Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [41]
One night John took a walk around the house after his ephedrine dose and noticed that he felt better than usual. “The next night I took less medicine and went for a walk outside. Then I tried a little jogging with the walking. Eventually, after several weeks, I found that after twenty minutes of sweaty exercise, the asthma would be gone.” Almost everything that John had learned in life since, he’d picked up on his own. He’d walked out of the only Spanish class he’d ever taken, years ago—“we kept talking about pillows—how’s that supposed to help me get through customs?”—and then practiced the language by talking to people and translating the newspaper. When I used a word that he liked, he wrote it down in his blue notebook.
Juvenal had invented some menial task for the boys to do, so that John and I could eat without feeling like we were onstage. With their crouched little bodies no longer blocking the view, we could watch the mules drinking from the rocky stream rolling down the hillside.
“You never told me how you got into guiding,” I said.
“Well, that’s sort of a long story we can get into later. I had a lot of jobs before that. I told you how I was an engineer, overseeing multimillion-dollar projects. I worked as a gardener. I was a beach inspector for seven years.”
This sounded like the sort of job that only existed on novelty T-shirts. “What’s a beach inspector?”
“It’s what you would call a lifeguard.” Justo set bowls of quinoa soup in front of us, along with a freshly made peppery aji sauce that was hot enough to clear our sinuses. John dumped several spoonfuls in his bowl, then passed it to me. “How’s your stomach?” he asked.
Sniffing the aji made my mouth water and my intestines rumble. I reluctantly passed it back toward John. “Let’s just say that tomorrow might not be a great day to attend a chili cook-off,” I said.
John blew on his spoonful of soup and reached for his pen. “What’s a chili cook-off?”
NINETEEN
Up, Up and Away
Choquetacarpo Pass
Yanama sat at almost twelve thousand feet, and most of our hiking the next day was uphill. Each time we crested a ridge, the terrain edged a few degrees further from green to brown. Streams appeared from nowhere, and we crossed them via a few logs laid above their gurgling current. We hadn’t seen rain since starting out at Cachora, and water levels were low. Most of the paths we’d followed thus far had been dusty mule trails. Today’s route was so far off the map that the Inca stonework was in near-mint condition. “Just think, Pachacutec and Manco probably came along this trail on their way from Vitcos to Choquequirao,” John said.
Our objective for the day was to stop just short of Choquetacarpo Pass. This was one of the many fifteen-thousand-feet-high breaches in the Andes that had brought the Spaniards to their knees with soroche when they tried to pursue the Incas. The Quechua people have long known that coca helps the body adapt to the lower levels of oxygen in the thin air of the Andes. They also have biological advantages over lowlanders like me. Their hearts and lungs are larger, which is why so many Andeans have barrel chests like stevedores; they also have blood richer in red cells than a person raised at sea level. These don’t seem to be genetic adaptations, but rather physiological advantages that one earns by growing up at altitude. This made me feel a little better each time Juvenal sprinted uphill past me on a trail pitched like the roof of an A-frame.
In midafternoon we crossed into a moonscape, a long valley with steep craggy sides capped by jagged black rocks that blocked out most of the sun’s rays. The blue-light