After we’d consulted our Peruvian tour guide, Reubén, about which essentials were really essential, we stocked up on hiking sticks, water bottle holders, alpaca socks, coca leaves, and yes, enough Snickers to feed an Incan army.
“Señora.” A Quechua woman pulled on the sleeve of Amanda’s quick-dry shirt.
“Gracias, no necesito algo más.” Thanks, I don’t need anything else, Amanda said in an attempt to wave her off.
“Pero, señora,” the woman persisted, standing her ground at just five feet tall. But Amanda’s gaze had already traveled far away to the Andes Mountains looming in front of us. Not to be deterred, the woman waved an object clenched tightly in her fist.
“Is that your money belt?” I asked, signaling for Amanda to come back down to reality.
Amanda immediately focused her eyes on the woman in the same instant she groped around under her shirt. The woman held out her hand to offer up the bundle of valuables, which must have slipped from its hiding place. Amanda took it from her outstretched hand with wide eyes, gave her a smile, then shuffled through her passport and the wad of tattered soles.
I studied the woman’s sun-creased features and knew she probably made less money in an entire year than the amount Amanda had toted around her waist. I stood quietly watching as Amanda offered her a propina (tip), which the woman refused with a violent shake of her head. This must have been a real-life example of a concept called ayni I’d read about in a guidebook. It was the indigenous Quechuas’ version of karma that held if you help your neighbor, they’ll do the same for you someday. Amanda practically crushed her with a bear hug as an irrepressible grin spread across the woman’s face.
Since the woman wouldn’t take Amanda’s money for pay-back, we bought another bag of coca leaves in the name of ayni before heading back toward our guide.
“Hey, everybuddy! I gadda question for you!” This exclamation, we soon learned, was Reubén’s code to gather around for a group debriefing. With his aviator sunglasses, North Face pants, and sleek black baseball hat, the thirty-one-year-old looked better outfitted for a starring role in a Bourne Identity sequel than for his current job leading a pack of pilgrims.
Our group of a dozen formed a semicircle in front of Reubén as he pointed a walking stick at a painted trail map. “Okay, leesten up. You see that the Inca Trail es just one. If you stay on the path, et is eemposseeble to get lost.” Jen, Amanda, and I looked at one another and smirked. Impossible? We’d already managed to take a wrong turn on our way back to Cusco after hiking the surrounding hills—despite the fact that a Cusqueño had insisted there was only one road leading into town. We were capable of pulling off the impossible.
Reubén then gestured to a bridge stretched over a churning river. “Do you remember the name of this reever that runs through the Sacred Valley of the Incas?”
Remember? I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of it, I thought, wondering whether my high school geography classes had covered it and I’d forgotten. I wished I had read more of the guidebook.
“It’s the Urubamba River,” said Shannon, a twenty-eight-year-old Irishwoman with long legs and glossy black hair.
“You are one hundred percent corrrrect!” Reubén said. “Eggg-cellent!”
I was pretty amazed that Shannon seemed to have memorized every fact about the trail—so far, she’d had the answer to all of Reubén’s trivia questions. Even with our unstructured schedule, I had never managed to get all the travel reading done that I’d hoped. Instead, I’d gotten sidetracked exploring Cusco’s cobblestone streets during my daily run, or sifting through the rainbow-colored handicrafts at the markets, or staring at the fire in our hostel’s common room and chatting with other travelers.
I caught Shannon’s eye as Reubén wrapped up his impromptu lecture and offered her a friendly smile. On the bus ride over, I’d slid into an open seat beside her. As we’d watched the world melt into streaks of green beyond the window, we’d talked about how cool it was to be spending Tuesday morning heading toward the ancient Inca ruins instead of to an office. Quickly the conversation had deepened, and I’d learned she was part of a trio of late-twenty-something women who were essentially the Irish versions of ourselves. Bonded by a sense of exploration and at a crossroads in their careers, relationships, and life in general, they were traveling as a sort of time-out to think about which direction to head in next.
