Forced to blog by the evil Liz ;)

OK, here I am sitting in La Paz waiting for the plane and I have decided to blog a little. Since this is my first blog I am going to just write about everything so far that has happened on the trip and I will give you the gory details unlike Liz.

The first being - The saga begins..-.

Day 1 - First let me say.. the hike was amazing. As we began the trail we were hiking along the river and stopping by Inka sites every hour or so. It was great to meet other travellers and form a ¨band of cool kids¨. While travelling, I throughly enjoy getting to know other travellers and then making temporary friends and this was the first time that I could get to know some on a personal level.

Day 2 - Things start to get crazy...

Day 2 of the Inka Trail is the hardest day. When I woke up I was feeling a little funny. My stomach was churning and I had pretty bad gas. However, I thought nothing of it and focused on conquering the mountain. We hiked up to the top of the pass at 12,000 ft ish above sea level I was totally fine. Besides the constant bad gas, I was doing well. Out of all the hikers, we made it to the top 2nd as Liz and I were in pretty good shape from hiking all around the United States. From the top of the pass we rolled down to our campsite and the crazyness began. My stomach started cramping and I knew bad things were going to happen. I stopped eating food as I lost my appetite and then during the night I lost all my body fluids. The worst part was not being sick but the stomach cramping that first night.

Day 3 - The Day of Death

This day was one of the hardest of my life. I woke up and was in terrible condition. I still could not eat and did not have any water left as I was so thirsty during the night I kept drinking it but it would not stay in my system. The guide gave me some rehydrating salts and told me I had 30 minutes to get up and get ready to go. I got ready and was still extremely sick. I was lucky, as when I started the hike, my stomach stopped cramping and I was left with continuatlly losing my body fluids along the trail. This was awkward as so many people are hiking the trail. I really did not care at this point though. The first part of the day we had to hike 1200 ft uphill to the top of the pass. That was defitelly the hardest part of the day. I took it extremly slow as every step was agony. To tell you the truth, I really do not remember much of that first morning. I was extremly out of it just trying to get through. All I remember, is Liz being super awesome and helping me along the trail. If it was not for her I do not know what I would have done. Sadly, the third day we skipped all the Inka sites as we were just focused on getting to the end. We managed to make it to the lunch point at which while everyone was eating I slept. Then it was downhill for three hours where I started dry heaving every mile or so from exhaustion. Finally at around 6:00PM we got to camp and I then slept until the next morning.

Day 4 - Macchu Picchu

Day four made up for the crazyness of Day 3. We hiked up to Macchu Picchu and watched the sunrise over the ruins. It was extremly beatiful. We then set out to explore the old Inka capital. The ruins were amazing, to glimpse a city set up so high in the mountains made of stone I feel so lucky.

More details to follow including a story about a drunken blind man accosting me and my personal favorite story story of Liz vs the pigeons.