Peru Day 3

I've had this blog post composed for a while now. But to be honest, sifting through photos and making sure they are all the correct size is so daunting and overwhelming that I've put it off. I'm really, really wanting to get into blogging again. I have taken maybe 10 photos on my real camera since the beginning of the year, and I really feel like blogging would encourage more photo taking, and in turn more documenting of our little family. And with a new baby set to make his big debut in just shy of two months, I think it's high time I start doing those things again.

So, onto day three of our Peru trip...

In the early morning hours of day three I heard my mom and brother's tent, who happened to be camping next to us, quickly open and soon after my brother began to spew. (How do you nicely say "throw up"? I'm not sure there is a way to put it eloquently.) After a little bit he crawled back into his tent and zipped it back up again. Maybe an hour or so later the same thing happened. Only this time Scott and his weak stomach couldn't handle hearing my brother out there by himself and Scott decided to join him. I later found out it wasn't just his weak stomach, but he was in fact sick too. The two joke to this day that they are throw-up brothers (like blood brothers) and are true family members now. I think they may have even high-fived each other while they were hunched over on their hands and knees sharing that experience together that night. We found out later that morning after waking up that our tour guide also had a case of the throw-ups in the middle of the night. I was feeling pretty lucky I had escaped the food poisoning as we had deemed it, until we began our hike early that morning and it hit me too.

That day of hiking was so hard. I can't remember how much elevation we gained, but the entire first half of the day was spent climbing straight up the mountain. Combine the intensity of that day with the looming fact that about half of us had been plagued with food poisoning, and it made for a pretty physically rough day. The landscape was beautiful, but because Scott and I were both sick we don't have a ton of photos to show for the first part of the hike. Most of the photos in this post (if not all) are borrowed from others.

When we reached the summit of our climb it was freezing and began snowing. I was so cold (and still not feeling great) and was so anxious to begin trekking down the mountain again. We finally reached our lunch spot where the cooks had food waiting for us, only none of us were ready to eat the food again after the experience we had with the meal the night before. I remember feeling so bad that they had prepared this big lunch for us (every meal was huge and had so many different components), but I just couldn't bring myself to eat much. None of us could. I think I maybe had a few bites of quinoa soup (so much quinoa soup on this trip that none of us wanted quinoa for awhile after we got home). As we left lunch it began raining and we began hiking down the mountain again. Not much longer the sun came out and we began quickly shedding our clothes. It was so interesting to me that we began the day freezing with gloves and hats, and then by the end of the day we were in short sleeve shirts and applying sunscreen to our bodies. The second part of our day consisted of hiking down the edge of the Amazon forest. It was all so beautiful.

Not only was this day the hardest physically, it was also the longest. We didn't arrive at our campsite until dark. Once again food was waiting for us, but all I really remember eating that night was popcorn and drinking hot chocolate. We decided that evening that we were going to modify the next day (day 3 of the hike, day 4 of our trip) a little bit. Day 3 was supposed to be another long day of hiking with our final destination being Aguas Calientes, where we would stay the night in a hostel before visiting Machu Picchu the next morning. However, we decided after such a hard day we would schedule a "bus" to pick us up in the morning and drive us part of the way to some natural pools. This was probably the best idea ever and none of us regretted cutting out a little bit of hiking that day.