Machu Picchu: Chapter 3, In Which We Ascend

At 5:00 a.m. we woke up, and at 5:20 we were at the SAS owned hotel meeting the group, the guides, and leaving behind the duffel bags we had been given to put our belongings in to send ahead with the chaskeys.  The bags could weigh a maximum of 9 kilos, including our rented sleeping bags and mats.  This left us with more or less 6 kilos of belongings.  Having only brought a total of about 6 kilos with me for the whole trip, this did not pose a problem for me. I put some sunscreen, 2 granola bars, a water bottle, my wallet, and my passport in my little day pack (kindly lent by Julia), and sent the rest on. This way on the hike I was carrying maybe 5 pounds, total. My strategy of packing nothing was working well.  It was the only hope I had of survival. Everyone else was carrying between 15 and 40 pounds.  I hoped that this would bring them down to my level.  

It did not.

We drove about 45 minutes to a breakfast spot where I carefully checked all items for potential death carrying properties.  Most of the offerings passed muster. We purchased coca leaves, large plastic rain bags, and water bottles, and continued on our way towards Ollantaytambo.  

During the bus ride I was filled with Morning Hate for everyone and everything and wouldn't speak, so J2 started a conversation with one of the guides sitting near us.   They spoke of many things until eventually I was ready to speak like a human again, at which point I told him I didn't expect to live to see the end of our trip.  He took this very seriously and started to become concerned that I would become a legal hazard.  

"NO!" he said. "No no. No.  You will not die. No. Don't do that. You are going to be fine. Do not die on this trip."

We arrived at the start of the trek around 8 a.m., showed our passports to some officials, took some photos, and headed on our way. 

The first day was not the one most talked about by those warning me of the horrors awaiting, but it was steep enough and challenging enough for me for sure. After only two hours I was pretty much maxed out physically, and we still had 10 of our 14 kilometers to go. The chaskeys, on the other hand, ran past us at intervals, having started long behind us and needing to finish long before us while each carrying 25 kilos of luggage and equipment.  They raced up the mountain with this weight to set up a tent and set places for us for lunch each day, and to cook gourmet 5 course meals before our arrival.  Many of us were incredulous. 

"How can do they do this physically?" we tried to ask through labored breathing. 

"They start as children," our guide told us. "They live in the mountains but go to school in the towns below.  They have to run there and back every day."

This seemed ridiculous, but I didn't have the breath to argue. 

As everyone can guess, I was not in the front of this group. I was not quite in the middle. BUT I WAS NOT LAST. I was not. I was NEVER LAST

Not last. 

I was. Not. Last. Ever.

Okay???

Lunch time was mid afternoon in a beautiful grove with some not-the-worst-toilets-ever in a tent with beautifully set places and little stools and a multi-course lunch.  I rejected many foods for their possible death properties even though theoretically a licensed tour group that takes Americans all year round should be pretty safe.  CONSTANT VIGILANCE, my friends.  Never trust a cucumber past the Texas border!! Mayonnaise? NOPE. Tomato? NO THANK YOU. I was a diarrhea free zone! 

While expertly deflecting Disease and Death, I got to know some of our other travelers a little better.  Were a few Americans, two Canadians, and a group of 7 Chinese. We never really learned much about them because mostly they kept to themselves and spoke Chinese.  

After lunch we continued upwards. As people forged ahead I had plenty of time to walk a solitary journey and contemplate all of the terrible pain I was in. As we moved forward, every 2 hours or so our guide would stop us all to point out ancient ruins and other Incan related beauty.  

Eventually we made it to our first campsite.  I was NOT the last person to arrive.  J2, it must be said, was the FIRST to arrive, by a long shot. She may have a career as a chaskey. It was demoralizing to some of the rest of us who might not have been last but were perhaps 13th by a fair amount. 

Tents were all set up for us, including a dining tent where we were given snack and tea.  Snack was popcorn and cookies, and the tea was amazing, especially as it was pretty cold outside. This particular campsite was advertised as having a shower.  Having not washed my hair at the hostel due to the cold, and with another 6 days ahead of me, I decided to brave the shower which cost $1.50 per use and was SWORN to have hot water.  

I was the first to brave the shower.  I handed over my money, grabbed my beautiful new camping towel, and stepped into the dirt encrusted little stall and took a moment to contemplate the mosquitoes congregating in various corners and around the drain. I started to shut the door but as I did realized there was no light.  I walked back out and asked the shower owner where the light was.  "No light," he told me. At first I started to grab my headlamp, but then I realized the shower was probably not the greatest place for a headlamp's well-being.  So I got back in the shower in the total darkness, felt around for the water chain, and was immediately doused in the freezing cold waters of the Andes.  "Hot" apparently to Peruvians just means "not physically frozen into ice quite yet." Combined with the 45 degree temperature of the outdoors, this quickly climbed the charts to make onto the Top Five Worst Showers I Have Taken Around the World. 

Quickly, the previous top 5 were:

1. The first shower I took in Bolivia upon coming down from the Death Journey through the mountains. I begged a stranger to use her shower which turned out to be a nozzle hanging over the toilet.  I was given a broom to hang onto to in order to continuously sweep water into a drain in the center of the floor as I showered, with the windows open, in temperatures of 30-35 degrees, in water that was just barely not frozen while simultaneously trying not to faint, vomit, or poop uncontrollably. 

2. Upon returning from Iceland to France where I stopped in Chateaulin to visit Alexa's home in the boarding house of her school, only to discover the heat and of course hot water broken in 40 degree weather whereupon I was forced to boil water in an electric kettle repeatedly to fill a bucket, stand in the middle of the bathroom, and dump all of the hot water over my head in one swift movement.