Finally the lecture was over, and it was time to begin the trek. The trail was a marathon-length twenty-six miles, and excitement for the journey pushed me across the bridge stretching over the river that marked the start. I hadn’t gotten far before the sound of feet slapping quickly against the path made me turn to see who was approaching. I stepped aside for the porter wearing a yellow T-shirt, whose back was strapped with a blanketed hump of supplies approximately the size of his body. “Gracias,” he called out as he breezed past.
The porters were the men who made the trek possible by carrying up to sixty pounds of supplies on their backs—including tents, sleeping bags, and food. Most were indigenous Quechuas. Some looked barely eighteen years old, with barrel chests and knobby knees. Others appeared to be in their fifties or sixties, with deep lines etched into brown skin from a lifetime of exposure to sun and wind. Almost all had callused feet protected only by leather sandals. Despite their heavy loads, they managed to race ahead of us to set up camp and cook meals.
Reubén told me that many porters used to earn less than $5 a day, but the government had recently passed a law requiring companies to give them at least 42 soles, or about $15 a day. My heart went out to them, as I couldn’t imagine that anyone could pay me enough to carry gas stoves, dishes, tents, and food for more than a dozen people on my back while trekking four days on what felt like an endless StairMaster session. Despite trying to acclimate myself to altitudes as high as 14,000 feet by running steps in Cusco all week, I was already panting from the weight of my six-pound day pack. Reubén must have heard me because he fell into step beside me and said, “Today is the easy day! It’s just seven kilometers to Wayllabamba, and then we’ll camp for the night.”
“La Labamba?” I asked in confusion, my mind working to churn up something familiar to connect to. He chuckled, and I wondered if he ever tired of tourists asking him questions that must seem obvious to him. “No, Wah-lee-BAM-ba,” he said slowly for emphasis, and I felt like a five-year-old asking her teacher “Why is the sky blue?” or “Why don’t boys wear skirts?”
Still feeling like a grade school student, I walked beside him for almost an hour, soaking up his stories. What were the piles of coca leaves and corn placed along the sacred path? “They’re pago, or offerings to Mother Earth. Giving to the gods—and others—helps to keep balance with the spirits, with nature, with your neighbors, and with yourself,” Reubén said. He went on to explain that the Quechuans believed that connecting with the elements of nature—air, water, earth, and sun or light—would help bring them closer to the divine, or Pachakamaq. “The Incas also did things like covering drinking cups and stone walls with gold—it symbolized the light of the sun god,” he said.
Reubén’s stories sounded like fairy tales to me, as if the Incas had lived their lives by magic and energy and things unseen. But it was probably their way of finding order in a mysterious world. If I were to tell Incans that Christians do things like drink wine to symbolize their savior’s blood, they might very well think that sounded like some kind of sorcery. I wasn’t sure what I believed in as I hiked that trail, but I knew I was looking for something deeper, something solid, to hold on to. After all, weren’t most religions a collection of stories and rituals, a way to make sense of the things we can’t understand, of finding meaning in the chaos?
With a father born of a long line of Irishmen and a mother who traced her roots back to Italy and Poland, I’d had the standard Catholic upbringing that called for making the sacraments of First Communion and Confirmation. But even as a kid I’d wondered about religion—both about the church
I was raised in and how other people worshiped. In fact, I’d pleaded with my mom to allow me to convert to Episcopalianism after going to church with my best friend’s family and learning that this particular group of Christian rebels allowed women to be priests.
At thirteen years old, I could not wrap my head around why God would deny me the chance to lead a congregation simply because I was born without a penis. “What about equal opportunity? You always tell me that girls can be anything!” I’d said, but my mom had held fast to her traditions and wouldn’t let me convert. “What would your grandparents think?” she’d asked. And so I’d honored my mother. I’d gone to religion classes after school for two years and fulfilled my required community service hours as a candy striper in a hospital in order to be confirmed by my parish in the Catholic Church.
I remember asking my teacher why the church would leave some groups out, such as women and gays. And she’d told me that that had come from people, not God. “The Catholic Church is an institution made up of humans who are imperfect. But God is perfect,” she’d said.
