Local guides always seem to adopt western names.
Our guide for the Inca Trail was no exception. His name evolved over the four days we spent with him. Smith, Smithy, Smitty, Smiddy. He answered to just about any permutation.
And he was very cool.
He met us at 10am to explain the plan.
As the story unfolded, so the blood began to drain, one by one, from faces around the circle.
“We will set out at 5am on day one” he opened. Ken passed out.
“We will climb to an altitude of 17,500 feet” he said a little later. Clare dabbed inconspicuously at a trickle of blood that started leak from her eye.
“Temperatures will fall to minus ten” Smitty added, almost as an aside. Someone suffered explosive decompression of the bowel.
It felt like a check list of all the things you would normally go some distance to avoid.
By the end, we all felt dangerously ill-equipped and likely to die horribly at some stage during the trek, of exposure, asphyxiation, avalanche or lack of sleep – and probably all four.
And that didn’t even take account of the possibility of being eaten buy a Puma.
Or a Llama.
Chastened, we rushed out to buy puma repellent, oxygen bottles and emergency flares. People routinely overlook the benefits of a pair of well-tailored bell-bottoms in a mountain emergency.
The trousers I lost in the laundry debacle in La Paz were replaced by a natty pair of zip-offs. What I didn’t notice in the suspicious darkness of the shop was the suspicious darkness of the trousers.
Accustomed to trouser darkening fear, you would have thought that I would have a keen eye for what was happening. Extracting them from the carefully sealed plastic wrapping back at the hotel, it became apparent that I had mistaken them for a new pair whereas, in fact, they had been worn by a Cusquenan vagrant for the last six months.
The presence of the filth was only obscured by the uniformity of it. The brown trousers that I had carried so proudly out of the shop were, in fact, white.
At least that is what the label said.
Shaking off the disappointment, I put them in the bag on the basis that a time would come, in the very near future, when they seemed the better choice, after four days of tramping through waste deep Llama droppings and sleeping with the transport mules for warmth.
When the shopping was finished, we wandered to the market. Acres of stalls crowded under a giant asbestos roof, collapsing in parts and undoubtedly raining tiny fragments of death onto all who breathed the air. It didn’t matter much to the llamas or the cows as they died long before they made it to market.
But what they did to the poor creatures just wasn’t fair.
The decapitated bull’s heads came complete with horns and eyes. All that was missing was the skin. I defy anyone to produce a pot big enough to boil it.
The severed pig’s trotters were pretty routine but the severed cow’s muzzles were just plain bad. The noses were still soft and wet, the tongues lolled drunkenly out of the toothsome mouths and whiskers just made it all seem so sad.
And that was before we stumbled upon the wind dried llama heads, eyes peering out of the mummified flesh like a discarded prop from the ‘Night of the Llamas’ horror movie.
Cusco has a lot of churches.
They differ only in size, displaying identical towers and belfries, arches and doorways. The Spanish arrived with space in their bags for only one church design and after ripping down all the Inca constructions, cannibalised the ruins for building materials. The only problem was that the Incas mastered the art of earthquake proof construction and the Spanish lost interest in demolition when the work got too hard.
As a result Cusco is littered with slightly incongruous but elegant colonial buildings which are Inca inter-locking stones to head-height and Spanish above.
After a statutory TJ recommended lunch of Huevos Rancheros at Jacks Café we wandered aimlessly.
Earthquakes in 1650 and 1950 levelled this place.
It’ll happen again.
And then the Incas will be back.
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