I was living out another one of my dreams: trekking through the Andes Mountains with my friends on a mission to see the sacred ruins of Machu Picchu (also known as the Lost City of the Incas). Ever since I’d studied Peru in high school history class, I’d wanted to go to that place where mysterious jungles kept stone temples under cover and Incas had worshiped the sun. I expected my first experience on the Inca Trail to be more mystical than commercial. But from the moment our tour bus arrived and our stiff hiking boots stepped down onto the trailhead, Quechua women enveloped us, pushing everything from wool hats to hiking sticks to candy bars into our chests, insisting that we needed them to survive the journey.
After we’d consulted our Peruvian tour guide, Reubén, about which essentials were really essential, we stocked up on hiking sticks, water bottle holders, alpaca socks, coca leaves, and yes, enough Snickers to feed an Incan army.
“Señora.” A Quechua woman pulled on the sleeve of Amanda’s quick-dry shirt.
“Gracias, no necesito algo más.” Thanks, I don’t need anything else, Amanda said in an attempt to wave her off.
“Pero, señora,” the woman persisted, standing her ground at just five feet tall. But Amanda’s gaze had already traveled far away to the Andes Mountains looming in front of us. Not to be deterred, the woman waved an object clenched tightly in her fist.
“Is that your money belt?” I asked, signaling for Amanda to come back down to reality.
Amanda immediately focused her eyes on the woman in the same instant she groped around under her shirt. The woman held out her hand to offer up the bundle of valuables, which must have slipped from its hiding place. Amanda took it from her outstretched hand with wide eyes, gave her a smile, then shuffled through her passport and the wad of tattered soles.
I studied the woman’s sun-creased features and knew she probably made less money in an entire year than the amount Amanda had toted around her waist. I stood quietly watching as Amanda offered her a propina (tip), which the woman refused with a violent shake of her head. This must have been a real-life example of a concept called ayni I’d read about in a guidebook. It was the indigenous Quechuas’ version of karma that held if you help your neighbor, they’ll do the same for you someday. Amanda practically crushed her with a bear hug as an irrepressible grin spread across the woman’s face.
Since the woman wouldn’t take Amanda’s money for pay-back, we bought another bag of coca leaves in the name of ayni before heading back toward our guide.
“Hey, everybuddy! I gadda question for you!” This exclamation, we soon learned, was Reubén’s code to gather around for a group debriefing. With his aviator sunglasses, North Face pants, and sleek black baseball hat, the thirty-one-year-old looked better outfitted for a starring role in a Bourne Identity sequel than for his current job leading a pack of pilgrims.
Our group of a dozen formed a semicircle in front of Reubén as he pointed a walking stick at a painted trail map. “Okay, leesten up. You see that the Inca Trail es just one. If you stay on the path, et is eemposseeble to get lost.” Jen, Amanda, and I looked at one another and smirked. Impossible? We’d already managed to take a wrong turn on our way back to Cusco after hiking the surrounding hills—despite the fact that a Cusqueño had insisted there was only one road leading into town. We were capable of pulling off the impossible.
Reubén then gestured to a bridge stretched over a churning river. “Do you remember the name of this reever that runs through the Sacred Valley of the Incas?”
Remember? I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of it, I thought, wondering whether my high school geography classes had covered it and I’d forgotten. I wished I had read more of the guidebook.
“It’s the Urubamba River,” said Shannon, a twenty-eight-year-old Irishwoman with long legs and glossy black hair.
“You are one hundred percent corrrrect!” Reubén said. “Eggg-cellent!”
I was pretty amazed that Shannon seemed to have memorized every fact about the trail—so far, she’d had the answer to all of Reubén’s trivia questions. Even with our unstructured schedule, I had never managed to get all the travel reading done that I’d hoped. Instead, I’d gotten sidetracked exploring Cusco’s cobblestone streets during my daily run, or sifting through the rainbow-colored handicrafts at the markets, or staring at the fire in our hostel’s common room and chatting with other travelers.
