It takes a village…to get the Lovgrens to Machu Picchu. Without the most amazing group of friends, Jimmy and I never would have made it through the 4 day Inca Trail hike. Our time in Cusco was a blur, and by the start of the hike, the team cheer was “Peru hates the Lovgrens.” After almost a year of travel, I guess we were due for some travel mishaps. Somehow, all our bad luck seemed to happen in Peru.
Great view of the Monastery of San Francisco in Lima
We were so excited when a bunch of our friends wanted to join us on the adventure of hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. I had a friend from high school in Nebraska, Meghann. Two friends from graduate school days at UNC, Mark and Jen. A triathlete friend from North Carolina, Kari.
Plus, three soon-to-be friends, Kerstin, Rachel, and Wolter, who came from Seattle with Mark. Although this was a bucket-list experience with an awesome group of friends, Jimmy and I started to realize a few months out that we may have taken on too much given our current lifestyle.
The first problem is that we didn’t have all the necessary clothing and equipment needed for a challenging 4 day hiking and camping excursion. Even if we wanted to spend a bunch of money to get it all, how would it fit in our luggage when we are already tight on space? And what do we do with all of it when we are done since we don’t have a “home” to go back to? That’s when friends started to step in. Kari was a champ and procured us each appropriate day packs, a hiking water pack, headlamps, and compression socks. Jen brought a wool hat, towels, ziplock bags, and large trash bags to protect from the rain. We only ended up having to buy hiking boots, a pair of hiking pants for Jimmy, and an extra hiking water pack. Not too shabby.
You may remember Jen & Kari, the 2 crazy ladies who visited us in the Amalfi coast and wrote a couple funny guest blogs
The second problem was that we didn’t find a lot of time to plan. When living a nomadic lifestyle with travel as a weekly activity, planning becomes a bit overwhelming. We made sure to cover the necessary details, such as the key equipment and booking the tour, flights, and hotels, but we didn’t take time to plan extra activities or even learn what else there is to do in Peru. We wing it a lot these days and figured the same would work in Peru.
We flew into Lima and spent a night in a hotel there before heading to Cusco to meet our friends. One thing we were concerned about was altitude sickness because there is no rhyme or reason to who gets affected by it. Whether you are young, old, fit or sedentary…altitude sickness does not discriminate. In my quick search to learn how to combat this problem, I read a couple blogs that suggested starting in other cities in Peru at lower altitude, like Lima, before heading to Cusco. Lima, we read on multiple sites, is at 5000ft (similar to Denver) while Cusco is at 11,000ft, so a good place to acclimatize.
So, sitting at breakfast on our one day to explore Lima, I ask Jimmy to pull up on his phone the suggested one-day itinerary he had found on-line. He starts reading off the options for our day….visit historic center and churches, walk through some gardens, hang out on the beach. Wait…back up one second…the beach? How are we at 5,000ft and only 30min from the beach? I thought we were in the mountains. We googled it because google is always right. Sure enough, google claims Lima is at 5,000ft.
How is that possible? Later with our friends, Kari claimed that she hacked google to trick the Lovgrens…diabolical. Mark confirmed with his fancy watch with altimeter feature that the Lima airport is at a whopping 100ft above sea level. Nice! We wasted a day “acclimatizing” in Lima.
Cathedral of Lima on Plaza Mayor
No problem. At least we had the altitude prevention drug to help us power through. Modern medicine won’t let us down, right? We have been carrying the drugs around all year with us. Could they lose potency? Perhaps, but we may never know. We arrived in Cusco and had a lovely lunch with Kari trying the alpaca steaks and famous lomo saltodo (stir-fried sirloin strips with onions and tomatoes served over French fries and rice, which ended up being my favorite Peruvian food).
As we wandered back to our hotel, we were impressed with the beautiful sites in Cusco and excited for all that we were going to get to see and do there.
Back at our hotel, we were relaxing with Kari and drinking Coca tea, which is supposed to help with altitude sickness. After my second cup, I started to feel a bit nauseous, so I told Kari and Jimmy that I was going back to the room to lie down for a minute.
