Latinalicious: The South America Diaries

by Becky Wicks

  Machu Picchu is called ‘The Lost City’ because it quite literally got lost in the jungle until a lucky American explorer called Hiram Bingham III brushed some wild vegetation aside and rediscovered it in 1911. In 1983 the site was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site and now thousands of visitors every year get to witness what’s known as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. Not all of them walk there, though. The cheater’s train only takes a couple of hours.

  In order to feel more excited about seeing Machu Picchu for myself, I went to the Inca Museum in Cuzco yesterday. It was pretty good, although, as usual, the English translations left a lot to the imagination. Also, like many museums about ancient civilisations, it was probably about eighty per cent pots. I’m always suspicious of museums that feature vast collections of pots. Sure, you’ve got your mummies in a dark room, conveniently shrouded in cloth and lit very dimly by a two-watt red bulb behind a glass door, and you’ve got your combs and other tools crafted from flint and promiscuous hooker bone, welded together with dinosaur semen and what-not, but mostly what you pay to see in these places is a whole load of pots.

  I don’t know about you, but to me this just screams, ‘We don’t know anything about these people at all, but hey, we found some pots, so we’ll make a museum out of them and pretend they tell us loads, till we figure out something else. That’ll be ten soles, please.’

  I wonder, if the human race as we know it dies out, whether future civilisations on earth will pay to visit museums filled with the remnants of our Crate and Barrel eighteen-piece dinner sets and Betty Crocker frying pans and cake trays. Will they all go, ‘Ooh, weren’t they clever, would you look at the decorative artwork on that Harvey Norman kettle!’ completely oblivious to the evidence of all that quantum electrodynamics/nuclear fission/laser technology we dreamed up later? It’s a bit daft, when you think about it. The Incas must have made so many wonderful things, but the average tourist coming to Cuzco judges them on their giant pots.

  I suppose it’s their fault really, though … they didn’t write anything down. I found out that the Incas kept records by tying knots in bits of string that varied in size and colour, which we can only guess the meaning of in most cases. They communicated verbally, of course, but as for taking a pen to a piece of paper … well, they just drew pretty pictures on all those pots. Even the reason for the existence of Machu Picchu itself is open to debate, and I’m looking forward to learning more about these debates on the trek.

  Somewhat disheartened and not much the wiser as to the real way of the Incas, I had an excellent lasagne at Cuzco’s Paddy’s Pub, ‘the highest 100% Irish-owned pub on the planet at 11156 ft’, according to the sign (shameful, I know, but someone told me their lasagna was excellent, which it was). Then I paid three soles to enter the Museo de Historia Natural, which is basically a large room that smells like disinfectant, full of fossils and creepy dead things.

  I couldn’t make out if this was Peru’s ugliest collection of animals, or if they’ve all just been stuffed so badly that they’re now grossly contorted. I swear, there’s a member of the puma family in this museum with the tiniest head ever and a body so long it looks like it’s been tied between two buses driving in opposite directions. All have ghoulish, bulging eyes, too. You wouldn’t want to get stuck in here at night.

  Like a lot of South America, the Museo de Historia Natural also needs to invest in some more light bulbs. A lot of the exhibits were shrouded in such a cloak of darkness I could barely tell my dead Homopteras from my dead Orthopteras, two types of what appeared to be giant winged insects, fastened cruelly to red tabletops with large pins. However, if you want to see a pig fetus, a double-headed calf, a Siamese goat or a six-legged lamb, this is the place for you. Most of these oddities from the animal kingdom are crammed into Tupperware boxes, or floating in tanks full of formaldehyde. I stood for a while in front of what had to have been the world’s biggest toad wedged like a strange balloon into a screw-top jar and wondered whether there was more point to a room full of Inca pots, or whether both were irrelevant and I was just a silly tourist throwing my money at whatever I was told to.