I caught Shannon’s eye as Reubén wrapped up his impromptu lecture and offered her a friendly smile. On the bus ride over, I’d slid into an open seat beside her. As we’d watched the world melt into streaks of green beyond the window, we’d talked about how cool it was to be spending Tuesday morning heading toward the ancient Inca ruins instead of to an office. Quickly the conversation had deepened, and I’d learned she was part of a trio of late-twenty-something women who were essentially the Irish versions of ourselves. Bonded by a sense of exploration and at a crossroads in their careers, relationships, and life in general, they were traveling as a sort of time-out to think about which direction to head in next.
Finally the lecture was over, and it was time to begin the trek. The trail was a marathon-length twenty-six miles, and excitement for the journey pushed me across the bridge stretching over the river that marked the start. I hadn’t gotten far before the sound of feet slapping quickly against the path made me turn to see who was approaching. I stepped aside for the porter wearing a yellow T-shirt, whose back was strapped with a blanketed hump of supplies approximately the size of his body. “Gracias,” he called out as he breezed past.
The porters were the men who made the trek possible by carrying up to sixty pounds of supplies on their backs—including tents, sleeping bags, and food. Most were indigenous Quechuas. Some looked barely eighteen years old, with barrel chests and knobby knees. Others appeared to be in their fifties or sixties, with deep lines etched into brown skin from a lifetime of exposure to sun and wind. Almost all had callused feet protected only by leather sandals. Despite their heavy loads, they managed to race ahead of us to set up camp and cook meals.
Reubén told me that many porters used to earn less than $5 a day, but the government had recently passed a law requiring companies to give them at least 42 soles, or about $15 a day. My heart went out to them, as I couldn’t imagine that anyone could pay me enough to carry gas stoves, dishes, tents, and food for more than a dozen people on my back while trekking four days on what felt like an endless StairMaster session. Despite trying to acclimate myself to altitudes as high as 14,000 feet by running steps in Cusco all week, I was already panting from the weight of my six-pound day pack. Reubén must have heard me because he fell into step beside me and said, “Today is the easy day! It’s just seven kilometers to Wayllabamba, and then we’ll camp for the night.”
“La Labamba?” I asked in confusion, my mind working to churn up something familiar to connect to. He chuckled, and I wondered if he ever tired of tourists asking him questions that must seem obvious to him. “No, Wah-lee-BAM-ba,” he said slowly for emphasis, and I felt like a five-year-old asking her teacher “Why is the sky blue?” or “Why don’t boys wear skirts?”
Still feeling like a grade school student, I walked beside him for almost an hour, soaking up his stories. What were the piles of coca leaves and corn placed along the sacred path? “They’re pago, or offerings to Mother Earth. Giving to the gods—and others—helps to keep balance with the spirits, with nature, with your neighbors, and with yourself,” Reubén said. He went on to explain that the Quechuans believed that connecting with the elements of nature—air, water, earth, and sun or light—would help bring them closer to the divine, or Pachakamaq. “The Incas also did things like covering drinking cups and stone walls with gold—it symbolized the light of the sun god,” he said.
Reubén’s stories sounded like fairy tales to me, as if the Incas had lived their lives by magic and energy and things unseen. But it was probably their way of finding order in a mysterious world. If I were to tell Incans that Christians do things like drink wine to symbolize their savior’s blood, they might very well think that sounded like some kind of sorcery. I wasn’t sure what I believed in as I hiked that trail, but I knew I was looking for something deeper, something solid, to hold on to. After all, weren’t most religions a collection of stories and rituals, a way to make sense of the things we can’t understand, of finding meaning in the chaos?
With a father born of a long line of Irishmen and a mother who traced her roots back to Italy and Poland, I’d had the standard Catholic upbringing that called for making the sacraments of First Communion and Confirmation. But even as a kid I’d wondered about religion—both about the church I was raised in and how other people worshiped. In fact, I’d pleaded with my mom to allow me to convert to Episcopalianism after going to church with my best friend’s family and learning that this particular group of Christian rebels allowed women to be priests.
