The Inca Trail

The Inca Trail is one of the classic treks and perhaps the best known walk in the Americas. It would be a pretty astonishing trek in its own right, but the finish at the 'Lost City of the Incas' - Machu Picchu - is the icing on the cake. Amazing. Anyway, this is how we found it warts and all. The practical stuff is at the end.

A soft, unmistakable scent of marijuana wafted over the cluster of tents accompanied by a gentle hiss of inhalation. From the shadows, Francois offered the joint across with that strange, gallic-accented wordlessness that the French have somehow perfected. it's something in the way they hold their heads, dip their shoulders - while above us, the stars burned like tiny halogen spots in the perfect, inky, blackness of altitude-thinned, unpolluted Andean sky.

'I say,' he began in that braying tone that ex-public schoolboys think is whispering, but probably carried all the way back to the Urubamba River, 'I couldn't help noticing that you'd, er, got some ...;' He let the inference hang in the air. 'Francois shrugged a cool, Gallic wordless shrug. 'It's just that we went to quite some trouble in Cusco to find some, er, and we were wondering how you managed.'

Francois peered at him through the gloom. 'I ullways avoid treurble,' he offered enigmatically. 'I am verry, verry careful. For me, thees was no problem.' The Brit' looked at him utterly non-plussed then slunk back to his mates and their cluster of cheap hire tents. Meanwhile I was pissing myself laughing. Not least because one of his group, a sort of stringy, grotty, unhealthy looking specimen with greasy blond dreads just happened to be a self-confessed, north London drug dealer ... Some dealer.

Which I mention mainly to make the point that virtually anyone and everyone, who travels to South America will, at the very least, have thought of trekking the famed Inca Trail to the allegedly 'lost' Inca city of Machu Picchu.

A wilderness adventure it's not.

This means that the Trail isn't exactly a peaceful, wilderness walk, you will meet dozens of other trekkers, some walking independently and carrying their own kit, others as part of big guided tours with porters; young, old, short, tall, thin and fat, they're all there, and some of the buggers even come complete with their own Andean pan pipe-playing guide. So wilderness adventure it's not, but there are plenty of other good reasons for finding the four days or so it takes to hike to Machu Picchu.

For a start, the Trail follows an ancient Inca road, which is an impressive construction in its own right, even including tunnels piercing sheer rock buttresses, but is also the only way of seeing a series of other Inca ruins, which can't be reached any other way. Then there's the, er, mystical resonance of the Trail which calls to the profound inner soul of some hikers. If this is your bag, you'll probably enjoy the unremittingly terrible Celestine Prophecy, a book which attempts to do for Peruvian hiking what Robert Persig did for motorcycle maintenance and zen.

Local colour in buckets

But all that seemed a world away as we joined the crush for the early morning local train from Cusco to Kilometre 88, the usual starting point for the Trail. The guide books are full of doomy advice about theft on the local train, particularly in second class, which is, of course, where we ended up, but with security guards patrolling the carriages and a modicum of common sense, you'd have to be pretty dozy to get fleeced these days.

What you do get in second is local colour in buckets, sometimes literally. As the train progressed, it filled rapidly with local people, complete with baskets and sacks of chickens, onions, potatoes, you name it. Plump Quechua women sold bowls of chicken stew and rice and the locals demonstrated their peculiar ability to ooze, like some sort of humanoid ectoplasm, into any unoccupied space. In the midst of this colourful, noisy, chaotic jumble of life and mayhem sat a group of very serious looking, very prosperous German tourists becoming progressively more appalled by the encroachment of their fellow travellers. The look on one Hausfrau's face when the young Quechua lass perched on the end of her seat began to breast feed was worth the train fare on its own.

I get my kicks, at Kilometre 88

In reality, Kilometre 88 is nothing special, a bare stretch of railway track with a few fruit stalls perched above the river and overlooking the bridge that's replaced a strange bucket on a wire contraption previously controlled by the local landlord and a part of Inca Trail legend. Apparently, more than one hiker found themselves stopped high above the river while the owner negotiated a more advantageous price for the crossing from a position of strength.

That's all gone now and it's just a question of paying your 17 dollars, which includes one day's entry to the Machu Picchu site, and crossing the sturdy bridge to the far side. It's an eerie feeling to be standing there, at the start of the Inca Trail itself, to put flesh on the bones of imagination, it doesn't matter how much you've heard about it, just being there puts a grin on your face, well it did on mine anyway.

After a few minutes of contemplation we shouldered our packs - full backpacking gear, but pleasingly light shorn of the mountaineering kit we'd got used to carrying - and set off along the flat, lightly forested river bank. The track may be popular and crowded but everyone finds their own pace and it's easy enough to be as sociable as you feel. About 20 of us, including Doc Dread, set off almost simultaneously, but within half an hour there was no-one else in view. Some of this is because many of the big, commercial tours with porters and guides start off from further back down the line at Chilca, which is accessible by road from Cusco.

