The Inca Trail - some tips for the trekker

I'll never forget the Inca Trail. My memories are still rich even though I trekked it 15 years ago. The smell of the damp air in the tent, the musty taste of coca leaves and the incessant rain that fell for every one of the 4 days still stay with me. The final morning waking up bats with our torches and being the first group to enter the misty ruins of Machu Picchu, before the throngs of fresh smelling tourists on the train from Cusco arrived. The feelings of being tired, dirty, elated, joyful at the same time, all mixed in with a wrap of deja vu.  

Five hundred years ago the Inca King in the High Andes was able to breakfast on fresh Pacific fish, brought by his relay runners over 300 miles. The roads were built of cobbled stones and were designed for travel by foot or pack animals as the Incas never invented the wheel. Their roads spanned the 4 corners of their empire, which was larger than Roman empire, from Ecuador down to Argentina and could have circled the earth twice over.  Some of these Inca roads still exist today and the most famous of these is a 45km stretch called the Inca Trail. It takes 4 days and 3 nights and carves its way past ancient ruins, over misty mountain passes just below the snowline, and through cloud forests of waterfalls, wild orchids and humming birds. It ends in the fabled Lost City of the Incas, Machu Picchu. In August 2000 , 4 of my friends and I were fortunate enough to make that journey.

Acclimatisation in Cusco:

After flying in from Lima to Cusco, the old Inca capital lodged in the Andes at 3,300 metres, we made sure that we spent two days just getting acclimatised to the thin air. I found the symptoms to be quite subtle, tightness around the temple area, a runny nose, and a slight headache. Running or walking at a pace will leave you catching your breath for the next half hour. For some people being at altitude can be worse, with a feeling of tightness around the chest and nausea. Drinking tea made from coca leaves said to alleviate the symptons as does refraining from smoking, drinking alcohol, and eating too much. The symptoms last only a few days, after which you barely notice them.

There’s enough to do in Cusco to keep you busy – the magnificent Plaza de Armas is the centre of Cusco , a pretty colonial  town resplendent with Cathedral and Church. When the Spanish arrived they built these on top of the old Inca buildings, although there are traces of Inca Walls and the Inca temple called the Coricancha. There are some lovely hikes to nearby ruins in Sachsayhuaman, Qenko and Puka Pukara which take about a day to do fully and show how sophisticated the Incas were. There are examples of their magnificent stonework engineered to resist earthquakes (some limestome blocks were over 130 tonnes), examples of their tunnels and underwater aqueducts.

Cusco has some excellent restaurants and some serve a local delicacy called cuy, which is Guinea Pig. Be warned though that cuy is served looking pretty much like a guinea pig, belly up, with an expression on its face that speaks volumes about its recent fate. With its limbs stuck in the air it’s a bit fidgety to eat, like a quail, and tastes, as these types of food tend to, like chicken. There’s a whole selection of international restaurants in Cusco and even a British pub (the Cross Keys). The local drink is the excellent Pisco Sour which is made of grapes, lemons and egg white and looks a bit like a glass of shaken Fairy Liquid.


Using a trekking agency – roughing it in comfort

Cusco is the place to organise your trek and there are many hiking agencies who can provide porters, cooks, guides and equipment. We used Big Foot and we met a well-informed guide called Washington and a superb cook called Theophilo. I would recommend doing this all in Cusco as organising it from Europe or the USA can be very expensive. In choosing an agency make sure they are environmentally friendly by taking away their rubbish, not burning wood and not over-burdening the porters. As responsible travellers, all rubbish should be packed away with you, and if you can, pick up any litter you see on the way.

The comfort of using an agency became apparent to me at lunch on the third day of the trail as we sat on chairs around a table adorned with a Peruvian patterned tablecloth. We were sipping tea and had just finished our meal of vegetable soup followed by rice, sweet-potatoes and peppers (the porters ate the same meals as we did). Theophilo had knocked up a culinary masterpiece whilst surrounded by clouds on a 3,600 metres pass called Phuyupatamarka. Getting the agency to organise our meals and sites made the trek relatively comfortable. It was hardly roughing it.