At thirteen years old, I could not wrap my head around why God would deny me the chance to lead a congregation simply because I was born without a penis. “What about equal opportunity? You always tell me that girls can be anything!” I’d said, but my mom had held fast to her traditions and wouldn’t let me convert. “What would your grandparents think?” she’d asked. And so I’d honored my mother. I’d gone to religion classes after school for two years and fulfilled my required community service hours as a candy striper in a hospital in order to be confirmed by my parish in the Catholic Church.
I remember asking my teacher why the church would leave some groups out, such as women and gays. And she’d told me that that had come from people, not God. “The Catholic Church is an institution made up of humans who are imperfect. But God is perfect,” she’d said.
Reubén and I turned to silence as my eyes flitted around the same natural world the Incas had found divinity in: tall grass strumming in the wind; the Urubamba River slicing through rock and dirt; sunlight filtering through gauzy clouds as if they were curtains for the heavens themselves. There were no sacred ruins to be seen that first day. There was only wilderness and the sounds of my breath and water rushing and feet striking against the earth.
After an easy hike, little more than three or four hours, we reached our first destination. Though Wayllabamba means “grassy plain” in Quechua, a better description might have been “free-range farm with a makeshift distillery.” When we arrived, we found pigs, chickens, and goats clucking and braying at the intruders and the smattering of red tents our porters had constructed in a formerly uncluttered pasture. Surrounding the clearing was a little village.
When the government restored the Inca Trail, Quechuas who already lived there stayed. And while the animals might not have been happy to see us, the villagers made the most of the opportunity to make extra cash by selling treats to tourists. Consumerism had made its way even to the outskirts of the Lost City of the Incas: the makeshift wooden shacks flanking the path were stocked full of candy, Coca-Cola, and another beverage rumored to offer much more of a jolt than caffeine.
“Quieres chicha?” asked one red-faced man from the window of the wooden box where he’d set up shop.
“No, gracias,” I said firmly, remembering that Reubén had warned us about chicha, a potent corn-brewed alcohol fermented with saliva.
“Solamente una Snickers, por favor,” I said, and forked over a few soles to add yet another candy bar to the three already occupying space in my day pack.
Sure, part of travel’s adventure is sampling exotic fare, but I opted for the safe route since I was still popping antibiotic Cipro pills like Tic Tacs. I really wanted to be brave like Jen and eat whatever landed on my plate. Deep down, I felt guilty over my utter lack of curiosity toward any beverage containing another person’s spit as an ingredient, Peruvian delicacies such as guinea pig, and the meat of adorable, doe-eyed alpacas—but facilities on the trail were few and far between, and it was BYOTP (bring your own toilet paper). Some risks just weren’t worth taking.
As we passed around the dishes at dinner, I piled my plate with enough rice and potatoes to feed a teenage boy going through a growth spurt. “Hol, are you feeling better?” Amanda paused momentarily between bites, glancing at my heaping servings.
After swallowing a mouthful of rice, I said, “I’m starting to feel like my old self now. How about you?”
“Whatever the doc gave me was like some miracle black-market drug—I actually feel better than before I was sick,” Amanda said as she dug into a minimountain of potatoes.
The three of us polished off dinner, placed our dishes in the wash bin, and strapped on headlamps to cast a cone-shaped path of light toward our tents. It was only 8 p.m., but the exertion from breathing in the high altitude and all that walking made us want to collapse into our sleeping bags.
The temperature had dropped well below freezing, and the more body heat we could muster, the better. We could’ve slept in separate tents, but we laid out our sleeping bags—all three of them—inside a two-person tent and then pulled our alpaca hats farther over our ears. We stopped abruptly when we heard something brush against the tent. “What the hell was that?” I whispered, turning my headlamp in the direction of the noise. The intruder squealed as it hooved the thin plastic wall.
“Jesus, it’s a pig!” Amanda exclaimed.
“Are we on the Inca Trail or Old MacDonald’s farm?” Jen said, slapping the tent wall and yelling, “Get outta here—go away!” We heard grass rustling as the animal retreated, probably in search of our dinner scraps.
