Three Weeks in Guatemala

San Pedro is the kind of place that feels like an island, but isn’t. It is self contained, wedged between a volcano and a lake, writhing up and down the hillside. A single road, snaking around the cornfield covered volcano that shares the name of the town, and the saint, connects it to the next district.

Tourism moved in a long time ago, but stayed within a few hundred yards of the lake. The Guatemalan locals refer to the area as “Gringolandia.” But the permanent gringos, many of whom have moved their shops and bars slightly further from the main docks, refer to the area as “The Vortex.” By the standards of a major city the thoroughfare is quiet, by the standards of a tranquil little town, vortex is the more apt term.

Upon entering Gringolandia from the heights the first thing one can see on most of the walls are flyers for beer pong tournaments, bikini parties by the pool bar, bar trivia nights, and the mélange of activities one would find at any large fraternity house in the states. Most days the walks down to the café are an unwelcome reminder that I am no longer 23. Once within the ethereal confines of the vortex the panoply of tourist trappings assault from all sides. There are hordes of art galleries, a generous term, where handfuls of no doubt talented artists manufacture uncounted copies of the same dozen photos. There are a few western stereotypes of natives, in fictional native dress, staring bemusedly at a volcano, with the lake and silhouetted canoes floating in the background. Various shops all sell the same products, which in New York we call chotchsky. A dozen tour operators hawk trips to the peaks of Vulcan San Pedro or “The Indian’s Nose,” coffee tours through some local villages also appear as advertisements in windows with mute regularity.

The vortex is easy to forget if you don’t take advantage of it. It would take a tremendous amount of noise to completely block out something as amazing as Lake Atitlan. It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful lakes on planet Earth, though I can’t pretend to be an expert on lakes. Many of the towns around the lake still look ramshackle during the day, but at night, when the clouds disperse, from a good vantage point, all human habitation around the lake is reduced to puddles of terrestrial stars climbing feebly up the sides of the great volcanoes. On the lake too, the volcanoes growing out of the shores manage to make one forget the groaning diesel engines of the lanchas that glide over the surface like fat water bugs.

There is always something disconcerting about these kinds of “tourist traps,” especially when they grow not from major cities, but places of natural beauty. We derelicts daily face the paradox of dealing with other travelers. Though for the most part outgoing, we all want to feel special, we all want the pleasure of a soul searching walkabout without losing cell phone reception, we all want the peak of the mountains without the blisters on our feet. We want to meet new people, but every new person who looks likes us, walking the same foreign streets, reminds us of how common our quests really are. When we meet each other in hostels, in campgrounds, we let down our guard, throw back a few drinks and talk shop, like fishing vessels meeting randomly in open water. When we are on the streets however, there is an unspoken resentment, a half-smiling admission that as our paths cross, we have invaded each other’s fantasies, every other white face that barges into our snapshots of some foreign landscape are like spots of turpentine tossed onto a priceless painting.

Travel Writers (the professional kind, that get paid for things nobody reads) face a similar, if not more stark, paradox. The goal of many a travel writer is to find the next undiscovered paradise, whether that’s a place that’s always existed that nobody’s bothered to visit (extremely rare these days) or the rediscovery of a place people had abandoned long ago (Come to scenic Mogadishu!) but within them, this drive to turn over stones and find moments of beauty and tranquility, is the seed of their undoing. By writing about something which struck them in the world, they are drawing in the very tourists which will convert it soon to something entirely as bland and uninteresting as the vortex. There is nothing so inspiring in this world that it cannot be destroyed by a healthy dose of other people.

The last person to be awed by the Mona Lisa probably saw it before the first World War.

In my experience, upon finding myself in a new country, a new tourist trap, when the foreground starts to turn Western, I take it as a sign-post – deeper it says, farther afield. Tourism is a travel challenge, because for every “Unesco World Heritage Site” there are usually a few more sites within a day’s reach that are just a mesmerizing with ten percent of the visitors. Or as I would find a few weeks after arriving in San Pedro, additional opportunities for suffering while on the hunt for the unique.

Before that fiasco there was school.

The Cooperativa school sits halfway between the local population at the top of the hill, and gringolandia, by the docks. Like most of the “schools” in San Pedro, teachers, mainly local women who underwent some kind of limited local training, line up in the mornings and take their students to a little outdoor hut where private lessons will go on for about four hours.

I tell my teacher, Rosa, on the first day that language teachers often make for the most frustrating language students. We know the drills, we’ve played all the little language games a thousand times before, and especially true, we know when you’re phoning it in. For a teacher it is a rare blessing to have students who actually want to learn. It makes the job easy, it makes the job fun, and it makes the job possible. Most of the people studying in Guatemala genuinely want to learn, and for many it’s easy to overlook the obvious shortcomings of the mock language schools. In three weeks, I filled up two small notebooks almost entirely with grammar. Sometimes functional, sometimes obscure.

It quickly becomes a chore to get through four hours of grammar lessons a day, and my limited enthusiasm for the task dissipated by the end of the first week. I also discovered through conversations that the teachers are treated awful, paid a pittance, and rarely get to work full time hours, even after years of dutiful grammatical drudgery. It’s not much of a surprise that the language schools dispense their earnings in roughly the same ratio as a pyramid scheme, greatly enriching a few owners, and shackling the rest of the staff to a life somewhere above farm work, but not very far.

After classes are over I often find myself wandering aimlessly through the town of San Pedro. The town is a labyrinth, with roads and alleys leading to dead ends or opening into the lake with the same frequency. Roads turn into alleys and alleys into trails and trails into dead ends at some family’s door step. You can start by walking steeply downhill only to be walking steeply uphill minutes later, and vice versa. It took three or four days to memorize the simple path from the house I was living in to the school and back. Landmarks come in the forms of painted signs, either of political parties, or praising Jesus, or large churches. The most unique landmark on the way to school was a painting of an eggman giving us the finger.

The churches are particularly noticeable in San Pedro. They are everywhere, and a great many of them are evangelical. I had my own ideas of what evangelical churches were like in the states, but in San Pedro “evangelical” must be Spanish for noisy. The house I was staying in was sandwiched between two of them, and every night I went to bed caught between the stereo sound of choirs and brass bands, singing and playing the same songs night after night. I’m still unsure if the churches are the harbingers or the after effect of the other unexpected surprise of Latin American travel: church people.