3. The shower in the hostel in Greece which was in a co-ed bathroom in which the shower stalls had doors that were not made for people of any human proportions I have yet seen on this earth which only barely covered your bits on the lower and upper ends provided no one decided to walk especially close to your shower or make any effort to peer in from the next stall.  Additionally hot water cost a Euro, which had to be deposited in a little box outside the bathroom which somehow connected to a certain shower.  So if you pick shower 3, you go outside, deposit a Euro in box 3 at which point hot water starts pouring out of shower 3 so you RUN TO IT because you only have 5 minutes of water, throwing your towel off as you sprint and hoping no one notices. Please don't forget that this was during February one day after a freak snow blizzard in a hostel that mostly DID NOT HAVE A ROOF.  The bedrooms and the showers had sort-of roofs, but they weren't fully attached to the walls so while it kept snow out of the beds, it did nothing for the temperatures.  And 5 minutes was not enough for my shampooing so I spent two days in Athens with the un-rinsed shampoo in my hair causing half my head of hair to randomly stick up in solid masses because all I had that morning was a single Euro coin. 

4. The shower in my host family's apartment in Toulouse.  This was just a repeated offense over the course of 6 months.  This was not actually a shower, this was a bathtub with a shower nozzle that didn't work most of the time so I had to constantly scrunch on my back under the bathtub faucet trying to wash my hair all winter where, again, in 35-40 degrees, the family ALWAYS left the windows open, and there was rarely any hot water. 

5. In London at a hostel a man tried to get into the shower with me. This had less to do with the shower itself and more to do with the emotional trauma sustained and the fact that I lay awake with a knife in my hand that night, but still. It goes on the list. Don't worry though! No Danielles were physically harmed in any way in the making of this Worst Shower Episode. 

This was my list before Peru.  But due to the dirt, the mosquitoes, the total lack of light and not being able to see anything at all, combined with the cold of the air and the cold of the water as well as the fatigue (remember I hadn't slept yet? I remember), the shower of this night definitely bumped #2 from its place.  And it fought hard for #1.

Only one other person tried the shower after that, and he didn’t have anything good to say about it either.

Once I had gotten clothing on and taped eight Hot Hands packets to various parts of my body, I was able to enjoy the sight of the night sky, which was STUNNING.  Maybe one of the top 10 most beautiful things I have seen alive in this world. With absolutely 0 light pollution for billions of miles, every single star visible from Earth lit up the sky so that there was almost more light than dark. There was no way to pick out constellations because every scrap of sky was covered in bright points. It was hard to believe.

Dinner was equally marvelous as lunch with its 5 courses and dessert and tea and good conversations, and soon it was time for bed at 8 p.m. because we were going to be roused at 5 a.m. to eat breakfast and continue climbing the mountain.

To come in Chapter 4:  Dead Woman's Pass, utter despair, an oxygen tank, VICTORY

Machu Picchu: Chapter 2, The Horny Llama

Leaving the Lima airport was bittersweet.  It was nice to be headed towards our goal, but sad to leave what had now become our home. The flight itself was uneventful, we landed in Cusco and the other two got their bags (I still had only my pink backpack) and we said goodbye to our airport friends.  We caught a very expensive taxi driven by a friendly driver and finally arrived at our hostel at 4:00 p.m., most of our day of acclimatization lost.  M was not immediately present when we checked in, but had left a note.  We didn't have to wait for her long, and we had a 4 person room which is super nice for a hostel.  It didn't have a door that locked, which wasn't 'ideal, but still not half bad.  The whole place was very open and therefore not heated which was unfortunate, as Cusco was quite cold.  With the seasons opposite, we were heading into winter.  Obviously I did not appreciate this.  

Once we had collected M, the four of us went down the street to SAS Travel to check in and get our final information.  SAS stands for something and something. South America...Stuff? Something Adventure Something? Savy Adventure Squids? I just don't know. But we went there and checked in and showed them our passports and then they asked for our immigration cards.  Three of us pulled out little white pieces of official paper.  

One of us said, "What the hell is that?"

Three of us said, "The piece of paper they told us to keep when we went through customs that they said was very important."

One of us said, "Aw shit."

So I had to run back to the hostel and sift through all the crumpled papers in my backpack and pockets praying that it hadn't been part of the handfuls of paper I had thrown away. Luckily, I found it squished among some trash. 

I started to run back to SAS but after half a second stopped and tried not to die as my lungs constricted, my head rushed, and I gasped for breath. Then I continued leisurely onwards where I presented my immigration card and everything was okay. The man at the SAS desk went over our reservation with us and we discovered that they had charged and booked me and Jessica for the Huayna Picchu hike on the last day. J2 and I had originally opted out of the Huayna Picchu hike because at the time we were both out of shape and the idea of a "very strenuous, somewhat dangerous" hike at the end of 35 uphill mountain miles and 4 days of camping sounded terrible. Sitting there though, finding out we'd been signed up anyway, we decided we might as well.  After all, J2 was now in the best shape of any of our lives, and I was an idiot. 

SAS also told us they were doing a promotion and could offer us a free tour of the Sacred Valley in the morning.  The catch here is that the Sacred Valley is several thousand feet lower than Cusco, and not the best place to acclimatize.  Seeing as how we'd lost the whole first day, the second day was all we had to build our lungs and hearts and blood and whatever else. Additionally, we had to get up at 6 in the morning for the bus. Having not slept in 48 hours and about to embark on the most physically challenging undertaking of my life, this wasn't super appealing, but it was a once in a lifetime opportunity after all. 

