The Lost Girls (9 page)

“No, you're sick, too. I'll be okay,” Amanda said. Ignoring her protest, Holly got up and walked over to Amanda, placing one hand on top of hers.

The man inched down the waistband of Amanda's pajama pants and swiped a path of alcohol against her right butt cheek. As Amanda scrunched her eyes shut, Holly squeezed her fingers to comfort her.

“That needle is new, right?” I asked the doctor, who paused to scowl at me.

“Of course, yes. Now relax muscles,” he said to Amanda.

She flinched, and I held my breath until he withdrew the needle. When it was over, Holly retreated to her bed and crawled back under the covers.

The doctor gave me a few instructions, plus a list of liquids and medicines that I should buy to help my friends feel better. By the time I pulled the front door quietly shut behind me, both of them were fast asleep.

 

I
n the middle of the night—or actually, very early the next morning, I heard the sound of someone slowly getting up in the darkness and turning on the shower in the bathroom. I
squeezed my watch and stared at the glowing green dial. Saturday, 4:51 a.m.

When Amanda emerged from the bathroom fifteen minutes later, both Holly and I were wide awake.

“How are you feeling, sickie?” I whispered. “Do you think we need to reschedule?”

All three of us knew the reality of the situation: there could be no rescheduling. Because of the intense restrictions on the number of hikers allowed on the Inca Trail each day, we had to go now—or wait until we traveled around the world next time.

Amanda took a deep breath. “Well, I know what my mom would say. Don't push yourself. You may feel better now, but you'll make yourself worse if you try to do too much. Let the girls go ahead.”

I looked at Holly and gave her a sad half smile. Oh well. Even though Holly had started to feel better last night, there was no way that we'd hike the Inca Trail without Amanda—or push her to try to go with us. Even though we'd been planning this for several months, it was better to make sure everyone was healthy. We had a whole year ahead of us; surely there would be greater challenges to face, more Latin American mountains to climb.

Holly opened her mouth to say something, no doubt to try to make all of us feel better about the whole thing. That's when Amanda cut her off.

“But c'mon, when have you ever known me to play it safe—or listen to my mom, for that matter?” She grinned. “Better start packing, ladies—we're gonna be late.”

INCA TRAIL, PERU
JULY

I
was living out another one of my dreams: trekking through the Andes Mountains with my friends on a mission to see the sacred ruins of Machu Picchu (also known as the Lost City of the Incas). Ever since I'd studied Peru in high school history class, I'd wanted to go to that place where mysterious jungles kept stone temples under cover and Incas had worshiped the sun. I expected my first experience on the Inca Trail to be more mystical than commercial. But from the moment our tour bus arrived and our stiff hiking boots stepped down onto the trailhead, Quechua women enveloped us, pushing everything from wool hats to hiking sticks to candy bars into our chests, insisting that we needed them to survive the journey.

After we'd consulted our Peruvian tour guide, Reubén, about which essentials were
really
essential, we stocked up on hiking sticks, water bottle holders, alpaca socks, coca leaves, and yes, enough Snickers to feed an Incan army.

“Señora.” A Quechua woman pulled on the sleeve of Amanda's quick-dry shirt.

“Gracias, no necesito algo más.”
Thanks, I don't need anything else
, Amanda said in an attempt to wave her off.

“Pero, señora,” the woman persisted, standing her ground at just five feet tall. But Amanda's gaze had already traveled far away to the Andes Mountains looming in front of us. Not to be deterred, the woman waved an object clenched tightly in her fist.

“Is that your money belt?” I asked, signaling for Amanda to come back down to reality.

Amanda immediately focused her eyes on the woman in the same instant she groped around under her shirt. The woman held out her hand to offer up the bundle of valuables, which must have slipped from its hiding place. Amanda took it from her outstretched hand with wide eyes, gave her a smile, then shuffled through her passport and the wad of tattered soles.

I studied the woman's sun-creased features and knew she probably made less money in an entire year than the amount Amanda had toted around her waist. I stood quietly watching as Amanda offered her a
propina
(tip), which the woman refused with a violent shake of her head. This must have been a real-life example of a concept called
ayni
I'd read about in a guidebook. It was the indigenous Quechuas' version of karma that held if you help your neighbor, they'll do the same for you someday. Amanda practically crushed her with a bear hug as an irrepressible grin spread across the woman's face.