It is not often that I have encountered church people abroad, though to be fair Japan is religiously apathetic, China is militantly atheist, and the Middle East…well, is the Middle East. The fact that the Catholic Church maintains its greatest grip on the souls of those in Latin America and Africa is somewhat mystifying to me, considering the device of delivery was Conquistadors and Smallpox in one and the slave trade and colonization in the other. There are Christian churches sprinkled around San Pedro like delis and pizza joints in Manhattan. Many of the students at the language school, and others scattered around the town are there to primarily do mission work, or learn Spanish in order to do mission work somewhere else.

It’s difficult for me to come to terms with this phenomenon. I have trouble putting myself in the shoes of devoutly religious locals, living in lands with such a unique cultural and spiritual heritage, and forsaking whatever invisible trajectories their own brands of immortality would have spawned in the absence of the omnipresent Bible. Believing that Jesus died for the sins of the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs seems akin to believing that Mohammed wrote passages of the Koran dedicated to the Australian aborigines. But here we are, in one of the most devoutly Christian populations of the world, thanks to whatever daily tortures and humiliations the Spanish and Portuguese empires inflicted on the local populations until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when homegrown dictators and U.S. foreign policy could pick up where the Spanish left off.

I’m hard on them though. My housemate was a kid from Texas, getting ready to do mission work for a non-denominational church. He went with his father to Zimbabwe for Doctors without Borders. Who is, all in all, a far better man than I, and who will likely improve the lives of others his entire life. What harm could they really do I guess, in a place where Christianity has already achieved such stunning, incontrovertible penetration? If the people have already got God, and what they need are education and healthcare, what good is dispelling their comforting superstitions going to do? I suppose that’s why Agnostic Missionaries really haven’t taken off quite yet.

Oddly enough, the only person who seemed to be pulling neck and neck with Jesus in a popularity contest was Batman, whose symbol adorned every Tuk-Tuk from Mexico City to Cusco, Peru. I’ll spare everyone the joke here about competition between fictional characters.

At the center of San Pedro is and will always be the lake. The story of Lake Atitlan begins 84,000 years ago. A day so far beyond the human past it’s hard to register, and a day so recent in geological history that the Earth could blink and miss it. We don’t know what the weather was like the day before the event, but we know to almost a certainty what it was like the day after.

Lake Atitlan, which doesn’t flow out to any rivers or streams, which collects and grows but doesn’t diminish, is a caldera. A crater lake created in a single moment, known as the Chocohoya event, and when the volcano erupted it blew a hole in the Earth 338 meters deep, scattering ash and debris as far north as Florida and as far south as Ecuador.

The lake only collects, it collects gasoline and motor oil, collects its decades of human waste, but most importantly, it collects more water. There are trees growing out of the lake at its edges, homes, abandoned as the first floors were submerged. It is as simple as a subtle shift in the rains.

A lack of subtlety was the scientific community’s greatest mistake, or at least the mistake of those speaking for the scientists. They focused on the extremes, bigger hurricanes, blizzards and tsunamis. Hollywood imagined firestorms and tidal waves, but what most of the world will feel is what San Pedro feels right now. This sense of helplessness as the world around them, the world they thought they understood, creeps into the foreground from its passive place at the back of their minds.

At first it’s a single family, then a neighbor, a cousin, a friend whose home is destroyed by some bizarre twitch of an increasingly precocious natural world. In the end, every one of us, in every quiet, noisy, busy, or tranquil patch of the world will be left scratching our heads. We’ll tell anyone who’ll listen, “I remember when.” Every one of us will remember our favorite piece of planet Earth, and how it changed into this unknown thing; shrunken, grown, or disappeared completely.

This is the last gift we’ll offer our grandchildren, our memory of a time when we all knew the creep was coming. A time when we all elected simply to shuffle half steps backward and admire the sunset, beyond the waters lapping at our toes.

Guatemala still places value in the wisdom of grandparents. After Bolivia it has the largest percentage of native peoples in all of Latin America. The evidence in San Pedro comes in the form of a festival. The locals descend from the tiny mountain towns around the lake like the migration of flocks of brightly colored birds. At the beginning of the week-long festival there is a beauty contest. The girls do not come brandishing bronzed bodies in swimsuits, but clothed in the regalia of their ancestry. Though many live within a few scant miles of each other the contest requires a series of translators to change the dozens of local Mayan languages into Spanish.

In this way do they set their lines against the inevitable, the dissolution of the unique into the accepted. The Mayan apocalypse brought to you by Coca Cola. Every passing day across the developing world modernity inches forward, making a gelatinous soup of the genuine for the high fructose corn syrupy goodness of progress. Many places and peoples have succumbed, and none of we privileged can blame them. Still though, in the hill countries of the world, in the remote corners, off the grid, they struggle and suffer. They keep their thousands of generations safeguarded in the soil they till, planting one more row of crops against the empty horizon. The last defense against the desertification of the human soul.

Climbing Huayna Potosi

It was one of many of the tourist jaunts on offer from the travel agency in the Loki Hostel in La Paz, Bolivia. I knew there were treks to the jungles, the Salt Flats of Uyuni, the infamous Death Road, and lastly I knew there were treks out to the glaciers in the high mountains the dominate the view from the windows of planes coming in for their landings in the city.

The travel agent handed me a pamphlet, but they had me at crampons and ice-axe. The three day trip, which included all of our mountaineering equipment, food, lodging, and one guide for every two climbers came in at the astoundingly low price of 150 dollars.

At the office of the Huayna Potosi Agency I met the other 10 wannabe climbers in the group, and with the exception of David, the young Irishman, none of us had ever attempted anything like this before. Hurry up and wait would be a recurring theme for the next three days. We’d all gotten taxis or hustled through streets closed by markets to get to the agency by 9:00 and it was almost ten before we headed from the agency to the equipment depot across the city.

There we all spent another hour and a half trying on jackets, snow pants, boots, hiking shoes, and gloves. It was also here that I held an ice-axe for the first time. I don’t know how the three girls in the group felt, but an ice-axe is one of those tools that once held goes straight to the grunting caveman part of the male brain. The ice-axe has three practical parts, all solid, two at the head and one at the end of the handle.

