"We have to change the mind just a little bit to understand these
people," he says.
Or as Liz Sotoodeh puts it, grimacing as the two of us huff up
toward 13,779-foot Warmiwañusqa Pass, "I just wish I was pulling a
boulder."
We carry almost nothing, and I try to keep this in mind as we
climb. Actually I have felt surprisingly good since we hit the
trail, a spring in my step I attribute partly to the running I did
before the trip, partly to my decision to walk most of the trail.
Certainly it's difficult to run, especially when the trail goes
mountain-goat steep. But I walk mostly because running seems to
defeat the purpose. Much of the
Inca Trail to
Machu Picchu is
uneven stone; running requires careful attention to footing so as
not to twist an ankle.
With such scenery erupting about us, it seems silly to stare at the
ground, an attitude many of my companions adopt.
"The running is secondary to the culture," says Ed Wehan, who once
ran 100 miles in nineteen hours but now moves at a mall- walker's
pace. "You can picture the Incas, get a feel for the country by
being out in it."
Run or walk, as we ascend toward Warmiwañusqa Pass, most of our
group is rasping, one is barfing, and Ed is singing.
"Tiiiiired of living, but scaaared of dying, that old man river he
just keeps on rollin' … ."
Cresting the pass is just part of our longest day, an eighteen-mile
trek that takes us from our campsite at Llactapata to
Phuyupatamarca, over three mountain passes, a trip that takes me
about ten hours. This might sound like a grind but it isn't. We
pass through villages where children light up when we pull colored
pencils and berets from our packs; cloud forests thick with moss
and cool shadow, and sprinkled with bright orchids and black
butterflies; wide, grassy pampas; and, atop Warmiwañusqa Pass, a
Scottish-moorlike scene in which a cold wind sends cannonballs of
gray fog gusting past.
That evening, standing outside my tent at Phuyupatamarca, I watch
the setting sun paint orange cloud swirls, then touch the snowy
mountains soft pink. Later, over the rim of those same mountains,
we see lightning detonate in bright explosions. Eddie points out
the shapes of animals woven into the Milky Way while the cold
stings our fingers.
"Just for us," he says.
This isn't entirely true. When we summit a last steep pitch of
trail the next day and look down at Machu Picchu from the Gateway
of the Sun, the lost city of the Incas has been found, by swarms of
tourists in buses that belch their way up and down the mountain.
The sun god sent man and woman to civilize the world, and they have
done far too good a job of it.