We’ve finally got another video up on the site, this time it’s a whole 10 minutes! from all 4 days of our Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, you can view it on You Tube, or just click play below.

Dolly wrote a post about our Inca Trail experience, but as well as the video, I thought I’d write about a couple of things that happened.

First of all I was really surprised to see a lot of rubbish on the trail, admitidly I thought it would be worse, but still. 500 people a day are making this trek, and it seems some tourists don’t think twice about leaving their litter anywhere. One good thing that has happened to try and sort this problem out is that the porters must have at least 11kg or rubbish at the end of the four days, otherwise they get fined. Sounds a little crazy at first, but it really works. At the last check point on the trail all the porters must declare there bag of rubbish, which gets a proper scrutinising for rocks, etc, this creates two interesting things happening on the inca trail, 1.) Some porters actively pick up rubbish on the way. 2.) Some porters steal other porters rubbish in the middle of the night!

We witnessed this crazy rubbish collecting for ourselves when we were trekking down to the final camp on the 3rd day. We saw a porter walking back up the other way. Our guide asked him what he was doing, to which he replied that he’d left the bag of rubbish from breakfast at the last camp, (9km away, mainly uphill), the head porter had gone mental at him, and he’d had to go back to get it, hoping that no one else had picked it up.

Before we started the trail we’d heard loads of stories from other travellers about how fantastic the food was, so of course we were expecting good things from Matteo, our cook. Our expectations may have been a little high from what we had heard, and we thought that our grub was a little dissapointing. For some crazy reason, desert was served first. bonkers. On day three Dolly nearly repeated my intestinal-pyrotechniques display after having a huge Chicken fillet sandwich and a veggie omlette for breakfast at 6am! And then walked up hill for an hour till 7am. She went a bit green, but managed to keep hold of “breakfast”.

Our Group consisted of only 4 of us, Me and Doll, and a lovely belgian couple called Greet and Manu, and the staff of course, 5 porters, 1 cook, and our guide Sylvia, thats almost 2:1 Staff to gringos! and if you think that’s a lot, there were to english girls from Sheffield, Laura and Amy who had 7 staff just for the 2 of them! bonkers.

The last week or so has seen us move from Bolivia to Chile via massive salt lakes and the Atacama desert (another story and photos to come soon from that adventure). Right now we’re in Santiago, Chile, we were forced to take a bit of a detour unfortunately as all the buses from San Pedro de Atacama to Salta, Argentina were full! gutted! we would have had to wait there for 5 days for the next bus, so instead we opted for the 24 hour bus to Santiago, although we went for club class! and got some right comfy seats! nice! So today we’re going to check out if there is still some snow in the mountains around Santiago and maybe get a days snowboarding in, fingers crossed, otherwise we’ll be heading straight over the andes to Mendoza, Argentina. speak soon. Rick.

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