The obvious and most fun part resembles a pick, this part is driven directly into the ice or snow for semi-vertical climbs up a wall. Opposite this is a flat piece mainly used for clearing snow and ice out of the way in particularly difficult terrain to shore up a path. The last part is the bottom of the handle, which is pointed. It is admittedly the least sexy and most useful part of the ice axe. You put your hand around the head of the ice-axe and drive the handle into the snow next to you to act as a kind of walking stick to balance you as you move uphill in the snow.

The last piece of equipment was the crampons. These are basically large, spiked metal cleats that attach to the bottom of the heavy, plastic boots we wore for the climb. The boots were essentially slightly less rigid ski boots.

After we’d all been outfitted we got back in our vans and headed to the “Refugio,” the lowest camp for ascending the summit. Before we got there we stopped high above the city, getting our last view of La Paz, and loading up on chocolate and coca leaves.

The Refugio was situated at the edge of a man-made reservoir that collected meltwater from the Huayna Potosi glacier and fed the booming population of La Paz. The reason Huayna Potosi is considered the “easiest 6000er” in the world is due to the easy access to the Refugio, situated at 5200 meters, roughly 3,000 feet from the summit.

That first day at the Refugio we ate lunch and headed for the foot of the glacier. Once we got there we had a chance to spend a few hours trying out walking up and downhill with the ice-axe and crampons. It was easy practice for a while, but by the end of two or so hours climbing the steeply pitched slope over and over again it took on the tenor of a tiring high school soccer practice…with an ice-axe.

That night we had dinner and sat around playing a card game called, “Shit head” over and over again, but by 9:00 a clock the workout and the altitude put most of us down for the count.

The next morning we had breakfast, played a little more shit head, had lunch, and then gathered all of our gear into our big bags and headed for the agencies’ base camp, a mere 400 meters up the mountain. What would have been a relatively tough three hour hike unhindered became an immense effort loaded as we were with our extremely heavy boots, axe, crampons, extra clothes, snacks and assorted gear. After about two hours we reached the public base camp at 5200 meters. For the last half hour it had been hailing pebble sized chunks of ice, and at the base camp a heavy snow began to fall.

From here we took off our hiking shoes and put on our heavy boots and crampons. The last two hundred meters of the climb was up a giant wall of snow. Here we used the handle of our axes as a balancing rod, but more often than not when it touched the snow it would sink all the way down to the handle, making it more work than not to use it. Even though the pack was lighter without the boots, crampons, and ice-axe, it was a huge factor in continually losing our balance and pitching one way or another into the snow.

We were also getting less oxygen per breath and I had to undo the chest strap of my backpack because it kept my lungs from expanding to their peak capacity, something that became necessary if I didn’t want to feel out of breath with every step. By the time an hour up the snowy hill had passed and we reached camp, I was covered in sweat, and more humbled by the activity than I can remember being in a long, long time.

Once we all reached the small room, loaded with a quintuple bunk bed, we had about two hours of free time before we had to get to sleep. We’d be climbing the last 688 meters in the dead of night, heading out around 1:30 in the morning, two climbers roped to one guide, moving up the mountain by the glow of headlights.

We had a welcome meal, a hot soup and some instant noodles cooked from a propane tank that I couldn’t even imagine carrying up that snow to the camp. The guides also boiled down massive pots of snow which we used to gulp up hot tea and fill our water bottles for the trek to the summit. We kept busy for a few hours going back and forth between the warmth of the camp and the constantly shifting clouds and fog outside, which concealed and revealed the awe inspiring terrain in a shifting menagerie of snow-capped peaks.

That night I don’t know if I really slept, or if I reached any kind of deep sleep, but I had my head down and my eyes closed for the next six hours. At half past midnight they woke us up and we all put on our gear by the light of our headlamps. There was no electricity at base camp, which added to the kind of mystical quality of that early morning, everyone a bundle of nerves and excitement, nobody having any idea of what to expect from the morning ahead.

We packed extremely light for the ascent, bottled water, high-density snacks (I hated the fact that nobody sold cliff bars in La Paz), sunscreen and sunglasses. We had a breakfast of bread with jam and hot tea, and then we were outside getting roped to our guides. I was hooked up to Paul, a Dutchman in advertising, travelling and looking for a job in Buenos Aires, and our guide was named “Rocky Balboa.”

We were the first ones to head up the slope, but we were soon overtaken by Neal and Adrien, or “Kangaroo and Swisse” as the guides called them. We wouldn’t catch them again until the summit, and I’m still amazed, considering how difficult the climb was, that they got there so fast, and blazed the trail, putting those critical first boots into the snow for the rest of us.

The trail often moved across incredibly thin ridges, barely big enough for two footed boots next to each other. Thankfully with our light packs balance was much easier, and the crampons, primitive devices that they were, held a remarkably firm grip into the snow.

We’d all taken a huge wad of coca leaves in our mouths as we set off, and though the first fifteen minutes of the ascent were relatively flat, if narrow, the first two major climbs were devastating. Each time the path went uphill we slowed to a crawl, taking the equivalent of baby steps while trying, sometimes in vain, to regulate our breathing.

Every half hour or so we stopped, collapsing onto a flat spot on the dark snow, replacing our wad of coca leaves with fresh ones, eating some kind of snack, and generally just breathing hard and thinking in the back of our minds that we should turn around. Rocky Balboa must have had a hard night, because every time we stopped he laid down and took a short nap, which was slightly disconcerting. I asked him at the second or third stop how long it took him to get to the top “sin gringos” and he said two hours. Roughly half the time it took while towing white people. I asked him if it was boring dragging us along at half speed and his answer was “mas or menos.”

It was interesting walking so far, and so high in complete darkness. The headlamps often illuminated only Paul’s footsteps in front of me, and occasionally when I pointed the light into the darkness ahead all I could see was that the trail went sharply up, until the power of the light was consumed by the mountain dark and I knew it simply went up more. The light also reflected off an endless field of virgin snow. It occurred to me as the light sparkled off of the untouched snow like a desert of diamonds, that I might never be within such dense quiet again.

