peru – 30-november, 2009 – inca trail day 4
30-november, 2009 – 4th day of inca trail
3:30a comes way too fast and i’m deeply asleep. the porters wak us and as a group we do surprisingly well getting ourselves going. we really only were running about 10-15 minutes behind the blistering pace that alex (our guide) had laid out for us the night before.
a comment about breakfast – cake. seriously, it was cake, with frosting. the porters and the cook are quite pleased with themselves, but i think everyone had the same reaction when they were introduced to the cake at 3:45a. muted surprise and not as well muted disappointment. still it’s a nice touch and kudos to the crew for doing it.
breakfast is short. we collected our stuff and prepped for the trail. in all of the hustle and bustle; elise falls from the tent terrace to the cooking / dining tent terrace. this was about an 8-12 foot drop. fortunately, she’s unhurt and what could have been a very bad situation is mercifully a minor bump. she and her husband (josh) were understandably peeved by the relative ambivalence expressed by the guide and the porters to what was potentially a nasty situation. still, kathy and i were impressed at the level of calm josh and elise seemed to have about the whole situation.
as a group we have to hustle to make it to the sun gate (intipunku) check point. the check point opens at 5:30a and we’re almost the first ones in line. all the groups queue up here. the early morning rise was worth it.
it’s at this point that i develop a particularly strong appreciation for our group. as i overhear the banality of our neighbors. the whining brand-oriented 20-somethings w/very little daypacks. daddy hired them porters for their makeup.
we get through the checkpoint and we haul ass. i mean we seriously haul ass to the sun gate. our group was passing the group ahead of us and it was a very brisk pace uphill to the sun gate. from here, you have an amazing view of machu picchu. more importantly, from this point, it’s a relatively short (and surprisingly modestly sloped) descent to machu picchu. when we got down to machu picchu and looked back it was apparent that we seriously motored through that distance. the distance between the sun gate and the funeral rock is a respectable amount and it took us no time to cover that distance.
finally, we’d made it to machu picchu.