We had dinner at a fun restaurant nearby, and returned to the hostel to shower and sleep.  Unfortunately the showers were outside in what as I said was the start of winter, so this was extremely difficult.  It was a very short shower in which I did not wash my hair.  As I mentioned, we had chosen this hostel because of its party nature, intending to party like crazy and live it up with such a conveniently located place to dance dance revolution only 1 minute away from our beds. However, reality was that by 9 p.m., we were all in bed ready for sleep.  We could always party the night we got BACK from the hike. 

Three of us fell asleep immediately. But I have always had a hard time with sleep, and I was awake for a little while, until the music from the Horny Llama started.  

The Horny Llama was RIGHT next to our room.  Right next to all the rooms.  And the bar appeared to turn into a club around 10 p.m. A club filled with booming loud music.  So loud that the bass was making the bunk bed frames vibrate.  It was as if I had gone out to a club, found the spot in front of the speakers, and laid down.  My heart was vibrating. My head was ringing. The music was kind of awesome.  But as the hours ticked by I started feeling sicker and sicker. Breathing was becoming hard.  Lying down in the altitude somehow makes it more difficult. I hadn't slept since the day before I left on the trip.

Somehow the others slept. I'm not entirely sure how.  They say there were tired, but honestly I don't care how tired you are, that is some hard business to sleep through. I lay awake all night vibrating with the music and wondering if my shallow breathing and rushing head was a foreteller of death.  Thank goodness for the repatriation of remains insurance I had bought!

At 5 in the morning people's alarms began to ring and I was unsure if I was relieved the night was over or horrified that now 72 hours had gone by without a single minute of sleep.  My hands shook as I climbed out of the top bunk and landed in a sad heap on the floor.  I drank some water from my bottle, cried a little, took a pill J2 handed me, and followed the others outside and down the road to SAS and climbed into a van full of strangers that drove us into the Sacred Valley, which was very beautiful.

We saw many Incan ruins, and learned that the Incans were not in fact Incans.  Inca is the Quetchua word for king, and so technically the Incans were not the entire people, but only the rulers.  The normal people were Quetchua.  I think. This was my understanding through the haze of sleep deprivation and altitude inspired delirium. We walked around a few sites, learned about terrace farming techniques, and had lunch at a nice place with a buffet.  I carefully avoided the steamed (not BOILED) vegetables, the cheese, the milk, and the salad.  No one else chose to be as cautious. It is true that by the end of lunch I was beginning to feel like one of those paranoid cartoon caricatures with crazy eyes.  "CHEESE.  IT COULD KILL US ALL." and "OH MY GOD. THAT GREEN BEAN DOES NOT LOOK WET ENOUGH WE COULD ALL DIE." But I stuck by my principles faithfully and completely.  

During lunch we got to know the other people in our group, many of whom were mildly interesting. One woman from Indiana described her small town as "50 miles past where Jesus lost his sandals" a phrase I will use for the rest of my life. Another had just gotten married--they were Indian, and it sounded like it was an arranged marriage. We had one man traveling alone who worked for FedEx transporting "dangerous materials" which was the most interesting of all. What is dangerous enough to be considered "dangerous" by FedEx but still legal to put in the mail?? A mystery I will spend my life solving. Possibly with repeated attempts to mail dangerous materials through FedEx. Trial and error! The scientific method! 

In the evening we stopped in a town called Chincherro, famous for alpaca dyeing.  The wool, not the whole llama. We were given a speech by a young girl named Anna about the different dye techniques and tools.  She held up a small bone.

"This," she told us, "is the bone of a tourist who did not buy anything from us....haha. I just kidding. This is bone of llama we use for combing." 

Everyone laughed.  But everyone also bought a beautifully dyed alpaca souvenir.  

That evening we had to be back at SAS at 7:00 for our pre-hike briefing.  We all squeezed into a little attic room in the office. We were 17 in total minus our 3 guides.  The guide gave us a basic idea of what to expect from each day and strongly encouraged all of us to hire a "chaskey" if we had not already, to carry our belongings up the mountain for us. 

I was at this point pretty sure I was going to be dead as well by mid-afternoon the next day because I still had not slept at all.  We got back to the hostel where I had intended to take a shower, but due to the cold and intense shivering and desire to live to ever be warm again, I decided against it.  Instead I stared down an Italian boy at the hostel computer so I could use the internet to send final goodbyes to my loved ones.  While sitting there in the empty common room, a movement by the couch caught my eye.  At first I had no idea what it was because my eyes were telling my brain some unbelievable things, but as the movement hopped closer and closer, I realized it was indeed a white rabbit.  What was a rabbit doing in a hostel common room in Peru? Had it escaped the kitchen? Were rabbits even native to Peru? Why was it indoors? Was it dangerous? It was closing in at an alarming rate.  I still hadn't fully comprehended that it was a real rabbit. We stared each other down as it hopped closer and closer until at about a foot away, it broke eye contact and veered left, through the door way and down the hall out of sight and out of my life as unexpectedly as it had come.  Shaken, confused, and mildly delirious from exhaustion, I gave up on the internet and went to bed where I did finally fall asleep at 2:00 a.m., as the club music was at about half volume.  

This was exciting, until we remember that I had to wake up at 5 a.m. in order to begin the 35 mile greatest physical challenge of my life. 

To come in Chapter 3:  The Ascent

Machu Picchu: Chapter 1, The Journey

The day of departure arrived.  I went to work with my bright pink school girl backpack, a bright pink fleece, bright pink shoes, and a bright pink water proof jacket.  I don't like pink.  The reason for the bright colors though was that I hoped in the case of my falling off a cliff, getting lost in the woods, or being kidnapped by the Shining Path, my brightly colored clothing would help the authorities a) find me or b) easily identify my body. 