About halfway through the climb I started feeling extremely nauseous, and Paul said his left lung was beginning to hurt. At the next stop I spit out my coca leaves and didn’t replace them with more, there were periods of the climb were I felt incredibly energetic, which I chocked up to the leaves, but it seems I was paying the price for that extra energy now, and it wasn’t worth chewing more.

It’s hard to remember one ascent, one ridge, or one dark area from another, but I know there was a noticeable difference in how difficult the climb became as it went on. I imagine it was a combination of the altitude increasing, and our bodies slowly tiring under the continuous strain. Particularly hard were the few, blessedly short, vertical walls that required us to sink our ice-axes into the wall and pull ourselves up foot by foot.

In the last hour we actually caught up to “Kangaroo and Swisse,” who were beginning to tire a bit, but as soon as we caught up to them they’d be off again, and we were moving slower and slower, taking more breaks, and I continued to yell up to Rocky Balboa, “mas lento por favor” to slow us back to our baby steps where I wasn’t quite gulping for breath.

The path was also notably steeper as we neared the peak. We found Kangaroo, Swisse, and their hardworking, trailblazing guide sitting at the last stop before the summit. They had been waiting for us for almost fifteen minutes because their guide wanted someone else to make the last, critical, and very likely most dangerous path, from this stop to the summit. We all sat a few feet apart on the relatively steep path, our crampons the only thing between us and a long slide. We chatted a bit, had our last chocolates and granola bars, guzzled water, and prepared for the last twenty minutes before the summit.

That last leg began with a twenty foot wall of ice, which we climbed slowly, making sure that we didn’t ascend an inch without knowing the ice-axe had sunk itself in deep enough to hold our entire weight as our feet scrambled to find a crampon toe-hold. When we’d finished the wall I looked up at the shadow of the path ahead. It was the first time I remember thinking that this whole enterprise was perversely insane.

There was about a two meter high wall of ice and snow on our right side, and I could see the outline of where other climbers had gone, now covered by the thick layer of last night’s snow fall. It was far and away the thinnest ridge we’d climb that day. Maybe wide enough for a boot and a half, and after that sinister, sharp looking rocks, and after that…nothing. We had a rope, in climbing circles known as a “confidence rope” because there had little to no hope that if one of us slipped that the guide had a prayer of holding both of our weight. It may have helped arrest a fall where we had space, and a firm toe-hold on the trail, but ironically, in the place where we most needed it, it would not help. No belays were sunk into the ice as we ascended the ridge. Occasionally we’d stop so Rocky Balboa could clear a particularly icy spot, but for the last twenty minutes, every single step up we took was inches away from launching all three of us into an abyss that none would walk away from.

At each step we sunk our axes into the wall on our right, but the hold was always tenuous as most of the snow seemed new. It was hard going as we were the ones now making the path, but we didn’t have any slip-ups, any close calls, just a zen-like focus on putting one foot tenderly in front of the other. We were the first three to make the summit that day, and the first thing I did upon reaching that wonderfully flat piece of the mountain was to fall to the ground and take about a hundred of the deepest breaths I’ve ever taken.

At the top it was still dark, though there were contours of the sky where the black began bleeding a dark blue. A few minutes after us Kangaroo and Swisse joined us at the summit. Ten minutes or so later “Alaska” and Hugo and their guide were at the top. 11 of us went to the Refugio together. A French couple had paid to do a four day trek instead of three so they would be going up tomorrow. One French girl has such intense vertigo on the hike up to the base camp that she stayed behind, and another French girl has hiked an hour in the darkness before some malady had convinced her to go back. Six of us summited at the same time, and about an hour behind us, our last member would get to the summit after we’d come down.

By the time Alaska and Hugo had reached the top the sun had risen. There was a layer of clouds above us and a layer of clouds beneath us, and though we couldn’t see much, nothing could dispel the absolute sense of awe I felt upon reaching that tiny piece of mountain real estate, with the narrow sliver of sky telescoping into the distance. We all felt an amazing surge of energy, and were thankfully given an abundance of time at the top to watch a small piece of the sun burst through the fog and clouds and rest our bodies and minds.

It was funny in a way that as elated as we were Rocky Balboa had used the entire period of our excitement to take an extra long nap. But what goes up must come down, and on the way down the guide would be in the back of each little group. The duty of leading us down the mountain fell to me, who was in the back for the climb. Though daylight revealed exactly how dangerous the last ridge had been, it was somehow much, much easier to move down that precarious path than it was to go up.

It took us around four hours to go up the trail, and a little more than an hour to reach base camp again. We stopped only twice for a minute to catch our breath before bounding down the trail again. We were the first to the summit, and first back to camp, but before long the other two groups joined us. We loaded up our packs with our sleeping bags, hiking shoes and other gear and headed back down the wall of snow to the public base camp. From there we put our heavy boots, crampons, ice-axe and other gear back in our large bags, and slogged back down to the Refugio. It was actually the worst part of the whole endeavor for me, my knees were sore and buckling under the weight of the pack against the rocky trail down.

At the Refugio we all gathered, and played a few more rounds of Shit head while waiting for the rest of the group to gather. Alaska said he’d been chewing huge wads of Coca leaves the entire trek up, and when he got back to base camp he’d thrown up pretty much everything he had in his stomach. David was in even worse shape, he’d arrived about an hour behind us to the summit, and looked incredibly sick as he passed us. He’d actually paid 100 Bolivianos a day for a bottle of oxygen and the porter to carry it up with him. When he got back to the Refugio people took turns taking a huff while considering their hands.

From the Refugio we could look up at the peak, with the fog and clouds criss-crossing the air in front of it, while we nursed our legs and lungs with soup and hot tea. It may have been the easiest 6000 meter ascent, but it was easy to see how conquering mountains like this becomes a lifetime obsession for many climbers. All I'd had was a taste.

The Machu Picchu Birthday Adventure

I had hoped the trip would be without many hiccups. I’d prepared all the hotels, buses, and trains we would need for ten days in Peru. I was meeting the woman I loved after a four month absence, and all I wanted was for her to have a memorable birthday in an amazing place.

For a few days things went off almost without a hitch. I picked up Rachel at the airport and within minutes we were in a relatively posh hotel room. We had a great dinner in Cusco and slept like lambs in a king size bed.

