This is where we came from to our first campsite
The delicious sleep I submitted to after the first day of our hiking on the Quarry Trail lightens toward 5 am, no wonder, I fell asleep at 8:30 pm last night! As I start my meditation on joy and happiness with a smile on my face dedicating my meditation to my daughter (a loved one), to a colleague (a neutral person), and to a trauma victim, somebody that made my life somewhat difficult), I start recognizing some movements on the campsite. Soon it becomes clear that the crew is up and about. Around 5:30, somebody shakes my tent and says “agua caliente”. I unzip the tent, there is a cup of hot water in one hand of Andres, one of the horsemen, who won’t have eye contact with me. In the other he is carrying a small basket with tea, coffee bags, and coca leaves in the center.
Clever and delightful Mercedes from Canada, not only washes her face but also her worn out feet in the morning
I pick up an Anise tea bag, which has become my tea of preference in Peru and thank him. No response, he walks away. I will ask later our guide whether I do something that is not culturally competent. He tells me the lack of eye contact is just because of mountain men being shy! How similar to mountain men from Turkey: A city girl or a woman is a creature they don’t know how to interact with, relate with, safest way to respond is no eye contact, no conversation…As I am putting on my hiking clothes on and sipping my tea, he comes back with another “agua caliente”.
By the time I unzip my tent again, I find a white plastic bowl of hot water in front of my tent and catch him with the corner of my eye as he is moving to the next tent; I assume it is to wash my face. I look out there is one of these bowls in front of each tent! This must be the “room service” the chief was talking about last night… I do wash my face, put on my glasses and get out of the tent. All my warm clothes that I brought with me are on me along with gloves, and a shawl over my head. I can barely keep warm against the whipping Andean wind.
Wild flowers find life even in this harsh terrain
The crew members have one single sweater on: “Are they are much better acclimated to this unpredictable weather or do they shiver as I do just because they don’t have anything else warm to wear. I hope it is the former as many people that I met in the past up on the mountains of Turkey. They would be perfectly fine in one or two layers of clothes when I would be shivering in multiple layers that got me the nickname of “plains’ sheep”! We have a lovely breakfast and as the crew is breaking camp, we are getting ready to leave for our second and hardest hiking day.
It is great to see that the crew has already prepared boiled and cooled drinking water for us all to replenish our bottles and reservoirs. As we start climbing up our trail winds around the village of Rayan, and from this point on there will be no other villages until we reach the summit at 4500 m. and wind down back to Ollantaytambe. As the chief guide promised us, it is indeed up and down. Just as we believe, we have reached the highest point, we start heading down and our guide points out to another peak in the distance that we need to get to. At the very beginning of the hike, I tell the chief guide, if it seems like I am slowing down the group at any point to let me know to use the horse since we have to finish this hike on time to get to our campsite before dark.
We are all in the same misery. Altitude, exertion, weight of our bags, although the major weight is carried by horses, and straight up hiking in order to shorten the distance. The stretch of the line of hikers is getting longer and longer… Two women and I are in the rear half of the line now. I can’t help but recall the experience I had in The Rocky Mountains National Park in the US some five years ago. I had done a very strenuous hike of 14 miles with 1500 feet elevation gain. I had run out of water half way up, sustaining myself with the powdery snow layers that had appeared on my path as I climbed higher.
Two thirds up the hike, I had lost the trail when I bumped into a huge snow bank that covered a city block size of an open space. In that sense of being lost, until I finally connected with someone, who directed me to the trail, I had been extremely stressed out. When I had finally gotten back to my tent that night I had wild arrhythmias all night long that hadn’t allow me to sleep. When I finally got it checked out, the reassurance was that there was nothing wrong with my heart but I should never bring together, high altitude, dehydration, exertion and stress to avoid recurrence of this again!
Here I am at the highest altitude I have ever been in my life, exerting myself like no other, and the insidious worry in my mind about arrhythmia is lurking right below the surface, can I call this stress? The only element that is absent is dehydration since I have been drinking a gallon of water a day for the last three days… We are in the middle of the trek, going back if I develop arrhythmia would be as much exertion as going forward. I hear we have only half an hour to the first peak… As my mind is busy with these thoughts chief looks at me and says “Hatun Mamako, would you like to take the horse a little bit?” His previous worries were unwarranted, but this one I may need to take up on. And I do.
I am so glad I rode the horse for about fifteen minutes to cover about half a km up to 4400 m elevation: I got to know Isidro, a 68 y/o man, who has been living up on these mountains all his life. That’s when I see that he has only plastic flip flops on his feet. He has a unique communication with his horse. We talk in Spanish as much as I can put my thoughts into Spanish words. We connect, we become brother and sister. When we reach the peak, I give him a hug “Gracias mi hermano”, he smiles and responds to my hug with a warm, strong hug. It nails down our brother-sisterhood. When at the end of the trek, I give him an extra tip in addition to the collective tip for all of them, there is no change in the shining in his eyes, since we connected at a deeper level than any money-changing-hands can reach.
The summit is harsh, with its wind whipping any exposed skin patch we might have left uncovered, with its cold, and its clouds moving at lightning speed: One moment the horizon is lined with the zigzag of the glacier topped mountain peaks; the next, clouds have sunk into the valley obscuring all the nature’s wonders from view. It is fun to be the photographer of all my fellow hikers, who are all putting all of what they have into this final stretch of the climb. Once we are all up there, our chief commemorates our camaraderie and takes photographs with everybody’s camera/cell phone. After this upright rest, we all start our hike on the crest 50 more meters of elevation gain to cover.
Reaching the highest point at 4450 meters (15000 feet) is like being on top of the world. When I lie on the ground, every single muscle and bone in my body become one with the earth, another episode of feeling the sense of interbeing. Such peaceful rest without a headache, without arrhythmia, without fear is the greatest gift Andean mountains could give me, of course not knowing what else it holds in store up the valley. We have our lunch here savoring the panoramic view below us. There is such energy in the harshness of the mountains, rising almost from the center of the earth. Yet, the rounded tops make them friendly and inviting. We are in the embrace of one of them at this moment.
After we have all been energized, the climb down starts on the surface of this very mountain, on hidden switchbacks through the bushes and trees, we make our way down toward Ollantaytambe. It is a long long hike, after some 5 kilometers of this harsh down-hike we finally come to somewhat more flat terrain. Some of the hikers go with the chief to see one more Inca artifact. All I want at this point is to get to a flat surface as quickly as possible. Half of us head to the campsite based on the chief’s instructions. Nickie is very tired, too. When we finally see the campsite from 1 km away, we cheer up.
It is a beautiful meadow about 100 m above Ollantaytambe. It is rainy, misty, overcast. We can’t see much around us, but our tents are up, kitchen staff clearly is busy getting ready to feed us with yet another delicious feast. It feels like I am back home! When we are finally there, Andreas is waiting by the “sink” to help me with the warm water container, soap and paper towel. I give him my thanks one more time and our eyes meet. He is still shy but has shimmering light and warmth in his eyes this evening with no fear or avoidance. We smile at each other, which will recur multiple times throughout the rest of our trek.
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| As we descend to our second and last campsite around 6 pm, our tents are all put up on a beautiful meadow overlooking Ollantaytambe |
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