Hello dear friends
I just returned from my first real high altitude experiance and all i can say is wow. Or as My guide for the trek, Freddie would say mucho wowowow. Five days of hiking through fields, and over mountain passes, descending into rain forest and ending up in the amazon basin. This has been by far the most amazing five days of my life. We started in a small city outside of Cusco called mollepata. from here we hiked about 15 km through fields and along a concrete aquaduct. we camped within view of two snowcapped peaks, salkanaty (the savage) which is the second highest in peru and umantay (?) another tall mountain. it was freezing cold, like -5 at night . t0eh second day we started very early, 5 in the morning and hiked up to the top of the salkantay pass. at the top, we were greeted by an inca shaman who performed a ceremony asking the mountains to keep us safe on our journey. Ten inca believe in the pachamama, or mother earth. It´s a religion based on respect and undersatdning for nature. It was absolutly gorgeous from the pass, on one side, you could see the moraines that we had climbed up and on the other, the cloud forest. we hiked about 20km that day and ended up in a small village over looking a valley. llamas horses, cows and pigs run wild around here. there are way too many roosters that wake you up way too early. our third day we got to sleep in a little bit as we only hiked 10ish km. we stopped at a hot springs along the way and then we entered the rainforest. there are so many bugs here !! they call them mosquitos, but they aren´t like any mosquitos i´ve seen before. it was really hot in the forest, but our final campsite was at ¨la playa¨ which means beach in spanish. There was no beach. the last day we hiked into the city of aquas calientes, at the base of macchu picchu. the last ten kms we walkewd on the train tracks which kind of sucked. We had to gget upo at 4:30 the next morning to cathch the bus into macchu picchu. I thought the city itself was rather over hyped, but uit was still neat to see the ruins and our guide told us all about the incas and how the spanish massacerred them when they came over. this trip was so amazing. we were a group of 17 and had 12 people and 5 horses to carry our food and tents and clothing. They served us three course meals for every meal and the views were absolutly spectacular. I can´t wait untill you can see the pictures, it will blow your mind.
Tommorow we leave for lima where we will stay for a day before catching a bus to Huarez to do a couple more treks.
Love you all
Sydney :)