Hard won wisdom I can now pass on to you, explaining this strategy to the salespeople at Sports Authority will only cause them to believe you are a deeply disturbed person and you may be treated accordingly. 

I left work at Metro Center at 2:00 p.m. for my 5:20 flight.  This seemed like plenty of time to take the metro to a bus and a bus all the way to Dulles.  Unfortunately, what I did not count on was pre-Memorial Day traffic, This meant I was able to experience plenty of the traditional pre-boarding all-consuming panic of thinking I was about to miss my flight and ruin everything. It's hardly a trip without that, after all.  

But the three of us boarded our flight together and breathed a sigh of relief that we would not miss the flight and our connection in El Salvador. 

Then we proceeded to sit on the plane for 1.5 hours,  As we were only supposed to have a 1 hour layover in El Salvador, this was Not Ideal.  There was a mild amount of panic from us and the other passengers, but soon after takeoff we were reassured that the time would be made up and everyone would make their flight on time.  They were true to their word, and when we landed in San Salvador we walked off the plane, wound 10 yards through a Duty Free store, and walked right onto the next plane and immediately took off. 

VICTORY! Not only had we made the flight, we hadn't even had to suffer any time in the San Salvador airport.  Because as my mother and Jessica pointed out, "If there is anything worse than the Miami airport, it is probably the San Salvador airport." 

We relaxed on the plane and watched things like the Lego movie. Some people slept. I did not, since as we know I do not sleep anywhere other than a bed and then mostly only ideal bed circumstances. At one point I asked a young man on his way to Colombia about his experience hiking to Machu Picchu. 

"It was rough. Haha.  I thought I was pretty fit, but by the end of it I thought I was going to die. Everything hurt.  The second day, with the stairs....it's just brutal. Here, have my orange."

We don't know why he gave me an orange. It was a kind and beautiful gesture. 

I never even knew his name.

We arrived in Lima at 2:15 a.m.  Our flight was set to depart at 4:25 a.m. so this gave us a reasonable window to collect bags, pass them through customs, buy some BOTTLED water, and continue on towards our gate for our final flight to Cusco. J2 and I settled in to a few chairs while J1 went to look for M, a friend of hers who was also traveling with us. J1 found her and brought her over, we had a lovely chat until around 4 in the morning at which point M's flight left.  We told her we'd see her about 20 minutes after she landed, in the baggage claim at Cusco. 

About 10 minutes after M left us, our flight was called, we all lined up, exhausted but excited to be continuing on, and boarded a shuttle to be taken to our plane.  We stood packed in with other passengers and their luggage for a few minutes, falling asleep standing up, when the bus lights suddenly went off and we were all told to get off the bus, the flight was not leaving after all--bad weather over Cusco made the flight too dangerous.  Annoyed, but accepting, we all got off the shuttle and went back to our seats to wait out what we were led to believe would be about an hour or two.  

After an hour or two, we were still sitting there, but other flights began leaving for Cusco.  These flights were on different airlines, so while we were annoyed, we did nothing more than grumble.  The others fell asleep on their chairs and at 8:30 a.m. after waiting 6 hours, I left them and made my way towards the Avianca airline desk by our theoretical gate.  

I found a rioting mob. 

We had been all the way in the back of this medium sized basement terminal and from our nest in the back corner I had been unable to see or hear the mass of angry customers who had begun to crowd around the desk and forming a threatening hostile circle around the two Avianca employees.  Everyone was shouting in Spanish and shaking fists over the heads of the people in front of them.  Spanish is not my best language, and 40 people shouting in Spanish was stretching my language limits, but I determined that a) people were VERY angry, and b) there was in fact no problem with the weather.  Many rageful passengers were shouting about how they were trying to get to their jobs.  One angry yet friendly man told me in English that what had happened was that Avianca had sent our plane somewhere else and then never gotten us a replacement and now there were no planes.  

Then, insult to injury to insult, other Avianca planes started taking off towards Cusco.

This seemed like a terrible business decision to me, and I stuck around a little longer watching the scene unfold and listening to the intense outraged shouting.  The second the next Avianca flight left for Cusco without us on it, the decibel levels of rage soared. At some point J1 and J2 came over to observe the scene.  I began talking with a guy around our age who looked more confused than angry and turned out to be Canadian.  Canadians don't seem to get angry.  We chatted freely for a long time about travel and jobs and South America until I realized we were chatting TOO freely and I became suspicious and I confronted him with "YOU'RE NOT AN ENGINEER ARE YOU????" and he became more confused and said "Yes....I am...." 

They're everywhere. He told me something very interesting that I did not know. That Canadian engineers all receive rings made of iron when they graduate because once a bridge fell down and killed a lot of people.  I immediately dismissed him as full of crap but when I returned home I looked it up and discovered that this is a thing.  You can read about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring

Please note the bit about "The Ritual of the Calling" which as far as I'm concerned only cements my belief that engineers are a total cult of weirdos. 