The downhill spiral happened fast. By the time I got to the elevator, I started to feel hot and light-headed. When the elevator door opened to my floor, the best I could do was crawl out. Luckily, a couple was standing there. The last thing I remember is telling them I didn’t feel well. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I opened my eyes, a woman was squatting next to me. I told her my husband, James, was in the lobby drinking tea. James? Kari didn’t even recognize the name of the person the woman was looking for when she came down to the lobby. Later on, the group got a bit of a laugh out of that because none of them have ever heard me call him James, except perhaps for our wedding vows. Anyhow, long story short, the hotel staff came to my rescue with an oxygen tank. I spent the rest of the night and most of the next day in bed with various terrible symptoms that I will not elaborate on. Let’s just say that I thought I was close to death and had to use up a second oxygen tank during the first night to bring any sort of relief. So, those pills we were taking, compromised? Maybe not since Jimmy was okay. Or was he? He had been struggling to breath for the first couple days but was powering through to take care of me. As soon as I was doing a bit better, down he went. He never fainted or felt quite as bad as I did, but he still spent an entire day in bed feeling pretty miserable.
Our view of Cusco for 2 days while stuck in our room sick. Of course it is raining.
At this point, we were both getting a bit nervous if we would be healthy enough for the hike. The morning of our orientation we finally found a moment to talk about finances. We were supposed to pay the remainder of our balance to the trekking company at orientation that morning….in CASH. Although Jimmy normally takes care of financial matters, I was the one “planning” the Inca Trail hike with our friends, so I was the one that had the email with the details of what we owed. I jumped on my computer to calculate our final payment – trekking fee remainder, personal porters, sleeping bag rental. It added up quickly…to $1100. Okay, Jimmy. Go to the ATM and grab us the cash for today. Jimmy looked at me like I was an idiot…because, well, I kind of am. You can’t withdraw that much cash from the ATM on one day in a foreign country. Oops. But, maybe the company will be okay with half now and half tomorrow morning before we start the trek?!? Nope…not an option. Jimmy doesn’t keep that much money in our ATM-accessible checking account so it would take a few days to transfer from our other account. Crap. I felt sick to my stomach. Would our trekking company cut us a break and let us use credit cards perhaps with a fee?
My heart was pounding during the orientation, and I didn’t even want to admit to our friends how unprepared we were and perhaps not able to go on the hike. How do we get out of this jam? Our friends, of course! As soon as she heard Jimmy and I discussing that we didn’t have the cash, Jen offered to let us borrow from her because she came with plenty of cash for her entire trip. She didn’t even flinch when we borrowed pretty much every dollar she had. But, no worries, Mark said he would step in if we didn’t have enough for incidentals while on the hike. Aren’t our friends the best? And guess how many more times they continued to bail us out on this trip?
Before diving into the long list of how our friends kept rescuing us, let’s go back to Peru not liking the Lovgrens very much. After orientation, the group split up to do some day trips outside Cusco. Because Jimmy and I had been sick, we didn’t want to go too far from the hotel and also still wanted to check out a bit of Cusco. So, we separated from the group to go visit a ruin and the famous Jesus that overlooks the town. We took a taxi up the mountain to the ruin Saksaywaman (sounds like everyone is saying “sexy woman”).
Everywhere around Cusco had been accepting USD, but of course, when we get there, only the Peruvian sole is accepted. Seriously? We didn’t have enough. But, wait, one of the workers is willing to exchange USD for Peruvian sole, so we get the correct amount of cash to enter into the sight. Crisis averted, but, as we walk in, kaboom!! What was that?!?? We look up and realize that the sun had quickly been covered up by some huge storm clouds moving in. Noooo!! We had ponchos but hadn’t brought them with us. Of course, there was a lady selling ponchos, so we spent more money to protect ourselves. Before the downpour hit, we did get a couple good shots overlooking town.
I was super bummed that we finally got out of the hotel and were treated to this terrible weather.
We didn’t even make it all the way to visit Jesus and just got this far-off shot.
