I'm going to try my damndest to remember the name of the teacher who told me that roosters call at the crack of dawn... so I can track her down and kick her. They started at 4:30 again. One would go from the tree next to our tent, then another would answer from somewhere up the mountain, then three would answer around us. "Maybe this is why they came up with cockfighting," Niels posited, "to kill all the !%#$ing roosters!"
I would have been in a foul mood besides the roosters simply because I didn't sleep well at all the night before, nor did Andrew. Apparently we both did the thing where we didn't get good sleep until about ten minutes before the alarm clock went off. Ugh.
We'd had to get up very early because we had to take a truck from Playa down to Santa Teresa where we'd then hike to a gondola to cross the river and then take yet another truck up to the train station where we'd wait to take the train to Aguas Calientes ("Hot Springs"), where we'd make our ascent to Machu Picchu from.
My first thought on seeing the truck we were riding down to Santa Teresa in was "Tom Joad". It was a flatbed truck with about a 15 foot bed. The sides were wooden and it had a tent A-frame welded to it. There were seven gringoes in the back (Andrew, Niels, and I, plus a French Family of four; the two little children, both under five, speaking French was adorable) and seven Peruvians. I immediately thought of how unsafe having that many people standing in the back of a truck was, but I was to quickly discover that I had no idea. We stopped every quarter mile or so and picked up various people who lived in the mountains who needed to get to Santa Teresa for some reason; we picked up many children and their teacher.
Besides that the truck was getting fuller and fuller, to the degree that occasionally someone would sit on the A-frame or would ride the bumper, the road itself was terrifying. The driver had no qualms about safety. He had to get to Santa Teresa soon and he was going to do it, by God. This might not have been so bad were we on a good road, but this road was one lane, dirt, and skirting cliffs (with no guard rails) the majority of the time. Nonetheless, the driver booked it, his only concession to averting disaster being that he'd honk his horn before we got to a blind corner. At one point we did meet another truck coming up the mountain and we had to back up (which the driver did without mirrors) to a point where the other truck could get by.
When we finally got to Santa Teresa we had FORTY NINE people riding in the back of the truck with us though, despite the fact that it was so packed, I had a three foot space around me, which turned out to be from the fact that they were intimidated by me wearing camoflage (soldiers get a wide berth here apparently).
From Santa Teresa we walked for twenty minutes down to the gondola. This wasn't a gondola like Venice, or a ski gondola, but rather a four foot by two foot crate that was attached to a 100 meter long metal rope by a pulley. I crossed (the river was roaring and there were vicious rapids just below) with two packs. My weight carried me most of the way and then I pulled myself the rest of the way by the threaded rope that hung off the wire rope by hooks. I was at least 40 feet above the river.
The other truck ride was not nearly exciting as the first, though the second driver didn't honk around curves and we didn't have the A-frame to act as a roll bar, so I guess that was a bit thrilling.
We had to wait at the train station for six hours and in the meantime I took a cold shower in a restaurant's bathroom, which was a corrogated metal shed. I merely stood next to the water, wetting my hands down and then washing myself. Had I gotten under the showerhead completely, I would have screamed. Nonetheless, I was finally clean. In thanks for allowing me to shower, I bought a beer from the restaurant, my first on the hike. Over the course of the six hours I bought many more.
After we finally got to Aguas Calientes, got to our hostel, wandered around the town on our own a bit, and met back up for supper, Niels said that he ran across some of the other hikers we'd seen on the hike. When Niels had said who he was hiking with, they'd said, "The Americans? The one that's still fighting the war (me apparently) and the one with the funny hat (Andrew bought an awesome hat in Cusco before we left)?"
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