Cachora / Choquequirao

The german girls, lea and laura, had arrived in abancay from lima to go on a four day trek to the remote ruins of choquequirao. They invited us along and we accepted. The four of us now, took a shared taxi out of the abancay valley over a mountain and descended back the other side to the valley village of cachora. It was a delightful little village with one paved street and lots of traditional mud brick houses, cool old ladies, horses, agriculture, and livestock. We stayed In a funky little guest house for a night where we arranged for a guide and four mules to escort us to choquequirao. We set out the next morning at dawn in the fog, having purchased enough food and whatnots that we would need for the journey.
The trek was magnificent, but grueling for sure, with over eight kilometers of rise and fall and 64 kilometers in total. It was certainly the most abusive hike ive ever done, and even though we had mules to carry our stuff and two of us up the mountains at a time it was still an unbelievable task non of us probably would have undertaken had we known so before hand. On the first day we hiked up one mountain and down the other side to where we camped by an unbelievably ragging river…one like I had never scene before…and inadvertently the same river that while we were hiking washed out the road to cusco which was to be our next stop. The second day we climbed up another mountain to a small scenic village where we set up camp and lunch and then continued onto the ruins of choquequirao.
The ruins we quite fantastic, nothing on the scale of machu picchu, but vast nonetheless, and the most amazing part is that we were the only one there, unlike macchu pichu that see some 2,000 tourists per day. We were greated at the top of the ruins by condors flying over head and a lone donkey that was super friendly and happy to see us and guided us around the ruins mowing the lawn as he went. The mountain top location of the ruins was spectacular, at the convergence of three valleys, one of which could have been hiked four days further to macchu picchu. We wandered around the ruins for the afternoon exploring the marvelous masonry involved in the stone structures, some of which were still shrouded in jungle, and soaked up the remoteness of the location.
The following two days were spent painfully retracing our steps up and down the mountains, taking moments to eat the wild cactus fruit that grew along the way, bathe in waterfalls, admire the multitude of flowers, foliage, and butterflies, and marvel at distances we were overcoming. The most useful tool of the journey was certainly the walking sticks that we picked up along the way that eased the down hills and aided in the hours of endless uphill climbs. The scariest part of the trip was springs allergic reaction to mosquito bites that spurred swelling of her legs, bruise like markings, and raw abrasions around the ankles…it was certainly a scary experience when on day two, thirty some kilometers from a mere village, we weren’t sure if spring was going to be able to walk the next day, but she powered through it and thankfully we made it back to the village, onto abancay, and to a pharmacy where we got some steroid cream seems to working.
After a day of resting up in abancay, and finding out the road was washed out to cusco, thousands of people were now stranded on macchu picchu and there was vast flooding in the highlands, we felt it necessary to take the next bus out of town before we got standed in abancay till the end of the rainy season. The night bus back through the mountains was torture once again, we were surrounded by a crying baby, barfing children, a snoring man, a woman with the most disgusting garlic breath of all time, and a kamakazi swerving bus driver that I was sure was going to kill us all. We arrived back in nazca with the realizations that cusco and the highlands weren’t happening because of the flooding, spring was tragically allergic to the mosquitos, and that peru was about twice as expensive as our outdated guide book had lead us to believe…it was a rough couple of days for sure…almost to the point where I just felt like the only rational thing to do was head back to lima to fly home. But luckily we didn’t and jumped on another bus ten hours further down the incredibly gorgeous southern desert coast of peru to Arequipa.