On Sunday, June 18th, we were picked up at our hotel at 5:30am in a tour bus that was freezing cold and we drove for 1.5 hours to Ollyantambo to pick up the porters for our trip. We needed 10 people to take care of the four of us!
About the porters, wow... these people are just amazing. They are peasants, many are farmers who can’t afford land, and they carry heavy loads on their back (60lbs?) and literally run the Inca Trail. It´s crazy. Every year they have a marathon over the Inca Trail and the record was under four hours. What takes us four days takes them four hours! And they wear sandals or sneakers, drink no water and just get their energy from coca leaves... They are amazing. Now there is control over how heavy their load is, each porter must weigh his or her load (before regulations, some of them would carry over 100 pounds). Our company pays them 150 soles ($50 USD) for the trek, which includes food and lodging, and that is considered generous. Insane. We tipped our porters after the trek, we loved all of them, especially our guide Miguel, but more on that later.
Ollyantambo is a large ruin site and we had breakfast while the company sorted out the porter situation. Then we drove for a little while longer to kilometer 82, the start of the trail. They weighed our bags, we had to be less than 15 pounds each and both Jared and I were 12.
Below is a map of the Inca Trail in detail that Q'ente gave us.
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