The original friendly yet angry man who had done the explaining for me decided he was going to take the entire flight worth of passengers under his wing and get justice and started making some demands that did actually end up getting met.  He was that good.  The most important of these demands was a free lunch, so soon we found ourselves heading with our engineer and our loud demandy friend upstairs to a cafe that served us ham sandwiches which I carefully checked for offensive items like lettuce.  Convinced it was not about to kill me, I ate the sandwich and life began to feel like maybe it wasn't over.  Our loud friend was named Jan, and despite his fluent English AND his fluent Spanish, he turned out to be Turkish. He told us all about his life, which was a very exciting one.  Currently he is working as a tour guide in Miami, but has also lived in Japan, China, and somewhere in South America. In addition to English and Spanish and Turkish, he is also fluent in Japanese.  He told us about his time living in Japan learning how to be a sushi chef--he claims to be the first white sushi chef in Japan.  Well.  Sort of white. He talked a lot about the training--spending the first 6 months being made to make rice over and over and over until his teacher felt it was perfect. Only then was he permitted to move on. He gave us a lot of life advice about living adventure, but always having a plan. The engineer began to tell me about working in mines.

After lunch we all headed back downstairs to wait by our gate to see when our new plane might arrive.  We were told 2 p.m.  Remember that we had arrived at 2 a.m. Now it was about 10 a.m. We hung out in the chairs by the gate with our new friends which now also included a student at UNC on some kind of interesting several week trip and a couple from Spain who had been doing a semester abroad in New York City and were taking a Peru vacation before returning to Spain.  In between chatting we were signing forms and petitions and legal documents and being given instructions on how to sue for financial damages incurred.  It turned out the only thing I could sue for was the cost of the ham sandwich and since I'd already gotten that I was left with a lot of useless papers. I did sign a petition damning Avianca, but pretty much all the papers were useless.  

At 12:00 they changed our gate number, and we discovered that it was now upstairs in a different terminal so all of us made a massive trek together upstairs where we determined that our gate was in a locked hallway we could not get into in some special place sectioned off by big glass doors.  Airport employees gaping at us from inside this section would not let us in so one girl started shouting very rude names at them in English through the glass, and other passengers began general angry sounds and Jan led the charge in demanding assistance from the closest airport employee.  He was successful, and we were eventually let into our special section where we continued to wait until a plane pulled up to the gate. We got massively excited, right up until the plane left again 10 minutes later without us on it. 

Finally though, at 2:00 p.m., we all boarded that plane and headed off towards Cusco, where we had no idea what M was doing or where she had waited for us or for how long.  Additionally, we had sacrificed the day of acclimatization we had been told was so necessary to our well-being, which I had fought for and abandoned children at work for.   

Our future was uncertain.  

Questions we pondered:

1. Would we be able to find a taxi?

2. What was the Horny Llama going to be like?

3. Where was M?

4. Would we ever get to witness a Calling of the Engineers? What do they call them with? Whistles? The Pied Piper's pipe? Alien technology? 

Several of these questions will be answered in Chapter Two, coming soon.

Machu Picchu: The Beginning

Fortunately or unfortunately, things went pretty smoothly for me this time in South America. Fortunately, because for once I did not spend my vacation convinced I was going to die horribly and painfully in a foreign country.  Unfortunately, because my story from this trip is pretty straightforward and not all that exciting. 

Some people have asked why on earth I would return to South America after the Bolivia Experience. This is an excellent question.  What happened was, my friend who we will call J1 said "Let's go to Machu Picchu," and I said, "Okay."

In January when we made these plans for the May trip, I realized that in order to make a 35 mile trek through the Andes mountains at elevations of up to 14,000 feet above sea level, I would need to make some changes to my lifestyle.  For instance, exercise ever. Maybe eat some vegetables.  With the help of my friend who will called be J2, I made an exercise plan that involved the elliptical at increasing incline 3-4 times a week along with climbing 15 flights of stairs 4 times up and down 2-3 times weekly.  In 6 months I did manage to get on the elliptical a total of 3-4 times and I did climb those stairs 2 times. I failed in all ways to prepare myself physically for the trip and began to ask everyone I had ever heard of who had made the climb how physically challenging it was. 

"It's really difficult."

"I'm pretty physically fit but I had a tough time with it."

"The second day....I wanted to die."

"The second day...I thought I was going to die."

This made me nervous, and yet I continued to not train at all. Periodically I would call J2. 

"J2! What are you up to today?"

"I'm at the gym."

"Oh. That's nice. I'm going to get ice cream."

And

"J2! Where are you?"

"I'm on the fourth climb up all the stairs in my apartment building."

"I should do that. Instead I am going to lie down on this bed."

And

"J2! Let's do something tomorrow."

"I'm meeting with my personal trainer for three hours."

"I might stand up in three hours...maybe...."

On the vegetable front, mostly I ate a lot of Chips Ahoy and at least one doughnut more or less every day. Once, I am pretty sure I ate a tomato. I almost ate some green beans one Wednesday, but they disappeared out of the fridge by the time I got up the energy to go downstairs to find them. 

I did, however, make some important changes to my preparation process in relation to the Bolivia process. For one, I did not bother looking up what vaccinations I needed until about two weeks before I was scheduled to leave.  I did the same with visa requirements. Sometimes I would call my sister and shout "I CAN'T FIND MY PROOF OF YELLOW FEVER VACCINE. WHERE IS IT?" but this particular tactic never yielded any favorable results. 

Luckily though, it turns out Bolivia provided me with all the necessary vaccinations and there were no visa requirements so while that could have provided a fantastic story of total failure, I came out a winner. No one even needed my proof of yellow fever vaccine papers. Peru doesn't even care if you run all over their country picking up highly contagious diseases that cause your kidneys to hemorrhage. 

Additionally, legitimately concerned that I would, in fact, die this time, the night before leaving I found a travel/evacuation insurance policy that would repatriate my remains in the event of my death overseas.  As the subject of remains repatriation was a big deal in Bolivia, I emailed my friend from Bolivia to tell her that this time I had gotten the insurance. I was very proud of myself until I received her response, which read (translated): "Hahahaha i my darling, if something happens to you in Peru there won't be any remains."  I found this troubling, but there didn't seem to be any good course of action besides immediately going to bed and pretending I had never received her message. 

