Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [25]
When we sat down for lunch, the temperature was ninety degrees in the shade. I’d guzzled a half gallon of water on the way down. We filled our bottles in the mornings with boiled water, so each warm sip contained doubly unhealthy echoes of plastic and Inca Kola. None of the mule team had drunk a drop, and they all looked queasy. Justo in particular wore the facial expression of a man who’d eaten some bad shellfish, and the others were having a laugh at his expense. John called everyone together and demanded that each man drink a bottle of water into which he mixed an electrolyte powder. The packets looked like something the Red Cross might hand out in Africa; their label said that the elixir had been formulated for babies suffering from cholera.
Even if my chances of running into anyone I knew on the trail to Choquequirao were pretty low, I was feeling a little self-conscious. Have you ever seen Mr. Travel Guy? He’s the fellow who strides through international airports dressed like he’s flying off to hunt wildebeests—shirt with dozens of pockets, drip-dry pants that zip off into shorts, floppy hat with a cord pulled tight under the chin in case a twister blows through the baggage claim area. All of this describes exactly what I was wearing. Between my microfiber bwana costume and the bags of candy that Justo kept foisting on me, I could have been trick-or-treating as Hemingway. John wore the same set of clothes every single day: a Bolivian park ranger shirt with one button missing; hand-me-down blue Adidas hiking pants that a film producer from Munich had given him years ago; and a pair of Merrell boots that looked like they’d turned up after a sandstorm in the Sahara. No matter the weather, the only flesh he exposed was his face, beneath the wide brim of his bush hat, and the tips of his fingers, which protruded from gloves cut off at the second knuckle.
My own boots were the only part of my ensemble that I knew wasn’t ridiculous. I’d spent a month picking out the perfect pair for this trip—I e-mailed Adventure’s equipment guru so many times that he finally stopped responding—and walked around in them for two weeks before departing for Cusco. Unfortunately, amid all my research, I hadn’t come across the Wear Two Pairs of Socks Rule. This is evidently one of those dictums like “Don’t Keep a Moody Two-Hundred-Pound Male Chimpanzee in Your Home,” a principle that seems so obvious that no one bothers to mention it until something has gone horribly wrong.
“You wore one pair of socks on the walk down from Cachora?” John asked, when I mentioned that my feet had begun to hurt. “Well, that’s your problem.”
When I pulled off my boots at camp late that afternoon, John was flabbergasted. The big toes on each foot were swollen on two sides. The middle toes were rubbed raw. My little toes looked like the sort of meat that ends up in hot dogs. Each had a chickpea-sized blister that, when punctured, squirted like a Super Soaker.
“These the first blisters of your life, Mark?” John asked as he sterilized a needle with iodine.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Trust me, I’ve had much worse than these.” This was true, though I declined to mention that the cause of my previous torment had been a tight pair of patent leather shoes that I’d worn with a tuxedo to the FiFi Awards—which are, of course, the Oscars of the fragrance industry—several years earlier while working at a men’s fashion magazine.
For the next two weeks, I wrapped my six aching toes in electrical tape each morning, which gave them the look of piano keys. Then I slathered them with Vaseline and pulled on the only two pairs of thin socks that I’d brought. “You’ll want to splay your feet when