Biking, hiking, and rafting through the Peruvian Andes added up to one breathtaking experience for the Gazette’s senior editor, who was previewing the trip for Penn alumni.
By Samuel Hughes
Mud spatters up from my front tire as I swerve to avoid a cow, nearly skidding off the rutted path. From the edge of a potato field, a Quechua woman in a white stovepipe hat eyes me enigmatically. Gringos on mountain bikes, streaking through the rain—this is not an everyday sight. But she returns my Buenos tardes with wary amusement.
By now we’re well into Day Four of the Peru Machu Picchu Multi-Sport expedition, and we —myself and a dozen other sodden adventurers, along with our Peruvian guides Antonio and David—have become an unlikely part of the landscape. Already today we have biked on paved roads, paddled down the roiling Urubamba River, and biked some more, this time across fields and through streams and past tiny hamlets where the campesinos are outnumbered by their free-wandering animals. Soon we will ditch our bikes, pull on hiking boots, and start walking to our first campsite on the Inca Trail, which leads to Machu Picchu.
By the end of the day we are mud-streaked, sweat-soaked, and bone-weary. So why are we all so … content?
Well, quite a few reasons, actually. One is the other-worldly Andean setting, which makes you feel as though either you or the world has just been reborn, several times a day. Another is the fact that somebody else is worrying about the adult stuff. We’re responsible for getting ourselves from Point A to Point B, for carrying our day-packs, and for not doing anything life-threateningly stupid. But once the day’s trekking is done, we can relax—porters have already set up our tents and begun preparing an excellent dinner. They also carry our sleeping bags and food and bring steaming mugs of coca-leaf tea to our tents at dawn. Oh, and one more thing: During the biking part of the trek, we spend several nights in hotels that verge on the sybaritic. It’s adventure— with a hammock-style safety net.
Don’t get me wrong: this trip is not for the flaccid. Hiking and biking for six hours a day can be taxing enough at sea level, but at 11,000 feet (our average elevation), you sometimes have to floor it just to keep moving.
Yet that just heightens the intensity. We are not experiencing that landscape through tour-bus windows. We are steeped in it: the smell of eucalyptus leaves, the grunting of pigs, the music of birds and rushing water. It’s a strangely intoxicating brew. I haven’t got it out of my system yet.
It was last spring when Tammy Jordan, the Penn Quaker Voyages travel coordinator and a colleague in Alumni Relations, approached me about “previewing” this trip, which is being offered again, this time to Penn alumni, June 20-29. All I had to do, it seems, is go there and write something up for the Quaker Voyages Web site. And, of course, survive.
That last part posed a few questions. I wasn’t in bad shape—I sometimes bike to work from my home in Narberth, which is seven or eight miles from Penn—but I wasn’t planning on entering any Iron Man competitions, either. At 48, I knew that most, if not all, of the other trekkers would be a lot younger, and probably in better shape, too. So I ratcheted up my biking and enlisted my dog in a morning jogging program. By the time I left in late August, I was ready. I thought.
As you approach Cuzco from the sky, you can’t help thinking about the Incas’ reverence for the sun. It’s a little after dawn, and clear, bright, life-giving sunlight is splashing across the hulking mountains, while the ravines and valleys seem filled with black ink.
It is also one degree Celsius when we land, a shock to someone coming from a Philadelphia summer.
At the entrance to the luggage area, a wiry, worried-looking man holds a sign identifying him as affiliated with The World Outdoors, the Colorado-based outfit that put together this trip. It’s Antonio, a smart, engaging, 40-something Cuzque`no whose job is to make sure that we not only reach Machu Picchu but enjoy ourselves along the way.
At our earth-toned hotel near the Plaza de Armas, we get briefed by Antonio and infuse ourselves with mate de coca to ward off altitude sickness. There are 13 of us: 10 Americans (five male, five female), two Icelanders, and a Brit, all but one in their 20s and 30s. It’s a high-spirited group, and everyone looks in alarmingly good shape.
