The most unexpected thing I found on Inca Trail was flushing toilets. There were flushing toilets on camp sites! I was not complaining that this civilized piece has damaged the authenticity of this trek at all. I was blissfully happy.
After a good night’s rest, we set ready for Day 2. This will be the most challenging day of this trail. We will hike for 10 hours and passed the highest point of Inca Trail — Dead Woman’s Pass. Also it’s easy to be hit by altitude sickness that day. For precaution, I asked some coca leaves from Russell. Russel passed along some extra powder to mix with the leaves. I rolled the leaves and put them back of my mouth. It tasted a bit sweet.
We went in a very slow pace. Part of the reason was to allow the body to adjust to the altitude and part of the reason was we simply can’t move fast at this high altitude. Anna, who came from Colorado, smashed it. She climbed up as effortless as walked on the flat. She told us the altitude was not much different from that of Colorado. She was fit and she was perfectly acclimated. At first I tried to keep up and not long I gave up. I stayed with Matt and Rebecca most of the time. Russell was behind with Sandy, who continued crying most of the time.
Becca was a beautiful girl and very outgoing. She used to do exchange in Columbia when she was in colleague. She can speak fluent Spanish, though with a strong American accent. Matt, on the other hand, was a typical nerdy guy — wearing glasses, a bit chubby. He looked quiet. But when you talked with him, he was chatty and very clear on his points. Of course, everyone asked them the typical first question with couples: how you guys met? The answer was trendy in recent years — tinder. When Becca moved to San Francisco from East Coast, she didn’t know many people there. She used Tinder to meet new people and luckily it worked. Becca said she realized Matt was such a nice person right from the first date. They dated for over a year and set the wedding date at the beginning of next year.
I forgot since when people around me started to vouch for dating apps. Living in Hong Kong, dating apps are not exactly in women’s corner. And everyone kind of agree those apps are just for hookups, especially with cheap men, who simply want to have sex by a few cheap texts. Yet suddenly, a few friends got married with the woman or men they met on Tinder or Coffee Meets Bagel. One of them is my dead friend AJ. AJ had a few initiatives on me over the years: bring me to the church, persuade me to go to Central Library in CWB to meet guys, get me to the very dark side of Shum Shui Po, and most recently, try to make me use dating apps when he met his wife Sarah on CMB. An absolute brilliant and tenacious guy himself, AJ failed massively on me, or I failed AJ massively. Years ago out of curiosity, I asked AJ to bring me to a church service. He particularly chose a live one, where there was a live band on the stage, in case the normal service would be too dry for me. He even let me take a better seat to have a better view of the stage, but miraculously I fell asleep only after 15 minutes. For the library one, I told him CWB was too far away from where I lived, which was 5 stops away by MTR. It took 30 minutes but the furthest stretch for me was Admiralty. Not to mention I would never travel that far to Shum Shui Po. As for dating apps, I told him I preferred to meet people organically. “Ego. That’s just ego.” AJ repeated.
So back on the trail. Matt was a good photographer. One of the perks of hiking at the similar pace with Matt was that I can ask Matt to take photos for me. I brought two lenses with me. Most of the time I stuck with the new lens I bought before my Peru trip. It’s a prime lens that can’t zoom. It was great to do portrait shoots but if you wanted to capture people with a relatively big background, you had to walk way back to get both the people and the view. I can’t imagine if any other people would bother to walk back and forth to get the right distance and angle for me. For that account, Matt was indeed an unbelievably nice people. Becca was smart.
The climbing to Dead Woman’s Pass was very dreadful. The trail was exposed. And the accent seemed nonstop. My breath was short and I paced myself carefully. Gradually it became Anna was leading ahead that I can see no sight of her at all, Becca came the second about 30 meters away, then it was me, and Matt, dropped another 30 meters below, and finally Sandy and Russell, who, too, were in no sight at all. When I finally heard Anna shouting “C’mon, here is the summit” from above, I felt both relieved and disappointed — it still looked a long way up.
When all of us made to the summit, we took a long time to chill. Well, you need to take time to enjoy your triumph. Russell was very pleased. We made it in the scheduled time and none of us had altitude sickness.
It turned out Dead Woman’s Pass was not exactly on “Dead Woman”. Dead Woman was a mountain far away but from this summit we can have a most close-up view. The mountain looked like a lying-down woman. Russell pointed to her face, neck and nipples. To sum up our Day 2 hike, we were pretty much following the nipples.
From there, the left of Day 2 was mostly flat and downhill. We took the ease to roll down the hills. Also from Day 2, we were completed out of the reach of civilization: no dwellings and no artificial sound except the nature. Plus there was a limited number for people on Inca Trail every day and different operators had different schedules for the first three days of this four-day trek, we were just with our own group at a lot of time in the vast nature. That feel was fantastic.
Anna was less fast when it came to decent. I managed to catch up and was leading for most of the time. I had more conversation with her in the afternoon. Anna was a surgeon. She met Sandy, who was a nurse, in a medical mission to Philippines. She and Sandy worked in different hospitals in Colorado. They shared the same passion to go on those medical missions to less developed areas for their holidays. She told me they stayed in a remote island in Philippines for a week and had become friends who travelled together ever since. Besides those adventures, she also enjoyed her free skiing trip to Europe as she can sign up as a medical staff for the team. I was officially jealous.
As we passed some cute little ponds with wild ducks in them, a magnificent waterfall and a big lake in the valley, we arrived at our camp site in the sun setting.