  Oh. If you’re a corn fan (the vegetable, not the band) there are twenty-one different types in here. I counted them. Corn is very important in Bolivia and Peru: they do everything with it. And while we’re onto veggies, the Incas were the first to cultivate the potato in Peru and there are seventy-eight kinds of fake potatoes on display for your enjoyment as well. I counted them, too. They’re not really good fakes, though. I couldn’t help but think that if the people of Cuzco put half as much effort into producing their fake potatoes as they do their fake North Face and Columbia weatherproof hiking jackets, there might have been more than one person in the museum. As it was, it was just me … counting veggies and scribbling notes like some weird plastic food fetishist from afar.

  We’ve got a 5 a.m. start tomorrow and then it’s time to shove everything I own, bar my five kilos, into the hotel storage room and begin the Inca Trail. I’m kind of hoping I get some sort of dream recollection of my own past life in Machu Picchu overnight, so I can have something more to look forward to, like my friend from the hostel. Knowing my luck, though, I’ll dream of getting stuck in a tent with dead toads stuffed into Inca pots, all lit dimly by Mother Ayahuasca holding a red two-watt bulb.

  8/11

  Inca Trail. Day One.

  Dear Diary,

  How are you? I’m OK but I’d prefer it if I was in a hotel room and not a tent. Today I counted sixty-nine donkeys. I thought if I gave myself a task other than trying not to faint, it might make walking in the rain up vertical slopes with a rucksack more bearable. Did I spell ‘bearable’ right? It looks weird written in pen and I have no way of checking. No wonder the Incas didn’t write anything down. They seem like they were very clever and they probably didn’t want to be associated with grammatical errors of any sort.

  I hope my laptop is OK in the hotel safe. I’m quite worried about it, although I should probably be more worried about the fact that my tent is on a slope on a mountainside and every time I move, I seem to roll a little downhill in my sleeping bag. I also need a wee, but I don’t want to go because the loo at this campsite is miles away and there are lots of big animals snuffling about. One of the guys said he was holding in a poo because he didn’t want to walk through ‘the donkey shit gauntlet’ just to get to the toilet. There really are a lot of donkeys up here — I swear, half the world’s population must live on the Inca Trail.

  Anyway, today was OK. There were only a few hard bits, really. Elias says we’ve made it through the easy day. All up, the Inca Trail is forty-three kilometres and I’m not even sure how many we walked today, but we were hiking for a good six hours after making it through the checkpoint. My legs hurt a bit but already the scenery is mind-blowing and our chef, another Octavio, is a genius. He made grilled trout for lunch with rice and some sort of spinach quiche. For dinner we had stir-fried beef.

  To think that someone had to carry the stove all this way … it’s insane. I saw one porter rush past me with eight stools tied to his back today, too, and another guy with a bag of heavy tent poles. You’re not allowed to leave anything at the campsites on the trail, so everything has to be carried in and out and re-erected by the porters, every time.

  You should see these guys. There are fifteen of them in our crew and just eight of us ‘trekkers’, including Elias. These porters range in age from twenty years old to fifty-three, all of them as strong as mules. Elias said the oldest porter working the trek is sixty-three but he’s not in our group. That’s the same age as my dad. It’s almost too much to imagine my dad carrying a bag of tent poles up near vertical slopes in Peru. He gets grumpy enough pushing a trolley round Sainsbury’s.

  Each porter carries twenty-five kilos, but Elias told me that, before regulations put a stop to it, some used to carry over forty kilos! That’s only a little under what I weighed before Buenos Aires.

  I like Elias, Diar
y. He’s always smiling and he totally loves his family. He told me how he is saving up to build a house and how his six-year-old son wants to do the Inca Trail with him at Christmas. He also said that last month he did four treks back to back, which is sixteen legs. He’s a machine. We discussed Peruvian politics (as corrupt as Bolivia’s by the sound of it), the weather in Iceland, Will Smith, Inca pots and the merits of Vegemite, which he likes, even though no one else he knows in Peru can stand it. I told him I would post him some Vegemite when I get back to Australia, and he told me that in return he wouldn’t let me die on the Inca Trail. It’s funny what you talk about when you walk with a stranger all day, and how much you can learn from each other.

