Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [23]
“Better have seconds, Mark,” John said. “Eat plenty of meat. The last thing you want is to lose weight out there. Makes you weak.”
John was a lifelong student of fitness, and for someone with such a hearty appetite, he kept himself in amazing shape. When he’d taken his shirt off that afternoon to wash I’d noticed that he had thickly knotted arms and those ropes of muscle around his pelvic bones that you see on Olympic swimmers.
“When I led trips across Asia and Africa, there’d always be one person who insisted he was a vegetarian,” John said, holding up a forkful of beef. “We’d go to ten different shops to get all the amino acids they need. Then a week later you’d see them sneaking meat. They craved it.”
“I guess the menu could get a little monotonous in the Sahara, huh?”
“You’ve probably read about chocolate as a substitute for sex. When we’d get to Morocco some women would see a chocolate shop and make me stop the truck. Remember, we’ve been driving for months. Some of them ate chocolate until they vomited.”
We stood up from the table Thanksgiving stuffed. It was only seven-thirty, but complete darkness had descended. There really wasn’t anything else to do but go to bed.
“Um, anything in particular I need to know about camping out in Peru?” I asked, stifling a belch.
“I’d meant to ask you—when was the last time you slept in a tent?”
“It’s been a little while,” I admitted. “Maybe even longer than that.”
Growing up in Illinois, I had skied on slopes with less incline than the one we were camped on. John gave me some pointers about stuffing things under my air mattress when trying to sleep on a hillside. “And roll up your fleece to use as a pillow,” he said. I asked a few awkward questions about where one might relieve oneself without offending our host or his livestock, and we said good night. A few pages of Bingham’s Across South America put me out within minutes.
About 1 a.m. I awoke with a start, my arms pinned to my sides. I had rolled down into the corner of my tent. I untangled myself and stepped out into the blue light of an impossibly large full moon, bright enough to read by. Flickering around it like luminescent moths were things I hadn’t seen since New York had experienced a power blackout years before—millions and millions of stars.
TWELVE
Off on the Wrong Foot
En Route to Choquequirao
“It’s important that you know a few things about traveling with mules, Mark.”
It was about 6:30 A.M. and we were ready to depart. The day had gotten off to a bumpy start. Justo, deputized to wake us at 5:30, instead roused us at 4:15. Things could’ve been worse—when I checked his wristwatch, it was off by three and a half hours. John went through a quick equipment check after breakfast and was shocked to learn that I’d only brought a single water bottle. “That’s all you’ve got for the hike to Choquequirao?” he asked. I offered to run the ten minutes back to Cachora to grab a few extras, but John dismissed the idea as an unnecessary waste of time and money. Juvenal must have guessed what we were talking about, because he walked over to Octavio’s trash bin and plucked out three almost empty bottles of Inca Kola, the neon yellow, bubblegum-sweet soda that is Peru’s national soft drink. John rinsed them out with iodine. These would meet my hydration needs until Machu Picchu. The muleteers didn’t carry any water at all. To them, drinking water was a sign of weakness.
“Usually we have the right-of-way,” John explained, pointing at one of the mules Mateo and Julián were loading up with Justo’s conga drum–shaped food containers. “But if the mules do get in front, let them go because they’re stupid and they do stupid things. Of course you know not to stand within”—here he spread his arms wide—“of a mule. I