Part 3 of 5
This was by far the easiest day consisting of mainly a downhill roll to the village of La Playa from our idyllic campsite of the night before in Winaypoco (note the “n” should have a tilde over it to give the nyuh sound).
We got off to a late-ish start which was fine, gave the sun time to take the night chill off the valley. After the disconcerting scrambles over landslides of the day before this day was to prove uneventful. We saw yet more beautiful flowers, hordes of butterflies, vistas to die for and so on. The day was bright and warm and other than the occasional muddy slippy bit was over very quickly.
We arrived around noon/one o’clock in the village of La Playa, the low point of our trip both literally and metaphorically. The village has something like 1000 families living in it as opposed to the other villages we had seen along the way with anywhere from three to thirty. A family seems to be about 4-8 people or so making for anywhere from 4000 to 8000 people living in this village.
With this in mind you would think that a high level of cleanliness and sanitation would prevail to prevent epidemics and such. Unfortunately this did seem to be the case and this was to mar what was otherwise a good trek. There weren’t open sewers or such but there was a certain air hanging over the town of decay.
According to our guide this village and more like it further down the valley produce an awful lot of fruits (bananas, oranges, limes…), coffee, corn, tomatoes and so on, most of which ends up in Cusco or farther afield in Arequipa and such. Like all farmer’s everywhere they are at the bottom of the money pile with very little making it’s way to brighten their lives.
our campsite was down at the far end of the town so we walked through most of it. There are some obvious signs of money being spent in the hope that trekking groups will stop in. In general it would seem that most make a beeline for the bottom end of town. We walked past the usual one room adobe houses with thatched or tin roofs, pigs, cats, dogs and chickens coming and going as they please. Some places had invested in Huge speaker stacks and were pumping out the reggaeton and cumbia tunes. It was all quite sad and desperate.
Arriving at our designated area we walked in to our dining area for the day, flung ourselves down and promptly bought some cold sodas from the lady of the establishment. She had cold beers which we longingly looked at but knowing that the following day would bring a hefty ascent/descent we held strong and denied ourselves unlike the group in the space next door where again the tunes were pumping.
While waiting for our cooks to present us with the final meal that all three were to prepare (the back-up two cooks were also our muleteers) I looked around and asked Edwin where we would be staying that night as there were to be no tents which had to be taken back up the mountain to our starting point that afternoon in readiness for the next group two days hence. He pointed to the shack that the cooks were using and emphatically said “there”:
and where is the shower and the toilet I asked, making an effort not to be taken aback. Edwin duly pointed them out and I took a wander to inspect our digs.
Now we had been told that there would be cabins on the last day and having done the Colca Canyon trek we had a vision of what a cabin was. A cabin was an adobe hut, four walls, a door and possibly a window, inside of which were pallet beds, the walls were solid walls from ground to eaves and the door was indeed a door in the classic sense and the same with the window except that there wouldn’t be glass just a wood shutter.
Our “cabins” were indeed four walls with a roof yet somehow our reality was far from Colca. The walls were rough planks extending maybe 80% of the way to the eave, the roof was sheetmetal, there were no windows but then you didn’t need them thanks to the gaps in the walls. There was no door, just a doorway, there were no pallets, just a muddy grassy floor that the chickens were pecking happily at. Looking around a bit I realized that our cabins formed the low point of the lot so if it rained we would be getting wet. There was a strong smell of rotting food, particularly meat, and occasionally a strong waft of sewage.
Ok, we are trekking in the impoverished Andean mountains, the mosquitoes aren’t that bad, it hasn’t rained since the first day and then really only at the higher elevations and I am sure that the pigs, chickens and dogs get shut up for the night somewhere. We can deal with this, the villagers live like this all the time, no worries.
Right, off to check out the shower situation. By this time it had been three days of sweating, repellant and sunscreen and for the most part we are wearing the same clothes as on Day 1 since we had to limit what we brought because we had to carry everything the next day to Aguas Calientes, still 30+km away on the other side of a mountain. The shower, which was cold water-only which we new in advance, was a pipe sticking out of a wall in a tiny grimy smelly box of a room. No showers then.
Right, let’s check out the toilet next door. Opening up the plywood door (at least there was one) I was almost overcome by the stench of ammonia and waste, it was a standard concrete squat toilet of the sort you see in Asia and sometimes in France. Unlike those in those countries which are usually clean, dry and not smelly particularly this was soaking wet, there was a 5 gallon bucket full to the brim with used toilet paper (bear in mind that all toilet paper in Central and South America goes in such a bin not in the toilet) and an empty bucket to be used to “flush” the toilet. I staggered away wondering to myself how Darcie and Sandy were going to cope. Graham and I could use the field next door like the dogs did (after dark of course, we don’t want to frighten the natives) but the ladies? that wasn’t going to happen. Can we say dysentery and weird foot disease anybody?
At this point the lunch bell rang and we all tucked in to the last supper so to speak, paid our muleteers their tip and settled in for a long afternoon and night of doing nothing but waiting for the 4am when we could head on off down the road to Aguas Calientes and Machu Picchu.
The rest of the day was uneventful, Edwin and Jose did the best they could to make our chicken coop bedroom tolerable (they put tarps on the lumpy bumpy floor) and we did the best we could to ignore the deficiencies and find something, anything to do to distract ourselves until dinner and bed should claim us. Sandy grabbed her camera and wandered back into the village to the delight of the children and Graham and I wandered off down the road towards Santa Teresa. Darcie stayed behind to guard the gear, trooper that she is.
That night we all took sleeping pills, put in ear plugs (the place next door was still blasting the tunes), wore long sleeves despite the warmth and huddled in our coop praying for a quick passage of the night…
No comments:
Post a Comment