hour outside of town, which is one of the most popular things to do in Salta. It is also probably one of the most popular things to do in North Platte, and this is probably a good place to let this analogy die a peaceful death.
With little else on our agenda, we sign up for an overnight stay, including two days of horseback riding. I am less excited about the horses and more excited about the promised asado lunches—a grill full of beef and sausage and vegetables and lots of wine on the side.
We hitch a cab ride out to the ranch, where we meet our host and, more to the point, our horses. We will return to our host shortly.
There is a reason the mechanical force of an engine is measured in horsepower and not humanpower: horses are immensely, effortlessly, massively powerful. I know this seems intuitively obvious to anyone who was watched a horse race or stood next to a horse. But you cannot truly appreciate that power until you’re sit
ting on top of a horse with little idea of how to control it and even less of an idea of what to do if it decides it’s tired of your pathetic attempts at guidance and is ready to strike off on its own in whichever direction and at whatever speed it so desires.
This thought terrifies me, and the thought of it terrifying me terrifies me even more. I have been on a horse exactly once in my life, and that was somewhere in northern New York in a much more controlled environment where the horses are trained not to kick off the riders in the event of any spontaneous disagreements.
Felix, our guide, makes it very clear that no such wisdom has been imparted to these horses. Felix is a true gaucho, having grown up on a horse ranch and herded cattle his whole life. He gives us a few pointers about directing a horse and then, a few seconds later, tells us to follow him. This instruction seems wholly inadequate for the task ahead, like someone telling you how to guide a rocket by pointing you at the ignition and waving goodbye, but it will have to suffice.
Thankfully, the horse seems to know more than I do, which works out well for both of us.
As we near the end of our first outing, Felix looks at us and asks, “Do you want to gallop?”
For someone who loves the idea of going fast and liberally ignores speed limits, this question is a no-brainer, even if I don’t have the slightest idea of how to get the horse to go fast or, at some point, to get it to go slow again. The latter seems like a less immediate, but no less important, problem. The notable absence of a brake pedal is worrisome.
To allay my growing concern about my imminent demise, Felix gallops with me the first time, holding the reins of my horse. Then he tells me to go again. Alone.
There have been a few times in my life where I have thought, I might die in the next few moments if this doesn’t go well. This isn’t one of those times. But it briefly crosses my mind that this may not be the best idea. A diabetic amateur rider on a galloping horse seems a recipe for disaster. I’m not sure how the diabetes changes things, but it certainly can’t help.
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