Peru Day 6: The Mighty Salkantay

I have never been as cold as we were that night, camping there at the base of the glacier. I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night; I needed to pee. I thought perhaps I could lull myself to sleep and wait it out till dawn, but when I glanced at my watch, it was just barely midnight. That's what you get when you go to sleep at 8pm, I suppose. With resignation, I got out to pee. I was kind of worried - can pee freeze while you're peeing? - but then I glanced at the sky, and it distracted me completely from my fears.

I had never seen the sky as it was that night. Crystal clear, cloudless, millions of stars, all jostling each other for space. It momentarily (quite literally) took my breath away. But then a moment later, the cold started seeping in again, and I quickly crawled back into the tent. Sleeplessness is one of the basic symptoms of altitude sickness. But that night (other than the peeing incident), Delta and I both "slept like baby llamas", as Marco would have said.

We woke up early the next morning, but the sun was already dawning. Our solitary tents there in the deserted valley, there was a quiet calm hanging in the air. Without realising it, all of us were whispering, unconsciously hesitant to disturb the surrounding peace.

After a hearty breakfast, we headed straight out ("We're late, team!" Marco hurried us on). The trail started immediately with a steep uphill. Barely a minute into the hike, all of us were gasping for air. Less than a minute into the hike, and my lungs were screaming for oxygen, my legs were screaming for a rest, my back was screaming to get the pack off. And in that manner, we continued for the next six hours.

Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Gasp, gasp. Shuffle, shuffle.

The good part as it turned out, everyone in the group was roughly the same level. Gradually, painfully, inchingly, we all made it up the mountain side together. Every ten steps, I had to stop to catch my breath. I'd suck in large gasps of air, trying to fill my lungs. But the air just had no oxygen in it. No matter how much you inhaled, you just couldn't catch your breath. "Keeping moving on," Marco advised. "It doesn't get better until we do down the other side."

And so I continued up the mountain, lungless, legless, backless. I mean, who needs to breathe anyway. You can breathe all you want when you're dead. At 16,000 ft, that's just what you get.

Just as I felt like I wouldn't be able to do anymore, Marco gestured to us excitedly. "We're almost there! It's the final push!" We looked up, and we could see it before us. There it were, we were almost at the top! Amazing how inspirational it can be to know you're almost there. We skidaddled to the top.

I've never been at the top of a mountain before. It looked like the moon. I wonder if Armstrong got off on the moon, and thought, hell, it looks like a mountain top.

Somehow, reaching the top of Salkantay had blown itself into such a big deal in my head, that somehow I'd assumed that it would almost be the end of our day. But it wasn't. At all. Far from it. As it turned out, reaching the summit was only one of the milestones in the day. And then it was downhill. For hours and hours and hours.

Downhill might be marginally better than uphill, but only by a hair. My old knees had a thing or two to say about the rugged steep downhill. And none of it was positive. But lower and lower we went, descending towards where the vegetation line started again, heading towards the forests. When we broke for lunch, I turned around to catch one of our last glimpses of Salkantay.

And there it was, unapproachable in its mightiness, the mountain we had traversed only earlier that day. Already, it seemed like a lifetime away.

That evening, we ended up walking well into the darkness. Of course, we ended up getting separated from those in the group who had flashlights. So the last hour was spent tentatively, gingerly, feeling our way down the rocks with almost no visibility.

But when at last we did reach camp, there was a woman outside running a little stall. Selling cerveza. Needless to say, sitting there squashed together on a tiny cracked bench in the mountains, exhausted after 12 hours of hiking, it was the best beer any of us had tasted in our lives.