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The following morning I woke before dawn, uncertain how—or if—we were going to meet our porters at KM 82, starting point of the Inca Trail. The last we’d heard from Efrain, Cusco was in lockdown and he was thinking about sneaking out of town on a motorbike.

As I walked out of my room, I almost bumped into an Andeanlooking fellow in a red ski hat who was heading up the stairs.

“Buenos días,” I said, trying to diagram the next Spanish sentence in my foggy head. “Do you know if it continues strong, the strike?”

“You look like Clark Kent,” the fellow replied, in English. Efrain had made it.

We went down to the hotel dining room for a much-needed coca tea. Efrain had left Cusco at 2 A.M. in a tiny Tico taxi, a vehicle that Peruvians call a coffin on wheels, but they exaggerate; it actually looks more like a washing machine on wheels. Efrain had traveled between midnight and dawn, when the strikers were sleeping off the day’s libations. Each time his taxi approached a roadblock, he’d asked the driver to kill the lights. He then rolled away the boulders, waved the Tico through, and put the rocks back where he’d found them.

“Isn’t that a little dangerous?” I asked.

“Nah. The last time I did it the strikers were a lot angrier,” Efrain said. “I had to bring bottles of pisco, and cartons of cigarettes.” Whenever he stopped, he’d hand out packs of smokes, stuff a few ten-sol bills into shirt pockets and do shots of brandy with the strikers. Eventually, someone would shout, “This guy is all right!” and wave his taxi through. “By the time I met my clients in the morning, though, I could barely stand.”

Efrain walked into the hotel’s kitchen and sweet-talked the motherly cook in Quechua, until she laughed and poured him a large mug of what looked like weak beef broth. He said it was maca, an old Andean energy drink made from a root that grows at high altitudes. After one mugful, he sat up straighter and started speaking more clearly. (I later learned that maca has a reputation for being stimulating in other ways. In the United States it’s marketed as “organic Viagra.”) Thus fortified, he walked into town to get a sense of how serious the local strikers were about enforcing the paro on the second day. To my great relief, the fervor had cooled a bit and we were able to hire a car to take us to KM 82 to start the hike. There we met our team of six porters, who would be carrying everything we needed on their backs— tents, cooking gear, even a portable toilet. (Regulations now limit each porter’s burden to fifty-five pounds, but I wondered if wages were prorated to reflect the nature of one’s burden.) We introduced ourselves, and they hoisted their loads, each the size of a small bookcase, and walked rapidly away.

“We used to pull ourselves across here on a sort of cable,” John said when we approached the bridge spanning the Urubamba. According to Peter Frost’s excellent guidebook Exploring Cusco, for years the only access to the trail was via a metal basket with a pulley system, operated for a fee that was often renegotiated as the hiker was halfway across the Urubamba River. The footloose days when a traveler could arrive in Cusco and decide at the last minute to hike the Inca Trail have long since passed. I’d had to book our spots three months in advance.

Efrain was thirty-three and handsome, with a smile that looked like it could bite through a corncob. He knew the Inca Trail about as well as I knew the path from my kitchen sink to the refrigerator. He’d walked it three hundred times, more or less. (He’d lost count.) He’d run the Trail twice, as part of the Inca Trail Marathon, which is about a mile longer than a regular marathon. (He finished in just over four hours, which would be a very respectable finish for 26.2 miles at sea level.) Efrain had a Dickensian life story: He’d been born in the Amazon jungle and grew up speaking Quechua for the first few years of his life. When the Shining Path began terrorizing Peru’s countryside in the late 1980s, his mom was unable to feed all her kids,