Day 2

We woke up bright and early, with porters delivering tea and warm water to our tents.

After breakfast Nilton introduced us to our porters and cooks and had us introduce ourselves. We took a group picture before heading off on our 2nd day of hiking. We had heard this was the most difficult day.

We went over to take a look at the ruins we camped beneath right away.

These little niches in the wall were used to store mummies, so I had Troy and the girls pose to get a better visual.

And then we had to leave to continue our hike. We looked back for a last picture because, what a cool place to spend our first camping night!

 

These are cool succulent looking plants growing along the cliff sides as we walked.

Here we have porters coming up behind us, and donkeys going the other direction.

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I am still in awe of the people living along this trek!

Ignore the girl clothing, this was a little chico posing with his donkey. Troy took a picture and I wished we had thought to pack a polaroid camera with us.

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I told Kalyn this could be her senior picture. It at least looks like a catalog picture for cute hiking pants in Eddie Bauer. Our hike on this day followed a river. this was log bridge where we crossed.

I kept waiting for one of those rope bridges spanning the mountain passes, like in Indiana Jones or The Emperor's New Groove. Actually, on the 3rd day when we had to climb up a mountain, then down the mountain, then up another mountain and back down I seriously did say I would have crossed one of those bridges to save myself from having to do all that hiking. But I'm not sure I would have. And now that I see our pictures of the things we saw along the way, I'm glad I didn't have that option.

Here's one of the porters, inspiring us to keep on moving. You can see that the steps require concentration, you could really turn an ankle on those. And they just kept going up, and up, and up.

I really like this picture of Carrie, because it shows the kind of mood we were in. We were totally exhausted and just plain silly. At one point I said "I really hate this." and we laughed as if I'd said something hysterical.

 Here's a chart I found on the internet, that looks similar to one's posted along the way. We were somewhere between day one and two on this chart, our tour looked a little different than most. We were probably about where the day one and day two arrows meet at this point.

It's not pretty, it's just the truth.

Nilton had convinced me to paste coca leaves to my temples to keep my energy level up. I knew it was a trick but I didn't care. Look at my chapped lips.

 But then, check out the views we were getting.

Here I think maybe the girls had already reached our camp. Troy must have too. I bet Carrie and I were sitting on some steps eating some chocolate for energy at this point.

Eventually, Carrie and I did catch up to the others (and we weren't last, by the way).  We kind of lost sight and sound of them for a while, and we knew our leader was way behind us with someone having trouble. We thought maybe we'd missed the entrance to our campsite and were hiking on beyond, but then we heard them laughing. And a porter came back to check on us. He kind of laughed at us. When I did get to camp, which is what the picture above was, of me looking exhausted, Troy was waiting there with a camera. I thought he was disappointed that I was behind the group, but he gave me a big hug and said "I know how hard it is!" And I laughed.

It was really cold and windy here, we gained a lot in elevation. Tomorrow would be another tough day. Can't wait to chronicle that one tomorrow!