We were all wide awake now. “One time a bear clawed at my tent when my family was camping in the Adirondacks,” I said, telling the girls the first of many random childhood stories on the road. “My dog, Corby, chased it up a tree to save me.”
“Your dog chased a bear up a tree?” Jen asked. “And wait, your dog’s name was Corby?”
“Yeah, what? I never told you that before?” I playfully feigned offense.
“Corby Corbett?” Jen giggled. “That’s as silly as Amanda’s white cat named Whyte Kat. I’m going to start calling you Corby.”
“Fine then, Baggy Baggett.”
“Wait, what about me?” Amanda chimed in.
“You can be Pressy Pressner,” Jen exclaimed, and we laughed. I attributed our giddiness to the coca leaves we’d been chewing for the last few hours to ward off altitude sickness. (Disclaimer: Cocaine does indeed come from coca leaves, but, according to Reubén, it takes hundreds of pounds of leaves to create one kilogram of the drug. Any loopiness we may have felt while chewing the leaves was purely medicinal).
Once we’d caught our breath, Amanda reached into her day pack to pull out a foil space blanket—an emergency provision for hypothermia—and stretched it across the three of us for extra insulation. Trying to get closer for warmth, I was glad we had opted to sleep together. We were settled in head to toe: three women snuggled inside a two-person tent high in the Andes Mountains. Instead of the familiar electric glow of skyscrapers, we drifted off blanketed by a sky with a different kind of light: the same constellation that had once guided the Incas, the Southern Cross.
I lay there long after Jen and Amanda’s breathing turned deep and even, next to them but alone with my thoughts. The flashing lights and honking horns gave New York City nights a sense of movement rather than stillness. I wasn’t used to how deep the silence could feel when darkness clung to a mountainside. In the heavy quiet, my mind wandered to my older cousin Adam, who’d unexpectedly died of heart failure two years earlier when he himself was just twenty-eight years old. I thought how our childhood selves, kids who had spent hours mixing the perfect mud pie or climbing the highest tree branch in the apple orchards behind my grandparents’ house, would want me to be having this adventure beneath the Southern Cross. I wondered if life would seem more comforting if I believed, as the Incas had, that those stars could show me the way.
The next morning our porter, Ramón, was outside our door (well, our zippered tent flap) with coca tea before the sun’s first rays penetrated the icy blackness. “Buenos días, muchachas,” he whispered with a singsongy cheerfulness that struck me as wildly inappropriate at that ungodly hour. The three of us huddled together, silently sipping our tea, reluctant to abandon the warmth of our down sleeping bags.
Once we’d gathered in the dining tent for a hefty breakfast of quinoa pancakes, eggs, and porridge, Reubén informed us that today was the hardest day: eight hours of steady climbing to the highest point of roughly 14,000 feet at Warmiwanusca, “Dead Woman’s Pass.” I was too worried about my own survival to ask Reubén how it had gotten its name.
Reubén commanded our attention with his now-familiar exclamation, “Hey, everybuddy! I gadda question for you!” Silence ensued in anticipation of Reubén’s next bit of trivia. “Who remembers the name of the man who redeescovered the Lost Ceety of the Incas, Machu Picchu?”
I took a breath to speak as Shannon shouted out, “His name was Hiram Bingham! He was a professor at Yale who found the ruins in 1911 during an expedition.”
“Muy, muy bien, Shannon,” Reubén said. “Why Machu Picchu was built is a mystery. Some say it was the center of the Incan Empire. Some say it was an ancient pilgrimage site thought to mark one end of the sun’s path. As you walk along the trail, imagine yourself as an Inca making your own pilgrimage to this spiritual site.”