Since the woman wouldn't take Amanda's money for pay-back, we bought another bag of coca leaves in the name of
ayni
before heading back toward our guide.

“Hey, everybuddy! I gadda question for you!” This exclamation, we soon learned, was Reubén's code to gather around for a group debriefing. With his aviator sunglasses, North Face pants, and sleek black baseball hat, the thirty-one-year-old looked better outfitted for a starring role in a
Bourne Identity
sequel than for his current job leading a pack of pilgrims.

Our group of a dozen formed a semicircle in front of Reu
bén as he pointed a walking stick at a painted trail map. “Okay, leesten up. You see that the Inca Trail es just one. If you stay on the path, et is eemposseeble to get lost.” Jen, Amanda, and I looked at one another and smirked. Impossible? We'd already managed to take a wrong turn on our way back to Cusco after hiking the surrounding hills—despite the fact that a Cusqueño had insisted there was only one road leading into town. We were capable of pulling off the impossible.

Reubén then gestured to a bridge stretched over a churning river. “Do you remember the name of this reever that runs through the Sacred Valley of the Incas?”

Remember? I don't think I've ever even heard of it, I thought, wondering whether my high school geography classes had covered it and I'd forgotten. I wished I had read more of the guidebook.

“It's the Urubamba River,” said Shannon, a twenty-eight-year-old Irishwoman with long legs and glossy black hair.

“You are one hundred percent corrrrect!” Reubén said. “Eggg-cellent!”

I was pretty amazed that Shannon seemed to have memorized every fact about the trail—so far, she'd had the answer to all of Reubén's trivia questions. Even with our unstructured schedule, I had never managed to get all the travel reading done that I'd hoped. Instead, I'd gotten sidetracked exploring Cusco's cobblestone streets during my daily run, or sifting through the rainbow-colored handicrafts at the markets, or staring at the fire in our hostel's common room and chatting with other travelers.

I caught Shannon's eye as Reubén wrapped up his impromptu lecture and offered her a friendly smile. On the bus ride over, I'd slid into an open seat beside her. As we'd watched the world melt into streaks of green beyond the window, we'd talked about how cool it was to be spending Tuesday morning heading to
ward the ancient Inca ruins instead of to an office. Quickly the conversation had deepened, and I'd learned she was part of a trio of late-twenty-something women who were essentially the Irish versions of ourselves. Bonded by a sense of exploration and at a crossroads in their careers, relationships, and life in general, they were traveling as a sort of time-out to think about which direction to head in next.

Finally the lecture was over, and it was time to begin the trek. The trail was a marathon-length twenty-six miles, and excitement for the journey pushed me across the bridge stretching over the river that marked the start. I hadn't gotten far before the sound of feet slapping quickly against the path made me turn to see who was approaching. I stepped aside for the porter wearing a yellow T-shirt, whose back was strapped with a blanketed hump of supplies approximately the size of his body.
“Gracias,”
he called out as he breezed past.

The porters were the men who made the trek possible by carrying up to sixty pounds of supplies on their backs—including tents, sleeping bags, and food. Most were indigenous Quechuas. Some looked barely eighteen years old, with barrel chests and knobby knees. Others appeared to be in their fifties or sixties, with deep lines etched into brown skin from a lifetime of exposure to sun and wind. Almost all had callused feet protected only by leather sandals. Despite their heavy loads, they managed to race ahead of us to set up camp and cook meals.

Reubén told me that many porters used to earn less than $5 a day, but the government had recently passed a law requiring companies to give them at least 42 soles, or about $15 a day. My heart went out to them, as I couldn't imagine that anyone could pay me enough to carry gas stoves, dishes, tents, and food for more than a dozen people on my back while trekking four days on what felt like an endless StairMaster session. Despite trying to acclimate myself to altitudes as high as 14,000
feet by running steps in Cusco all week, I was already panting from the weight of my six-pound day pack. Reubén must have heard me because he fell into step beside me and said, “Today is the easy day! It's just seven kilometers to Wayllabamba, and then we'll camp for the night.”

“La Labamba?” I asked in confusion, my mind working to churn up something familiar to connect to. He chuckled, and I wondered if he ever tired of tourists asking him questions that must seem obvious to him. “No, Wah-lee-BAM-ba,” he said slowly for emphasis, and I felt like a five-year-old asking her teacher “Why is the sky blue?” or “Why don't boys wear skirts?”

