Guest post by Sandy Vakos

One of my life's best things is the trip I made to Machu Piccu hiking the Inca Trail.  We had porters carrying our stuff:  tents, food, toilet paper, even a little toilet tent.  The Peruvian government requires Inca Trail hikers to use porters.  It provides jobs and keeps the trail clean and controlled.  Our porters blithely slide past us grinning, huge packs on their backs, their sandled feet like dried peels of black bananas, and beat us to camp by miles.  

When we finally show up, we find little cups of tea and crackers, waiting  along with bowls of water and small bars of soap. The doors to our tents flapping, all set up, and happy to see us.  Our pancakes in the morning had flowers on top made by carving strawberries, and served on a little table on the side of the mountain.  

The clouds in Peru billow big and white and coat the sides of the sky, giving the impression of being inside a snow globe, the liquid settled clear, a tiny me eating pretty pancakes on the side of a mountain.  We were hiking the Inca Trial, the same footpath the Incas took up to Machu Piccu. Little Mountain, built out of stone and shaped like a lizard way up in the clouds on top of a mountain, where they lived and farmed and worshiped.  We walked up, down, up, down, up, down. We walked way up, way down. Down, down. Up, up. We walked for four days.  

Our guide was like a mountain goat, leading us along the trail, knee deep on either side with drippy, moist epiphytic orchids sprouting out of plant, out of plant, out of plant.   There on the lush green walls of our walk, parrots appeared, giant hummingbirds hummed.  We walked in a spongy cloud forest.  

We all had diarrhea and we swallowed charcoal tablets. Our faces turned red with vertical climbs as we leaned into our walking sticks. Our hearts and lungs and legs getting bigger, stronger each day. Our guide skillfully stirred us away from other hikers so that it seemed to be just us, a little group of poncho people, walking up a mountain somewhere in the Andes.  We hardly knew anyone else was there, anywhere.  

At times on a “goat's path,” we stumbled on an archaeological dig. Possibly, we guessed, the Smithsonian, or maybe National Geographic?  Tiny full grown bodies laid out in bones under blue tarps into which we peered. The dirt they lay in a perfectly smooth box with perfectly sculpted right angles. Molars still in their mouths.  

Macchu Piccu was accidentally discovered only one hundred years or so ago, abandoned by the Incas. No one knows why. And covered by plants. There are still polished stones on the foot path, relics rounded and smoothed by the hands of an Incan some one hundred years ago, kicked unwittingly by an innocent hiker, doing one of life's best things: hiking the Inca Trail.  PS- charcoal tablets work.    

Sandy Vakos lives in Virginia Beach