The next day we checked out and grabbed a cab to our tour bus. The bus ride to Puno was probably one of the least exciting tourist jaunts in Peru, but I couldn’t have been happier.

First, we went to some kind of Church thing.

Then we went to some kind of Inca building that had collapsed, leaving only a wall. There was a high point though, a baby alpaca, and some rocks.

The last stop was some kind of museum we didn't even bother to go into, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with bulls.

Once the bus deposited us in Puno we grabbed a cab and five minutes later were in another fairly posh suite in the Plaza de Armas in Puno. Apart from a rather awful dinner from a restaurant I’d actually had good luck with before, and the fact that I’d lost my sunglasses in the bus, things were still going swimmingly.

A taxi picked us up at the hotel and took us to the dock where our boat was waiting. A microphone cracked on and I was afraid of another series of monotonous tour guide droning, but thankfully we were saved from that by a rather clipped series of short announcements. We were free to enjoy our boat ride across the highest navigable lake in the world in relative peace.

The boat stopped at Los Uros, the community of floating islands. Los Uros are a pretty unique specimen not only in Peru, but really anywhere. There are little island communities all over the world, (the ones in Hao Long Bay come to mind) but I don't think any are actually made of the plants that grow in the lake where they live. The visitors on Los Uros all get pretty much the same speech, unfortunately I'd heard it before, but they explain the process of acquiring the root systems of the reeds as a kind of floating foundation over which they build the islands, and after the speech they offered us a chance to wander around the island, taking pictures and shopping for chochkys.

Rachel and I opted to pay a nominal fee and ride on the Mercedes Benz with the rest of the tour. Pictures were taken, unique if not relatively predictable experiences were had. Afterward we shoved off to the beautiful island of Amantani, and thankfully our “home stay” had a very nice room, and little actual contact with natives who’d long ago grown bored of tourists.

We had our passable lunch of quinoa soup and some strange native potatoes that looked like a cross between a potato and a carrot. They have a very distinct flavor somewhere between the starch of an American potato and a sweet potato. The whole tour group, actually, a half dozen tour groups met up in what passed for a plaza on this side of the island. Thankfully I already knew where they were going so Rachel and I could head them off at the pass. We coasted up the hill past the aging or wheezing gringos on the path and made it to the top of Pachamama, the Westernmost facing mountain on the island. From there we wandered, unmolested along the mountain top before retreating to a wind break to watch the sun sink into the horizon behind snow capped Bolivian mountains.

Sometime after a fairly edible dinner, there was a “party” for all the tourists in a building nearby. We went down with the Peruvian woman staying in the same homestay as us. We were given “native dress” to make the party more festive. I put a poncho on over my jacket and Rachel put some kind of wool shawl on over hers.

A Peruvian band consisting of a drum, small guitar and pan flute took the stage. Some local men wandered around the room grabbing groups of men and women and we all formed circles in the center of the room and did something that approximated dancing. Rachel and I fled after about a half hour, which was fifteen minutes too long.

I had hoped that we would get up around 4 AM to go watch the sunrise from Pachatata, the eastern facing mountain, but whether from the local food or the altitude, we weren’t quite up to it.

So we woke up around seven, ate breakfast, and moseyed down to the dock to get the boat to our next island, Takile. An hour after the boat was unmoored we set foot on our next shore. The island is beautiful, and fairly isolated in the lake, making for some spectacular views. The tour took us around the island and to a restaurant, where Rachel was interested to know that the native’s equivalent of peacocking turned out to be increasing the size of the colorful pom-poms single women draped around their skirts. The men showed their marital status via the colors of wool hats they wore.

After Takile we had an uneventful three hour slog back to Puno, where the plans would begin to unravel at startling speed.

We disembarked in Puno, said goodbye to the tour guide and group and jumped in a cab that delivered us to our hotel in five minutes. We collected our bags and got in another cab to the bus station, where we didn’t have tickets but I knew that buses left on the half hour throughout the day.

I checked at the first ticket window and a woman rather rudely brushed me off, saying that there were no buses to Cuzco for the day. The next three windows were oddly closed, and the fourth didn’t have any buses to Cuzco. When I asked who did have buses to Cuzco they sent me around the corner. Finally, the man at this counter was willing to explain why nobody had buses to Cuzco.

The city of Juliaca had decided to strike, for three days, and were closing down the only direct overland route from Puno, where Lake Titicaca was, to Cuzco, the jump off point for Machu Picchu. This was an incredibly bad turn of events.

I went back to Rachel, thinking, well we may not be completely screwed, we could just shell out the cash for the next plane back to Cuzco.

As it turns out, the only nearby airport was located in, you guessed it, Juliaca. So the rat bastards had closed off the roads and the sky.

I went back to a few of the bus companies to find out if or when the next bus was leaving. A few companies did have buses, but those buses weren’t leaving until 9:30 PM (It was 4:00 PM now) and would take 12 hours to arrive in Cuzco. This wouldn’t have been a problem if we were planning on staying in a five dollar hostel, but we had a 120 dollar hotel booked for that night. We also had a 160 dollar set of train tickets from Cuzco to Machu Picchu in the morning, at six in the morning.

The first thing we did was check the train schedule, and as it turns out, there was not a single train leaving Cuzco after 9 AM. So there was no chance to change the tickets to a later train. At this point it looked like we’d end up eating an expensive hotel and the train tickets.

We left the train station and went back to the hotel, from there we asked the concierge if they could find us a taxi or private car to take us around the road blocks and into Cuzco. After about twenty minutes of trying the best that the woman could do was a price of 380 American dollars for a ride down to Cuzco. As my eyes were starting to show murder to anyone who passed by Rachel managed to keep her cool and began trying to find some kind of solution online. Neither her useful effort or my smoldering brought us to a particularly good conclusion. I had a local phone which was both dead and out of money and the hotel was unwilling to let us use theirs, further complicating the situation and boiling my blood.

We left the hotel to go get some food and charge my phone after putting some money on it. We happened to pass a travel agency on the gringo walking street near the hotel. After some explaining the two women working behind the desk were using three cell phones simultaneously to try to find taxis past the temporary war zone of Juliaca.

