On our fourth morning on the Inca Trail, we awoke to an ethereal sight. It was still dark in the Andean valleys, but the sun`s first rays caught the snow caps on Pumasillo (The Puma`s Claw) to the west and turned the mountaintop white and brilliant against the darker blue of the early-morning sky.
Above the peaks, a full moon shone softly and took the breath away.
Our camp stood at 11,000 feet, and the dawn was cold. We lay on the ground in our tents, drank hot tea laced with coca leaves, and simply stared through the tent flaps at one of the most beautiful views any of us had ever seen.
There were 16 of us, all Americans but mostly strangers less than two weeks before, and we were nearing the end of an extraordinary trip. It was a trip that began in the Peruvian jungle and included white water rafting and Indian villages in the lower Andes. But the heart of the trip was the four-day trek along Inca trails hundreds of years old, over Andean passes of 13,000 feet or more, ending at the fabled Inca shrine of Machu Picchu.
In many ways, the trip was an odd mixture of physical stress and luxury. One day we climbed 4,000 feet in four hours, on a tortured trail that rose relentlessly through thinning air without a break. Temperatures ranged from 20 at night to the 80s by day. At one time or another, most of us suffered ailments ranging from blisters to chills to digestive distress. One young member collapsed with altitude sickness and had to be carried down from the mountains, fireman`s-style, on the backs of Quechuan Indian porters.
Each day began with a cup of hot tea and a pan of steaming water brought to our tents. We slept on the ground, but ate hearty meals-washed down by a young but very drinkable Peruvian red wine-in a mess tent catered by four Indian cooks. After a day on the trail, we gathered before dinner for tea spiked with pisco, a Peruvian brandy. We walked with light packs while the heavy packs, tent and food were toted by 34 porters, all with outsized chests and heavily muscled legs of the Andean Quechuans.
Several travel companies run ”adventure tours” into the Andes. Ours was organized by a California firm, Mountain Travel, operating through Explorandes, the oldest and best Peruvian firm leading trips into the interior.
This was no trip for the faint of spirit or body. Mountain Travel requires a doctor`s certificate and recommends a training program. Much of the trail passes along narrow ledges and across primitive bridges over 2,000-foot precipices. There were no toilets, no beds, no showers. We may not have been living as ruggedly as some of the teenage backpackers we met on the trail, but it was a far cry from Aspen or a Caribbean resort.
Our ages ranged from 22 to 70, but mostly we were in our 40s and 50s, those years when middle-age spread of the psyche sets in and the spirit needs a jolt.
Two of the men had been medics in Vietnam and craved a reminder of that excitement. Others were joggers or climbers seeking more extreme exercise. Some just sought an exotic vacation amid glorious scenery. Many of us, I think, wanted a challenge to shake us out of the certainties of our well-ordered, well-padded lives.
For myself, it also fulfilled a 10-year-old dream. I had seen Machu Picchu a decade ago, but the way most tourists do, by taking the three-hour train trip from Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital. I realized then that the right way to see Machu Picchu was to walk in over the Andes, building up slowly to the splendor of the site.
We rendezvoused first in Lima and flew to Puerto Maldonado, in the jungle lowlands east of the Andes, the jumpoff point for a research station four hours by motor launch up the Tambopata River. For two days, we walked the jungle trails, stalked the crocodile-like caiman along the riverbank and lay in our thatched huts at night listening to the rain approach like a freight train through the forest.
It was fascinating, but mostly it was a chance to get acquainted and to get through the requisite swapping of information about jobs, kids and past travels. It took a couple of days to shed our old skins, to stop relying on our place and prestige in the ”real world” and accept ourselves on the terms of the wilderness.
From the jungle, we flew into the Andes, to Cuzco, now a modern city, set in a Spanish colonial framework, which in turn rests on the Inca base. Cultures and centuries overlap here, 11,000 feet up, a Shangri-la of cathedrals and buzzing Indian markets, which is the base for journeys into the mountains.
There followed two days of rafting on the Urubamba, the so-called sacred river of the Incas, a mostly placid mountain stream that erupts often enough into rapids to provide some white water thrills. We were amateur rafters, eight to a boat, and nearly overturned a time or two, soaking ourselves with 39-degree water fresh from a glacier.
The rafting was good cold fun, but the interest lay in the setting. The Urubamba Valley has been inhabited since prehistory. The hard mountains that rise from the river are furrowed with terraces still farmed as they were centuries ago. The terraces climb literally to the peaks and grow wheat, barley or potatoes. In some places, wheat fields lay directly on the side of a hill, without terracing, and we saw families harvesting by rolling the bales down the slope.
Tourists are a modern intrusion into the Urubamba Valley and have brought a measure of hustling and begging. But the Quechuan culture seems strong enough to survive tourism as it survived earlier invasions beginning with the conquistadores in the 16th century. Behind the hustling exists a society living as it has for centuries, still dressed in red woven cloaks and knit hats (for the men) and great layered skirts and bowler hats (for the women). Only the children seem to show a partiality for American-style sweatsuits.
One afternoon we left the river and climbed quickly-about 400 feet in 10 minutes-to the Inca ruins at Pisac. I started out fast and bravely, steamed up the first 200 feet, collapsed, gasped, recovered, climbed, collapsed again and arrived in staggering disgrace. It was a valuable lesson, probably meant as such, in the need to develop a slow, rhythmic, steady style of climbing for the truly rugged trek ahead.
Actually, the Inca trail to Machu Picchu began with a day of easy walking that was, for me, pure fun. We had dropped down the Urubamba Valley from Cuzco to about 8,500 feet and stayed there most of the day, along a trail that rose and fell gently beneath snow-capped peaks. The surroundings changed hourly, from hard scrub plants and cacti, to a semitropical forest, through stands of bright yellow flowers on reed stems, and then along ledges suspended halfway between the sky and the roaring Urubamba below.
Along the way, Indian families sold Sprite or Coca-Cola. Indian children grinned shyly from the thatched huts they share with chickens and another staple of the Andean diet, guinea pigs.
The porters jogged ahead, and as we came around a bend, we found a blue tablecloth laid out in a clearing, with yellow plastic cups for hot tea, looking like a Crate and Barrel ad. Lunch was a very stylish spread of round, chewy Peruvian bread with salami, cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, cheese, even mayo and mustard.