Reubén and I turned to silence as my eyes flitted around the same natural world the Incas had found divinity in: tall grass strumming in the wind; the Urubamba River slicing through rock and dirt; sunlight filtering through gauzy clouds as if they were curtains for the heavens themselves. There were no sacred ruins to be seen that first day. There was only wilderness and the sounds of my breath and water rushing and feet striking against the earth.
After an easy hike, little more than three or four hours, we reached our first destination. Though Wayllabamba means “grassy plain” in Quechua, a better description might have been “free-range farm with a makeshift distillery.” When we arrived, we found pigs, chickens, and goats clucking and braying at the intruders and the smattering of red tents our porters had constructed in a formerly uncluttered pasture. Surrounding the clearing was a little village.
When the government restored the Inca Trail, Quechuas who already lived there stayed. And while the animals might not have been happy to see us, the villagers made the most of the opportunity to make extra cash by selling treats to tourists. Consumerism had made its way even to the outskirts of the Lost City of the Incas: the makeshift wooden shacks flanking the path were stocked full of candy, Coca-Cola, and another beverage rumored to offer much more of a jolt than caffeine.
“Quieres chicha?” asked one red-faced man from the window of the wooden box where he’d set up shop.
“No, gracias,” I said firmly, remembering that Reubén had warned us about chicha, a potent corn-brewed alcohol fermented with saliva.
“Solamente una Snickers, por favor,” I said, and forked over a few soles to add yet another candy bar to the three already occupying space in my day pack.
Sure, part of travel’s adventure is sampling exotic fare, but I opted for the safe route since I was still popping antibiotic Cipro pills like Tic Tacs. I really wanted to be brave like Jen and eat whatever landed on my plate. Deep down, I felt guilty over my utter lack of curiosity toward any beverage containing another person’s spit as an ingredient, Peruvian delicacies such as guinea pig, and the meat of adorable, doe-eyed alpacas—but facilities on the trail were few and far between, and it was BYOTP (bring your own toilet paper). Some risks just weren’t worth taking.
As we passed around the dishes at dinner, I piled my plate with enough rice and potatoes to feed a teenage boy going through a growth spurt. “Hol, are you feeling better?” Amanda paused momentarily between bites, glancing at my heaping servings.
After swallowing a mouthful of rice, I said, “I’m starting to feel like my old self now. How about you?”
“Whatever the doc gave me was like some miracle black-market drug—I actually feel better than before I was sick,” Amanda said as she dug into a minimountain of potatoes.
The three of us polished off dinner, placed our dishes in the wash bin, and strapped on headlamps to cast a cone-shaped path of light toward our tents. It was only 8 p.m., but the exertion from breathing in the high altitude and all that walking made us want to collapse into our sleeping bags.
The temperature had dropped well below freezing, and the more body heat we could muster, the better. We could’ve slept in separate tents, but we laid out our sleeping bags—all three of them—inside a two-person tent and then pulled our alpaca hats farther over our ears. We stopped abruptly when we heard something brush against the tent. “What the hell was that?” I whispered, turning my headlamp in the direction of the noise. The intruder squealed as it hooved the thin plastic wall.
“Jesus, it’s a pig!” Amanda exclaimed.
“Are we on the Inca Trail or Old MacDonald’s farm?” Jen said, slapping the tent wall and yelling, “Get outta here—go away!” We heard grass rustling as the animal retreated, probably in search of our dinner scraps.
We were all wide awake now. “One time a bear clawed at my tent when my family was camping in the Adirondacks,” I said, telling the girls the first of many random childhood stories on the road. “My dog, Corby, chased it up a tree to save me.”
“Your dog chased a bear up a tree?” Jen asked. “And wait, your dog’s name was Corby?”
“Yeah, what? I never told you that before?” I playfully feigned offense.
“Corby Corbett?” Jen giggled. “That’s as silly as Amanda’s white cat named Whyte Kat. I’m going to start calling you Corby.”
“Fine then, Baggy Baggett.”
“Wait, what about me?” Amanda chimed in.
