¨On the first night of the trek, I had a very bad dream. It was I think, when you got sick. I dreamt that I was in a store that sold many, many shoes, and I bought a pair. But they became bad very quickly. My mother.. who was dead five years ago.. appeared in the store. I said many things, many awful things to her, and she started to cry…it was a very bad dream.”
My guide Romero said this to me this morning when I woke up in the hospital in Cuzco. At first I thought he said ¨why¨ instead of ¨when¨, but I´ve since decided on the latter in order to feel more at ease. He’s become my caretaker in the past 48 hours. I had fallen ill sometime around 2am on the second day of the Inca trek to Machu Picchu , and could not fall asleep on the rocky campground. The itinerary on the second day would have been rough– climbing more than 1200 meters to reach the ¨dead woman’s pass¨. I attempted a start, but I couldn’t walk more than a few minutes without feeling incredibly nauseous– I knew I had to make the choice to go back down. I told Erik to continue with the rest of the group and the main guide, and Romero accompanied me downhill to the small clinic at the beginning of the first campsite, where they put me on a drip and some antibiotics, and where my porter Elias magically appeared with my duffel.
The Peruvian porters are incredibly efficient workers. They ranged from 20 to 54 years old in our group, were half the size of many of the westerners, yet carried up to 25 kilos on their backs, walking (sometimes running) the trail ahead of us in order to set up camp, lunch, etc. We’d chosen our particular trek company because of how well they treat their porters– giving them good boots and a full bright yellow sweatsuit as accompaniment.
My porter had been called back from ahead of the group to return to me, and he and Romero soon accompanied me down the trail, retracing our steps from the first day. I rode a small horse that I had rented, led by its owner. It took us a mere three hours to reach the entrance at km 82, after which the target was Ollantaytambo, the town with the fantastic ruins that I had already been to twice, and which I will visit five times before the end of the trip. By the time we neared the town I could barely stay on the horse, and had to dismount and lie on the grass. The heat seemed insurmountable, and the fever they had subdued earlier returned. Now at the base of the river, we had to travel about 300 meters up a hill along the tracks to reach the bus, but I couldn’t walk more than a few seconds before having to hit the ground. The guide and porter tried to prop me up, but the smell of their sweat and body odor only made my stomach turn. I found myself face down on the large pebbles beside the track, blithely wondering how fast the train might appear to put me out of my misery.
“Please, I need you to walk a little more”
Eventually, I was able to make progress on all fours for a while, and threw myself into the van which sped us into town. In the back of the vehicle my fever rose to what I felt was a frightening level, and I couldn’t breathe without sharp pains in my stomach. I have no idea how long the ride was, maybe 40 minutes, but all I could think about was strangely, Anna Nicole Smith, and how they could have saved her if only they’d brought her fever down! Oh, Anna Nicole! I thought of what point and in what order my body would shut down its flow of circulation. Someone recently had told me the heart was the last to go, and in my mind, I thought I felt my arms and legs going numb. In retrospect, it was probably because my shoes were too tight and I was lying on my arm, but the look of concern on my porter’s face as he sat in front of me with his arm reaching backward to keep me from rolling off the seat, did little to assuage my thoughts. I ended up at the clinic in Ollantaytambo, where they put me on another drip, and a young American volunteer translated for me. The doctors were afraid I had appendicitis, and said I should go to Cuzco for a sonogram just to make sure. So, Romero and I rode in an ambulance that evening to the old Inca capital, where I spent the night hooked up to yet another drip and was administered drug after drug… followed of course by anti nausea for the drugs themselves.
Parasitis, from food or water, was declared as the cause of my suffering, and after being prescribed a string of antibiotics and a diet which I’ve almost already broken, I was released to return to Ollantaytambo by ambulance to catch the train I am now sitting on in order to visit Machu Picchu early tomorrow morning, and to meet up with Erik and the rest of the group.
If I decided to move to Peru, I could replace “soul” with “sol”, and feel quite witty. I like Peru, but why woudnt I- the people tell me I’m bonita and guapa, and I’ve been waited on hand and foot since arrival.
Romero is four cars back, in the local car with all my gear, where the tickets are one eighth the price of my tourist car. As I sit backwards in the nearly empty train, backwards because I can’t be bothered to move the three feet into the chair facing me, I’m thinking about at the point at which visiting places in the world might become uninteresting to me, or commonplace. I find the thought frightening, and realize that so much of how I feel about a place is dependant on my frame of mind. As I’ve realized countless times over the years, but every time for the first time, it is important to remain in the present in order to enjoy, and when things pull you in another direction, its hard to appreciate where you are or what you are doing. If you asked me, however, in which time period I mostly dwell, I wouldn’t have a good answer. I know I tend to pamper myself in the present, to things that others don’t, like traveling, but it does leave me wondering if I’m being roundabout in how I reach my goals. But for now, it all seems to make sense.
I’m moving to China in February, and will have open doors for whoever is able to visit. I am curious to return to New York in the interim and to see all my friends, and to be able to be a strobe light witness as to how things have changed since I departed in the summer, and since the real detonations in the market have happened. I’ve grown a bit weary of the conversations I hear over and over on this trip, where although I am surprised at the level of opinion everyone I meet has about the market (and Obama), am always disappointed in the way everyone always finishes with “Well.. it’ll be interesting to see what happens”. That feeling of powerlessness drives me crazy, even though I’ve been guilty of saying those words myself.
In the end, coming back home to a stranger living in my place, and a new destination in February makes New York seem like just another stop (albeit a fantastic one) in the continuation of my journey.. and maybe that´s a good thing for now.
