I'm realizing now that I really should have either taken notes or tried to write these posts as I was on the trail and not 2 weeks later back in the comfort of my house, but here's a lame attempt to summarize possibly the hardest and most worthwhile thing I've done.

Inka Trail Map

Day 1 - "Easy"

 Our trek began VERY early in the morning - our guide, E, came to pick us up at our hotel at 5:30 am. We traveled around Cuzco by bus picking up the remainder of our trek companions, and got to the Peru Treks' office by about 6:30. From there, we drove for about 2 hours through Chinchero and Urubamba to Ollantaytambo, where we stopped for breakfast. Since we left as early as we did, there was no breakfast available at our hotel, and I was very glad that we stopped!

From Ollantaytambo, we continued to kilometer 82, where we disembarked, picked up our sleeping bags and mats supplied by Peru Treks, and began our journey.



On our trek we had a family from Mississauga, a honeymooning couple from Montreal and another from Perth, Australia, a couple on a year long tour from England, a young couple from Melbourne, Australia, a nice couple from Belgium and his cousin from Italy, who was a machine on the course.  I'm pretty sure he could have (and maybe did) keep up with the porters!

In the beginning, I was the annoying girl who stops to take pictures of everything, including a donkey!




We had to register at km 82, where in addition to the tickets pictured below, we also got some cool stamps for our passports!




The white things on the prickly pine are a bug that was used as a dye. You can't tell at all, but when E squished some of this stuff in his hand it turned a very deep red colour.  The Inka used to mix their dyes with urine and soak the fabrics for days. It sounds gross, but apparently it works really well, and based on all the other cool, interesting and effective things I saw the Inkas were able to do, I'm inclined to think they're probably right!

Our next stop was at a small village, where we learned how to chew coca leaves and llipta, this black stuff that is used to make the taste a bit sweeter, but also made everyone's mouths numb.  I really didn't like the taste of the coca leaves, even with the llipta, but they did seem to improve my ability to breathe at altitude, so I continued to chew as instructed.  It left beautiful green globs in my teeth, though.




This is a good indication of the type of trail we hiked on day 1, uphill but sloped as opposed to stairs.



Llactapata was discovered by Hiram Bingham in 1911 and was primarily an agricultural station used to supply Machu Picchu with maize.





This was our lunch: avocado with walnuts and cheese. On the trail! Delicious!


We continued on our way to our final destination for the day, Wayllabamba.


It was smokey because there was a forest fire, that we could see later on from our camp site.  S, our other guide, was telling us they are not very common.



When we arrived in Wayllabamba, we stopped outside the local bar (really it was a simple structure with a metal roof), where we tried chica, a home-made alcoholic beverage made from maize. While most of the people on the trek weren't particularly keen on it, T and I liked it a lot!  We then went into the bar, where we saw the vat the chica was made in, and some guinea pigs under the stove. Cui,



Once it got dark, we could see the forest fires that C was talking about. This is my lame attempt to take a photo.  While I had a mini tri-pod, I couldn't find anything stable to put it on...


We had a very, very cold night. T and I snuggled in our tent, and made some changes to our sleeping arrangements for the next day.

You can find all of my unedited photos on Picasa:

Peru