At first they quoted us the same price, 380 dollars for the ride. I told them I could probably buy a used car somewhere in Puno for that price, and they laughingly agreed. Rachel and I decided to throw a figure at them, 250 dollars, a fairly staggering amount of money for a cab ride. Five minutes later the girls found us a cabbie, allegedly trustworthy, through which we could arrange transport to Cuzco, leaving a half hour later.

We jumped at the chance, grabbed the cash from an ATM, paid up, ran to a restaurant and got some food to go, and then walked over to the cab. We were feeling pretty happy about finding a solution to the problem, but Peru tends to reward those who count their chickens before they’ve hatched by burning down their farm.

After about a half hour the highway out of Puno was covered in rocks. The taxi had to swerve onto the shoulder to avoid the mass. The rocks were sprinkled with the reflective shards of broken glass gleaming under the yellow streetlights. We had assumed a truck carrying stones had gotten into an accident.

Not a hundred yards down the road there was another mass of stones, and shards of broken glass. Fifty yards further down there was another round of the same. After we’d passed a half dozen piles of stones studded with broken glass I was still wondering what the hell kind of accident it possibly could have been, and why no police had arrived to fix the situation.

Only later did it dawn on me that this was actually part of the protest. Our driver swerved to avoid all the piles of stone and glass, until at the gateway to the city of Juliaca the road had finally become completely impassable. Boulders, huge piles of glass, and pieces of tarmac had been heaped three feet high across all four lanes of the highway.

The lights of the city brightened the mass across the road, but there were no angry mobs guarding the blockade. Kids in backpacks walked down the street, presumably coming home from school, old women sold corn and vegetables on the side of the blockaded road. Teenagers rode back and forth on their mopeds, smiling and laughing. Not knowing the vagaries of Peruvian protesting and rioting, I had no idea what this meant.

The driver, Victor Hugo, reached the impasse and reversed. I was getting very nervous. I had assumed, and seemingly confirmed that the nine hours of our trip meant that we were circumventing the city of Juliaca altogether, but here we were, right in the thick of the very thing we’d paid the cab driver handsomely to avoid.

Skirting the main road, we headed down a side road, following a truck over and through an empty basketball court to get back on the road. The road was also filled with rubble and broken glass, but it was seemingly possible to avoid most of the mass and continue on.

We went down a few of these roads, swerving to avoid the stones and glass, but much of the time wincing at the sound of glass getting crushed beneath the wheels of our less than rugged Toyota Yaris.

Eventually we’d gotten off the roads of the city completely and were climbing up a dirt path. It was wide enough for our car but the distinction between a large path and a small road was razor thin. We climbed in a cloud of dust until the entire city of Juliaca glowed in the silent geometry of its street lights. From the heights there was no indication of the chaos and anger brewing in the city center. There was only the beauty of its sharp orange edges arrayed like an army of fireflies marching along the contours of the valley, below the ovular silhouettes of the surrounding mountaintops.

The dirt road made Rachel nervous, but I thought we were finally heading out of harm’s way and to the highway on the other side of Juliaca.

After ten or fifteen minutes on our dirt road the cab managed to find asphalt again, and again that asphalt was covered in boulders and glass. We’d taken a mountain road above the heights of the city but confusingly only seemed to dive right into the city again. We drove on, the streets on the outskirts darker but less peopled than before. We turned around a half dozen times and though I was confident we’d make it out before, the driver seemed hopelessly lost in this particular quarter of the city. He bottomed out over a couple of different roadblocks before taking some kind of shortcut through a construction zone.

Afterwards we were driving along the side of a set of train tracks, seemingly the only part of the city that had avoided the walls of stone and glass before again finding ourselves in a new maze of roadblocks. An another side street we watched a girl sweeping the broken glass in front of her parents’ tienda to the other side of the road. There was a vanishingly quick moment of tranquility within the maelstrom as we passed by, like children poking their head out of the door in a recently shelled city.

We finally made it onto what seemed like a major artery out of Juliaca but the waves of boulders and shattered bottles continued for what seemed like ten or fifteen miles outside of the city. I can only assume that the people of the city had loaded huge construction trucks with the empty bottles and rocks and driven around the city while people standing in the back had been tossing them onto the road. The shutdown of Juliaca, one of the largest cities in Peru, was a seemingly herculean effort of thousands and thousands of people.

At one point we’d passed a street filled with what seemed like all of the city’s police cruisers. It evoked an odd feeling, that such a huge collection of the symbols of order could perfectly represent a total absence of authority is not something I would have ever considered.

After we’d passed what seemed like the last of the barriers erected by the angry populace the cab ditched off to another mountain road. This one was larger and reminiscent of many of the roads I’d traveled between the mountain towns of Peru, which is to say thousands of feet up with hardly enough room for two cars to pass, and girded by nothing but air separating the car from the cliff face and a fall into the endless dark.

I was immensely thankful that Rachel couldn’t see much of that.

The mountain road finally gave way to the main highway, which we’d traveled in a cushioned tourist bus only two days earlier. The driver sped up to about 110 km/hr and despite a few whining noises that weren’t there when we left Puno, the car deftly sped us back to Cusco. We arrived at an amazingly well appointed hotel room around midnight.

We’d be able to enjoy our little oasis for about four hours before we had to leave for the train to Machu Picchu.

I’d lived in Cusco for the last three months, and in that time almost all of the beauty I’d found, driving between islolated mountain towns not connected to the electric grid, was that the Andes were a region of very stark contrasts between the browns of the mountains and the white of the occasional snow capped peaks. The valleys would take on green hues of their slightly increased fecundity.

I had assumed this would prepare me for the terrain around Machu Picchu, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. There is a reason that Machu Picchu makes it onto so many bucket lists, and it was obvious on the train ride into Aguas Caliente.

The area around Machu Picchu is a few thousand feet below Cusco, the city that most people will fly into when they arrive in Peru for the trip. That slight difference in elevation is enough to create a microclimate totally unlike anything in the mountains surrounding Cusco. The windows outside of the train revealed a breathtaking panorama that went on for three hours. The Urubamba river wound its way along the train tracks, taking millions of years to carve out the valley along which the train wound its way.

Mountains rose up on both sides, separated only occasionally by the rivets that glaciers had made as gravity pulled them down to the valley floor. There was no obvious distinction between those draped with snowcaps and those carpeted in plants, a subtle shift in the weather patterns could probably turn an icy peak green or vice versa anywhere along the range.