I did believe my friends and I truly were on a pilgrimage, a search for what matters most. I wasn’t sure if Jen and Amanda were as excited about being pilgrims as I was, but my life in New York, so lacking in spirituality, had left me hungry to feel more connected, either to a higher power or simply to the world around me. On my first big trip during undergrad on Semester at Sea, I had signed up for a world religion course to learn how people around the planet fill their lives with meaning—exploring Shinto shrines in Japan, Muslim mosques in Morocco, and Buddhist temples in Hong Kong. One of my most vivid memories is of the first day I walked Istanbul’s cobblestone streets, holding my breath when I’d heard a powerful male voice chanting through the city’s loudspeakers. Masses of men stopped, threw down mats, and collectively prayed toward Mecca in a sort of sacred time-out. The clouds above cast shadows over the scene below, proving the world was still turning even though I felt as if it’d momentarily stopped. Ever since, I’d longed to go back to places where holy rituals were such visible parts of daily life, the way it was for those men.
Contemplating the divine was proving to be a somewhat helpful distraction from the exertion of climbing a path sandwiched between boulders and a steep cliff—and from the knowledge that the distance between living and falling to a tragic death was about six inches.
“How long did you ladies say you were traveling for?” asked Shannon. She fell into step behind me, saving me from imagining one of us plummeting down the mountainside.
“We’re on the road for a year,” I said, suddenly sweating under the heat of the intense sun piercing through my fleece.
“This is our first country,” Amanda called back from her place at the front of the line, with Jen a few steps behind her. I paused to peel off a layer of clothing, and the others took the opportunity to do the same. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I peered at people ahead on a peak, who resembled ants marching. The six of us women had formed a pack of our own on the trail, and that peak looked so high above us.
“How long have you been traveling?” Amanda asked.
Since leaving New York, the standard questions asked upon an initial meeting had changed from Where do you work? to Where have you been? and How long are you traveling? In fast-paced, success-driven New York, most people wanted to know whether a new acquaintance was, say, a Wall Street banker or a graphic designer. But on the travelers’ circuit, the amount of time you’ve been on the road and number of countries you’ve visited pegged you as a causal vacationer, newbie vagabonder, or seasoned backpacker.
“We’re doing six months through South America,” Shannon answered. The others in her trio, Elizabeth and Molly, had fallen back behind us after resting for a little longer.
“It’s so hard to find chunks of time to get away, especially if you have a boyfriend. Are you all single?” Jen asked.
“I’ve been dating my boyfriend for almost seven years,” Shannon said after a brief pause.
“Holly and I have been with our boyfriends for more than three years,” Jen shared, talking slowly to conserve her precious breath. “Shannon, do you think you’ll end up marrying him?”
Shannon’s walking stick made a steady thudding rhythm as she leveraged over the stones, and her breathing came out ragged between words. Maybe being in motion like that made it easier for us to open up so quickly because Shannon answered, “Everybody keeps asking me that question, but I never know how to answer because it’s not really up to me.” She sounded tired—both physically and emotionally. She revealed that her boyfriend was in medical school and that he kept postponing the marriage talk. Then she added, “I’m just not sure how long I’m supposed to wait.” She pulled her dark hair into a long ponytail as she walked, and I noticed sweat beads clinging to her neck.
As I listened, it occurred to me that Elan and I had never really had a big marriage talk either, apart from a mention or two about the far-off future. Marriage hadn’t been on our minds when we had met at twenty-three years of age (him) and twenty-five (myself ). But the years had sped by as if on fast-forward, and I understood that the pressure to check off that adult milestone couldn’t be avoided. I wondered if that pressure, mixed with his path as an actor, which would likely send him away too someday, would cause cracks in whatever that force is that holds a couple together. I hoped that it wouldn’t. I hoped that, as clichéd as it sounded, love really would conquer all.
As I scanned the path for potential ankle twisters like tree roots and loose rocks, it struck me as funny that our group was on the Inca Trail discussing quarter-life crisis issues such as commitment (which apparently aren’t confined to U.S. borders). After meeting the Irish girls, I was willing to bet that they were also struggling with the same questions we were: How long should I date a guy before getting married? Do I want to have kids? How can I make a living doing what I love?
