This is what I wrote down in the evening on our second day of El Camino Inca, the Inca Trail.

Kristi and I gave our packs to porters for this, which they say is the hardest day of the three. As a result, I was able to watch the scenery with more appreciation than yesterday. [when my thoughts constantly returned to the weight distribution and straps of my pack.]

We passed through something like 5 distinct climates today.

(On the first day, it was mostly the same as we´ve seen around Cusco -- spiky succulents all over the place like sea anemones, making the cliff faces look like a Wyland tidal landscape. Golden grasses mostly short-cropped by grazing animals, creating traces of terracing on the slopes, sometimes incredibly high above the human-built stone terraces.
We camped on a grassy terrace among indifferent scrub trees/bushes/vines, above what I imagine to be a small farmer´s field because of the donkey in the morning.)

Today we started in the same, dry landscape. As we ascended, we began to notice more broad-leaved trees, especially in the valleys, and sub-tropical bushes and flowers. Especially near water (simple stone channels, like the ones I commented on earlier in the temples, carried fast-running small streams across and alongside the trail. Often, after hearing a stream of some time, we soon came upon a small house or neighborhood, with a rest-stop for trekkers. Women nd children selling clean water, sodas, chocolate, and other small comforts; porters resting in the shade of a thatched awning or roof; sometimes campsites for tents; benches, garbage disposal, and other luxuries. [At first, I responded to these way-stations with the same wary aloofness that I had learned in Cusco to fend off the innumerable street vendors. Three of them within 20 feet will ask if you want cigarettes; returning to the hotel becomes a gantlet of ¨No, gracias.¨ But on the high trail, I began to see these offers of comfort as a genuine gesture of hospitality, and to respond with more heartfelt thanks even when I did not choose to buy.]
My favorite stop on the first day was a round bench of whole bamboo stalks nailed down to wood supports, with a thatched roof and a solid table in the center. [We lay and sat in the shade, and then in the sun, and drank water and ate nuts and fruit.
It would have been even better if, as originally planned, we had been stopping there for our first lunch on the trail. But our porters and cook were vainly pursuing the 8 French hikers who were nominally part of our same party. They had already passed several checkpoints where they were supposed to stop for the guides. We never saw them; they pressed on without waiting to cut a day off the trek, and as a result we didn´t eat lunch that first day until 5pm. They camped an hour and a half, as the guide strides, from where we camped for lunch, tea, and dinner.

For the last hour, they sent back a porter, Achillino, to carry my pack and speed us along. Kristi´s pack had been reluctantly surrendered long since, as the altitude and a persistant cough were making the steep stairs of the trail miserable for her. I was miraculously comfortable on this, techincally my first backpacking trip. I lucked out on adapting to altitude, and also adapting to the rigors of the trail because I stayed with Kristi and didn´t push myself that first day. I was able to surrender my pack to the porter with some grace and gratitude, even though I had become attached to the idea of carrying it the whole day myself.
I took advantage of the opportunity to ask for some lessons in Quechua, and to practice my Spanish. Achillino had some Sesame-street level English, so we got on quite well, rehearsing numbers and occasionally making a foray into ordinary conversation.
Once we reached camp, exhausted, there was hot food and rest. It was impossible to stay upset for long, at least for me, as I tend to enjoy dapting to surprises, and count the pleasant ones as worth twice the unpleasant ones. Later, we had an incredible view of the Southern stars. Kristi retrieved the star-maps she had printed from the Internet. Angel (An-hell), our trail guide, pulled out a flute and treated us to some traditional songs he´d been learning from his brother. (Kristi later commented that with his indefatigable good humor, energy, and pipe, he seemed a lot like Pan. It was a little disconcerting to have those bright dark eyes laughing at us across the dinner blanket, while incomprehensible but apparently amusing words of Spanish flew between Angel and our city guide, Gustávo.)]

