Top of the World

The next day we hiked over 700 meters up to an altitude of about 4450m. This is about 14,600 feet, which is the highest Scott and I have ever been! We didn't feel nearly as rough on this trip as when we hiked Whitney (about 14,500 ft) because we have been in cities at very high altitudes on an off for over a month now. Aldo also encouraged us to chew on coca leaves to help with the altitude. No worries - they don't have the drug effects in this form, though we do have to make sure to take them all out of our bags before returning to the US! The first time I put some of these leaves in my mouth, I gagged because the juice tasted so bad. However, I kept chewing and got used to the taste after a while. Aldo also set a very nice pace, which helped us a lot. Scott and Debarshi were up at the top before me and Scott decided to take terrible pictures of me huffing and puffing. There is a nice background, though!


It was pretty chilly at the top with the wind, but we stayed anyway to do another ceremony to the mountain gods. We all brought a little stone with us to the top and after taking three coca leaves and blowing to pachamama and the mountain gods, we put the stones on top of all of the leaves (those that didn't blow away anyway!). Aldo then said a prayer in Quechua. This is what everyone does as they go over this Ibsacocha Pass. Another animal that we saw along the way up was the al paka. This was exciting because we had bought quite a few clothes made of alpaca in order to stay warm on this trek. It's so soft.



After the top (oh, did I mention that our group broke the record for making it to the top fastest - go PUMAS!), we hiked down for about half an hour to a beautiful lake site to have our lunch. We had picked up a young boy from the family I showed before so that he could help and make some extra money. Aldo took him to the stream to go fishing. Aldo took my walking stick and would push the fish out of their holes and they swam down the stream right into this little boy's bag. Smart fishing!

The rest of the trek was downhill and we camped out that night at around 3700 meters in the Patacancha community. The family that owned this campsite seemed much more well-to-do than the family at the last campsite. They had tons of guinea pigs running around and even had two stories to their house. It was a nice place to stay and we all got a little more sleep that night.