Talking soon became too much effort as the climb grew steeper and the air thinner. That was just fine by me—I didn’t want to think about the future anymore. Worrying about stuff like marriage and jobs and things that only might occur were just distractions from what was actually happening that very moment. We were almost at mile 12, and my mind was focused on the rhythm of the walking sticks clacking upon the uneven stones; the sweet smell of rotting leaves; the dull burn of my thighs as they repeatedly lifted my legs; the starbursts dancing before my eyes as sunlight filtered through my sunglasses; the salty taste of sweat when I ran my tongue over my dry lips.
I forced any thoughts about the rest of my life out of my head and was content to stare down, concentrating on the task of putting one foot in front of the other. I paused only periodically to replace the layers I’d removed earlier as the temperature dropped and wind slapped my cheeks. After about two hours of steep but steady climbing, I was so consumed with taking it one step at a time that I was startled by the cheers erupting from the mountaintop ahead.
That must be Dead Woman’s Pass! I spied a rocky crest blanketed in clouds and nestled between two peaks. Bands of hikers yelled encouragement to those still on their way up. “You’re almost here. Just a few more steps!”
Turning around, I saw specks of people below on what looked like a vertical path from my high vantage point. Natural endorphins must have flooded my body after hours of climbing because my thighs were suddenly completely numb. My lungs, however, weren’t: My entire chest was burning from struggling to suck in as much precious oxygen as I could from the atmosphere up that high.
“Just a few more minutes, and we’ve made it halfway!” I called to Jen, who was walking steadily about five feet in front of me. Normally I’d have been up front, trying to push my body to the max by running toward the invisible finish line. But today I was willing myself to slow down and soak up the scene. I’d imagined what it would be like to walk this trail since high school. I wanted to hold on to the moment so it wouldn’t disappear so quickly. Amanda had made it to the top just seconds earlier and wasted no time in pulling out the video camera. Though Jen had wanted to do the trip without stopping to document it, I was happy Amanda was making the effort to preserve our first big achievement together—especially because I never thought to stop and record the moment. I didn’t want to forget the view from the top of our first mountain, where the sky itself looked so big it dwarfed even the snowcapped summits shooting up from valleys sprinkled with wildflowers.
Our third day, roughly twenty-four hours later and 5,000 feet below the hike’s highest point, we reached the last campsite. It proved to be practically luxurious compared to the pasture-turned-distillery where we’d camped on our first night or our second night at the base of Dead Woman’s Pass, where it got so cold ice crystals formed on our tent. Our group joined what seemed like hundreds of others in the lodge, where you could purchase showers by inserting coins into a metal timer. Though the bathrooms still lacked a few things I’d always considered essential (toilet paper, soap, a little bleach action), simply being able to rinse the grime from our matted, hat-head hair felt totally indulgent.
As we sat down for our last supper, it felt like the night before Christmas. The anticipation in the air was so thick that you could practically cup it in your hands. The next morning we’d start hiking around 4:30 a.m. to make it to our final destination, Machu Picchu, in time to see the sun’s first rays illuminate the ruins.
We weren’t waiting until tomorrow to celebrate, however. Reubén organized a tipping ceremony, and the porters stood in a semicircle directly across from our team of trekkers. The group of men with their callused, sandal-clad feet shyly shared their stories, and Reubén translated each into English for us. Reubén mentioned that Ramón had started this job when he was sixteen and that his fifty-four-year-old father, also working on this trek, was the oldest on the team. I’d noticed that Ramón was usually smiling. He smiled while shouldering a load as big as his body; he smiled while squatting over a pot cooking our dinner; he smiled while cheering on the tourists whose gear he carried. His life might not have been easy, but still he smiled.
Besides offering money, the trekkers also pooled together things to donate that we no longer needed, such as socks, T-shirts, and flashlights. Reubén assigned each donated item a number and wrote the numbers on scraps of paper to be plucked from his black cap. Each porter was invited to pick one, and they all clapped wildly when someone drew a number that corresponded to, say, an opened tube of antibiotic ointment. The porters’ faces lit up, and they chanted, “Gracias!” as they clutched the bundle of castoffs.