“You can be Pressy Pressner,” Jen exclaimed, and we laughed. I attributed our giddiness to the coca leaves we’d been chewing for the last few hours to ward off altitude sickness. (Disclaimer: Cocaine does indeed come from coca leaves, but, according to Reubén, it takes hundreds of pounds of leaves to create one kilogram of the drug. Any loopiness we may have felt while chewing the leaves was purely medicinal).
Once we’d caught our breath, Amanda reached into her day pack to pull out a foil space blanket—an emergency provision for hypothermia—and stretched it across the three of us for extra insulation. Trying to get closer for warmth, I was glad we had opted to sleep together. We were settled in head to toe: three women snuggled inside a two-person tent high in the Andes Mountains. Instead of the familiar electric glow of skyscrapers, we drifted off blanketed by a sky with a different kind of light: the same constellation that had once guided the Incas, the Southern Cross.
I lay there long after Jen and Amanda’s breathing turned deep and even, next to them but alone with my thoughts. The flashing lights and honking horns gave New York City nights a sense of movement rather than stillness. I wasn’t used to how deep the silence could feel when darkness clung to a mountainside. In the heavy quiet, my mind wandered to my older cousin Adam, who’d unexpectedly died of heart failure two years earlier when he himself was just twenty-eight years old. I thought how our childhood selves, kids who had spent hours mixing the perfect mud pie or climbing the highest tree branch in the apple orchards behind my grandparents’ house, would want me to be having this adventure beneath the Southern Cross. I wondered if life would seem more comforting if I believed, as the Incas had, that those stars could show me the way.
The next morning our porter, Ramón, was outside our door (well, our zippered tent flap) with coca tea before the sun’s first rays penetrated the icy blackness. “Buenos días, muchachas,” he whispered with a singsongy cheerfulness that struck me as wildly inappropriate at that ungodly hour. The three of us huddled together, silently sipping our tea, reluctant to abandon the warmth of our down sleeping bags.
Once we’d gathered in the dining tent for a hefty breakfast of quinoa pancakes, eggs, and porridge, Reubén informed us that today was the hardest day: eight hours of steady climbing to the highest point of roughly 14,000 feet at Warmiwanusca, “Dead Woman’s Pass.” I was too worried about my own survival to ask Reubén how it had gotten its name.
Reubén commanded our attention with his now-familiar
exclamation, “Hey, everybuddy! I gadda question for you!” Silence ensued in anticipation of Reubén’s next bit of trivia. “Who remembers the name of the man who redeescovered the Lost Ceety of the Incas, Machu Picchu?”
I took a breath to speak as Shannon shouted out, “His name was Hiram Bingham! He was a professor at Yale who found the ruins in 1911 during an expedition.”
“Muy, muy bien, Shannon,” Reubén said. “Why Machu Picchu was built is a mystery. Some say it was the center of the Incan Empire. Some say it was an ancient pilgrimage site thought to mark one end of the sun’s path. As you walk along the trail, imagine yourself as an Inca making your own pilgrimage to this spiritual site.”
I did believe my friends and I truly were on a pilgrimage, a search for what matters most. I wasn’t sure if Jen and Amanda were as excited about being pilgrims as I was, but my life in New York, so lacking in spirituality, had left me hungry to feel more connected, either to a higher power or simply to the world around me. On my first big trip during undergrad on Semester at Sea, I had signed up for a world religion course to learn how people around the planet fill their lives with meaning—exploring Shinto shrines in Japan, Muslim mosques in Morocco, and Buddhist temples in Hong Kong. One of my most vivid memories is of the first day I walked Istanbul’s cobblestone streets, holding my breath when I’d heard a powerful male voice chanting through the city’s loudspeakers. Masses of men stopped, threw down mats, and collectively prayed toward Mecca in a sort of sacred time-out. The clouds above cast shadows over the scene below, proving the world was still turning even though I felt as if it’d momentarily stopped. Ever since, I’d longed to go back to places where holy rituals were such visible parts of daily life, the way it was for those men.
The Lost Girls: Three Friends. Four Continents. One Unconventional Detour Around the World. Page 8
