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Where Porters buy their Equipment

THE CRISP morning in Ollantaytambo dawned perfectly clear. You couldn’t have asked for a nicer morning. The air was crystal clear showing every tiny detail in the barren brown mountains towering precipitously above the village. The clear sky above was a strongly contrasting deep blue colour only found at mountain altitudes. I went downstairs had breakfast early as I was hungry. No one else from our group was there yet. Having been awake for a couple of hours already I was very hungry. It seemed my biological clock had settled on a four to five o’clock start every morning since arriving in South America nearly a week ago.

Breakfast was the horrible flat buns with butter and Fanny jam. Two nights ago after the trip briefing and eating guinea pig we had explored a few shops and to our horror discovered the main brand name for jams is "Fanny". That was a most unfortunate branding faux pax. I still couldn’t get over the brand name but in desperate times of hunger such as now (apparently) I had to overlook that rather glaring detail and just deal with it. There was also some fruit and aniseed tea which I was starting to take quite a liking to. Despite my hunger the dreary buns quickly took away my appetite though. Bread is obviously a big thing here in South America.

As soon as I finished breakfast, Luis appeared with a couple of the others who needed to buy some gear for the trail. I decided to tag along too. Luis knew of a shop where all the porters bought their equipment. He used to be a guide on the trail before becoming a tour leader, so he knew all the trade secrets of the locals.

We walked down the road through town and across the large car park before entering an obscure street. We then entered an obscure mall that we most certainly would not have found ourselves. We walked upstairs to a very messy shop with tables absolutely covered and bursting with clothing and equipment. Now I needed a sunhat, so I started with buying one for less than a dollar.

I needed a good lightweight parka. I also needed some rubber ends to my walking pole. I had gone to my camping store in Brisbane before coming over. The walking pole needed a large flat end for muddy ground, and a rubber tip for the end. I had lost the mud guard coming down off Mount Kinabalu earlier this year, and had managed to get a replacement one back home before coming here. They had run out of rubber tips though, and the camping store I had visited in Lima didn’t have any either.

I continued looking through the store. The tables were insanely packed full of merchandise that shouldn’t possibly fit in there. I was amazed it didn’t all fall off them as people rummaged through everything. The shop keeper was crammed into a tiny alcove beside the door. The window of which was surrounded by so much merchandise I could hardly see him.

Thankfully with Luis’ help I found a good lightweight green parka and an entire box full of rubber tips, so I bought two along with the jacket, taking it up to the tiny counter and paying a tiny fraction of what I would have paid back in Australia.

I don’t recall the way back to the hotel, except that we did pass the large cobbled parking area with the tiny supermarket we had visited last night. Perhaps I was not meant to know the location of the shop. After all it was mainly for the local guides and porters.

The others were yet to have breakfast, so I took my time going back to the hotel, photographing the buildings with the precipitous walls of mountain towering behind them. The area was devoid of vegetation apart from the odd tall cactus plant. None of the mountains I could see had snow despite some towering well over two thousand metres above me to nearly five kilometres above sea level. It couldn’t have been a clearer morning. I returned to the hotel to see everyone else eating breakfast. I joined them briefly explaining that I have already eaten before heading upstairs to my room to pack while they ate their unappetising Fanny jam buns and drank their herbal tea.

I brought my pack downstairs for storage during the hike. Our bags were placed in the van which will be returning to the hotel we had stayed in Cuzco once it had dropped us off at the start of the trail. I then returned and brought down my day pack and the duffel bag they had supplied for me to include my sleeping bag and spare clothes. Everyone else brought their bags down to be weighed as well. There was a six kilogramme limit for each bag. A few of the porters were there with a tiny spring scale weighing each bag. Mine came a little under at 5.6 kilogrammes, so it was fine. Almost everyone elses bag weighed in at over six kilogrammes, so they had to take things out to either put into their daypacks or back into their luggage for storage. Finally we were all under six kilogrammes each so the porters put them into their packs.

Once we were all loaded into the van, we waved goodbye to Luis. He was heading back to Cuzco for a couple of days to work. The driver took us through the remaining part of the village and out onto a gravel road that took us through cornfields. The road followed the railway line heading downstream towards Machu Picchu. There were now a few puffy clouds in what had only half an hour ago been a perfectly clear morning sky. Despite that we still had spectacular views of the mountains around us towering up to three vertical kilometres above us to their snow-capped summits clawing the deep blue sky above.

We finally pulled into a car park at the end of the road. This was the start of the Inca Trail. From here onwards we walk. Once out of the van we gathered around Wilbur for our final briefing. We would have liked to have met the porters properly, but they were too busy at the moment meticulously packing the large blue backpacks ready for the hike to the first camp. We were told to put on plenty of sunscreen and drink plenty of water. After all we were at the rather high altitude of two thousand six hundred metres above sea level despite being at the bottom of the valley. The thin air down here results in the radiation levels being a lot higher than one would expect. The porters provided us each with a packed lunch of snacks to fit into the tops of our daypacks. That was quite a bit of extra weight to carry on top of the warm clothing and camera gear in my day pack.

As we waited for the porters to finalise their packs, we looked out from the lookout at the end of the car park. The landscape in each direction was very different. Upstream, where we had come from, the landscape was a classic glacial U valley, with wide flat plains across the bottom of the valley and walls of rock towering over two kilometres high on either side. Looking downstream, the valley immediately closed off into walls of rock towering straight out of the cascading river with barely enough room for several shelf terraces marking what had at one time beenthe valley floor. The railway clung to one side about ten metres above the river. This really was the Andean landscape I had always imagined.

Finally we set off. Wilbur lead our group and Carlos took the rear. I walked with Wilbur at the front to start with, introducing myself properly and said telling him I had looked forward to this trek for such a long time..

We followed a fairly steep decline in the gravel until we were running parallel with the river next to the railway line. Fortunately no trains came as we followed it. We passed several people leading donkeys laden with produce. The porters took a lower track onto the grassy flat beside the river which tumbled in our direction cascading over giant boulders.

We reached a small railway station – the Piscacucho station, where we stopped and had our group photo taken under a sign marking the start of the Inca trail. A nearby sign showed we were at 2450 metres above sea level - about level with Machu Picchu and 1765 metres below the highest point of the trail which we will be crossing around this time tomorrow morning. We all gave our cameras to Wilbur and Carlos to get our group shot done. Little did I know at the time there was another photographer sitting inside the station taking our picture to put onto certificates that we would get at the end of the trek.

Wilbur had my big camera, but I still had my little camera, remembering the missed opportunity in the Amazon a couple of days ago when Luis had been laden with our cameras. Now the opportunity presented itself again and upon seeing how funny Wilbur and Carlos looked laden with all our cameras, I took a quick photo of them with my credit card camera.

With our group shot done, we continued along the pathway as the railway line started ascending away from us. We almost immediately passed a small building below us where the porters had lined up to get their bags weighed. There were two groups of equal size down there. There was our group wearing navy blue and carrying the same colour packs. There was another group of porters coloured a bright orange red. It was a bit odd they were all looking the same apart from the very obvious differences in colour in their clothes.

The porters needed to get their packs weighed because the park authorities had to ensure they were not carrying excessive weight. This was clearly not Mount Kinabalu where porters carried insane amounts of weight lugging things like washing machines up the mountain. Each porter had a weight limit of twenty five kilograms. If they weighed any more than that the tour company would be fined. That is why they had been so meticulous about packing.

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