Hiking the ancient Inca highway along the spine of the Peruvian Andes was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but Nick Dall first had to find his way to the trailhead…
The taxi driver didn't seem nearly old enough to be driving. "You'll have to get out and walk," he said. "I'll wait for you after the roadblock." I was sharing the taxi with an abuela (granny) and three youngsters wearing knock-off baseball caps. We all knew being asked to get out was not a good sign, especially considering that our destination – the high Andean town of Huamachuco – was still more than four hours away…
It was 2017 and I'd flown to the South American country of Peru to go on a hike. Not just any hike: I was joining my friends Nick Stanziano from California and John Leivers from Perth who were midway through a 4 000 km adventure along the ancient Inca trail from Quito in Ecuador to Cusco in Peru.
I had noticed the young driver's fidgeting as soon as I got into his red Honda sedan in the coastal city of Trujillo, which I'd flown into from the capital of Lima. The other passengers were unperturbed, so I shrugged it off. We'd barely left when the abuela – sitting next to me – started vomiting into a plastic shopping bag. If she was carsick here, on an arrow-straight road through humid fields of sugarcane, what would happen on the winding ascent to the Altiplano? (As luck would have it, I wouldn't actually find out the answer to that question…)
There was something fishy about this taxi ride and it wasn't just because the abuela must have eaten a plate of dodgy ceviche. Upon reaching the outskirts of town, our driver pulled over and a silver Hyundai – which I now realised must have been driving in convoy with us – drew up. We were told to move ourselves and our luggage over to the Hyundai. I was a bit baffled,especially when we swapped back to the red Honda after passing through a police roadblock. Maybe the Honda wasn't a registered taxi and the Hyundai was, and the driver and his friend had figured out how to dodge the police? Who knows, but off we went again.
The problem was that the silver Hyundai had stayed behind in Trujillo, so when we reached the roadblock in the mountains and our driver asked us to get out and walk through, we all knew we'd reached the end of the road, so to speak.
Resigned to our fate, I slung my mamba-green duffel bag over my shoulder, the abuela secured her groceries in a blanket, and we walked under the sweltering tropical sun. We were still about 2 km from the roadblock and managed to score a lift on the back of a tuk-tuk for a short stint, but as soon as the police roadblock came into view we were on our own again – the tuk-tuk driver was also wary to take us through.
When the cops asked why four Peruvians, one gringo and all their luggage were slogging up a country road, I pretended to speak only German. They actually pointed at the red car, which was now visible in the distance, having passed through without us. I offered a feeble, "Nein."
They let us walk through anyway. The road soon got a whole lot steeper and my bag – containing a week's worth of all-weather hiking kit – got a whole lot heavier. I told myself it was great acclimatisation training for my high-altitude hike, but there was no escaping the fact that I was actually really peeved with the pipsqueak in the red Honda, which was now coming back into view.
When we reached the car, the pipsqueak was nowhere to be seen. He'd pulled up alongside a roadside kiosk and without even bothering to close the driver's door, he'd disappeared into the ravine below. I'm sure he wasn'tlicensed to operate a taxi and had finally decided to cut his losses and do a runner.
We stood around feeling spare for a while, and then ordered freshly squeezed sugarcane juice from the kiosk. Soon enough, the same cops who'd just interrogated us showed up. They were surprisingly sympathetic but not very helpful in securing us an alternative ride.
One by one, all four of the Honda's other occupants managed to score lifts to Huamachuco: The still green-at-the-gills abuela was picked up by an unsuspecting businessman in a fancy sedan and the others squeezed into overcrowded buses. I was left behind: a sad, solitary gringo on the side of the road. Over the next four hours I chewed my way through an armadillo-sized pile of sugarcane and – thinking it might be the reason no one wanted me in their vehicle - gradually let my mute "German" persona slip.
Just when I was about to give up hope of ever joining my buddies, a Hilux containing three new Peruvian cops pulled up. The beefy, acned youngsters were headed to Huamachuco for a three-month secondment in the gramadoelas and – once they'd moved a box of ammunition from the back seat – had space for my bag and me.
We sped up the serpentine tar road that would eventually take us to 4 200 m above sea level. On theirphones, they showed me GIFs of their girlfriends and nearly-girlfriends back inTrujillo and I returned the favour with pics of my wife, kids and dogs back home in Cape Town. We chatted about Mandela, the 2010 Soccer World Cup and – while snapping a selfie on a perilous hairpin bend atop a 1 000-metre drop – a horrific car accident on this very road that had claimed the lives of four of their colleagues.
As we approached Huamachuco we almost seemed to gather speed (quite something on roads designed for llamas, not bakkies) and before I knew it, I was bear-hugging my new friends goodbye and marvelling at the larger-than-life topiary kangaroo in Huamachuco's main plaza, where I was dropped off.
A few WhatsApps later, I found my hiking buddies and told them about my crazy day over beers and a sunset. The next morning, groggy and short of breath, I found myself kneeling in the shadow of the town's 16th-century belltower, as a shaman wearing an animal pelt and brandishing an enormous conch shell marked my cheeks with stripes of ash and gave me a bunch of cocoa leaves to chew. (Ours was the biggest hiking expedition to pass through in decades and the mayor wanted to give us a proper send-off.)
Much like the previous day's taxi journey, things got off to a good start: The trail was relatively flat and we spent the first night camped next to a spectacular snowmelt lake where we fished for trout from a leaky rowing boat.
But on day two I hit a roadblock of a different kind: altitude sickness.The trail changed radically as we headed up the so-called Escalerillas ("gangway" in English), a true feat of Inca engineering. Over eight gruelling hours and several thousand hand-carved stone steps, I somehow managed to summit three 3 500 m-high passes. I don't think I'veever felt worse than I did at the summit of the third pass, but once the waves of nausea subsided and the feeling returned to my fingers and toes, I found another gear and gradually started to enjoy the hike.
The next seven days went according to plan as we followed the ancient highway over passes and across valleys, through villages accessible only onfoot and past centuries-old terraces planted with quinoa and corn.
It was one of the best weeks of my life and it had all begun when I hopped into that dodgy taxi in Trujillo. Funny how an adventure often starts before you know it. Here I was travelling halfway around the world to do a hike- but just getting to the starting point was a story all in its own.