The train stopped in a little town called Aguas Caliente though it has apparently been renamed “Pueblo Machu Picchu” in recent years. The train station is surrounded by an artisanal market of a labyrinthine nature which is pretty disorienting. I had expected to get a cab to our hotel, which neither of us knew the address of, but there’s only one main road in Aguas Caliente and its frequented solely by the buses that take people up to Machu Picchu.

Luckily for us though, a little tired and very sandy from the last day and a half of hussling, the hotel was not two blocks from the station. The room was incredibly spacious and comfortable as well. From the top floor we had a stunning view of the Urubamba river beneath our balcony and the imposing mountains that shielded Machu Picchu from Aguas Caliente. Rachel took a well deserved nap and I, not wanting to wake her with my melodic snoring, took a walk around the town and found out when, where, and how we’d get to Machu Picchu the next day. We bought tickets for “Machu Picchu and Mountain.” Having done absolutely no research ahead of time we weren’t fully prepared for what that actually meant. We only knew that we weren’t going to do Huayna Picchu (the iconic rounded mountain directly behind Machu Picchu in all the pictures) because Rachel has some issues with heights and the path is decidedly more dangerous than the average hike.

The next morning we got up around 3:30 and were waiting in line for the first bus around 4:30. It was already raining. Breakfast wasn’t up until 5 so Rachel and I took turns waiting in line and walking back to the hotel to eat breakfast. The bus left at 5:30 for the winding half hour drive up to the gates of the city. Once we got to Machu Picchu we still had to wait, and behind us the buses piled a steady stream of ponchos into the line. A rainbow of cheap plastic waited eagerly for the gates to open.

There are definitely parts of Machu Picchu that feel like going to Disney World. Luckily, after we got through the gates, we made a beeline for the first uphill trail we could find. Despite the rain there was a clearing at the altitude of Machu Picchu itself and the clouds rolled around in the upper parts of the surrounding mountains, obscuring the peaks but leaving the city at its charming, picturesque best. We managed to get some really beautiful shots on the empty viewing platforms, not only of us in the clear without being surrounded by tourists but of Machu Picchu itself without a single soul roaming its rocky corridors.

After about a half hour of taking photos and climbing up the hillside we had to admit our total lack of research was beginning to come into play. We had a choice of going up “Machu Picchu Mountain,” whatever that was, or going down into the city itself. We chose to go up, and after wandering around for a bit found the gates to the mountain trail. The mountain didn’t open for another twenty minutes so we had to listen to some middle-aged southern California blondes banter until we were mercifully allowed to run up the mountain ahead of them.

The view from Huayna Picchu is supposed to be epic, but Machu Picchu Mountain makes it look like a little hill. We climbed for almost an hour straight, up stone stairs, stopping only to get a few agonizingly disappointing views of the clouds that had descended to cover everything. And though Rachel was a trooper, bounding up the stone stairs, sometimes fairly well exposed to precipitous drops, her fear of heights kicked in pretty hard at the top. We went down a little slower than we’d gone up, but the whiteout across the trail probably came in handy here as we couldn’t focus on much except putting one foot in front of the other. To help out I took Rachel’s bag and put it inside my water proof one, this will be significant later.

When we got back down to the bottom of Mount Machu Picchu we’d been getting steadily rained on for at least four hours. We were wet, my poncho had large holes in it, and I’d given my jacket to Rachel, who was basically shivering. Rachel was also wearing old running shoes which had a fairly prominent hole in the front so both of us were we through our socks as well. We had bought “boxed lunches” with the understanding that we could eat at almost any beautiful spot throughout the part on a sunny day. When it was raining though, there are very few places for cover at Machu Picchu, so we simply had a couple of granola bars and pressed on.

The city center of Machu Picchu, though filled with thousands of tourists a day, has absolutely no markings, so we knew if we went into the city it would basically be meaningless to us and we’d get bored easily and leave. We went back to the entrance to get a guide.

We actually lucked out and were able to piggy back off of a group of five tourists that already had a guide. He led us into the city, where we took some of the same pictures we’d taken three hours earlier, only this time surrounded by people and of the city turned into colored walkways by all the ponchos roaming around the edifices.

The guide explained most of the sites pretty well, sometimes with pictures dating back a hundred years, and there were periods that we listened attentively and others when the rain, which hadn’t stopped, and the increasing wind were getting to us. We were soaked and cold and only getting wetter and colder. Rachel hadn’t been wearing a hat so her hair was soaked, and I was having trouble figuring out where the sweat ended and the rain began.

Once the tour ended, around noon, we’d been wandering around Machu Picchu in the rain for over six hours. We darted into one of the buses back to town, tearing off the already half torn ponchos and throwing them in the trash. Thankfully, we got to go back to our warm hotel room rather than a hostel.

We relaxed for a bit and then went out to the free dinner provided by our hotel, which was pretty delicious the night before. We looked at the wine list and Rachel wanted a Malbec that the hotel didn’t have. I took a few minutes and spoke to the manager and he sent one of his employees out to grab a bottle from another restaurant nearby. I may have mentioned that it was Rachel’s birthday and she wanted a piece of chocolate cake as well.

Two woman wearing Peruvian mountain garb came over with the manager and another employee to do a Machu Picchu version of the embarrassing Happy Birthday song they do at Applebee’s. They also wrote “Happy Birthday Rachel” in chocolate sauce on her plate with a really good piece of cake. My girlfriend was embarrassed on her birthday, so my job was done.

When we got back from dinner I realized I hadn’t taken my phone out of my bag. I wasn’t too worried as I’d hiked for hours and hours in the rain with it before and everything inside stayed dry. What I hadn’t contended with is that putting Rachel’s wet bag inside of a watertight seal had essentially turned the bag into an oven which sucked all the water out of it. When I looked into my bag there was a pool of about a third of a gallon of water at the bottom, in which my phone had been floating for the better part of half a day.

I went downstairs on Rachel’s orders to get an airtight container and some rice, and left the phone in it until the next morning, but alas Machu Picchu and its Incan ghosts had claimed my phone as tribute.

