On the bridge, all eight of us stretch our leg muscles. It is half past four in the morning on Friday, January 20, and almost everything is dark in Aguas Calientes, the closest town to Machu Picchu, Peru. “We put on the ball of one foot and turn from left to right,” the youngest woman in the group says in English about the sound of the river below. We all comply and then rotate our knees and hips as instructed. When the exercises are over, someone says let’s go.
In the cool night we went out on the path to the right of the train track, carrying backpacks and grocery bags. After sleeping for three hours, we got up early to go to a place that I don’t know exactly where it is, from which they say it is at least six hours away on foot. We are four Argentines, my wife Verónica and my children Fátima –our impromptu physical trainer– and Valentín; two Californians, Christina and Ian; and the Colombians Alix and Felipe. The previous afternoon, my pointless anger at the closure of the Inca Rail station was followed by cries of impotence from Fatima and Veronica. That somehow they pushed us to adhere to the American’s plan: walk along the train tracks until we reached a town with a road where a taxi driver from Cusco could rescue us. “A woman here told me that she once walked to the other town with a baby in her arms,” Ian had told us. It seemed an unlikely story to me, but the prospect of staying in Aguas Calientes until the train could run again was much worse.
In Peru, after more than a month of protests and strikes against the government of the president Dina Boluarte which had left some 50 dead and hundreds wounded, the situation gave little hope of a return to normality. Until January 19, luck made us avoid roadblocks and the closure of the Cusco airport. But that day, after a morning of admiring Machu Picchu, the strike began to affect us in our own flesh.
There are no routes near Aguas Calientes and the train is the only vehicle to travel the 60 kilometers that separate it from Ollantaytambo, from where we had left on Thursday to visit the Inca ruins. But the service had been suspended since the previous afternoon because the protesters had blocked the tracks. Later we learned that more than 400 tourists were stranded that Friday in Aguas Calientes. What by train implies a journey of one hour forty, became an unknown quantity for us.
For the first few blocks, the public lighting allowed us to see where we were walking in silence and in single file. Later, the darkness deepened and the trails ended. We had to march between the two rails, on the shifting bed of broken stone on which the sleepers rest. Alix, who was ahead of me, lit the way with her cell phone light for many blocks. The night is never darker than just before dawn.
As daylight dawned, we saw that we were driving surrounded by green hills, with the Vilcanota River on one side. The first iron milestone we saw marked kilometer 108. How many were missing? And how much was it going to cost us to reach the town of salvation? I had already slipped several times on the stones of the road, and the fear of suffering a sprained ankle that would prevent me from walking haunted my brain all the way. It took me several kilometers to find a branch that would serve as a walking stick. Something helped.
Almost two hours after starting, someone from the group suggested stopping to rest. We sat on the rails to drink water and eat a cookie, a banana. We had to make our meager provisions last as long as possible, for we did not know when we would make a decent meal again. To keep up the spirit, we made little jokes that we were in the middle of nowhere. Only hills and the sound of the river surrounded us.
We covered endless meters and meters of stone and rail while the mist slowly retreated. We cross a tunnel dug into the rock, with “1928”, the year of its inauguration, carved on the lintel. There was very little to see inside, and you had to be twice as careful to avoid falling onto the greased stones between the sleepers.
We walked until a horn startled us. From behind a curve something was coming towards us. We turned away from the track: on the rails a motorcycle was running attached to an improvised wooden platform, manned by three men with their faces covered with chinstraps. Our signs were useless: they left us behind without making a gesture. We had other meetings on the road. We asked several men walking in the opposite direction how far away was a town. “It’s three or four hours,” they said. “Does it never go below three hours?”, the walkers asked each other, incredulous. On the train track that took us away from Machu Picchu, the meters passed one at a time, without the slightest rush.
The fox-motorbike passed again in the direction of Ollantaytambo, and then we saw it going towards Aguas Calientes. Always with their mute passengers as if they didn’t see us.
Then we went through two more tunnels. Later, with the summer sun already in full swing, the little path at the side of the track went away until we lost sight of the rails. We passed through the land of two houses and we were able to find the way again thanks to a local who told us that we had to pass a gate and climb a stone wall.
Farther away, at the side of the road, a woman under an awning was selling cold water and soda. She was asking four soles for a half-liter bottle. Twice as much as she in the Ollantaytambo pantry.
Still further on, at the edge of a farmhouse, three women offered drinks and sweets and several of the group took advantage of the stop to pee.
Little by little, the number written on the markers at the side of the road was reduced: 102, 96, 91. Someone in the group had said that the 82 kilometer station was the place to stop to wait for rescue. Eighty-two: I’ve never wanted a number so much.
Kilometers 89; 85; 84. By God, I want to arrive. 83. Kilometer 82!
It’s half past one in the afternoon. Eight and a half hours passed, and 26 kilometers of rocky roads from Aguas Calientes. I am the last of the group to reach the smallest halt, and my legs are shaking; the other seven are lying down or sitting on the concrete of the platform. With the fatigue marked on our faces and our muscles bursting, we are in the mood to high-five our hands in celebration. We found out that we were in a small town: Piscacucho. We took refuge in a square that serves as a craft market, where after a while five Argentines arrived who had also walked the tracks. There was nowhere nearby to sit, eat or have a coffee. But there was a store where I managed to go to buy some bread, two cans of tuna and an envelope of mayonnaise. A camping lunch, which included the beers shared by Felipe, the Colombian travel companion.
But the triumph of reaching Piscacucho was followed by disappointment. The taxi driver who had promised our walking companion Ian to come pick us up with a colleague wrote to inform him that the route to that town had also been blocked by protesters. But he told us that he could pick us up in the town of Chillca. At half past five in the afternoon, when the sun was already setting, we started walking again. It’s six kilometers, someone said. Our leg pain was going to worsen even more. Luckily it’s on asphalt, not tracks, I thought. Still, I felt like I was moving like a zombie the walking dead.
Before leaving, Verónica saw that there was a cell phone signal and called the airline to change the day of our Lima-Buenos Aires flight. Dating for eight in the morning on Saturday, we were not going to arrive without the mediation of superpowers. The operator didn’t even understand the reservation code and the process took almost two hours on the phone as we walked to Chillca.
After laboriously climbing several hills on the road, we saw what looked like white trucks in the distance. Would they be those of our saviors? Closer up, we saw that there were two half-wrecked trucks and that a huge tree crossed the road from side to side: that was the end of the protesters’ cut. We surrounded it and, after going several blocks that took us forever, I saw that our American companion was talking to two men: the taxi drivers Herwin and Freddy. Finally we verified that they were real people and not an illusion. I shook their hands with all the affection that fatigue allowed me at that hour. They told us “Let’s go this way” and led us to a bridge.
There we find a barrier and a few protesters. “It’s 15 soles to spend,” we heard. “No, you guys don’t listen!” Herwin reassured us as he led us to the escape. Muscles on the brink of strikeout, we half-crawled past under the barrier. There, finally, the promised vehicles were waiting for us. We hugged our four travel companions – at that point we already considered them friends – to say goodbye and, as in a dream, we got into Freddy’s car. From there he took us to our hotel in Ollantaytambo, where we retrieved our luggage. We immediately continued our trip to Cusco, where we arrived around ten at night, exhausted but happy to have come out alive. The next day we had a flight to Lima.
Ricardo Mosso is a journalist and author of the book “Coreanos argentos”.
by Ricardo Mosso
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