Peru

This is going to be my final post. I've been back in the US for four days now, and I think it's time to wean myself off oversharing now that my life in boring again.

(Sample post: Today I went to the famer's market and bought tamales. Then I backed up my hard drive, ate a mango, and painted my toenails. True story, just not an interesting one.)

But Grandma requested a final update on my post-Argentina trip to Peru, so here it is.

Hiking the Inca Trail was more amazing and challenging than I can possibly put into words. In the course of the four-day trek, I was every kind of tired imaginable (and I learned that there are a lot): up at 4 am tired; 8th mile of a 9-mile hike tired; can't breathe from altitude tired; uphill tired; downhill tired; muscles aching from yesterday tired.

We covered 26 miles, through mountains that looked like the backdrop of Lord of the Rings and jungles that begged for Indiana Jones jokes. (I made them. Lots of them. They mostly involved the words "booty" and "plunder.") The hardest day by far was the second, when we climbed up interminable stairs to the well-named "Dead Woman's Pass," at about 14,000 feet. The air that high up is so thin that walking even a few yards is enough to make you pant. We walked a lot more than that.

But of course, getting to the top made the climb worth it. From where we had come, we could see a snow-capped peak and three or four other, smaller mountains with various combinations of scrub and rocks. Where were were going, there were more mountains, these covered in lusher vegetation. Mostly, though, we were concentrating more on breathing than on the view.

The third day of the trek was my favorite, although it started with a rather harrowing situation that involved me, yet another mountain, and a breakfast that was threatening to, uh, escape my stomach before its time. The less said about that, the better. In any case, I was distracted by watching the barren landscape of the higher elevations turn into a jungle as we descended from the Dead Woman's Pass.

We stopped a little before lunch in a beautiful Inca ruin that overlooked a valley that our guide referred to as the "ceja de la selva" — the eyebrow of the rainforest. The rest of the day took us above and around it on a narrow path with 30 foot-deep moss on one side and a sheer drop on the other. We saw orchids and ladyslippers and begonias, an abandoned staircase overgrown with moss that seemed to lead to nowhere, and a natural cave big enough for me to walk through with my backpack without bending over.

The last day we woke up at 4 am to make the sunrise at Inti Punku, a site overlooking Machu Picchu that played some part in Inca sun worship. We got there in time, but it was so misty we could barely see the path some 20 yards in front of us. Machu Picchu itself is overwhelming and stunning, but at that point I was pretty sick. (Stomach again.) I took a bus to the town of Aguas Calientes at the base of the site and spent the rest of the day in our hotel reading Angels and Demons in a real bed.

I know the trip was almost two weeks, and I've only talked about four days of it. But the trek was so phenomenal that the rest of the time — the part with beds, and hot water, and sufficient oxygen — seems kind of mundane in comparison. It wasn't, of course: Peru is a fascinating country with tons of indigenous, colonial and post-colonial history that mixes in really interesting ways. And the food was good.

I'm not going to get all nostalgic, because I did that in my last post. (And more recently, got it all out of my system with a crying fit in the security line at the Miami airport.) So I'm going to leave it at that.