Lares Day 2

Saturday 10th May

The tents may have been comfortble, but I wasn't. I spent a large part of the night awake with stomach problems. I actually think I had them for a few days, but my body was able to resist until I did all the exercise yesterday and it needed its strength for that. It wasn't that I was having problems with things coming out of either end, but I was just in a lot of pain, couldn't really eat too much, and definitely couldn't sleep.

So not a great preparation for the hardest day of the trek. We got a nice breakfast, which I didn't eat much of, at 6am. However the guides did make me some celary tea which they said would settle my stomach, and in fact it seemed to. So off we set.

As I said today was the hardest day. We left our site at 3650 and we climbed to a pass at 4200. Then we had to drop down into another valley at 3500 and back up to our lunch site at 3700. Again we stopped along the way to get glimpses of local life.

Anyway the morning wasn't too bad. It was after lunch (which was great but I was unable to eat much of) that it got hard. Then had to walk up to 4500 meters. As I had no real energy left, due to the lack of food, I really struggled. In fact I was last up the pass. Yesterday I had stayed at the back to keep Sara company when she was struggling, today I was at the back because I had to be.

Having said all that I was only 15 minutes or so behind the rest, so it wasn't too bad. We had a little ceremoney to celebrate reaching the top point of the trip, and then we began our descent.

It was a great sense of achivement anyway getting to 4500. Its a good bit higher than the highest part of the Inca trail, and in fact even when we descended to our campsite at 4200 we were as high a they got. I had to sleep immediately we got to the camp site, I was a bit wrecked after the 18k, considering I had only 3 hours sleep the night before, and then when I got up for dinner, an hour later at 6, I was shocked by how cold it had got. It was bitter.

However our guide did had a surprise for us, a bottle of rum, which mixed with some hot water, lemon and a few other things, made for a very warming cocktail. Even with my dodgy stomach it was the right thing to have. That, and a decent dinner, left us all warm, but because it was so cold outside, at minus 7, we just had to go straight to our tents and get into our sleeping bags and hope we could sleep the cold away.

No such luck. Just before midnight I was woken by a sound and felt the tent on my face. It had partially collapsed. I had no idea why, and was just getting my shoes on to go out and see when one of the porters came along and shook whatever had been on the tent off and fixed it up. It was too cold to open the tent up to see what it was so we just thanked him and tried to get back to sleep, although there was a bit of a commotion outside so it wasn't easy.