  The three Aussie guys in my group — Josh, Zack and Ben — are all AFL footie players and seem to walk at the pace of a herd of giraffes. They’re always ahead by at least an hour. I’ve barely seen them all day, except for meal times and a competitive game of Uno in the dining tent tonight. I like Uno. I remember once on a holiday to Mexico, me and my friends Hannah and Kirsty played Uno all day every day in a hotel bar for about a week while drinking through the cocktail menu with a bunch of Texans. There was nothing else to do because it was rainy season. I remember watching the deckchairs flying across the beach and landing in the swimming pool as a hurricane destroyed everything around us, thinking, God, this was a terrible idea, no wonder it was a cheap all-inclusive, last-minute deal. I’ve never been very good at travel planning, now that I think about it.

  There are two very nice Asian–Australians in the group, too, both called David; and an Aussie girl called Emma, who’s doing the trek as a kind of last hurrah before she gets reconstructive knee surgery. She says she has the knees of an eighty-year-old, even though she’s thirty-two. She’s still faster than me.

  Elias told me today that our final destination is actually pronounced ‘Machu Pick-chew’ which means ‘Big Mountain’, whereas ‘Machu Pee-chew’, the way most visitors pronounce it, means ‘Big Penis’. How funny is that?

  I have nothing to do in this tent apart from write in you, Diary. It’s easy to see how the Incas got so much done. I wonder what kind of empire I could build if I didn’t spend seven hours a day on Facebook?

  Goodnight, Diary. Sorry for never writing in you before now.

  I wonder what font my handwriting would be in if it was on a computer …

  9/11

  Inca Trail. Day Two.

  How’s it going, Diary?

  I’ve been thinking very carefully about whether to say something as casual and seemingly flippant to you as ‘today was the hardest day of my life’, but really, I honestly think it was. I’m here in my sleeping bag on yet another perilous slope and it’s only 7.30 p.m. Camp is deathly quiet beyond this canvas. Everyone’s crashed out in recovery mode because today was hideous. Truly horrendous, Diary. I even cried at one point.

  Of course, I did it very discreetly behind my sunglasses as Elias puffed diligently along behind me, but as the steps kept on coming, so did my tears and I thought my lungs were about to collapse along with my dignity. I can barely convey the difficulty that comes with heaving your wobbling thighs up an endless rocky staircase at high altitude, carrying a rucksack, two litres of water (and a half-eaten Toblerone).

  I have never seen so many stairs, Diary. Scaling them was like one of those dreams where you try to move but you can’t … you know? When your limbs become heavy and the air thick, like sludge? Every time I thought I’d reached the top, more steps sprang into view, each one at least a foot high and a foot deep.

  Yesterday, the less fit among us stopped regularly to ‘admire the view’, but today there was no disguising the desperate panting coming from all corners as people stopped, hunched over beneath their rucksacks, slugged back water and struggled for air. I was huffing and puffing all day, but still, something made me want to hold my breath as the porters passed me and it wasn’t just their body odour. I felt so guilty even conveying my discomfort when they were carrying so much more. Loads of them were doing it in open-toed sandals, too. Some were even running!

  Two of the guys in my group got sick today: one of the Davids and AFL Ben. Ben says it was the food (he did rather overindulge in Octavio’s offerings last night), but it was more than likely altitude sickness that made him hurl his guts up first thing this morning, outside his tent. It made a nice breakfast for the chickens, and a good wake up call for the rest of us, at least.

  The second day of the Inca Trail is known to be the most difficult, as you have to scramble all the way up to Warmiwañusqa (Dead Woman’s Pass) at 4198 metres, and then walk all the way down to Pacaymayu Camp at 3580 metres. While battling to control first your protesting quads and then your quivering knees and calves, you literally have to climb a mountain, stop at the top and scramble down the other side. Those Incas were either deranged or made of stronger stuff than your average twenty-first century human. Why they didn’t build Machu Picchu there instead, I will never know. It would have saved a lot of effort on everyone’s part.

  I went through all the clichés and songs in my head, weighing them up: ‘I’d climb a mountain for you’ (but not this one, ever again); ‘don’t make a mountain out of a molehill’ (because molehills can be jumped over in one second); ‘ain’t no mountain high enough’ (yes there bloody well is, it’s this one). Every one of them annoyed me.

