two gringos skip machu picchu for choquequirao

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In all my life, my family only ever took one (1) camping trip: a weekend – or was it just one night? – at Skofield Park with the Unitarian church, a good 15 minutes out of town and nigh on half an hour from our Goleta home. It was a lunatic’s adventure, to be sure. My mom stayed home, watching Murder, She Wrote and eating Haagen Dazs coffee ice cream while my dad and I struggled to manipulate the aluminum poles of the triangular red tent bought at Big 5 Sporting Goods a good week beforehand. (My mom never left anything to the last minute, and almost certainly bought the ice cream at the Turnpike Shell station on Thursday, lest the Friday rush force her to settle for chocolate chocolate chip). I got poison oak that weekend, and decided that I wasn’t very good at camping. After all, how many people that you know have ever gotten poison oak in the rain?

Really, why would anyone ever go camping? Sunburn, mosquito torture, soreness after sleeping on the ground like a dog with no home, and having to eat sand when the food runs out are all guaranteed, right? Right, but as my wise friend Martín once told me regarding being faced with epic traffic jams while trying to go get out of town over a long weekend, “no hay que dejar de hacerlo.”

After these almost two years spent in South America, I’ve learned to love camping, to enjoy the taste of sand. I’ve come to think that the most astonishing things to be found in the world are to be found in nature. Not only that, but if you really want to dig those things, you have to be willing to walk to them and camp there. This is the reason we’ve been lugging tent, cooking set, stove, gas tanks, three kinds of mosquito repellant and two kilos of malaria pills on this big schlep of ours. A quick consultation of the schlep stats tells me we’ve only been required to bust out the whole ensemble a total of six nights, probably some nine days or so, but even when I consider the 57 mosquito bites that Clare sustained on the upper half of the back of her left leg alone on this recent long walk – and I think she would agree – I think that the pains in the neck, ass, arms, hands, legs and feet have been a small price to pay for the chance to see phantasmagorical pink river dolphins or the infinite terraces of Choquequirao.

Choquequirao is The Big Schlep’s answer to the Inca/Gringo Trail. We read about it some months back in a sappy New York Times article, and after a day spent investigating in Cuzco, we decided that walking to and from this Incan city built after the Spanish arrived, three times the size of Machu Picchu at that time but with 1% of the visitors now, would be a nice alternative to parading to every gringo’s favorite Incan ruins which, by the way, are now prohibitively expensive for regular Peruvians. In keeping with our (my) penchant for making things a schlep, we took public transportation to and from the 700-person town of Cachora, nearest the archeological site, and did our own cooking. We permitted ourselves the luxury of a mule and handler, who doubled as a guide. The final cost of this four-day stretch of The Big Schlep was $75 per person, satisfyingly more affordable than the $275 apiece that the standard jaunt to Mucho Gringo would have cost.

The informal poll we’ve taken in Cuzco has us believing that we are very literally the only gringos ever to come to Cuzco (twice!) and leave (twice!) without visiting the most famous ruins in the Western Hemisphere, and we’re okay with that. I’m sure it’s awesome, etc., etc., and when I’m old and better funded I just may go, but I’m also quite sure that it will be a far less astonishing experience that our walk to Choquequirao and back, on which we spent second morning climbing 1600 meters from the Apurimac River to the ruins, only to see, at the top, a set of stone terraces for cultivation said to reach all the way back down to the river.

The fact that our trip to Choquequirao continues to amaze us tells me that we made the right decision by saying, “We’re skippin’ it!” to Machu Picchu. In a line I often quote in Travels with Charley, Steinbeck talks about how some trips are over before the end destination is reached, and some continue long after the traveler has arrived home. He cites a man in his neighborhood that once went to Hawaii or some tropical place and spent the rest of his years sitting on his porch in Bermuda shorts. Well, after a tormented night of sleep in a plenty nice hotel room, trying not to scratch mosquito bites, or irritate sunburns, or wake up thinking about the ten miles straight uphill or straight downhill to be walked before lunch, I woke up to the mess of a backpack I’d left in the corner of the room the night before. After re-packing the stove and sorting out my choners, I moved the backpack a little to the left to find, to my sincere astonishment, quite a large tarantula hanging out there on the hotel room floor, apparently having hitched a ride somewhere along the way. Wondering where exactly the hairy bugger hopped on, I relived every step of the 40-mile round trip, all the time thinking that our four-day adventure to Choquequirao may never end.

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Filed under Choquequirao, cachora, camping, cusco, hike, mosquito bites, peru, photos, tarantula, travels with charley