The Arena Of The Unwell: Inca Trail and Machu Picchu

You want pain, but pain costs, and right here's where you start paying, in sweat ... and a few blisters. If Galapagos was high on my list, this one falls squarely in the bracket of childhood dream.

Upon my return from Galapagos I have a couple of days back in Quito to hang out with Julian and Paul. Paul's just flown in from Peru and I haven't seen him since about September back in London - he looks like a man who's seen the light. He's recently completed the Inca Trail and puts me on track to securing my space with SAS Travel Peru in Cusco ahead of my booked flight to Lima. Unless robbery and mugging is your idea of excitement, I've heard little to persuade me to stick around in the Peruvian capital so I book an immediate onward flight to Cuscu. Before I depart Ecuador, I manage to seduce Paul and Julian with anecdotes of Cotopaxi so we retreat to the countryside for a couple of days. The three of us and a charming young Tasmanian girl named Meg have the place to ourselves before returning to Quito and finally heading our separate ways.

Quito is enduring its coldest snap in about 60 years right now. As a result, my efforts to get out and see a few more of the sights (e.g. the equator line at Mitad del Mundo) are annoyingly scuppered.

After dinner on one of my last evenings spent on the terrace at The Secret Garden, the hostel staff announce a free bullfight next door and it's the real deal. My conscience gets the better of me when it comes to gratuitous bovine slaughter in the name of entertainment and I decline the offer. Oddly enough, the other worldly guests seem to lap it up - "It can't hurt to go just once, can it?". Yes it can, dickheads! Of course, if you gave lethal weapons to dozens of matadors and set them upon each other I'd pay handsomely to watch the uncivilised wankers die.

I'm told next Sunday is Quito census day. In addition to no booze, there'll be no open shops or functioning transport and anyone found outside their "home" will be fined by the police. I'm quite pleased to be leaving this crazy place so I wrap up warm, kick back and await my scheduled departure.

The layover in Lima is a pretty miserable seven hours, punctuated only by the wonders of modern technology which allow me to watch films on my laptop - I can now highly recommend Anvil! The Story Of Anvil. Sympathetic comparisons to This Is Spinal Tap are not undue. Cheers Bob!

My first Peruvian stop is the beautiful Loki Hostel in historic Cusco. Never a dull moment round here, it's buzzing all day with English speaking tourists. The place revolves around a lounge bar which resembles a student union bar. It has a pool table, ping pong, televised footy and serves great food all day - the Chicken Caesar Salad is right up there. My roomies here are an Aussie girl and a pair of hilarious stoner guys from Vancouver who are hitting on anything with a pulse. I kill a couple of days here, not venturing far from the hostel whilst my body tussles with the vicious altitude. The night before the Inca Trail, fifteen trekkers descend upon the SAS office a few blocks away for our briefing. I leave with a 9kg capacity duffel bag (which a paid porter will kindly carry for me) to accompany my day-pack and my alarm is set for 5am.

Day One. A cheeky 15 mins snooze before I spring into action and I hit the hostel reception fully laden at 5:30am. I'm challenged by a sleep-deprived fellow trekker from my hostel, "Where were you at 5am?". Ooops! It seems I'm 30 mins late, but then again, so is the bus. I love when an plan comes together. En-route we stop off for breakfast and a last opportunity to purchase coca leaves. Our guide, Fredy, assures us these will simply assist us during our ascent and not reduce us all to drug-addicted bums. We trust his judgement and move on to our starting point at Piscacucho, or "Kilometer 82" - so named as it's approximately that far from where we set out in Cusco. In the group photo, we're standing just in front of the train tracks which ferry fat Americans in relative comfort to our destination in a matter of hours. We're going to Machu Picchu "bareback" and the fun starts right here at the checkpoint. Passports at the ready. Our names are checked against a government registered list of 500 names, the maximum permitted on the trail per day. What I didn't realise is that about 300 of these names are guides and porters. It's is a pretty significant operation at hand and us weedy gringos are gonna need a little help.

It's a fairly leisurely 12km / 7 hour hike which allows plenty of surplus energy to throw in the odd pirouette and appreciate the scenery. It looks a bit like Snowdonia but stretched skyward to breaking point. The ferocious torrents of water which thunder through the Urubamba river are screaming, "Don't fuck with these mountains, amigo". Llactapata is our first archaeological site where our guide gives us our first history lesson. I'm a bit awestruck by my surroundings and don't catch many his musings except a bit about Quechua, the onomatopoeic language of the Incas. It's claimed the name of the city of Cusco is constructed from the sound of two stones being banged together. Also, the names of native birds in these lands loosely match their mating calls. Or something like that. Another one of those, same time next week.

