We pull into Ollantaytambo again and stop for breakfast around 8 am. We are swarmed by tons of people trying to sell us hiking poles, hats, scarves, gloves and other things. We wade through them to our restaurant and walk up stairs, sit down and order. A few guys snuck into the restaurant and tried to hawk their wares at 2x prices which we wisely ignored. We all ordered pancakes and Tom attempted to order a poached egg which they totally didn't understand. They brought him a glass of boiling water and a raw egg. Finally they hardboiled it and brought it to him but it wasn't quite cooked yet. He ate a little and smeared it all over his plate so they didn't get too angry. Megan meanwhile decided to make amends and talked to Cesar and Juan and apologized. She found out that Cesar was totally cool and didn't take offense. She also found out that Juan would like to be refered to as Don Juan or Numero Juan.
Tom and I decide we should get hiking poles and talk to one lady. She wants to sell us one for 10 or crappy ones for 5. We tell her 2 for 15 and she takes one good one and one crappy one and hands them to us. Tom takes the crappy one hands it back to her and takes the good one and says 15 again. She tries a halfhearted 16 and he says 15. She says sure and he makes her break a 100 sole note so he has change for the trail. We take our new sticks, hop on the bus and take off for the start of the trail.
We get off and they put out a tarp for us to pack up all our gear. You can see the red bags are for our porters, and the other backpacks are ours. This is our last time to use a real bathroom before we leave for the trail so we all head down and pay the 1 sole to use it. While we are using the bathroom, the porters leave with their packs. This was common as they would leave as soon as possible and would always beat us to the next location. They were completely absurd. We were hiking with like 10kg packs and they had 25 kg packs. They would beat us by multiple hours. So hardcore. Oh and they hiked in sandals.
Megan and I took a before picture:
We started walking and about an hour in, Cesar stopped us to show us some of the natural plants they used for dyes and for natural remedies (like tara for sore throats) We eventually came to the first ruins on the trail, a small fort along the river. We then proceeded on to Llactapata, which was another agricultural site. They apparently grew a lot of crops here and took them all the way over the pass to Machu Picchu. We then headed onward towards our first lunch site. I was excited to get lunch. I knew that we had a cook, but I wasn't sure what to expect.
Turns out I had no need to be worried. In fact, we were going to eat better than at the buffet we went to. I think there also was more food. High school Wes would have been happy. For our first meal, they served us garlic bread sticks, followed by a soup, followed by rice and trout and something else. They also served coca tea at pretty much every meal to help with the altitude. It was all delicious. I think it would have been good even if I hadn't been hiking for 4 hours already. Megan had an excited timing learning how to use squat toilets after lunch. She can tell you all about it if you are interested. We then continued on to our first camp site at 2600 meters.
Some of the porters and the guide amused themselves with Jake's frisbee (they weren't very good) while Jake tried to figure out how to put up his hammock. He finally got it up and used it for only about 20 minutes before we started playing euchre to kill time until dinner. After dominating at Euchre for a while, we had dinner and then I went and played more Euchre with Mark, Chad and Adam. I finally ended up going to sleep around midnight. I had heard that the 2nd day on the trail was the hardest as we climb up to 4215 meters and then descend down to the campsite. I was not excited about the mile vertical the next day.
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