I started packing two entire days before the start of the trip.  This is a Huge Deal in my packing habits. One reason for this is that by this point I had decided my only chance of survival on this trek was to carry the least amount of weight possible. I could hardly manage to haul myself around.  Therefore, for 10 days in Peru, I packed everything into my pink flower first grader backpack.  This took some time, as a lot of rolling of clothes was involved and hard choices needed to be made.  For example, did I really NEED more than 3 shirts for 10 days?
Which was more important, the Advil or the blister reducing band-aids? I succeeded at this endeavor by not taking nearly enough clothing or any useful emergency items such as anti-diarrhetics or extra socks.

Things to keep in mind as we head into Chapter 1 and the heart of this story:

1. J1 sent us an email with several hostel choices, once of which owned its own bar called The Horny Llama.  Another of which was a quiet hostel billed as a "spiritual, new age retreat." At the time, we were in party mindset and the idea of a fantastic dance/bar spot right next to our bedrooms was the dream. We chose the Horny Llama.

2. We had read that you had to have at least 2 days of acclimatization time in the city of Cusco.  Any less and you risked dangerous side effects of el soroche, the terrible dreaded altitude sickness with which I was acquainted. Our original desired trek date was for May 27 but they could only take us May 26.  This involved on my end a lot of frantic calling around of bosses to see if I could take an extra day and abandon the children in the name of my own health and safety.  They kindly agreed. 

3. I had completely forgotten to call my credit card companies and bank to tell them I was leaving the country. 

Barcelona Christmas

In 2008 I was living in France and having a fabulous time doing incredibly stupid things across the European continent.  At Christmas time I decided to follow my friend to Spain where she knew a whole bunch of people, some of whom were willing to lend us their apartment while they were traveling.  This Christmas was absolutely filled with stories I could share, including how I had my first kiss in this apartment right after accidentally locking myself in the bathroom, which apparently some people find pretty sexy.  Who knew.  But that’s not the story I’m going to tell.  The story I have chosen is the story of how my friend and I ended up wandering the streets of Barcelona at 4 a.m. because we had forgotten to actually write down the address of this apartment before leaving it to have Christmas Eve adventures. 

 It started off amazing.  We spent the evening at an apartment with a number of expats from all over the world and danced until nearly 4 am, at which point we decided maybe it was a little late and we should go home.  It hadn’t occurred to us quite yet that we had no idea where home was.  We only knew the metro stop nearest the apartment, because that is where we had met our hosts earlier. Unfortunately, the metro in Barcelona closed at some point and wasn’t going to reopen until 6 a.m.  We could either wait two hours, or attempt to take a night bus which theoretically would drop us a few streets down from this metro stop.  We would just have to change buses once, and then ask the bus driver on the second bus to let us know when to get off. 

At 4 a.m, my friend and I were standing around shivering in the pre-dawn winter air at a deserted bus stop waiting for a bus we hoped would actually come.  After twenty minutes, it did.  Thank goodness, because the two of us were ready to collapse on the street and wait for the metro to open at 6. 

Which is what we should definitely have done.

But we weren’t that smart.

The bus itself was actually pretty crowded.  A lot of Christmas partiers. They say Spain is the country that knows how to party, and let me tell you, the stereotype doesn’t come from nowhere.  So I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find a packed bus full of slowly sobering people at 4:30 in the morning.  We took the bus no problem to Placa de Catalunya and got off, very proud of ourselves. 

Until we realized we had no idea where to find the bus we needed to transfer to. 

We walked all around the square, going up to every bus driver asking if they were the bus we wanted, and every time the driver pointed in some other direction.  It was a giant game of connect the dots but with buses, and we ran back and forth and around and across until finally we found a bus driver who said, yes, get on, this is your bus. 

Here we came to a problem.  My friend and I only knew what metro stop we were near.  No other significant markers, not even the name of the street we were on.  And the bus driver had never heard of this metro stop.  He advised us to ask the other passengers. 

It was so wonderful that my friend was a native Spanish speaker.

We  (my friend) started asking other passengers about this metro stop, but no one had heard of it.  We began to panic, because there was no way we would recognize anything, we didn’t even know the name of the street we were staying on, and…and…all around panic. Eventually though we found one man who said, oh yeah! Florída! Yes, yes, we’ll pass right by the metro there, you’ll just have get off the bus, walk a ways, turn left, turn right, and you’re right there.  He told us that we should get off at the stop after he did. 

This meant that around 5:30 in the morning we stepped off the bus into an area we had never seen before.  And could not remember how the man had told us how to find the metro.  What should we have done?  I’m still not really sure.  There was no one around to ask directions, we had no map…

Whatever we SHOULD have done, we certainly should absolutely not have done what we did.  Which was picked a direction and started walking.  My friends, please don’t ever find yourselves wandering a foreign city in the wee hours of the morning on Christmas day with all the drunk creepy people completely lost.  It is a BAD IDEA.  I cannot stress this enough.  Everyone says, do not go wandering alone in the night you could get murdered or raped or whatnot and you may kind of shrug it off and think, well, clearly bad things can happen but they probably won’t.

This is FOOLISH THINKING.  Some things maybe you have to learn the hard way.  I can tell you one thing, next time I’m taking a taxi no matter what.  This was a horrible experience.  We saw fights, we hid behind walls and in doorframes from crazy people, we ran to avoid groups of very drunk guys who looked indescribably frightening, and in the end we stopped on a street corner, horribly lost and afraid to go in any direction for fear of running into people or getting even farther from home. 