Their enthusiasm over receiving unwashed clothing made my throat tighten. Far away from the glitz and grit of New York City, I thought that often the people who had the least in the way of material possessions seemed the happiest. The porters, who carried giant packs of other people’s belongings, didn’t appear to focus on what they lacked. Instead, they acted grateful for the small stuff that came their way—even used antibiotic ointment. And their eyes, though lined with creases and slightly weathered, looked to me to have more sparkle than any guy I’d seen walking down Wall Street in an Armani suit. I wished I had more to give than a measly bag of coca leaves, but living out of a backpack didn’t leave much room for miscellaneous items.
On our last morning, breakfast wasn’t the bountiful affair it had been on previous days. Instead, we quickly devoured cinnamon-sprinkled porridge by starlight, gathered our belongings, and then relied on our headlamps to guide us.
The earth quivered under the hundreds of feet tracing the path. We moved at warp speed through grassy fields and then forests with fan-shaped leaves that rustled in the wind. As the stars were gradually absorbed back into a brightening sky, it was a race against the sun.
We trekked the final few kilometers along the mountainside, slipped into a cloud forest, and then climbed about fifty steps to get our first view of Machu Picchu framed by the sun gate, or Intipunku. The Incas were genius architects, lining up the stone walls in this gate to match the angle of the summer and winter solstices. On those two days of the year, the sun was perfectly aligned to flood the gate’s opening with a solid beam of light. As we approached, the light beckoned us forward.
Less than three hours after we’d started, our group sat cross-legged on a stone terrace to soak up the moment we’d trekked twenty-six miles to witness: The first rays peeked out from behind the sprawling ruins of Machu Picchu. As the sky morphed from pink to gold to periwinkle, the light pushed shadows across the stones, making them appear to be living, breathing beings.
The centuries-old city changed shape before our eyes, sunlight flowing like water through the labyrinth of rectangular passages, staircases, and buildings sitting on a flat plateau framed by a cloud-covered mountain peak. The ancient Incas didn’t have wheels, so the sheer manpower it must have taken to construct such a monument was as impressive as the intricate architecture itself.
Despite the fact that Amanda and I had been sick just days before and we’d all spent the last few nights sleeping on rocky ground in the Andes, my friends’ eyes shone brightly and their complexions glowed. The sun suddenly shifted higher in the sky, illuminating every stone in the ancient city.
“Can you believe people built this place by hand?” Shannon, always filled with facts, whispered beside me.
Though the ruins seemed to me like some sort of miracle, I wasn’t contemplating the Incas’ brilliant engineering as I watched the sun climb higher in the sky. I was thinking about my own journey to Machu Picchu and how it wouldn’t have been the same if I’d done it alone. My thoughts flitted back over the past three days. The Quechuan woman who had returned Amanda’s wallet at the start. How Reubén’s voice had grown lower as he pointed out the offerings to the gods left along the trail. How Ramón’s face had lit up during the porter-tipping ceremony.
I can’t recall exactly how long I sat there, thinking that my teenage self never would’ve believed I’d have done this. It was long enough for the exhaustion from twenty-six miles of hiking to hit Jen and Amanda, who were leaning against each other and using their sunglasses to unsuccessfully hide eyes surrendering to sleep. Reubén jumped to his feet in front of them, signaling for us to gather around for another lecture. “Hey, everybuddy! I gadda question for you!”
Our pack of pilgrims dragged ourselves over as he continued, “You win a Snickers bar if you can tell me, what is the Quechua spiritual law of ayni?”
“It means reciprocity,” I belted out, excited to finally be able to answer a trivia question. “Kind of like, give and you shall receive.”
“Eggg-cellent!” he said, tossing me the chocolate.
My stomach grumbled, and I realized we hadn’t eaten since the porridge hours before. Ready to rip open the wrapper and devour the chocolate, I suddenly stopped.
“Hey, Jen, Amanda, you hungry?” I asked, breaking the bar into three. Handing them each a piece, we ate in silence as we followed Reubén for a tour of the Sacred Plaza.