We were not in the mood to keep fighting the rain, so we made a quick decision to jump in the one taxi that was available at the site before someone else did and went back to the hotel. What a fiasco. And when we talked to all of our friends who went to different places outside of Cusco. Of course, everyone else had beautiful, sunny days because… Peru hates the Lovgrens.
Quick side note: As I am writing up this blog, Jimmy and I are in-flight from Peru to Colombia. My tray table is broken, so I have nowhere to put my meal. And Jimmy didn’t get the cookie for dessert. I am praying that we are still flying over Peru and that our luck will not continue into Colombia. We don’t need to be cursed by an entire continent.
So, have you come up with a guess of how many times our friends came to our rescue on this trip? I won’t go into details about all the wonderful times we had during the hike because that will be covered in an upcoming guest blog. But, here is a recap of our friends coming through to get the Lovgrens to Machu Picchu.
I had tweaked my calf a couple weeks prior while out on a run to the point that I was limping for a few days. I was honestly quite nervous that my calf wasn’t fully healed and wouldn’t make it through the strenuous 4 day mountainous hike. Remember those compression socks that Kari had brought me…well, her dog (I’m sure he must be Peruvian) managed to chew a hole in them without her knowing. But, Meghann sacrificed her calf well-being and gave me her compression socks for the trip since I was so nervous that my calf would not hold up. Meghann is also a physical therapist and mentioned that she wished she had brought KT tape to help support my calf throughout the hike. But, guess what, Rachel came prepared with KT tape! So, Meghann was able to tape me up before the hike. What an amazing team we were surrounded by.
Meghann, my personal PT during the hike
Oh yeah, and I can’t leave out that one of the items we bought in Cusco was a new water pack to make sure we had enough water on the hike. When we stopped for breakfast prior to the hike, I noticed that my bag and all my belongings inside were soaking wet. Of course, the “new” water pack that I bought in Peru had a leak. Luckily, Wolter is an engineer. He had some sort of fancy fix-all tape, and he helped me to fix the leak while we waited at the checkpoint to enter the Inca Trail and cross this raging river.
One of the most serious and scary problems that we encountered was that Jimmy’s altitude sickness came back at camp on the first night. We had hiked up to a pretty high altitude. He was struggling to breath and felt a terrible pain in his lung/diaphragm. Mark has experience hiking and camping at high altitude, so he came to the rescue with lots of advice for Jimmy as well as some extra drugs to help out. Both Jimmy and I had lost our appetite that night, and all our friends freaked out knowing that was not like us. At altitude, you just have to get in whatever calories your body will let you. Sugary carbs usually being the best and easiest to eat when not feeling well. Of course, the Lovgrens packed a few nutrition bars but nothing sugary. So, Mark and Jen compiled their stash of cookies and Sour Patch kids for Jimmy and I to eat that evening. Mark gave me specific instructions that I could not go to bed until I ate a pack of Oreos. Isn’t that every kid’s dream? You don’t finish your dinner but you get oreos instead. I think I have to say it again, our friends are the best!
After a rough night of little sleep (and another oxygen tank to the rescue thanks to our guide carrying it up the mountain), Jimmy wasn’t sure if he could make it through the second day of the hike as it was the hardest day with the largest elevation climbs. A doctor camping in a group next to us spoke with Jimmy and seemed to put his mind at ease. Mark and Jen stepped up to be his personal sherpas. Mark took Jimmy’s pack to help lighten the load and effort needed. And Jen counted out steps and helped set the pace to make sure he had the energy to make it through the whole day. Everybody shared their sugary snacks to help keep both of us energized through the hardest day.
Jen taking on sherpa duties and setting the pace
Okay, I think this blog has already gotten too long and there are still MORE stories of our friends coming through…everything from yoga breathing tips in the middle of the night to borrowed jackets in the rain, I don’t think we can even come up with a number for the times we were bailed out by our friends.
Although we had tough times and wondered what Peru has against the Lovgrens, our hike along the Inca Trail was a magical experience. We literally could not have done it without the best friends in the world. Huge thanks to all of them for everything that they did and for making this a trip we will never forget. Stay tuned for the guest blog with all the AWESOME stuff that happened on the Inca Trail.
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