Finally, we saw a police car.  We started to run after it, hoping to catch their attention and get directions, or even better, a ride.  But we weren’t fast enough, and we stopped again on the sidewalk, dejected and despairing.  But miracle of miracles, the police car stopped just within our view.  Without saying a word both of us started to run at the same time towards the car, but before we made it the police officers jumped out of the car and ran into a building.  We slowed a little, and in the next few seconds, two more police cars showed up and stopped in front of the building.  All the officers got out and ran inside.  My friend and I looked at each other.  We couldn’t decide which was worse.  Continuing into the unknown, or waiting around by the police cars in front of a building where god knows what crime had been or was being committed.  There were a lot of police officers, so we were afraid it was a pretty big crime.  In the end we decided to wait, because criminals in handcuffs scared us less than the criminals running around loose on the streets. 

We waited about twenty minutes.  I have no idea what on earth those police officers were doing in there, perhaps having coffee and tea with the perpetrators, because they all came out together laughing and smiling, with no criminals in tow, and were quite surprised to see two frightened looking girls huddled together against one of their cars.  My friend took over, for obvious reasons, and got directions to our metro stop.  The police officer talking to us thought it was hilarious that a) we had gotten so lost, and b) we didn’t even know the name of the street we were staying on.

Travel tip #1, always know where you live. Could come in handy.  Travel tip #2, carry a map, because knowing where you live is often useless unless you know how to get there.

The policeman flirted like mad with both of us.  He told us nothing would happen to us in Barcelona, it’s a wonderfully safe city, and all we had to do was walk four blocks down and six blocks over and we’d be fine. 

We thanked them and walked until we were out of sight and then we ran until we got to our apartment.  We went to bed immediately.     

The next morning brought new madness and poor decisions, and the next week brought the amount of adventure some people don’t have in a lifetime.  Maybe this blog will revisit that week at some point in the future. 

Remote Access

A long time ago, I returned from my year in France expecting to start my new career in publishing only to find that just as few people wanted to speak to me in 2008 as did in 2007.  With no prospects, growing debt, and no take backs on my decision not to renew my teaching contract, I took a job as a software tester at my father's company.  Yes, I worked in software development. This doesn't fit with what anyone knows about me, or what I know about me, and sometimes I forget it's even true.  But for 9 months I worked alongside engineers and filed bug reports, making a contribution to society and only once blew up the computer.  I could tell several ridiculous stories from this time of my life, and I may end up getting to them in other entries, but this one is going to focus on the day I learned about "remote access."

I was probably in my fourth or fifth month at the company.  It was around this time that the financial situation, which had been sharply declining since the day I arrived, took a turn for the worse.  The place was in so much trouble that they could no longer afford to pay their rent, so they were slowly phasing out the office, which meant at first half, and then eventually all, employees were working from home.

Except for me.

I had to be on a special testing computer and they hadn't quite figured out yet how to let me work from home.  This meant that by the end of it all I was literally the only person coming into the office daily which led to fun situations like that time they forgot for a whole week to tell me I'd been laid off.  Ha! That was fun.

But that comes later.  On this day, I was not yet out of a job,  but I was alone, and my boss had called in and told me something specific he wanted tested.  It involved a complex series of commands and functions and something that might have been html but could have just been gibberish.  At any rate, I agreed to take care of it straight away, opened up a command prompt, and typed in something that to me looked like abcd/open/file\::::\\/.  I got back an angry error message.  So I retyped it. Got back the error. Retyped it. Error.

I got frustrated.  I was typing it in EXACTLY like he said. I knew it. So I typed FUCK YOU PIECE OF SHIT COMPUTER.

Error, it said.

I'LL ERROR THE HELL OUT OF YOU YOU HATEFUL MACHINE I'LL SEE YOU IN HELL

Error.

My phone rang.

It was my boss. He said, "Hi Danielle.  Just wanted to check in....having any...problems?"
"Yes, actually," I said. "Having quite an issue here. It's just giving me an error message."
"Did you accidentally hit the backslash instead of the forward slash after the file?"
"Uuumm....yes! Yes I did! Wow. Thanks."
"No problem."

We hung up. I thought my boss was pretty amazing to figure out so quickly where I had gone wrong, but I just put that down to his being smarter than me.

I went back to my typing.  No error! Yay! On to step 2!! I typed in what looked to me like :::'';;,;kl(fileserver////Ping

Error.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME, I typed into the command box.

Error.

I WILL FUCK UP YOUR SHIT, I replied.

My phone rang.

"Hi Danielle, just wanted to make sure things are going more smoothly."
"Actually, having another problem over here. When I..."
"Did you put the : at the beginning instead of the end?""
"Um...yes. I did."

This time I was a little suspicious, but I hung up, rearranged the : and continued onward without dwelling on it. I got to the next step.

Error.

THAT'S IT I WILL SMASH YOU TO BLOODY MOTHERFUCKING PIECES

I had hardly finished typing when my phone rang again.

"Hi Danielle just wanted to clarify that there's no space between the / and the \ okay?"
"Okay..."

Now I was convinced my boss was made of magic.

I went home that night and was telling my father the whole story (he no longer worked at that company by this time) and he just stares at me and before I get halfway through the story he said, "Danielle...you do realize your boss can SEE your computer screen?"
"No no," I said. "He can't. He's not in the office."
"He has software that allows him to connect to you computer and see your screen.  He's been checking on you. That's how he knows when you're having a problem."
This was possibly the most horrific news I could ever have received. Ever. I stopped breathing. "So....he saw..."
"Yes," said my father.
"Shit," I said.
"Yup," said my father. "any time you see a little red eye icon at the bottom of your screen, he's watching you."