  The mountaintop is called Dead Woman’s Pass because apparently it looks like the contours of a horizontal woman, when you look at it from the valley below. I couldn’t see it myself. I was too busy crying. I chewed so many coca leaves today I’m surprised I didn’t fly off the pass when I finally made it up there, and perhaps because of them I didn’t feel the altitude as much. I didn’t get sick anyway. Just knackered.

  I made it to camp at roughly 4 p.m. and promptly collapsed on the blue tarpaulin laid out on the floor by our tents. Elias called Happy Hour (popcorn and hot drinks) at five o’clock and we all dragged ourselves begrudgingly to the dining tent, practically falling asleep over coca teas and a halfhearted game of Uno.

  Apparently, tomorrow isn’t as difficult. I hope not; I don’t think my legs could take it. Machu Picchu still feels like a distant dream, and not from a past life, either, sadly. Goodnight, Diary. Thanks for listening. You’re helping me not to feel so alone. Sometimes when I’m alone for long spells I go a bit mad, like last night when I couldn’t sleep for a while in my tent because I kept thinking about my eyes just looking at the back of my eyelids. It’s a bit weird how eyes never really switch off. I’m starting to like writing all my thoughts in you, although I do still miss my laptop, so I don’t think this relationship will last. Don’t get any ideas.

  10/11

  Inca Trail. Day Three.

  Oh my God, Diary,

  Today I learned even more more about how the Incas made human sacrifices — child sacrifices, too — during or after important events. Elias told us that as many as 4000 people were killed when the chief Inca Huayna Capac died in 1527. That’s like the US government ordering a mass hanging after the death of a president, just to show acknowledgment for what he did/didn’t do. Mental.

  Cranial deformation was also popular with the Incas. To do it they’d wrap cloths tightly around the soft heads of newborn babies in order to change the shape of their skulls. The result of this was a line of people we’d call Coneheads today (probably), who, instead of being laughed at and made to feature in local carnivals, were regarded as a higher class. Only the most noble of Incas were Coneheads. Again, mental.

  The Incas also tested the intelligence of their children at an early age and, based on the results, kids were either sent to school in order to become part of the nobility, or taught a trade. Personally I think this is terrible. My GCSEs were enough pressure at age sixteen, but imagine if a pass or fail was the difference between living in a palace eating delicious roasted guinea pig with a noble future ahead of me, or living in a slum with the cockroaches, learning how to make yet more pots. Mayb
e that explains why there are so many of them (pots, that is)? It must have been a hard test to pass.

  All of this further cements my theory that the Incas knew full well what they were doing when they got the aliens to help them build Machu Picchu. They’re probably looking down on us from their spaceships, laughing as we struggle to follow in their footsteps, saying things like, ‘I can’t believe they think we did that fucking walk. What fools!’ The Incas were clearly very smart, but very cruel.

  Anyway, Diary, today was pretty interesting. It was tough because my legs still hurt from yesterday, but nowhere near as challenging. We started early, as usual. Our wake-up call was at 5 a.m., and after another of Octavio’s feasts (this one featured omelettes, fresh fruit salad and steaming tins of hot chocolate), we started our ascent to Runkurakay Pass, which lies at an altitude of 3950 metres. It took the AFL boys about an hour. It took the rest of us two. On the way up, we saw a few lagoons and the mosquitoes started to attack, but luckily I’d replaced my now-eaten Toblerone with a can of mozzie spray in my day pack.

  Once over the pass, it was mostly downhill again for about five hours. My calves feel firmer than they have in years, which is kind of cool. I keep squeezing them and, yup, they’re definitely not as wobbly as they were. I wonder if that’s because I’m fitter after just three days or if my muscles have seized up in self-defence. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

  We saw some amazing Inca ruins on the way to the Wiñay Wayna campsite (where I am now, in yet another sloping tent close to a dodgy cliff edge). The first was Sayacmarca – a fort-like ruin that was once the old control point for those heading on the trail towards Machu Picchu. Getting to the top of it involved an optional climb up even more stairs, which Emma and I declined in favour of finally beating the AFL boys to our designated snack spot at Phuyupatamarca. They overtook us about twenty minutes later.