Inca Trail: The Preparations

So we've moaned about it, cursed it, debated whether it was actually worth spending nigh on 500 GBP to spend four days walking to some old rocks with heavy packs, when anyone with 50 quid and half a brain can get the train there ... and now we've done it. Worth the money? Worth changing our travel plans? Oh yes - absolutely. The Inca Trail is very very good, and surprisingly, a lot of fun as well.

First the stress. We arrived in Cuzco after 3 days of bus hell (the majority of which was spent on the dirtiest long distance bus we've had the misfortune to encounter) to find that, at 3,300 metres above sea level, we could hardly breathe. Fine. That's why they suggest getting there at least two days before the trek to aclimatise. We arrived with four days spare to be safe, but by day three when I was still gasping for breath having rolled over in bed, I began to think that a month might have been more sensible.

We thought that four days would give us ample time to sort everything out, as well as do a short warm up trek. It ended up being an incredibly busy four day rush-a-thon, as we tried desperately to prepare all our stuff for the trek, and get over a spot of altitude sickness as well. The stuff we needed to sort included:

- Rent walking boots
- Rent sleeping bags
- Rent walking sticks (you need them for the steep downhill sections - everyone has them! Honest!)
- Buy snacks
- Train ticket back from Machu Picchu
- Malaria pills (yes I had failed to get these in the UK)
- Water purification tablets
- Waterproofs
- Arrange storage for all the stuff we're not taking on the trail
- Upload 1 gig of photos to online storgage (with a rubbish internet connection) to free up the camera memory card so we can actually take photos on this thing
... etc etc etc ... blah blah blah ...

You get the picture. This was far from the "stay in bed for four days, grab a sleeping bag then go" approach I was hoping for. We finally got everything sorted on the final day at around midnight - 5 hours before we had to get the bus to the start of the trail! Reminded me a lot of my preparations for this trip in January. Fortunately this time my passport was much easier to find. Liz had it.

So, at 5am on Friday 11th April, we caught the bus to km82 ready to start the trek ...