This was especially bad news, because this was NOT the first time I'd gotten frustrated at the computer and used some pretty bad words.  Also, when I was testing the text boxes, I would type things like "LOOK OVER THERE. ISN'T THAT A BADGER WITH A GUN?" and "THERE WERE TWO MUFFINS IN AN OVEN....HAHAHAHAHAHAH."  And I had seen that little red eye ALL THE TIME and never thought about what it was.

He had seen everything. He never mentioned a damn thing. Not to me, and not to my father, who he spoke to regularly.

At first, I was very, very careful.  And no longer surprised that my boss always mysteriously knew when to call me to make sure I wasn't having a problem.  Soon though, when it was clear he was never going to fire me for using profanity or being generally weird, I started having some fun.  When I could see he was logged in, I would immediately start testing the text boxes and write in the weirdest jokes I could think of.  I even looked a few up at home so I would be prepared. I liked to think I brightened his day.

One day, I was having a major problem.  I could not get the commands I needed to work, and I was typing them over and over vainly.  Then I noticed the little red eye.  I typed it in a few more times so he would see that I was clearly stuck and call, but he stayed quiet.  No phone call.  No sign.  He kept pretending he wasn't there.  I repeated the same futile action for five more minutes, daring him to call me.  The red eye remained, but the phone didn't ring.  No email popped up.  I stopped typing for a minute and stared at the still computer screen.  The red eye stared back.

Finally, deliberately, I opened Notepad and typed, "I know you're there. I need your help."

For nearly a full minute, the note remained there, unanswered.  He was trying to keep up the charade.  But finally, slowly, my mouse arrow moved on its own and words eerily appeared under my note with the correct command.

From them on, the spell was broken. I didn't bother with anymore jokes, I watched my language, and I wrote a few more HELP ME notes in Notepad.  Soon after that I was apparently laid off, no one told me for a week, and when they did, I awkwardly moved on to teaching at Fox Chapel Area High School.  Which was pretty special.

Year of Firsts: Piercings

I did this at the beginning of November, but it was a secret from the family until last week.  No one in my family has pierced ears. Not my sister, not my mother, not my grandmother, not my aunt, not anyone. Growing up, anytime anyone in or out of the family mentioned ear piercings my mother would take the opportunity to tell me and my sister exactly how terrible getting your ears pierced was, using words like "mutilation," "puss," "infection," and "agony." Then she would reach over and pinch our ears with her nails.  Sometimes if no one had mentioned piercings for a long time she would randomly just pinch us and remind us of the horror that awaited us if we tried to pierce our ears. And that was just for ears.  Nose rings would ruin your future and belly button rings would kill you outright.

She started this with us young enough that it actually worked.  No matter how many friends and strangers I saw walking around with beautiful earrings and perfectly un-diseased ears, I still had no desire to do it after I turned 18.  Or after 21.  Or 25.  I was pretty convinced I would die with un-mutilated ears.

But then the Year of Firsts came, and FriendJ was getting her nose pierced, and it seemed like a logical step.

I made the decision extremely last minute so as not to have time to back out of it. FriendJ had picked out a tattoo/piercing shop in Virginia (uuuuuuuugh VIRGINIA) and we went on a Friday evening just before closing and had a nice, long consultation with a patient  boy named Peter whose face was made 50% out of metal.  He spent a good amount of time reassuring me that Death was a negligible risk of ear piercings.  He was very kind.  He even gave me a small, round, pink stuffed creature to hold during the ordeal like a small child and he did not have a trace of mockery on his face.  Though any mocking looks could have been concealed by all the glinting metals.

Everyone had told me it hardly hurt at all, but I don't like seeing needles if they are about to go into my skin so I told Peter I would just keep my eyes shut while he made all his preparations.  This means I missed seeing what the needle looked like, which is best, because afterwards my friends told me that it was a hollow needle, and the largest they had seen.  I yelled a terrible word when the needle went through.  If the creature had been live instead of stuffed, I would have killed it brutally and barbarically. But I did not cry!  Even though it hurt worse than the worst I had ever imagined and continued to be agony filled as Peter said, "Okay! Now the other one!"

I want everyone to take a moment to think about how proud they are of me that I let him do the other one.

I continued to be in terrible pain for days, but I had completed a pretty big First! I had Overcome Fears! I had Defied Authority!

Things went remarkably well for 7 weeks, right up until I saw the Authority whose name is Mother, last week for our family vacation.  She took the initial news moderately well, although she did spent the next 5 days pinching my sister's ears at a new high rate.

I was pretty pleased with myself for proving her wrong.  Nothing terrible had happened! Everything was JUST FINE.

Until 5 days into the vacation at which point we were in the middle of the Caribbean Sea with no land in sight for two days, no internet and no phone, when my left ear began to swell grotesquely and hurt as though someone with strong fingers was pinching my ear.

The irony.

I kept it quiet for a few days instead of going to the ship doctor, because my favorite way of handling medical situations is to pretend they are not happening and assume they will go away. Of course, it did not go away. It continued to get worse and worse until I finally decided to take the earring out to clean and replace it and discovered that I could not get the earring out.  This was panic inducing and involved me locked in a hotel bathroom yelling incoherently for a few hours. The Authority had such a fit that my little sister ran away from the hotel.  She forgot her shoes, however, so she didn't make it especially far.

Eventually though, the earrings came out, gold set ones went in, and I am now mutilated just like everyone else normal.