Inca Trail - Day 3

We set out on the third day knowing that this was to be the last day of serious treking (some 7/8 hours of walking ahead of us) and thinking that the hardest pasrt was behind us.  But the first part of this day´s walk is a really difficult steep ascent for the first hour or two, more difficult than the Dead Woman´s Pass in my opinion (or perhaps it just felt more difficult becuase of the tiredness from the day before!).

On the way up we did get a breather as we stopped at an Inca warehouse and inn, where the importance of Inca trade routes was explained to us by Jose in his usual round-about way (instead of just telling us its a warehouse he´d start by talking about Incan economics until someone would lose concentrationa nd simply ask ´so what´s this building then?´).

  It was another misty day, creating an interesting atmosphere but once again oscuring any views there might have been.

Anyway, we made it to the top and I was somewhat heartened to see a couple of the porters - usually racing ahead of us carrying all our stuff, tents and food, literally running - taking a rest too!  We then made our way down to some ruins and just as we made it there the weather began to clear for the first time in our three days, giving us an indication of the remoteness of the places we had been passing.  We then walked further into the cloud forest, really interesting scenery, before it clouded over once again for the afternoon.

From there it was all descent, some of it pretty tough, but one of our group overheard another group of hikers say to a friend ´they must be doing the trail in 2 days rather than 3´, which gave us some satisfaction as we just happened to be a quick group that overtook other stragglers at a decent speed!

At the end of the day we made the final base camp, which had electricty and therefore hot showers (I didn´t have one though, that´d be cheating!) and cold beers (definitely had one of these).

  The views of the cloud descending over the Machu Picchu mountain where we´d be heading the next day were pretty cool and then we settled down to an evening of drinking.  This included a celebration of the porters´achievements at carrying all our stuff, and our attempt to buy them all a beer to thank them (not a cheap round when there´s 22 of them and you´re paying overinflated prices!).  Helen, one of our group, was pretty happy though when the beer we´d bought a particularly grumpy looking porter made him burst into a smile!  From there on the night got pretty messy with many drinks consumed, and our group being ejected from the bar because the staff there wanted to close it way before we wanted to leave.  Given that we had to be up at 4am the next morning, it turned out that this amount of drinking was inadvisable, and the last walk to Machu Picchu was made with a hangover emerging!