On the second day, we head east to Pisac, a village and ruins at the head of the Sacred Valley of the Urubamba River. Our bus takes a good switchback road to the ruins, which are a couple of thousand feet above the valley floor.
The Incas perceived a divine energy in the great rocks that surrounded them, and their stone-carving techniques still baffle experts. Most recent attempts to reconstruct their old walls (by the scholars, as our guides inevitably called them) are almost laughably inept by comparison. But the real mystery is how a motley group of Spaniards managed to storm this mountain fortress, held by a much larger army on its own territory. Apparently the roar of the cannon, amplified by the acoustic effects of the fortress, terrified the Incas, some of whom hurled themselves over the walls to avoid the horrible fate that awaited them.
After the tour, we get on our bikes for the first time and make a fast, swooping descent down hairpin turns to the valley floor. When we reach the bottom we are as giddy as kids after a roller-coaster ride. After crossing the Urubamba, we start to ride along a dirt path that parallels its western bank. I push myself hard, and stay in the middle of the pack. This is fine for the first hour or two; even for the third. But by the time we reach the village of Calca, after four hours of rocky, rutted roads and fields at 9,000 feet, I’m wiped. When we reach our hotel—a series of beautifully appointed bungalows surrounded by flowers and hummingbirds—I fall into bed, stumble out for dinner, then stumble back and sleep like a corpse.
I wake up feeling pleasantly alive. Antonio has prescribed a morning regimen of downhill speed-biking, to begin at 13,000 feet. As our bus lurches up the switchback gravel road into the mountains, I find myself contemplating the fact that the road is very narrow, that there are no guardrails, and that if you went over the edge you could recite the entire “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” before you hit the ground.
“You should skid through the turns,” I hear somebody saying. “It’s easier that way.” That would be Derek, a likeable Chinese-American wiseacre who missed his calling as a regular guest on Seinfeld. In this case he’s actually serious.
But once we get going, it’s a fantastic ride. I take it cautiously at first, but after a few minutes I feel like I’m on a virtual Game Cube and one of my sons is playing The Simpsons: Road Rage in the Andes. At the bottom, I rip through a village, dogs barking furiously. Suddenly a two-year-old boy scurries across the road in front of me. His mother yells something in Quechua. I jam on my brakes and somehow veer around him. I also decide to stop riding like Homer Simpson.
From there, we follow the course of the Urubamba again. Cows sleep by the side of the road. Red flags flutter from scattered houses, signalling not leftist politics but chicha, the home-made corn beer. Tourists, returning from Machu Picchu, eye us blankly through bus windows. Always, the mountains loom: some brown and heroically wrinkled, some snow-capped, some wreathed with gauzy clouds.
The next day it’s drizzling by the time we reach our put-in point on the river. I make sure I’m in Antonio’s raft, even though he has a large bowie knife strapped to his chest and directs our strokes like a drill sergeant. We pass grazing goats, more steeply terraced Inca fields, a distant condor, and finally the ruined fortress of Ollantaytambo, high above a narrow gorge.
By now, all that separates us from lunch and dry clothes are a couple of high-end Class Three rapids. These are the real deal: cauldrons of churning, plunging foam strewn with jagged boulders. (From my notes: “You don’t realize as you enter that you’re about to go over a waterfall.”) Antonio has us paddling like deranged galley slaves: “Back! Back! Back! Forward! Forward!! Lean in!!!!!” Somehow, we make it over, around, and through, and watch smugly as the other raft gets hung up on one rock after another.
We still have nearly three hours of biking ahead of us, and it’s a lot more fun than it has any right to be. The countryside is wilder here, and the muddy path a lot hillier. The climbs are brutal, but the descents are out-of-control: bouncing, splashing, mud-spattering, skidding. I can barely see through my glasses.
