How to Travel the World for Free

by Michael Wigge

  The drive through the north of Lima offers a rather sad view: the streets are overcrowded and cars and buses keep honking. Wherever I look, the traffic jams are interspersed with people selling chewing gum, cotton candy, fruit, or even old car parts. People keep squeezing onto the bus trying to peddle their goods there as well. Hardly any houses have plastered walls. We pass endless streets with semi-finished brick houses that have metal rods pointing up from their flat roofs. The few trees I spot are covered in dust. Lima is located in a desert complete with brownish, sandy dust that drowns every bit of green, and I see the same dust on the unfinished houses, cars, and buses. I breathe it in along with the soot from the many diesel engines in town.

  They say Lima is caught under an eternal pall of smog and hardly gets any sun at all. That’s just what it’s like today: a gray veil covers the sky, making dusty Lima and its 7.5 million inhabitants look even sadder. The difference between Lima and Cartagena is shocking to me. Karina says that Peru still has huge problems with poverty: the average wage is $400 per month; more than one-third of the population is poor; and every eighth person even suffers extreme poverty. I look at the faces of the chewing gum vendors on the overcrowded minibus. Some, I see, are quite desperate. They keep begging me to buy at least a single piece of gum for a bargain price. I’m deeply relieved in a very sad way when we arrive at the house of Karina’s grandmother and close the door behind us.

  Her grandmother, uncle, and son welcome me. With the ever-present lack of money, the term “patchwork family” takes on a completely new meaning here. Karina’s uncle, Miguel, who lives on the roof in a shabby, windowless brick shed, isn’t her uncle at all. The man just appeared one day at her doorstep ten years ago, completely broke, and has been allowed to live on their roof free of charge out of sympathy ever since. Karina’s son is not her son, but her sister’s. She usually leaves him with Karina because she works fourteen hours a day. Then there is Karina’s brother, Claudio, who—strictly speaking—is her nephew as well. His parents are living in the United States, but he had to return to Peru due to drug offenses and is now unemployed and living off his grandmother’s money. Karina informs me during the bus ordeal that her grandmother is a strict Catholic, and since Karina is married to Eduardo, an American, she was only able to get permission for my visit by saying that I was Eduardo’s brother. This means that for the next three days, I will be playing her husband’s brother without knowing the first thing about him. The grandmother is as hospitable as she is smart. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

  “Michael, how is Eduardo at the moment?”

  “Oh, quite okay.”

  “What? I thought he was very sick?”

  I hesitate. “Oh, yes, but he’s better now. Everything’s fine again!”

  “Really? Two weeks ago he sounded quite different.”

  “Well . . . sure, but last week he got much better.”

  “Remind me: what was wrong with him?”

  Stumbling, I say, “The . . . many trips abroad . . . with the military. . . weakened him. But the doctor saw to that now.”

  “Yes, poor Eduardo. But didn’t he have something wrong with his appendix?”

  Karina then steps in and answers for me, claiming I don’t know the word for appendix because of my bad Spanish.

  So I am spending three days with a very welcoming Peruvian family that keeps engaging me in talk about Eduardo: Eduardo’s childhood, his training with the military in Arizona, his first meeting with Karina at the American embassy; Eduardo and his life at the military base in Rammstein, Germany; Eduardo and his big heart; Eduardo and his bad Spanish (they claim it’s even worse than mine); and Eduardo and his American football with lots of beer. The days with the family are hardly stress-free since I have to be on my guard constantly in order not to fall victim to the grandmother’s trick questions. At least I manage to play along without being directly exposed. However, I think everyone involved in the conversations about Eduardo knows perfectly well that I am not Eduardo’s brother, and I am convinced the grandmother enjoys watching me stumble with wrong claims about him. She confirms this when I later leave by calling after me with a sly grin, “Muchos besos a Eduardo!”

