Hiking the Inca Trail

The Inca Trail is the famous trail that weaves through the Sacred Valley in Peru and ends in Machu Picchu. It takes four days of backpacking to complete the trail, and along the way are ruins of smaller Incan towns that supported the trekkers over five hundred years ago. My family arrived in Peru two weeks ago to do the trek with me.

I don’t want to mislead anyone when I say backpacking, so let me be more explicit. We had eight porters and a guide to help carry all of our stuff. We ate three course hot lunches every day with a table, chairs, and dining room tent. The porters woke us up in the morning with hot tea in our tents and hot pans of water to wash our hands and face. They rolled up our sleeping bags, packed up our tents, and ran to our lunch and dinner spots with their 55 pound packs in order to have everything ready before we arrived. “Backpacking” the Inca Trail was by far the most luxurious part of my time in South America.

However, the trail was no walk in the park. We were hiking 10 miles a day and climbed up to almost 14,000 feet, which is not a light day for a family activity. In addition, I persuaded my parents that we did not need to hire extra porters to carry our stuff, so I ended up carrying two sleeping bags, two pads, all of my mom’s clothes, and half of our snacks on my back. On day two, one of the porters was curiouos and lifted up my backpack during a break. He came over, shook my hand, and congratulated me on making it so far.

The Incas were a civilization that performed technological feats that we still cannot do today. They built homes and temples without using mortar—instead they carved each rock into the perfect shape so it stacked neatly on top of the next. In addition, some stones were so big that today, with all of our technology, we have to break the stones into smaller bits to move them. They built models of cities, experiented with farming different crops in different altitudes, and constructed fountains, drainage, and irrigation systems. Their buildings could withstand earthquakes and the ground sinking underneath. And they did all of this without a written language. 500 years later, with no maintenance, their buildings are still standing.

The Incas were only a couple hundred years behind the Europeans, which in the sceme of human evolution is nothing. The Spaniards wiped out most of their culture when they came to conquer South America. Fortunately, for the Incas and for us, Machu Picchu was never found. To this day, it remains 75% intact and remains one of the best insights on earth of an extinct civilization. Hiking the Inca Trail and ending in Machu Picchu was like going back and experiencing their civilization, and it is a trip that no one should miss.