The Porters – the supermen of the Andes

On the first day of our trek we stopped off at Urubamba for Theophilo to pick up 5 porters. A mad scramble ensued, as about 30 men volunteered for our trek. In the dry season the local farmers top up their incomes this way, which is clearly sought after work.  You could choose your porters yourselves, which does have an element of uncertainty, but at least you know that the money goes direct to the local community, instead of an agency who could be just giving a small cut to these hard working men of the mountains.

The porters of the Andes are generally quite small averaging about 5 feet 5 inches but they are incredibly fit and their muscular frames are able to carry huge loads. They don’t wear boots like the hikers, instead they prefer open sandals with which they can race with full load up and down the passes. One porter apparently was seen carrying a VW engine!

At the start of every day’s trek, the porters were the last to leave the camp but within about half an hour they had overtaken us in order to make it to the next camp to claim the best areas for us to pitch our tents. Once a year the porters race the Inca Trail – the record so far is just over 3 hours which shows that these men really are the supermen of the Andes. As I  can’t speak either Quechua or Spanish as they passed I  would just offer them coca leaves. They take about ten leaves and roll them in to a ball which they place like chewing tobacco under the bottom lip; the juices of the coca leaf are said to impart extra energy at altitude, although I think it just made my tongue and lips green.  The Incas made cocaine from the coca leaves but its use was regulated to Royal Messengers, the Chasquis.

The porters, like most Peruvians, are Catholics but they also have their own religion of the mountains and they believe in spirits and haunted areas they would be too scared to go to.

Fitness: The Inca Trail or Inca Trial?

You don’t have to be super fit to do the Inca Trail, but a general level of fitness will mean that you enjoy it a lot more. You are in inspired settings that lift the soul, so you feel more energised. The equatorial sun at altitude can be deceptively strong so it is important to wear sun-block and a hat and to keep drinking water.  At nights the temperature plummets to freezing point so you must take warm clothes with you too. The hardest part of the trail is climbing the Dead Woman’s Pass which is a series of unending steps , with a teasing false summit, peaking at the snowline at 4,200 metres. You’ll feel your heart beat race in the rarified air and  a great sense of achievement once you’ve done it that transcends the aches you’ll feel in your knees by the end of the day.

On arriving in Peru your two health priorities are firstly getting used to the altitude and having a robust tummy. All over the world, having an upset stomach has a local name such as Delhi Belly (India), Montezuma’s Revenge (Mexico),Mummy's tummy (Egypt), Bali Belly (Bali). In Peru this is termed the Inca Two Step. The rule is if you can’t cook it, peel it or wash it (in bottled water) then forget it. Do try cerviche (raw fish with lemon juice) but only after the trail. getting ill on the trail is not pleasant and because helicopters only go up to a certain altitude, you may end up being carried by a porter some of the way. After day two of the Trail when bottled water runs out, you have to drink water from streams purified with iodine tablets.

On the trail at Pacamayo campsite, we met a hiker from America who was weak and bed-ridden with a stomach disorder. It was a two day hike to any medical help and radioing a helicopter would have cost $3,000  (that night the helicopter wouldn’t risk a landing due to the mist). The Inca Trail is a terrible place to fall ill and it is worth taking all precautions against that eventuality.

Wearing the correct footwear is absolutely essential as the paving stones of the Inca Trail are not uniform and angled so could easily cause you to slip. My Hawkshead Lomers were comfortable, caused no blisters and were totally waterproof even after I had stepped through streams and puddles. In the wet, the soles grip well. Ankle support is vital for me as two years ago I broke my ankle and had seven screws put in to the bones – my Lomers provided me with excellent ankle support and they were the most precious piece of equipment I took on the Trail.