  In addition to all of the storytelling stress, I find Lima characterized by poverty, dust, and thick traffic, but I also have pleasant experiences waiting for me as well. Karina tells me that the upscale restaurants in Peru have a tradition where, on your birthday, they give you free ice cream with a candle to blow out while singing a birthday song. This all starts when Karina jokingly points out, in a restaurant where we are not even eating, that it is my birthday. We sit down and, a moment later, five waiters appear before me singing “Feliz Cumpleanos, Felizidad” or something like that. They put free ice cream with a candle on the table and a paper crown on my head. We try out this free phenomenon two more times in the quarter of Mira Flores: “Yes, Micha has his birthday today!” Thus, I spend the 13th of October mostly eating free ice cream.

  With my three birthday paper crowns, I take a bus to the town of Cusco, located more than 600 miles away in the Andes. At less than thirty dollars, the ticket is very cheap and paid for by good old Eduardo all the way from his military base in southern Germany. Karina had told him about my journey with no money and the resulting problem: my white lies to her grandmother. Since I had been forced to intensely study his life, he decided to pay for my bus ticket as something of a reward. Now I am traveling first class on a Peruvian long-distance bus: I can fold back my seat and turn it almost into a bed; blankets are distributed and the air-conditioning is running at full power, like everywhere in Latin America; and I have a TV in front of me with an American movie playing on it. Peruvians seem to particularly enjoy horror and splatter movies: Friday the 13th, Stephen King movies, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre alternate in the program. The television’s volume rivals even that of the air-conditioning, making it impossible for me to sleep. At midnight, the Japanese horror movie The Ring starts playing; now it’s officially impossible to sleep, since this movie is truly one of the scariest horror films that I have ever seen.

  The next afternoon, I reach the Andes without much rest, but now I’m at least somewhat of an expert on horror films. The city of Cusco lies at an altitude of almost 11,000 feet and is the starting point for trekking tours to the world-famous Inca city of Machu Picchu. Cusco is a very beautiful mountain city with two huge missionary churches directly at the marketplace, which everyone in Peru calls Plaza de Armas (Place of Weapons). Narrow streets run through the centuries-old walls of downtown, which was built by the Spaniards after their conquest of Peru.

  This is where I meet Stefan, a thirty-four-year-old German whom I had contacted by email before my trip. At the beginning of the year, Stefan had moved from Germany to Cusco; he is now trying to set up an agency called GeoMundo, which organizes trekking tours for tourists. He aims to do this in an ecological way and with fair salaries to the local workers. Stefan tells me that it was a difficult decision to give up a well-paying job as a management consultant in order to go and start a business abroad. Here, he is struggling with a different mentality: different standards of punctuality and reliability between him and his colleagues make starting a business difficult for him, he mentions. I’m able to spend two nights in his new apartment that has just been renovated and furnished.

  Stefan hooks me up with a local trekking agency that is ready to take me free of cost to Machu Picchu . . . if I carry the baggage for the other tourists. A visit to Machu Picchu after a five-day hike is naturally in order because the Inca city represents a massive cultural highlight of South America.

  Machu Picchu lies fifty miles away from Cusco, in the middle of a rainforest in the mountains. The city was built by the Incas in the middle of the fifteenth century and was abandoned about one hundred years later when the Spaniards conquered the region. Still, it was not the Spaniards who drove the Incas out of the city; even today, it is not clear what happened. One theory is that Machu
Picchu was built to control the economy of this region, while another theory considers Machu Picchu as a former prison city of the Incas. Other researchers consider Machu Picchu as the home of the former Inca king. Thus, the origin of the so-called lost city of the Incas still remains a mystery to us.

  On the first day, there is a lot of amazement and laughter among the sixteen members of the trekking group (who come from Germany, Canada, the United States, Argentina, Ireland, and France). Even the three local porters are amazed that a gringo wants to carry the baggage. How can it be that a German is carrying food, utensils, and tents up the mountain? I explain that I am traveling to the end of the world without any money and that this is the only way I’ll be able to see Machu Picchu. The porters laugh and are happy about the unusual helper. The tourists laugh at my rather foolish outfit; before my departure, Stefan had lent me a traditional poncho and a woolen cap with earmuffs and pompoms, but it looks like the only Peruvians wearing this attire are the ones you would find on the sidewalks of Europe or America.