Finally, we arrive at Kilometer 82, where we leave our bikes and hike across a suspension bridge high above the river. Ten minutes later we are at our first camp, which is almost luxurious: a long hut with an eating table, a make-shift fireplace—and a couple of tepid showers, the last we will have for three days. After dinner, in a small cabin high above the river, someone has prepared a sauna, with eucalyptus boughs piled on the wood-burning stove. I last about 15 minutes, then ooze across the field to my tent.
In the middle of the night I wake. The nightscape is surreal, witch-like: think Goya, zonked on ayahuasca. White clouds sweep low across the mountains. A patch of stars glitters through unfathomable darkness. From across the field and far below, the Urubamba issues a steady, whispering roar.
By our last full day on the trail our surroundings have evolved from merely stunning to hallucinatory. We have already hauled ourselves over Dead Woman Pass (13,900 feet), watched the sun rise from Phuyupatamarca—City in the Clouds, and aptly named—and descended into the high jungle, where wild orchids and begonias frame the mountain vistas. Some parts of the ancient trail have been rebuilt, with debatable results, but here the road is un-retouched and in excellent condition—a sort of Peruvian Appian Way, with 30-foot retaining walls built into the cliff-sides to support the stone path, and the occasional tunnel carved through solid rock. Several less-famous ruins, including the magnificent Wi`nay Wayna, are almost as spectacular as the one we’re hiking toward.
Finally, after one more precipitous, knee-testing climb, we reach the Inti Punku, or Gate of the Sun. And there below us, spread out on top of an old green mountain surrounded by far higher mountains and clouds, is the Lost City of the Incas that Hiram Bingham stumbled upon in 1911. Antonio clasps my hand and says, “Welcome to Machu Picchu.”
But we still have one last challenge before we give ourselves over to the Lost City. It’s Huayna Picchu, the near-vertical mountain overlooking its scooped-out older brother, and it comes with its very own warning from the State Department. Thick ropes and cables are affixed to the rock in some—not all—of the most precipitous sections. A light rain has moistened all surfaces, and the air is warm and humid. After 10 minutes my hands are filthy and my T-shirt drenched with sweat. I offer silent thanks for Vibram soles, then shut my mind off and just climb: one step, one hand, after another. An hour later we reach the craggy peak, where a few deranged souls lie on their backs, their heads dangling over eternity. Far, far below, the silver Urubamba glitters as it coils around the base of the mountain.
Going down is as hard as going up, and it’s impossible notto look down. Near the bottom, we suddenly realize that David, our tall, steady Brit, is missing. Gone. Vanished. There is no plausible explanation—he was right behind me, and right ahead of the guy we call Rambo. We call, again and again. No answer. Antonio is on his walkie-talkie, looking as though he has just ordered up a batch of hemlock. I’m composing shocked, respectful obits in my mind.
Finally, we hear something, and a moment later David materializes in the distance, grinning sheepishly. He had taken the one possible wrong turn. Antonio sags with relief, and leads us on to the Lost City.
Machu Picchu plucks deep strings in the psyche. Pablo Neruda wrote an entire book of poetry about it. The more mystical travelers approach it on an astral plane, inspired by the cloud-swept fusion of stone and sky. Others take a more cerebral route, appreciating its pre-Columbian (yet, in places, strangely modern) architecture and anthropological lessons.
It’s certainly a terrific place to meditate on the sheer spookiness of history, and after our guided tour ends, Derek and David and I perch ourselves on a rocky outcropping overlooking the ruins. For a long while, none of us says anything. The sun is warm, and our long trek is over. Then, inevitably, one of us wishes aloud that we could go back and tweak the past a little, so that Pizarro and his Conquistadores didn’t arrive in the middle of the Incas’ civil war. Maybe their empire wouldn’t have lasted much longer than it did, but at least they might have had enough time to develop a written language, and left us with a better understanding of their impressive civilization. Maybe …
And yet, at the heart of Machu Picchu is a deep sense of mystery. There’s something to be said for leaving some of it intact. And for walking there, on the road the Incas built.
For more information about Penn Quaker Voyages can be found here.
