I was in Peru in July/beginning of August, basing myself in Cusco and making three major excursions (Amazon region, seven-day trek in the Vilcabamba Range, and Lake Titicaca). This is a report on the hiking part of the trip.
Since the Vilcabamba is all about the Incas (Cusco was their capital city), I decided to do one of the treks that gets you to Machu Picchu on foot. The well-known Inca Trail is four days, but is permitted for 500 people a day (300 of whom are porters) and is booked months in advance; the Salkantay Trek is five days and has no restrictions, but is also very popular. I chose the Choquequirao Trek (10 - 20 people a day: most of these do it as a four-day in and out) and was initially joined by a young couple, who then got sick and bailed out. I was thus left with an entourage of guide, cook, and muleteer, plus his four mules, and the luxury of setting my own pace.
The trek begins about a four-hour drive from Cusco on winding roads and involves several descents into steep-sided, deep and remote river canyons (Apurímac, Blanco, Yanama, Totora, Santa Teresa, Urubamba) to get to Machu Picchu. The highest pass was at 15,256 feet, the low point was at 6,690 feet – with Machu Picchu itself at 7,970 feet – for a total of about 24,000 feet elevation gain in seven days. Trails were a combination of the old Inca routes and new paths carved where the 15th-16th century treads have slid away. These trails are also used by local villagers and their mule trains, which bring supplies to isolated farmsteads.
We camped at various elevations. This is the dry season in the Peruvian Andes so we experienced both the highest and lowest temperatures of the year: below freezing at night above 10,000 feet but above 80 degrees at the bottom of the canyons at midday. We never got up to the snow zone (about 17,700 feet): the vegetation regimes included dry equatorial forest, Amazon cloud forest, and high alpine grassland.
We began high above the Apurímac River and reached the ruins of Choquequirao the second day.
Choquequirao (the ‘Golden Cradle’) was the birthplace of three of the last Inca leaders and was sacked by the Spanish during their 40-year resistance after the conquest. The site was located by Yale archeologist Hiram Bingham in 1909 during his search for the “Lost City of the Incas.” Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911 eclipsed his other findings and excavations only began at Choquequirao in the 1970s. About a third of the site (It is three times the size of Machu Picchu) has been uncovered and some minor restorations have been made. The settlement was probably set up in the late 15th century as one of the gateways to the Sacred Valley. It contains all of the classic features of such Inca sites: a main plaza, retaining terraces and cultivation terraces, grain storehouses, a royal house, temples and mummy niches, metal factories, workers’ dormitories, drainage systems, and a sacrificial platform. One unusual feature is the series of steep “llama terraces.” While the main plaza is at 10,000 feet, you have to hike up and down steep slopes to see all that has been uncovered so far.
After exploring Choquequirao, we descended through dry forest, the habitat of the rare spectacled bear (Paddington of storybook fame) – a mule driver saw two bears that same day although we didn’t have a sighting. At the bottom of the hot Río Blanco canyon, my guide Lenyn (His mother was a communist) decided it would be a good idea to go for a swim. I disrobed and was immediately swarmed by hundreds of biting sand flies, the main vectors of leishmaniasis, and am scratching the itches to this day. Also, despite the heat, the water was freezing. We then ascended 6,000 feet from the bottom of the canyon to our campsite.
The next day, we passed old adits from silver mines and took interminable switchbacks up to the Victoria Pass (13,200 feet), from where we got a vista of a spread of snow-capped peaks. I participated in my second
kintu ceremony, whereby Lenyn had me pick three coca leaves from his stash and we invoked the blessings of the mountain gods and poured beer into the ground before making a small shrine. The descent into the Yanama valley passed more old silver mines and thickets of Andean lupine, which is a food crop in that area.
(We drank it frequently as well. Pretty cheap after you get your bottle deposit back.)
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