  I am lucky and get a grace period on the first day of the trekking tour. The porters halve the normal carry load for me from eighty to forty pounds. However, this weight is not carried as it would (or should) be in a normal backpack, but is instead made up of plastic bags tied together with ropes that are then carried as a makeshift backpack. While the porters run in front at full speed, on the first day I am allowed to walk with the rest of the group at the normal pace. We cover almost twelve miles and climb from 8,500 feet to the height of 11,800 feet.

  At around five in the evening, I reach the first bivouac shelter with the group and help the porters set up the tents for the tourists and prepare dinner. The porters have two gas cookers in a small shelter, and for the next two hours, my task is to peel the peas. The evening then becomes a nightmare: while the group sleeps in tents, protected from the extremely cold temperature outside, I spend the night with the three other porters in a five-by-eight-foot wooden shelter without any walls and only a blue plastic sheet to separate my sleeping bag from the extremely cold, extremely hard ground. Lying near me is Gomerciendo, the cook for the group. I ask him how he endures this, and Gomerciendo explains that he only rarely sleeps in beds. While he is snoring away, I remain awake during most of the night; it’s noisy, cold, uncomfortable, and the high altitude of 11,000 feet makes me toss and turn all night.

  At four in the morning, Gomerciendo’s alarm clock rings. We have exactly one hour to prepare breakfast for the group. I sit quietly, shivering in the corner. At six o’clock, the group starts for the second leg of the trip; they have six hours to reach the afternoon stop at the 15,000-feet-high Abra Salkantay pass. The porters have to make it in three hours’ time; hence, we have to walk twice as fast, basically running. The reason for this lack of time is that we took ninety minutes to dismantle the tents, wash the utensils, and load up the horses that morning, and the porters must arrive at the next stop ninety minutes before the group does so that we have time to prepare and have lunch ready by the time everyone else arrives.

  It quickly becomes clear to me that the decision to go along with the group as a porter was, and is, insane. I can hardly keep up the speed, although I am carrying only half the weight that Gomerciendo, Yuri, and Nico have on their backs. After nearly half an hour of running, I manage to remain on my feet but pant and bend forward frequently in order to breathe in gulps of air. Yuri asks me to pull myself up and keep up the pace because we are under enormous time pressure; after all, the tourists would like to have their lunch on time. I continue to follow the three porters and the three horses, but physically I am just not able to make it. I am dizzy and my legs feel like rubber.

  A short while later I am far behind them. Yuri is up ahead of me as the path goes up the mountain in a serpentine trail. He calls out again and again: “Amigo, vienes. No tenemos tiempo! Rápido!” But it doesn’t help me; the air is too thin and I am not trained. I lie down on the path and breathe in and out deeply. Shortly thereafter, Yuri, Gomerciendo, and Nico come down with the horses and look at me hopelessly. Gomerciendo laughs because he has never seen such a wimpy porter in his entire life, but Yuri is annoyed and asks me to stand up. He anxiously explains to me that we need to be at the next camp before the tourists in order to prepare the lunch; if the food is not ready, there will be complaints to the agency and it might cost them their jobs. I realize that I have behaved very carelessly as a porter.

  Two evenings ago I had boasted to the boss of the agency (who, by the way, was called Fidel Castro) that I was a thousand-meter runner and that the fifty miles would not be a problem. Now I was a burden on the tour. Due to their care of duty, the porters cannot leave me behind but also cannot continue to wait for me. I promise them that I will keep up with the pace if we could just buckle up my weight on one of the horses. The three porters consult among themselves and reach the decision that about twenty pounds from my baggage could fit on the horses; any more than this would be unbearable for them, too. So now I carry only twenty pounds up the mountain pass, but the altitude makes it feel like eighty pounds.

  Even after this lightened load, I am not able to match the speed of the porters and quickly fall behind. I drag myself through the breathtaking landscape with its snow-covered mountain peaks and 20,000-feettall glaciers, but all these things make no difference to me because I am totally exhausted and overwhelmed. I come across a wooden hut selling chocolate bars and beverages to the trekking enthusiasts. I hear a German couple trying to decide between a Twix and Snickers, and between a large and a small Coke. I am completely envious and can only drag myself frustratingly past them. Oh, the things I would do now for just a two-liter bottle of Coke and a chocolate bar!

