Inca Trail - Day 1

This morning at 5am one of the tour guides picked us up....guess the bus was too big to fit down our street so we walked down to the main square. It was pretty cold, so Charli let me borrow her super multifunctional neck warmer thingy.....

From Cuzco we drove about an hour and half to the trail head. On the way, it started raining, so we all had to get these really great looking plastic ponchos. They turned out to be a big part of our time on the trail.

It stayed pretty rainy all day, but the mountains were pretty amazing and the trail wasn't too difficult.

Along the trail there were several small settlements of people who farm and sell things to people along the trail. At one of these stops we saw this little boy sleeping in a doorway....so cute! Turns out that ALL peruvian babies are extremely cute.

We saw the first of many Incan ruins. Our guide wasn't the best tour guide, so I don't remember much about them, I think I may have also fallen asleep while he was talking....oops.

At about two we stopped for lunch. There were about 16 of us in our group and we had about 10 porters too, who were all these little tiny peruvian men that could carry these huge packs. They would of course hike way faster than us and set up our tents and make our food. They were really impressive. By the time we got to the lunch spot, we found this all set up, which was nice since it had started raining again. The group consisted of people from Ireland, Canada, UK, US, Australia, Poland and France. Over the course of the trail we became good friends with most of these people.

Along the trail we saw lots of donkeys, they were all packed with gear and all looked a little like Eore.

We got to our camp about 5pm and found our own little tent village set up.

At dinner we realized that one entire side of the table was wearing a chullo (that classic Peruvian beanie). Dinner always started with soup and ended with tea. I didn't really love either but it was warm and on a cold, wet night it was great.

By about 9 we were off to bed. We all squeezed in a little tent, which was acutally warmer. Day starts early again tomorrow morning at 5. Tomorrow is summit day....

Cuzco

This morning in Lima we met up with Charlie who flew in from London to adventure around with us. So good to see her again! We met at the airport and caught a flight to Cuzco.

Just after taking this picture these people stopped us and motioned at their camera, I thought they wanted us to take a picture of them, turns out they wanted to take a picture with us...haha! This was even more funny because these two boys at the Lima airport had asked us for the same thing earlier. Who knew that we would be such a novelty here...

We were SO happy when we got to our hostel finally! We had all been traveling all night long and were supper happy to see a warm bed to rest on.

We headed down to the kitchen to have some coca (cocaine leaf) tea, which is supposed to help with the elevation change. Not too bad actually. Cuzco is at 11,000ft.

While we had our tea we chatted with James, who works for the hostel, he set us up with a two day tour to Lake Titikaka when we get back from the Inca Trail. We found out that he had lived in Provo, Utah with a friend for a while before being deported. He had lots of questions for us, so we chatted about a lot of gospel topics which was really great. We gave him some scriptures to read in his Book of Mormon, which we found out later he didn't read....classic. Still a very nice man and it was fun to have a missionary moment with him.

After a nice long nap we headed out to explore the town a little. Here we are in the main square, with the big main cathedral in the background. The weather is pretty cold, they are in the end of winter here.

We went to a traditional Peruvian restaurant that James recommended, very tasty. Charli had an Alpaca llama dish...not my favorite and Rosey got great trout and we had Inka Cola, a Peruvian soda that tastes a lot like bubblegum. Pretty tasty. After dinner we went to our informational meeting about the Inca Tail which we are starting bright an early in the morning at 5am!

To Peru!

After church Sunday afternoon, Rosey and I grabbed our packs and headed to LAX.

Luckily it was a pretty comfortable plane and we had an uneventful 8 hour flight directly to Lima.