But back to the second day of the trail:
Once we reached the streams, the land grew much greener. We began to leave behinf the dark desert greens -- colors like dusty sagebrush and black oak, though neither of these were actually present. Gradually, creeping up from the streams and valleys to trim the lower hills, an improbably bright green forest of water-fed small trees and herbs. Donkeys, horses, and occasionallyt cattle were visible, eating greener grass that we´d seen outside of irrigated winter farmlands. Where the streams crossed the trail, there were lush, dense green grottoes like in Oregon: moss, flowers, ferns, and water-darkened rocks. (The Andean rocks are mostly pale granite, almost the same pale color as the dust that our feet wring from them.)
These trees, sometimes opening out into forest glades, other times standing among dense brush -- were snake-trunked and branched, like madrone, tall juniper, or oak. They were probably the same trees that would make up the canopy of the Eastern rainforest across the mountains, but shorter, an alpine tropical rainforest. Dappled with light and shade, sometimes festooned with hanging moss, red-fleshed bromeliads (in the sun) or spiky grey lichen-moss tufts like chestnut sikes, and patchy with sedding bark, the trees provided a wonderful respite from the high-altitude sun. Any shade is cool in these mountains, even at the hottest part of the day.

At the next ridge, we left the trees behind. In their place, everywhere, the ubiquitous straw-faded grass, ¨hichu.¨ It is a rush-like clumping grass used for thatch as well as fodder. Its closest Northwest resemblence is to the tough grasses that anchor the dunes on our sandy beaches. Mixed with this grass, at first, were small flowering plants, bushes, and even the occasional small tree. Kristi spotted purple lupine, among more exotic flowers.

By the high pass, it was almost exclusively hichu-grass, as far as the eye could see, breaking up into clumps in the foreground and making a thick taupe carpet to round the edges of the tumbling slopes beyond. Except, of course, where there was no grass at all, but trail dust and pale rock. In the crags, sed-bearing grasses, lichen, and crevice-dwelling alpine plants also appeared.
Beyond, the mountains dark with raw rock, craggs filled and slopes dusted with brilliant snow.
I spent the better part of an hour drawing as much as I could of the deep valley and distant mountains from this pass. As people approached the last 20 steps to the pass, friends and companions would cheer them on. I teased Leonardo, from Andalusia, and tried to cheer Kristi. Everyone responds differently to attention when they are fatigued. I, and a couple of other hikers I saw, made a gesture like running or dancing up the last few steps to respond to the crowd. Leonardo complimented my fitness that I had arrived ahead of him, made a show of counting each remaining step, but gave up counting before he finished walking. Kristi seemed to take the cheering as teasing, since she was self-consciously last of our small party, and tried to make us stop. The large-and-growing French crowd on the stone benches behind us chanted, ¨Allez, ....., Allez!¨ for each flagging trekker from their party.

After I finished drawing the pass, Gustavo and I trotted down the steps to make up for lost time. He pointed out little yellow orchids among the grass. He says there are two kinds - one all yellow with tall, slightly wavy top petals, the other with shorter, redder top petals. But there seemed to me to be a middle ground between the two, and I was never completely sure which I was looking at.

We went up and down through slightly-more-varied terrain, still dominated by the hichu-grass and lichens, but with orchids and daisy-like flowers adding some bright accents, and the occasional, usualy distant, flash of bright red, green, or white. There were a few remarkable plumed grasses with crimson stems -- multiple seed-heads, with fine white hairs making a plume like pampass-grass, usually in clumps of 6 to a dozen seed-stems. The light behind them made them glow white, with a hint of dark crimson veining between the seeds.

Near the second pass (there´s _Second_ pass? I thought we were done!), Kristi, Gustavo and I came upon a tiny lake. The dark water was clear only because undisturbed -- under the surface, dark-brown algae coated the stems of drowned grasses along the shallow bottom. Beside the water was thick green moss, like sphagnum, among the roots of hichu-grass, and the bare ground was dark and soft with water and pulverized generations of grass-matter. Beside the trail, at this place, the earth was so dark that at first I thought it was burnt. A crazy proliferation of plants spangled this dark soil: bright red mosses and flowers, ropy green club-moss, a startling variety of tiny grasses and lichens. It was like a peat-bog at 12,000 feet.

