3/21/06
JULI, PERU

The Inca Trail is Peru's most popular and most regulated trek, requiring a licensed guide, a ticket, a passport, and porters. In Cuzco I checked out a few agencies with three German women I'd been bumping into since Andahuaylas, and after just a couple hours we had the trip booked. At the orientation a couple evenings later, we met the four other hikers, plus our guide, Saul.

We bused out to Ollantaytambo early Saturday morning, most of us punchy from overexcited sleep. At the trailhead were local matrons selling bamboo walking sticks and plastic ponchos. We had to say no, thank you to every one of them as we snugged up our packs and eyeballed the sky.

There were several porters and a cook, speaking Quechuan amongst themselves with throaty clicks and apparently a lot of jokes. They shouldered enormous lashed-up bundles and went chugging ahead to set up lunch. Meals were in a mess tent with liberal amounts of tea and jam. We'd have dishes like lomo saltado (stir-fry over french fries), roasted chicken, and banana wontons.

Colonial treatment aside, you need the calories. Day One is steady hiking, but Day Two gets steep. The trail's highest pass is at nearly 14,000 feet, and hikers straggle out according to their knees and lungs. Coca leaves help with the altitude or possibly just numb your lip. After hauling up the last of the uneven stairs, you reel over a view of buff-colored ridges and the white tops of clouds. Downward is a plod through llama-bitten grass, through fragrant tunnels of cloud forest, over bouncy log bridges, alongside cliffs.

We stopped at Inca forts and temples, each one lichenous and looming over a steep drop. Inca stonecutting is incredible-- oddly polygonal blocks fit like puzzlework. Buildings mesh with the land and vice versa. Outcropped bedrock is carved into a foundation, or an altar, or it's just shaped with a few planes and protuberances, as if to bring it into the game.

The evening of Day Three, the porters boiled medicinal leaves to apply to some afflicted German knees. Our tents smelled like socks.

On Day Four, wake-up is at four o'clock. You pack and toss back your tea under a mess tent clingy with rainwater, then hurry down the trail after the boots flashing in your headlamp-- the mob of hikers backs up at the checkpoint, which opens at 5:30. From there you charge the Sun Gate, and Machu Picchu appears gray and misty on a far-off saddle. I didn't wait for anyone and reached the city right before the clouds rolled in, when nobody was in the plazas, hours before the buses disgorged the Cuzco tourists in their Jolly Rancher-colored raingear. I could sit on a rock and look at the thing.

In Cuzco, windows are plastered with that poster image of Machu Picchu under the summits. You arrive saturated and expectant. As the morning develops, you'll have moments of clutching at something ephemeral: This is one of the wonders of the world, and I just took a picture containing a woman in bright purple pants.

That said, a moment alone with Machu Picchu and the rain pattering on your hat is achingly good.

We had six or seven hours there. It's a big complex that rewards wandering around and gawping at the fog-shrouded stonework, the layout of its spaces, the cloud forest creeping over the edges. When the gaggles of umbrellas arrive, you can still find quiet parts.

For a late lunch we descended to Aguas Calientes, a tourist ghetto set in the forested cliffs of the Urubamba Valley. The Germans and I stayed a night, soaked out some knots in the hot springs, cringed at pop music over dinner, and the next day took the train back to Ollantaytambo to climb the fort where the Incas once beat back the Spanish-- their only real victory during the conquest. On the bus that evening I was so bone-tired as to feel part of the shaking windows and the scalloped valleys and the mountains crawling by. The tackiness of tourism had fallen apart. Across the aisle sat a Quechuan farmer, his long face circled by a knit chin-tied cap under a felt hat, taking slow bites from a fruit he turned in dark, burled fingers.

After a dead sleep I spent another couple days in Cuzco, walking in the outlying ruins (though it's hard to call them ruins, since during earthquakes they regularly outperform newer buildings), eating crepes, and poking through museums (favorite piece: a huge foldable diorama called The Portable Trunk of the Birth of Christ, featuring Andean costumes, llamas, and flamingos). Cuzco is still laid out as the Incas laid it out, and with a good map you can see where there once were palaces and now are alpaca souvenir shops.

On the cheaper long-distance buses-- like the one I took from Cuzco to Puno-- vendors and buskers hop on for a while, swaying down the aisle proffering wheels of homemade cheese, playing panflute and ukelele, or booming about a miracle cure that they pass around with the cap off (reeks of mint). They collect money and hustle off waving thanks, presumably to catch a bus going the other way. In an economy like Peru's, people have to exploit the nooks and crannies. I heard that there are people who stand in line at the bank just so they can sell their spots. Self-appointed guides hound you at tourist spots, where you also find gaudily quaint people holding baby llamas and asking for a sol a photograph.

There's a lot of this around Cuzco, of course, and somewhat less around Lake Titicaca. The lake spreads out cold and blue in the prairie-like altiplano, high in the mountains. Puno, on the northwestern shore, is Peru's jumping-off point for lake tours, most of which visit the floating islands of the Uros. The Uros have lived for centuries on spongy mats of reeds, regularly laying down new reeds as the bottom layers rot. The fresh reeds squeak underfoot like giant green beans. The islanders sell crafts to tourists, eat fish and guinea pigs, and somehow have a phone hut.

So it was a tour. I was just happy to be on a boat. The sunlight at that altitude flashes blindingly off the water. On the isle of Taquille we visited the shy local community. The men knit the women's clothes and the women knit the men's. The way a man flops his cap indicates his availability; women do this with the colored pompoms hanging from their shawls.

The countryside around Puno is sweeping and friendly. The giant stone burial towers of the Colla people (pre-Inca) stand semi-ruined on a long hill. An hour and a half southeast is Juli, known as "Peru's Little Rome" for its 16th- and 17th-century churches. Cobbled streets crook around a lazy plaza where round women in bowler hats shamble along. It's a sunny, not-much-happens kind of town with a breeze off the lake, and my last stop before the Bolivian border.