Day 1: Bikin'

I already did Machu Picchu with my parents. We did it in the most comfortable way possible. We took the train, stayed in a Luxury hotel and ate exquisite food. This time around, I was going to get an entirely different experience. We decided to hike the Inca trail instead of taking the train. Because we were going during the rainy season, we picked a trek that wasn’t as hard core as some of the others that have you carry all of your stuff and sleep on the ground. Our tour had a wide range of activities we did along the trek so we weren’t just walking non-stop for 4 days strait. We also stayed in hostels in small Andean villages along the way instead of camping.

The first day of our trek we mountain biked. The start of our journey was rainy and cold but within an hour the rain stopped and as we descended from our start point at 4,000 + meters, the air warmed up around us to a point where we actually missed the cold.

We had our only scare of the trip which resulted in a minor injury. My friend from Lima, Dave and his brother Dan who was visiting from Costa Rica were with us as well. Dan was trying to take a video on his camera while biking. He almost fell of a cliff. The video is pretty funny to watch, but only because he didn’t actually fall off the cliff. He scraped up his knee and lost his glasses.

That wasn’t the only excitement of the day. As evening approached, we came upon a road block, literally. A bunch of old drunk men in a small village had barricaded our route to protest the government not paving the dirt road we were riding on. It wasn’t that big a deal, they let us pass but not the van that was carrying all our stuff. So we left the bikes with the van and carried our stuff by foot. When we finally arrived in the village we were staying in, it was dark and we were exhausted. It was an inconvenience that we weren’t able to bike the last portion of the day, but I feel like my friends got the real Latin American experience. Every day there are strikes and road blocks, it’s part of the way of life down here. I’m glad my friends weren’t completely blinded from the real Peru while sticking to the gringo trail.

Dinner was prepared by a local woman. After just a few days, my friends were already complaining about the excess of rice and potatoes they were served. I know I’ve done my fair share of whining about the carb heavy meals here, but it’s a way of life for me. I didn’t see why they couldn’t just suck it up for a week when I‘ve been putting up with it for a year and a half. Stephanie asked me what was and wasn’t okay for her to eat so she could avoid having stomach problems. Being a Californian, we’re so used to eating salads regularly. And while traveling in a less developed country, staying away from salad is safe a way to avoid getting sick the same way as not drinking the water. Having explained this to Stephanie several times before she came, she still asked me every meal if she could eat a salad. And every time I said no, she got mad at me, like it was my fault. Telling her I suffered worse, that I went a whole 3 months without eating salad when I first arrived, didn’t seem to do much to console her.

Apart from the food, the group did a pretty amazing job of rolling with the Peruvian punches. One thing some of the people in the group had a hard time accepting, was the ability to use their credit cards. Coming from the states we have the mentality that we can use a credit card anywhere. My friends were shocked when places like hostels and travel agencies didn’t accept credit cards. Only at one point did someone get really upset that not only did our hostel not accept credit cards, but there wasn’t even an ATM in the town we were staying in. This was completely illogical to this person, but I had to remind them that you can’t apply what you believe to be normal to another countries reality.