Bob and Karen's Circle Pacific Tour: Hiking past our limits in the Sacred Valley

Peru was the right place to begin a year's travel

Peru was an eye-opener of a place to launch our trip. It’s a little difficult to remember all the things that went through our minds as we settled into our year off during that first month of leisure. But I recall being sharply aware of the need to travel differently than any previous travel we’d done. This was a year off, and there was no way any person could spend that many days in full-on explorer mode. You have to stop and let the time pass you by. And you have to do that surprisingly frequently. You can bully your way through the strenuous two days of climbing Mount Putukusi and neighbouring Machu Picchu after a big bad bout of altitude sickness, but there are serious physical limits in the longer term. I speak now from a position of clearer understanding. Our first major steps on returning home were health care – Karen to a naturopath to fix her digestive tract, me to the family doctor to treat a knee injury. Now the knee MRI data is in and it turns out that a year of stress to one’s knees doesn’t necessarily cause ligament damage. At least not in my case. Instead, a year of daily strain (and about a dozen mountain climbs) results in bone injuries – extensive bruising and a small fracture to my left femur. My knee may take as long to heal as it took to cause the damage. And Peru was a powerful dose of knee wear with which to begin our year’s adventure. About two-thirds of the way through our year off we began to look back at Peru and comment that it was a good thing we’d done Peru first, because at that point we didn’t feel capable of the mountain exploits we’d done back in September. Now, a full year later, I have similar thoughts regarding the year off. I don’t think I could do it again. I certainly can’t do it again in the condition I’m in now. The effects of aging isn’t the point of this piece but I had to get past that to get to the wind-down in Huanchaco. While Machu Picchu was one of the icons that we built our year off around – the others were Easter Island (up next) and Angkor Wat (towards the end) – the lazing away of days and weeks in Huanchaco is the travel style that we wanted to perfect. Later, we executed a nearly perfect down-time dropout on the island of Koh Phangan, where we spent 33 days doing as close to nothing as two people can manage. In Peru, we spent almost half our month in Huanchaco. It is a small fishing village, with little going for it but charm, and we made it our home. By the time we had wandered every street I knew we were successfully living in the moment. That’s a sensation that we are striving for in our travels and, as much as Machu Picchu was a miracle in the mountains, Huanchaco was its own miracle on the seashore. I am more likely to go back there, but that may just be the bad knee talking. We could always bus it up Machu Picchu.

Re-living our tour in photos

A totally unexpected result of travelling for a year (unlike any other number of months) is that we are re-living the experience month by month as we sort photos. It's September now so we have spent weeks sorting and editing our Peru pictures. As we build a slideshow of our month in Peru, we are choosing from photos that weren't available for posting during our trip. We carried two cameras but only blogged from a backup point-and-shoot. So, here's the result, a handful of our Peru favourites. We might find a few more before the end of September when we switch to reminiscing about Chile. But first we'll have an essay on Peru, which will be our next text post.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Hiking past our limits in the Sacred Valley

Just before we left, my doctor said your body will tell you when you´ve done too much. Right now, I think ít´s screaming at me. With the help of our guide (bless you Aly Amaut of Mother Earth Tours) we did five straight days of serious hiking in the Sacred Valley, including climbing two mountains. And I mean climbing -- 2.5 hours up and 2.5 hours down Putacusi for the spectacular view of Machu Picchu, which we climbed the next day beginning at 4 a.m. The first half of Putacusi included seven ladders of up to 20 metres. Then we dug out our hiking poles for the tricky uneven stone stairs to the top. It was worth it for the spectacular view, to hear Aly´s encouragement, and him calling his office from the mountain top to arrange a few more flights for us. Karen would like to thank Cheryl Carter of The Edge Personal Training for making it possible to even attempt this climb! Machu Picchu was so amazing, the rest of this year may seem a bit anticlimactic. It will certainly be less physically challenging. We didn´t get back down to town until 1 p.m. We finally left the ancient site when we ran out of water and energy in the noon sun and altitude.
During this period, we debated the next part of our plan -- Lake Titicaca and the Colca Canyon. Both of those are much higher than the altitudes we had pushed ourselves through so far. With the toll that the hiking took on us, we didn´t feel confident about going any higher. In the end, we decided to focus on a different part of Peru, still loaded with archeological treasures but at sea level, and within taxi distance of a small fishing village, where we are headed tomorrow.

3 comments:

Unknown said...: OMG did you have to go down those ladders too? Love you guys
Lisa; September 22, 2009 at 8:57 AM
Rob and Carolyne said...: WOW!!!! after this everything will seem like a piece of cake.
MUM/DAD Rob/Carolyne; September 23, 2009 at 8:02 PM
Bob Rittinger said...: Yes, Lisa, 7 ladders up, same 7 ladders down, a million stone steps to the top. Took us a week at the beach to fully recover. At the time, the excitement drove us despite the hardships (altitude, tummies, couch potato history). Yes, Mum and Dad, it´s all cake from here on in. We don´t plan anything that hard again. Thanks for following us. Love ya. B+K; September 26, 2009 at 2:02 PM