  It becomes really cold after 13,000 feet, although we are sweating from the strenuous climb. I can no longer see Yuri and the others. Every step seems like a kick in the teeth; the pain penetrates my entire body. After breaking for the second stretch of the day, Yuri tells me that he earns fifty dollars for a five-day trip. I am speechless that the tourists have to pay so little for such an effort on his behalf.

  Shortly before the pass at 15,000 feet, I am able to overtake the tourist group. Yuri, Gomerciendo, and Nico have passed them long ago with the horses. The leader of the group of trekkers is taking a special break so that the porters have enough time for cooking (since they have lost so much time because of me). The group cheers when they see me passing them. They know that my experiment has been a total flop but they all take it lightly; unfortunately, Gomerciendo doesn’t. When I finally reach the midday camp, the food is almost ready and laid out on the tables. Gomerciendo, who is totally pissed off, gives me a lecture about how they can no longer manage having the food ready on time and that something like this could lead to problems with the agency. During the lunch, Yuri takes me aside and tells me that it simply can’t go on like this. Further reprieves are made for me: I can continue to work as a porter, but I can walk with the tourist group. This means that the speed is only half as fast and that I don’t have to help so much in the kitchen, or in setting up and dismantling the tents—a huge respite for me. Thankfully, the very next day, everyone’s displeasure over the conspicuous gringo porter changes to sympathy. My service from the second day has become something of a legend: I hear the porters as they again and again laughingly tell the story of how I lay panting on my back on the narrow trail.

  We continue on and, on the third and the fourth day, pass a temperate rainforest. There is even a delightful break to relax, and the group takes a bath in one of the hot springs in the Andes. The hot spring near Santa Theresa is commercially used for tourism: one has to pay a five-dollar entry fee, whereas the locals pay only thirty cents. Dietmar, a police commissioner from Heilbronn who is trekking with us, invites me along and pays the entry fee for me. Unfortunately, I catch a cold at the hot springs and on the fifth day, set out at four in morning relatively ill. We have to climb 1,600 steps and about 1,500 feet to reach Machu Picchu. It is, again, a hard
struggle to the top.

  The previous evening, Yuri had distributed the entry tickets to Machu Pichu. I assumed that as a porter I wouldn’t need one, so I didn’t worry about it. Now I stand in front of the entry gate, still dressed in the foolish poncho and the cap and loaded with cargo, explaining that I am the porter and have done the impossible in the last five days. The lady smiles in a friendly way and lets me in without a ticket. Tourists stand in front of and behind me in the long queue, laughing and cheering at the gringo porter entering the Inca city without a ticket. But at the second checkpoint, a man pulls me out of the line. He doesn’t say a word and radios someone: “Hay un hombre sin ticket!” (“There is a man without an entry ticket!”) I am brought, or rather led, away to an office. The man throws my baggage on the floor and refuses to answer me.

  In the office I talk to the boss who handles visitor relations. I explain to her that I have worked as a porter for five days and hence have the right to enter. She counters that I am obviously a tourist and hence have to pay forty-three dollars. I explain that my work as a porter was part of my journey to the end of the world. She tells me that she finds this all great, but that I still have to pay forty-three dollars. Even whenI offer to collect the garbage in Machu Picchu, she remains unmoved.

  Yuri and the tourist group are nowhere to be seen. This is the darkest moment of my trip. I sit in front of the gates of the Inca city totally frustrated: fifty miles with forty pounds on my back climbing a height that, in comparison, makes the Grossglockner and Mont Blanc seem tiny, and now this! I know that from now on, this journey is going to be really difficult. I still have to cover 3,700 miles and have only three weeks in which to do it. I will be lacking the drive of the initial months, the excitement that I felt in San Francisco and in Hawaii. Even after the muscle cramps, cold, and emotional setback of Machu Picchu disappear, the last 3,700 miles will be anything but easy. Later, a bus takes me back to Cusco. Stefan has agreed to let me spend one more night with him, and the next morning I will travel from Puno to Lake Titicaca on a train called the Andean Explorer.