But what I’d give for the cup of coffee I hadn’t had time to drink before I left the hotel.
I pried both lids open and peered at the crowded seats around me. Sturdy mountain women in dirndl skirts, most in traditional hand-woven wool, a few in the garish colors of fabric woven from modern synthetic yarn. Some, sadly, in fabric that had never seen a hand loom. Gone, too, were the towering class distinction of top hats—white for mestizas , black for full-blooded Quechuas—that I’d seen in my mother’s photos. The hats had been replaced by floppy-brimmed leather headgear in brown and gray that tended to look like the women were wearing giant misshapen mushrooms on their heads. More PC maybe, but ugly as sin. The men conformed even more closely to modern coastal dress, with only a few in ponchos and colorful vests. Their heads were bare or topped by the ubiquitous lopsided floppies that seemed to be unisex. Only a few of the older men wore the peaked knit caps with ear flaps that had once been the hallmark of Andean men.
The train shuddered to a halt, paused, then proceeded in a forward direction. Good. I didn’t like traveling backward. Even when I knew the train was moving in the direction we needed to go, it didn’t feel right. Like we were going eight steps forward, then ten steps back. But, amazingly, we finally reached the rim of the bowl and set off on the slow journey that took us to every small town between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. The smell of the trays of unidentifiable goodies being hawked at each stop was torture, but I resisted the urge to jump off and buy. Who knew if my pampered North American stomach was ready for food direct from South American natives so agriculturally savvy they’d made potatoes, tomatoes, beans, chocolate, and peanuts a daily part of our lives. And then there was that leafy plant called coca .
I ordered my stomach to stop growling. Visions of problems worse than finding a place to pee along the Inca Trail allowed me to sit stoically in my seat until we reached that magical stop in the middle of nowhere, Kilometer 88. Including the Arendsens and myself, we were a party of seven. Pumawari Khuyana, known as Puma, was our guide; Raymi, Yanay, and Urqu, our Quechua porters. The Arendsens and I backpacked our clothes, some food, and a canteen, with the porters toting extra food, all the tents and the many little things needed to smooth the way for novice Andean trekkers like us. I was humbled enough by my less than stellar adjustment to the altitude that I didn’t make the mistake of thinking that hiking the trail at eighteen had made me an expert.
We passed inspection by the trail guards, who not only examined our permit but weighed the porters’ backpacks to make sure the northern gringos weren’t taking advantage of the natives. I’d heard tales of porters’s packs burgeoning from twenty-five to forty pounds the minute trekking parties were out of sight of the inspectors, but not in our group. Toting a pack to 14,000 feet was part of the challenge of the Inca Trail, even if the Quechuas were used to the altitude and we weren’t. Even if they were hiking with a wad of coca leaves in their jaws, and we weren’t.
The first part of our trek went smoothly as we paralleled the Urubamba River, a raging whitewater torrent, plunging down from the Andes on its way to the eastern jungle, where it would join one of the headwaters of the Amazon. But as we approached the River Cusichaca—narrower than the Urubamba but strewn with boulders and almost as violent—we ran into our first crisis.
“ Oh, no!” Hildy skidded to a stop. “No way, no how,” she declared. “I’m not walking across that !”
“ That” was a narrow suspension bridge over the Cusichaca, which appeared to be double-timing it on a race toward its junction with the Urubamba.
“ Hildy,” I said quietly while the Quechua porters demonstrated their expertise by trotting across the swaying structure,
I pried both lids open and peered at the crowded seats around me. Sturdy mountain women in dirndl skirts, most in traditional hand-woven wool, a few in the garish colors of fabric woven from modern synthetic yarn. Some, sadly, in fabric that had never seen a hand loom. Gone, too, were the towering class distinction of top hats—white for mestizas , black for full-blooded Quechuas—that I’d seen in my mother’s photos. The hats had been replaced by floppy-brimmed leather headgear in brown and gray that tended to look like the women were wearing giant misshapen mushrooms on their heads. More PC maybe, but ugly as sin. The men conformed even more closely to modern coastal dress, with only a few in ponchos and colorful vests. Their heads were bare or topped by the ubiquitous lopsided floppies that seemed to be unisex. Only a few of the older men wore the peaked knit caps with ear flaps that had once been the hallmark of Andean men.
The train shuddered to a halt, paused, then proceeded in a forward direction. Good. I didn’t like traveling backward. Even when I knew the train was moving in the direction we needed to go, it didn’t feel right. Like we were going eight steps forward, then ten steps back. But, amazingly, we finally reached the rim of the bowl and set off on the slow journey that took us to every small town between Cuzco and Machu Picchu. The smell of the trays of unidentifiable goodies being hawked at each stop was torture, but I resisted the urge to jump off and buy. Who knew if my pampered North American stomach was ready for food direct from South American natives so agriculturally savvy they’d made potatoes, tomatoes, beans, chocolate, and peanuts a daily part of our lives. And then there was that leafy plant called coca .
I ordered my stomach to stop growling. Visions of problems worse than finding a place to pee along the Inca Trail allowed me to sit stoically in my seat until we reached that magical stop in the middle of nowhere, Kilometer 88. Including the Arendsens and myself, we were a party of seven. Pumawari Khuyana, known as Puma, was our guide; Raymi, Yanay, and Urqu, our Quechua porters. The Arendsens and I backpacked our clothes, some food, and a canteen, with the porters toting extra food, all the tents and the many little things needed to smooth the way for novice Andean trekkers like us. I was humbled enough by my less than stellar adjustment to the altitude that I didn’t make the mistake of thinking that hiking the trail at eighteen had made me an expert.
We passed inspection by the trail guards, who not only examined our permit but weighed the porters’ backpacks to make sure the northern gringos weren’t taking advantage of the natives. I’d heard tales of porters’s packs burgeoning from twenty-five to forty pounds the minute trekking parties were out of sight of the inspectors, but not in our group. Toting a pack to 14,000 feet was part of the challenge of the Inca Trail, even if the Quechuas were used to the altitude and we weren’t. Even if they were hiking with a wad of coca leaves in their jaws, and we weren’t.
The first part of our trek went smoothly as we paralleled the Urubamba River, a raging whitewater torrent, plunging down from the Andes on its way to the eastern jungle, where it would join one of the headwaters of the Amazon. But as we approached the River Cusichaca—narrower than the Urubamba but strewn with boulders and almost as violent—we ran into our first crisis.
“ Oh, no!” Hildy skidded to a stop. “No way, no how,” she declared. “I’m not walking across that !”
“ That” was a narrow suspension bridge over the Cusichaca, which appeared to be double-timing it on a race toward its junction with the Urubamba.
“ Hildy,” I said quietly while the Quechua porters demonstrated their expertise by trotting across the swaying structure,
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