We stop off for lunch at a ramshackle family house where two valleys meet. The catering porters are here, and our dining and kitchen tents are already set up. I'm beginning to think these guys are magicians. We continue on for another couple of hours to our campsite at Ayapata where the porters have set up about ten three man tents into which our duffel bags have been dropped ready for the sleepover. The catering porters have also hot-footed it up from our lunch spot and start preparing dinner. Now, I know they're magicians. A lone traveller named Veronika asks if she can share my chosen tent. How could I refuse? Freshly made popcorn in hand, the night sky is crystal clear and the stars are treating me to the best movie I've seen in a long while. I could get used to this.

Day Two. I had been pre-warned the second day is a killer. It's two peaks over 16km in 9 hours with a vertical ascent of 1km. It all starts pleasantly enough, heading up through a glistening canopy of trees with hanging vines and tiny streams which look like they just meandered their way into position overnight because they fancied a change of scenery. One visual treat gives way to another. Stick insects are replaced by iridescent butterflies are replaced by yellow hummingbirds are replaced by hawks as we emerge skyward through the roof of the forest. Here we get a chance to look back and see how far we've come and how much further we have to go until we reach our highest point of the trail at Warmiwanusca, or Dead Woman's Pass. There's nothing to do but chomp down hard on the coca leaves and power through to the top of the peak where exhausted trekkers wearily applaud the new arrivals before passing the applause baton to their replacements and setting off again. Up here the sunless side of the mountain is throwing over huge swirls of freezing cloud which seem to rise up in ghostly shapes and dissipate as quickly as they appear. We wait to regroup before heading down the other side towards our awaiting lunch in the Pacaymayo Valley where a couple of our group are starting to succumb to some kind of debilitating and unmentionable sickness. Hats off to them, that was my worst nightmare and they all made it.

We thought the worst was over but the rain set in which made the afternoon a little more challenging than expected. Up to the peak at Runcuracay Pass and a most unlikely lake perched on top then through a natural cave tunnel to the steep downward home straight. The stones are getting real slippery after the downpours and my hiking poles saved my arse a couple of times. I skip the opportunity to inspect another archaeological site off the beaten track and haul my battered bones to our campsite. After dinner our guides treat us to a well deserved Rum Hot Toddy but I could have done without the spooky camping stories and bad jokes. There's a number of other tours out on the hike today and by busting our balls over two peaks today the intrepid fifteen have stolen a lead on the competition for tomorrow which gives us a better chance of getting a spot in the preferred campsite for the final assault.

Day Three. Much more down than up today but it's still a straight six hour hike to to our final campsite. I'm running out of superlatives but this one is a real treat. The weather is perfect and the trails are starting to resemble something like one of those fancy jungle warfare video games with water dripping from every overhang. There are tons of awesome archaeological sites on the way. You can't refer to these sites as "ruins" as the travel books do. We're not talking about the sort of buried nonsense you see on Time Team. These were full on functional buildings - agriculture laboratories and sophisticated observatories - that remained almost perfectly preserved and hidden from the public gaze for over five hundred years. If straw roofs lasted more than two years they'd be pristine.

When we reach our final campsite I take my first hot shower for a few days and relax for a while. We're given one last archaeological treat at Intipata. It's special simply because it's not exactly open to Joe Public like Machu Picchu - you really need to have done the Inca Trail to get there. We've got a 3:30am alarm call tomorrow so I skip dinner and call it a day early, foolishly leaving my boots outside.

Day Four. No stars overnight, just cloud, rain and a boot thief. I wake in a panic. How the hell am I going to finish this in socks? Thankfully, the boot thief was one of our porters who kindly recognised the opportunity for a genuine thief to stitch me up and gave them a new home for the night. Panic over, with torch in hand and rain poncho donned we rejoin the trail to the entrance gate for the home straight. It doesn't open for an hour so all the groups line up in anticipation of daybreak and a change in the weather which doesn't come. It's and hour hike up to The Sun Gate where we're promised our first view of Machu Picchu - it barely emerges from the blanket of cloud. We really should have been here yesterday. Onwards, we trek down to the famous landmark hoping that the weather changes. Major buzz kill. It doesn't. The disappointment is hard to suppress. I'm pretty wet and miserable at this point. Sure, we got here before the fat American commuters so what we can see of Machu Picchu is looking pretty unspoiled but I'm still gutted. I think all of us had the intention of tackling the final peak of Huayna Picchu for its feted views but as we can't even see the peak itself, our exhausted consensus was, "What's the point?".

It's still raining when we leave the visitors centre for nearby town Aguas Calientes (Hot Springs) in a bus like a pack of zombies. I avoid the offer of Guinea Pig for lunch and wait, dazed and confused, at a nearby hostel for a very uncomfortable 4 hour train ride back to Cusco.

In hindsight, The Inca Trail is without doubt the highlight of my travels so far and is gonna be real hard to top. OK, so I wish I could re-shoot the final scenes, but look on the bright side, I can always come back and try again.

Next stop, Bolivia via Arequipa and Lake Titicaca, maybe? ... who knows?

Choon of the day: Foo Fighters - Next Year