Raiders of the Lost Ark, or a Back Packers convention

In those days, any amount of trekkers could hike the route and it felt really crowded (especially so during trekking season which is April to October). Up to 400 people could have been doing the the Trail, but nowadays the government has made it compulsory to have a permit and numbers are now restricted. It’s so exceptionally beautiful, it’s inevitable that people from all across the world will congregate.There are several campsites and these can appear to have a crowded feeling. The campsites are adequate, some have running water, but the toilets are best politely  described as Spartan. Be careful of the campsite at Huayllabamba on the first night of the trail– there are thieves in the area, and I heard a story of some Dutch trekkers who woke to find their tents slit, rucksacks and boots missing. All they had left were their sleeping bags and pyjamas. At Huayllabamba, I made sure I slept on my boots and kept my money and passport under the insoles!  

Certain parts of the trail have a great feeling of solitude and oneness with nature and history. You can easlily find your group alone in a bamboo grove, with a cascading waterfall and humming birds. On the other hand, certain parts of the trail have crowds on them, such as the highest pass, where it can feel like a convention of the world’s backpackers, fashioned in goatie beards and dripping in cameras.

On entering Machu Picchu at the end of the Trail you arrive there after a walk in the dark with torches at 7 am and for a while you have thwarted the tourist trap. But as the buses arrive, there is a confluence of day-trippers and  Inca Trail hikers, the washed meeting the unwashed. There is hotel there with a restaurant that serves full breakfasts and plays supermarket music. Its inevitable that such wonder as Machu Picchu is so touristy but it is  so breath-taking, you won’t notice this.
  
If you are expecting the trail to be like the first scene in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, then the Inca Trail won’t be what you are looking for- there are other trails, less well known such as Vilcabamba, Mollepata and the Chilca circuit which would be the roads less travelled by. Further excacavations in the area still go on and there are still legends of lost cities made of gold which lie at the end of trails overgrown by the Amazon jungle, which the Spanish never conquered.

The ruins

The trail winds its course around many ruins and it is useful to have a guide for this purpose. Each ruin had a specific purpose but as the Incas had no writing , much of this is still open to historical conjecture.

On the final day of the trail, we left camp at Huinay Huana at 4.30am and walked one and a half hours up the steps to the Sun Gate, our torch lights rudely waking the bats. From there you can get a view of Macchu Picchu which was surrounded in mist and for me added to its mystery.

From there we descended to Machu Picchu to arrive at 7 am. It takes about half a day to explore the city of Machu Picchu and a guide will be able to recount the various stories and explanations of each sector of the city. Some say Machu Picchu was the Inca King Pachacutec’s hill top city, the watchtower of a frontier province. Others maintain it to be an agricultural outpost or an observatory as parts of the ruins align with the moon, sun and certain star constellations. As you walk the ruins there is something mysterious about them, as if there’s an untold story, as if the rocks hold a secret that they want to but are unable to yield. Every year, Shamans arrive in the world heritage site, to perform rituals for the spirits of the mountains that cradle Machu Picchu. Who were the people who made it and how could they moved the rocks? What was its purpose? . Why was it deserted so suddenly and how did the Spanish miss this place? When Hiram Bingham discovered it in 1911 it was overgrown by jungle and must have looked very dissimilar to its well pruned appearance today.

The ruins are breathtaking  and awesome – its not just the sheer physical geography of a city perched next to sheer precipitous slopes, engulfed on all sides by mountains and mists, but the buildings too are beautifully built,  with  terracing for agriculture, temples and fine stonework. They evoked the richness of a once great race but they also brought to me a sense of sadness as they  were made by a people which was cruelly and treacherously put down, their beliefs and traditions airbrushed away.

Hiking the Inca Trail was unlike anything I had ever done before, or am likely to do again. Whether the Trail is to find nature, history, a physical challenge or a pilgrimage there are things around every corner that just left you breathless. Would I recommend the Inca Trail as a holiday? The answer would be to whom? The weather can change and if you are not fit it could be arduous. For those who choose to do it, the Inca Trail will leave them feeling physically tired, mentally enriched and even spiritually lifted. The experiences of those 4 days will always be with them.