THE HIKE
This is the post about our Friday afternoon mountain hike in Ollantaytambo. It needs its own post because it was the most excellent kind of adventure.
During out first day in Ollantaytambo, I had scoped out this path up one of the mountains surrounding the town. I wanted to climb it. It went basically straight up the mountain, and it turned out to be a drainage ditch. Although my trail was no longer a feasible possibility, we had gotten the hiking bug, so on Friday afternoon after lunch we filled our water bottles and headed out on a mission.
In this post, “we” means: me, Isaac, David, and Sierra. Isaac was attached to the ruins on the edge of town, but 50% of us (to remain unnamed) did not have our tourist tickets, so we couldn’t get in. We headed for the other ruins, which are arguably less majestic but are open to the public.
Up we went. We probably hiked for a solid 34-40 minutes before coming to a point where the trail basically dissolved into a bunch of tiny unmarked trails, most of which looked unpromising. We had already seen a lot of cool things (ruins, rocks, flowers, etc.) and we had achieved a respectable elevation that gave us a beautiful view of the whole town, but were we satisfied? No, of course not.
We chose a path that seemed fairly promising but ended up leading to a cave (tunnel??) that had some torn away caution tape in front of it. We went in. Unfortunately, it quickly became too small for any of us to shimmy through so we were forced to seek an alternative route. David chose up. Sierra quickly climbed after him, Isaac shrugged and followed, and I stood there complaining. When it became obvious that no one was planning on turning around, I followed them. We climbed a steep slope through a small gap in the rocks, scaled the rock wall down on the other side, and continued on our merry way. Always up.
The next 30 minutes will get abbreviated here, with the crucial information being that we just kept going up. It was so beautiful. SO BEAUTIFUL! And then we got to the top. Well, not the actual top, but our highest point. It probably would have been another solid hour to the very top and we were tired and needed to get back in time for dinner. Mind you, this was not settling for second best! We got exactly what we were looking for. We crested a ridge and basically entered a gorgeous wind tunnel. I had to put my hat in my pants so it wouldn’t blow away. We had an amazing panoramic view of the town, the ruins on the opposite side of the valley, and the surrounding mountains.
We took some pictures and then just sat on the edge of our ridge and just enjoyed everything. We were in the middle of our peaceful enjoyment when Sierra peeked her head around a wall and said, “Um, guys? I think someone is blowing a whistle at us.” Now, Sierra is known for annoying jokes such as this one, so it took us a moment to process that she actually looked genuinely concerned and uncomfortable. We hustled to the edge of the cliff and looked down a few hundred feet to a small Peruvian man who was blowing a whistle and dramatically gesturing in what was clearly a come down right now sort of wave.
I have never descended a mountain so fast. Sierra and I reached were ahead of Isaac and David when we reached the man, who informed us that we had been spotted with binoculars from the town, that the police had been on line for the radio call telling him to come get us, that we had gone far beyond the public trails, and allegedly crossed numerous danger tapes. Sierra and I had taken our decent time to go through all the possible scenarios, and this was actually one of the ones we had discussed. Game plan: apologize profusely and get the hell out of there. Unfortunately we were still lacking in the Isaac and David department, so we stood there waiting for them while the man dramatically informed me that my shoes (Vans) did not have enough traction for mountain climbing. When the boys caught up to us, we participated in a second round of being scolded and apologizing. It was clear that he was open to being bribed to keep his mouth shut, but when we seemed uninterested, he began to warn us that the police would want to take our pictures and know how we had gotten up so far, etc.
Sierra and I looked at each other and, in a moment of telepathic connection, apologized to the man a final time, grabbed the guys, and took off. We did not run. Trying to run down the rest of the mountain would have been a terrible idea. But we walked fast, really fast. What took us a solid 2 hours to ascend took less than 30 minutes in the other direction, not shocking considering we were aided by the downhill and the adrenaline pumping through out bodies. For the second half of the decent, we contemplated what might await us at the bottom. Will there be police there? Are we going to get arrested? Should we run? Split up? How will we tell our program directors that we’re in police custody?
As it turns out, there was no one waiting for us. We laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation, and maybe a little out of relief, and walked back into town very content with our adventure.
