Peru July 24

Today’s entry is going to start last night in the middle of the night. The situation was a first for me. I was having trouble sleeping when Vaughn turns over around 4 am and touches me and says “Forrest, is that you?” Keep in mind that we are in a tent in the middle of nowhere and not more than 2 people can fit in the tent. So of course I reply with a cordial “Ya”. Vaughn takes my “ya” the wrong way and rolls over and says with a little frightened anger, “No it’s not!” He then proceeds to punch me as hard as he can (which luckily isn’t very hard at 4 am) to fight me off, because obviously when I say “ya” it means “No, I’m a stranger that somehow took your friend out of the tent and took his place without you ever knowing.” I finally convinced him that I was myself, not Tom Cruise from Mission Impossible with a mask of my face on. We had a good chuckle after that one. But I be Vaughn’s arm didn’t hurt while he was chuckling. We ended up waking around 6:45 on not very good and not very much sleep. We woke up to a man walking by with some mules and whistling (everyone local that walks past either whistles or plays a crappy fuzzy sounding radio). Unfortunately, I didn’t warn Vaughn quick enough to get him to ask the guy if we could use a mule. So we got up and had our usual oatmeal breakfast. Then, when we were ready to leave, a guy with donkeys walked by but wanted 70 soles for us to use one. BUMP THAT!! So we followed some guy on a horse who was going to Chacas, where we wanted to go. Sadly, he was on a horse and we were wearing heavy packs so we cold only follow him for so long. Soon after he left us we hit a fork in the path. Now I contributed to this dilemma by saying the famous Yogi Berra quote, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Sadly, that advice doesn’t work when it comes to trails in Peru, so Vaughn and I chose one way. That way took us past a bunch of ownerless cows (who we aren’t particularly scared of anymore) and finally to another fork. Shit! We decided to eat lunch at this fork and hope for a local to walk by and lead us in the right direction, or tell us that we have already been going in the wrong direction. No one came except more cows, and their English isn’t too good. We were totally demoralized because the whole hike so far was extreme steepness with literally no breaks in steepness. And now we had to make another guess at what trail to take from the trail we were on (which we didn’t even know if it was right). Thijs is when the thoughts of turning back really became prevalent. Somehow, through our total demoralization and doubt, we chose a trail. The trail took us into a small canyon which was going north, the direction we needed to go in. But, it was a narrow trail with no mule or horse droppings or footprints, only cows (mules and horses are usually accompanied by ppl, while cows sorta roam free a lot). That meant there probably wasn’t much human traffic along that trail, which was not in the least bit reassuring. We hiked for about 30 more minutes through the canyon and nothing looked reassuring. So, at a break that we had, we ended up deciding to head back the way we came because getting lost in the mountains of Colca Canyon is not the smartest thing in the world. We were totally bummed but then realized it was the safest, smartest thing to do, and immediately our spirits went sky high for some reason. So, in high spirits, we climbed right back down to our same campsite in about 2 hours, when it initially took us 4 ½ hours to get there. That’s how steep the paths were. So now we are in the same exact position as we were last night, except going back where we came from instead of forward. We had spaghetti and sauce for dinner and then star gazed for about 30 minutes, like every other night on the hike. Romantic. No light-pollution and clear skies means beautiful and countless stars. We also had the silhouette of the canyon which didn’t hurt the aesthetic pleasure of the sky. And finally, we saw a couple shooting stars and two comets. The comets shot off at the same time but in opposite directions. We watched one for 5 minutes and one for 3 minutes. We’ve learned to enjoy the little things we can’t see at home. That’s it, goodnight.