We arrived at the second pass up another flight of stone stairs. I got there first, and noticed that every pale stone jutting above the pass, and several simple rocks, were crowned with little cairns. The path broadened to make a stone circle in the middle.

Descending to the other side, we found a valley of amazing beauty between dark-green ridges. At first, all we could see was white clouds rushing up at us, as the wind funneled them between the dark peaks. As they cleared, the sun struck a sloping meadow almost covered with the gold and crimson plumed grasses. Tufts of hichu, and scattered bushes with scarlet flowers, as well as crimson-tipped herbs, with the sun behind them all making them glow. You have seen crimson plants glow with the sun behind them, but nothing like this setting.
Ahead of us, between the mountains (cerros, technically big hills), the clouds continued to swirl in the sun, sometimes revealing the snowy tips of true mountains ahead to the west. The vista was so vast that clouds and mountains both seemed soaked in bluish-purple shadow, contrasting wth the golden-white late afternoon light.

We passed down under tumbled stones, through the glowing valley with its refreshing winds, and into lush green again. There was a ruin, closed for restoration of the floors, where we stopped to learn a little more until the sun left it. I drew again; this time Angel waited with me, and then we scampered, almost racing, down the long flights of rough stone stpes toward our friends in the camp we could see, beyond the next ruin, below. [The floor-repair crew, apparently on break, let us know ¨Corres despacio!¨ which was apparently a continuation of a similar insult to our walking companions.] I was too much enjoying the run to care.

We passed into scrub and then lush green, with tufted bamboo making arches across the path, and little trees framing spectacular views. Something like sorrel beside the stream, leavy vines... OUr camp site was out in teh open again, full of that lovely white-plumed crimson grass, and we had a west-facing ledge to ourselves, for uninterrupted sunset- and moonset-viewing. Imagine the moon in jnew-crescent, setting after then sun as the sea of clouds sweeps from the distant mountains to whiten our camp with a warming blanket of fog.
[The light leaves the Andes early in this season, no later than 7:30 most nights, so we had plenty of time to play cards and watch for emerging stars -- and a few early Leonid meteors -- before retreating from the cold.]


That ends what I wrote that evening in the tent [with additions], but a few more words:

The next morning, we woke in the shadow of one of the great hills that had framed our view from the second pass, before. The ruin we had passed was already bathed in the early light, quietly glowing on its carefully-selected promontory. My knees were so stiff that I swallowed my pride and asked for a porter for this third day as well. But they warmed up as we reached the sun, and this day was full of downhill stairs.
Since I can´t stand to tromp down endless flights of uneven steps one at a time, waiting for my boots to slip forward or my knees to bend that last inch too far and spring ligament, I prefer to run, scmper, skip down them, keeping my balance with uneven steps. I probably learned this from hiking in slippery street-shoes over the last decade. It´s ven safer in hiking boots, though I have to be more careful to pick up my toes. So I scampered ahead, and enjoyed a trail full of wildlife. What sounded like geese or ducks to me was declared to be monkeys by one or the other of our guides -- they did a good job of making sure that both ends of the prty were accompanied most of the time. When I got too far ahead, I stopped to watch the butterflies -- glowing devils-food chocolate, or oiled red-cedar wings with black tips and white spots, as well as more ordinary yellow or orange varieties. Or to peer after sounds in the undergrowth. Once Gustávo and I heard little feet, bigger than squirrel but smaller than dog, running in the trees to our downhill side. We heard them scurry up a tree trunk from below us to just past the height of our heads, but we could see nothing between the vines and branches, in the patchy shade and glare. Through this green and sunlit world, the trail wrapped along the rocky hills and swung out around curves on walls of stone, built for the fleet messangers of the Inca, unwinding like an avenue for us 400 years later.