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The path narrowed around a rock ledge to just two feet wide, and I held my breath and forced myself to focus for the sixty seconds I needed to pass through it. Curiosity got the best of me midway. I tensed every muscle in the lower half of my body and tilted my neck for a peek into the abyss. A wall of sand-colored rock dropped straight down. There seemed to be no bottom.

When we reached the far side, John looked back and said, with some disappointment, “I think they’ve widened it. Someone must’ve lost a mule and complained.”

As the day grew hotter, the distant rumbles of rock slides punctuated the quiet. At a spot where stones spilled across the trail, John paused to listen for any further avalanches on the way. “It’s not so bad up high where we are, but down there,” he said, nodding into the chasm to our left, “the rocks will be coming at a hundred miles an hour or more. Once you hear them it’s too late to react.” The sun was blinding. Every surface was coated with flecks of mica, which gave the impression that some crazed fairy had tossed glitter over the entire valley.

We were headed toward the ruins of Vitcos. I was especially excited about this because Vitcos happened to sit in a crucial location—near a hostel owned and run by Juvenal’s family. This meant a bed for three nights. The muleteers were excited, too—the stop meant two days off from the trail. John was excited—by his standards, anyway—because to get to Vitcos we would have to hike through some serious Inca country.

“There are fewer people walking this route now than there were fifteen years ago, and there weren’t many then, either,” he said. Less than fifty miles to the east, a couple thousand people were walking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.

“It’s usually just the hard-core types you see out here?” I asked.

“Oh, I doubt we’ll see anyone on the trail until we get to Juvenal’s house”—two days away. The last foreigners we’d seen were a French couple who shadowed us for a few hours on the hike out of Choquequirao: they wore matching eyeglasses with nickel-sized lenses and hiked with a walking pole in each hand, as if working out on his-andhers NordicTracks. Our last sight of them they were setting up camp by what looked to be a charming riverbank. “They’ll change their minds when the bugs come out,” John said, with a final glance back.

The town of Yanama consisted of a one-room school, a shop selling rice and Inca Kola, and a few small houses. We camped at a farm by the side of a stream. After two straight days of walking until my clothes were drenched with sweat, then passing through clouds of dust and mica flakes, drying off in the hot sun during lunch and repeating the entire process in the afternoon, both I and my Travel Guy attire had crusted over. I stripped down to a pair of shorts, a bit of immodesty that made the señora of the house shriek “Ay!” and hide her face behind the brim of her hat when she saw me. Her two boys, ages eight and nine, watched me from the hillside.

At the bottom of the hill, a hand pump drew water from the river, and I chatted with Mateo while he hurriedly filled a bucket for cooking. The late afternoon sun warmed my bare back. Mateo was a laconic and sociable fellow—he chuckled when he pointed to my ankles, which had two-inch stripes of dirt like Samoan warrior tattoos—so I was surprised that he seemed to be agitated about something he called “poo-moo-blah-blah-blah” (at least that’s what it sounded like) and bolted up the hill the moment his bucket was full. Of all the times he could have chosen not to shake my hand repeatedly, I wondered, why did it have to be when I was carrying a bar of soap?

A friend who had gone off to work in the Peace Corps in the Amazon basin once wrote me a letter that began: “At a certain point, you resign yourself to the fact that there are at least three bugs on you at any time, and that one of them is going to bite you.” I had noticed, both in Cusco and at Choquequirao, that many of the travelers I met had constellations