We had one more day in Aguas Caliente so we decided to go out for a hike to a place called Mandor ( MANDOOR!!!!) to where there was some kind of pretty mountain thing and a waterfall of some kind. To get there, the hotel proprietor assured me, all we had to do was walk for a bit along the train tracks to the easily marked entrance. So along the train tracks we went. After we passed our second or third “Don’t walk along the train tracks it’s dangerous” sign we were staying into a relatively long train tunnel. We half-walked, half-sprinted through it, thankful no trains had come before we were at yet another train tunnel. I still maintain that there was probably enough room for us to spread eagle against the rock walls to avoid getting squished, but Rachel thinks there wasn’t enough room.

It seemed that this was probably not the way to Mandor so we turned around and went through the tunnel again. We had passed a set of stairs earlier but assumed it was the path to Putucusi, which was apparently steep and dangerousy. After yesterday’s adventure with heights I didn’t want to press us into another steep situation.

We got to the stairs and started to climb. It was a very pretty path and before long we arrived at something I’d never quite seen before. There was an empty booth much the same as the entrance to Mount Machu Picchu and a little wire mesh door framed in wood standing ajar. There was also a ladder. The ladder went up for probably about a hundred feet. A thick steel cable was bolted to the wall next to it. I won’t even venture to guess what the actual angle was, but it was a damn near vertical ascent up the rock face on the ladder to a point where the climber then disappeared into the mountain before ascending the next ladder which was just as steep and about half as tall. I could not imagine a more terrifying “hike” for someone who was afraid of heights.

Rachel said she thought she could do it, and I certainly didn’t want to press her one way or another. I told her we could climb about thirty feet up the ladder, her first with me behind her, and we could see whether we wanted to keep going or not. We made it up to the pre-determined point and decided it probably wasn’t worth going all the way up.

Rachel was adamant that I go up and take some pretty pictures though, so I left my bag at the bottom and shimmied up the ladder, and the next one, and the next one. One can apparently climb mountains much faster if ladders are scaling the face than other hiking methods, and before long I was way, way above the starting point. Pretty pictures were taken. I half jogged up the mountain a little bit more after the ladders, not wanting to keep Rachel waiting too long, but wanting to get some good shots before I went down.

As I scrambled back down the trail and the ladders I got a few more pictures before I was stopped in my tracks. The first thing I saw at the space between the ladders was a Peruvian guy wearing my bright orange backpack. The next thing I saw was Rachel sitting down near him, at the top of that hundred foot vertical ascent. I don’t think I would have been more surprised if I saw Abraham Lincoln arm wrestling a velociraptor at the top of the ladder. I still feel bad that, probably from the strain of running up and down the trail I wasn’t able to even remotely convey how proud I was of Rachel at that moment. Climbing up the path of Machu Picchu Mountain on a well worn trail was one thing, but to come up that ladder, faced every rung with the thing that most terrifies you, was an amazing accomplishment.

Apparently a young Czech lady, her mother, and Peruvian boyfriend had given Rachel the 8-Mile speech (one shot) and convinced her to climb up the ladder. So the five of us reclimbed the trail together, and after four or five more ladders, a few narrow spots, and another 45 minutes or so of climbing we got to the top of Putucusi. I had no idea what was waiting for us but apparently Rachel did. We had a totally unobstructed view of the entire city of Machu Picchu, and it was gorgeous. I should mention that the sky was clear and blue, and not a drop of rain fell, until we were going back down the trail. Not only did Rachel have to climb back down these incredibly frightening things, but she had to do it in the rain. The Peruvian guy, fleet footed as anyone I’ve ever seen, went down first, and then Rachel, with me behind as I tried to talk her down the increasingly slippery rungs of the ladders.

We went straight from the trail to the train station. A frightened young American girl was asking us how to get a hotel as she realized that she left her backpack on the train. Rachel did an amazing job of comforting the hapless girl and bought her a little gift before we were back on the train. We were treated to another three hours of the picturesque valley of the Urubamba river before we got a cab back to the hotel.

The next day we spent most, if not all, of the day shopping. Over the course of six to eight hours markets were visited, gifts were purchases, and Christmas was firmly destroyed under the barrages of haggling. That night it poured, the skies opened up and after a few hours of rain pebble sized pieces of hail scoured the surface of Cusco. The roof of the hotel sounded like it was under attack until the squall passed and it simply continued raining.

The next day I had planned for us to visit some old Incan salt mines and hiking to an Incan amphitheatre before retiring to a fancy spa in Urubamba. However, when I looked at the weather it said rain for a solid week, so we just gave up and went to the Spa. Posh would be an understatement for this place, a five star luxury resort called Inka del Tambo. We went in, ate a meal by the pool and then went in for an odd hour of “hydro therapy” before a hot stone massage. The hydro therapy consisted of a dry sauna, an ice rub, then a steam sauna before a series of random water jets in various positions. There were also some kind of scouring shower jets before we went in for the massage.

On the ride back to Cusco we were treated to some more beautiful Andean skies, but Rachel was feeling particularly sick. It was touch and go by the time we got back to Cusco, and after moving a dinner reservation to 8 PM Rachel made her recovery and we went to a ridiculously tasty Tapas restaurant called Cicciolini’s.

Rachel’s flight left at about 5:50 in the morning, but the Cusco airport is an odd beast. There are virtually no flights in or out of Cusco after 4 or 5 in the afternoon because the weather becomes wild and too dangerous for even regular airliners. They don’t open the airport until 4AM after the last afternoon flight, and Rachel’s was the first flight of the day. We left at about 4 to go to the airport, and when we got there was a long line to check into her flight. None of the other flight operators had even opened yet.

After waiting over an hour in the check in line it was looking like something had gone horribly wrong. It had also started raining. Apparently, Lan had downgraded the flight to a smaller plane, so some of the passengers were going to get booted to the next flight. Rachel was less than happy, but when it was finally her turn to check in everything went off without a hitch. My plane would be another matter.

I got to the airport around 9 for my 10:20 flight. They told me they were still trying to figure out when the plane would actually take off. Despite the significant profusion of tourists that flew into Cusco, only one airline, Rachel’s (LAN) had planes that were equipped with the necessary devices to thread the needles necessary to take off from Cusco in bad weather. My flight eventually took off around two and I made it back to La Paz, already missing her by the time I landed.