The walking here was flat and easy on a good, dirt track with great views of Veronica, a small fat, French girl, sorry, a snowcapped 5750 meter peak overlooking the trail. The first ruins on the trail pop up after an hour or so of walking. Llactapaca is an impressive set of agricultural terracing plus a few excavated buildings, but to be honest, unless you're a keen archaeologist, the ruins further along the trail are more interesting. We drifted through, looked around a bit, then bore right along the bank of the Cusichaca River an easy stomp along an undulating path roughly following the line of the river through the trees and with some excellent designated camping areas on flat ground next to the river. Contrary to what some of the guidebooks say, you have to camp in designated areas along the trail, rather than at will or, as the pioneers did, among the ruins themselves.

Crossing the river takes you through the tiny village of Huayllamba (Grassy Plain) at around 3000 metres, where locals sell drinks from tables erected in front of their ramshackle homes. It's here that the Trail begins to climb up more steeply, zig-zagging into an area of temperate forest towards the ominously named Abra de Huarmihauanusqa or Dead Woman's Pass at 4198 metres.

Given that Cusco is at around 3300 metres, higher than both Km 88 and Machu Picchu itself, most walkers will already be acclimatised up to about this altitude, and as we'd already been above 6000 metres in Bolivia, it all felt pretty good. By now though we were starting to come across guided groups carrying daysacks while local porters hefted the big stuff for them and some of them were already beginning to suffer. There's a good campsite at a clearing in the forest known as The Forks, but we were feeling good and pushed on up the relentlessly rising path through the cloud forest till the point where the vegetation eased into a meadow campsite known as Llulluchapampa, 3680 meters.

Serried ranks of tents stretched out above us

It's a lovely place and the last designated site before the pass - a beautiful spot with great views back towards Veronica and onwards to the pass above, but it was also our first brush with the military might of the organised Inca Trail tours; serried ranks of tents stretched out above us, maybe 30 or 40 of them. The tours work on the basis that local porters carrying huge loads race ahead to set up camp, while their lightly laden clients plod after them to be welcomed with a cup of tea and biscuits.

It's hard not to feel a bit smug when you're carrying all you need to survive on your own back and still finding it easier going than someone with a daysack, but then the great thing about the Inca Trail is that it attracts people who would no more go for a walk in, say, the Lake District, than use a budgie as a shuttlecock. Unfortunately these included the dread-locked druggy of introductory fame, but more positively Mel and Paul, a pair of Brit' teachers en route to New Zealand and our French mate, Francois. As darkness fell at about 6 o'clock, as it always does this close to the equator, we chattered away and gawped at the sight of shooting stars streaking across the firmament.

Next morning dawned bright and early, which was more than you could say for Team Brit' High Altitude Trekking, still, it gave us the chance to see the ceremonial packing of the group tents ceremony from above as we began the long slog up towards 4198 meter Dead Woman's Pass, the highest point on the trail. It's on this last 500 meters or so of ascent that most walkers start to feel the altitude, gasping for breath after every ten steps or so. That however wasn't the problem of the young local porter I came across about halfway up the climb. He had two full rucksacks tied together and onto his back and was obviously suffering. Turned out he was 'freelance portering' for two Spanish girls - some porters hang around Km 88 touting for trade - and the convention is that the client provides food for the porter, unfortunately the Spaniards hadn't or at least not enough and the poor guy was famished. I gave him what chocolate I could spare, but if you are thinking of hiring a porter off your own bat, feed him.

Was the toilet seat really necessary?

Right at the top of the slope, just below the pass, you can just make out the remains of some ancient steps, the first real indication that you're on a historic Inca road. The view from the pass is excellent, both looking back the way you've come and ahead where the next ruin, a strange oval construction clinging to the hillside ahead is visible. Heading downwards into the scrubby valley, the descent is steep and hard on the knees, but every so often we'd hear a burble of Quechua or Aymara and two or three porters would hurtle past bent forwards under huge loads ranging from tents to big gas cylinders. Was the toilet seat, we wondered, really necessary? And what did it mean when most of the bog seats in Cusco appeared to have been stolen, was this where they ended up ...

It's easy to make cracks about it, but local porters don't use rucksacks and tend to be shod in flimsy sandals made from old car tyres with dried grass wedged under their heels to provide cushioning. Some of them were frighteningly young and later, at Machu Picchu, we witnessed an official berating an older porter for employing a slight teenager to carry huge loads. It's not a simple issue and not always under the trekker's control, but if you are going to use porters then at least make a point of tipping them properly and trying to ensure they're well treated.

It was a measure of the weight of their loads that I could still catch them heading up towards the distinctive egg-shaped ruin. Like most of the ancient ruins in South America, no-one really knows what Runkuracay was for. It may have been a staging post for Inca messengers who ran in relays along the road, but the Incas had no written history, so we simply don't know. At any rate it's an interesting place to pause and ponder what it must have been like living here in this isolated oval fort and to wonder how it was built. Was it, we wondered, an early empathetic attempt at rehousing battery hens.