Still feeling like a grade school student, I walked beside him for almost an hour, soaking up his stories. What were the piles of coca leaves and corn placed along the sacred path? “They're
pago
, or offerings to Mother Earth. Giving to the gods—and others—helps to keep balance with the spirits, with nature, with your neighbors, and with yourself,” Reubén said. He went on to explain that the Quechuans believed that connecting with the elements of nature—air, water, earth, and sun or light—would help bring them closer to the divine, or Pachakamaq. “The Incas also did things like covering drinking cups and stone walls with gold—it symbolized the light of the sun god,” he said.

Reubén's stories sounded like fairy tales to me, as if the Incas had lived their lives by magic and energy and things unseen. But it was probably their way of finding order in a mysterious world. If I were to tell Incans that Christians do things like drink wine to symbolize their savior's blood, they might very well think that sounded like some kind of sorcery. I wasn't sure what I believed in as I hiked that trail, but I knew I was looking for something deeper, something solid, to hold on to. After all, weren't most religions a collection of stories and rituals, a way to make sense of the things we can't understand, of finding meaning in the chaos?

With a father born of a long line of Irishmen and a mother who traced her roots back to Italy and Poland, I'd had the standard Catholic upbringing that called for making the sacraments of First Communion and Confirmation. But even as a kid I'd wondered about religion—both about the church I was raised in and how other people worshiped. In fact, I'd pleaded with my mom to allow me to convert to Episcopalianism after going to church with my best friend's family and learning that this particular group of Christian rebels allowed women to be priests.

At thirteen years old, I could not wrap my head around why God would deny me the chance to lead a congregation simply because I was born without a penis. “What about equal opportunity? You always tell me that girls can be
anything
!” I'd said, but my mom had held fast to her traditions and wouldn't let me convert. “What would your grandparents think?” she'd asked. And so I'd honored my mother. I'd gone to religion classes after school for two years and fulfilled my required community service hours as a candy striper in a hospital in order to be confirmed by my parish in the Catholic Church.

I remember asking my teacher why the church would leave some groups out, such as women and gays. And she'd told me that that had come from people, not God. “The Catholic Church is an institution made up of humans who are imperfect. But God is perfect,” she'd said.

Reubén and I turned to silence as my eyes flitted around the same natural world the Incas had found divinity in: tall grass strumming in the wind; the Urubamba River slicing through rock and dirt; sunlight filtering through gauzy clouds as if they were curtains for the heavens themselves. There were no sacred ruins to be seen that first day. There was only wilderness and the sounds of my breath and water rushing and feet striking against the earth.

After an easy hike, little more than three or four hours, we reached our first destination. Though Wayllabamba means “grassy plain” in Quechua, a better description might have been “free-range farm with a makeshift distillery.” When we arrived, we found pigs, chickens, and goats clucking and braying at the intruders and the smattering of red tents our porters had constructed in a formerly uncluttered pasture. Surrounding the clearing was a little village.

When the government restored the Inca Trail, Quechuas who already lived there stayed. And while the animals might not have been happy to see us, the villagers made the most of the opportunity to make extra cash by selling treats to tourists. Consumerism had made its way even to the outskirts of the Lost City of the Incas: the makeshift wooden shacks flanking the path were stocked full of candy, Coca-Cola, and another beverage rumored to offer much more of a jolt than caffeine.

“Quieres chicha?”
asked one red-faced man from the window of the wooden box where he'd set up shop.

“No, gracias,”
I said firmly, remembering that Reubén had warned us about chicha, a potent corn-brewed alcohol fermented with saliva.

“Solamente una Snickers, por favor,”
I said, and forked over a few soles to add yet another candy bar to the three already occupying space in my day pack.

Sure, part of travel's adventure is sampling exotic fare, but I opted for the safe route since I was still popping antibiotic Cipro pills like Tic Tacs. I really wanted to be brave like Jen and eat whatever landed on my plate. Deep down, I felt guilty over my utter lack of curiosity toward any beverage containing another person's spit as an ingredient, Peruvian delicacies such as guinea pig, and the meat of adorable, doe-eyed alpacas—but facilities on the trail were few and far between, and it was BYOTP (bring your own toilet paper). Some risks just weren't worth taking.

 

A
s we passed around the dishes at dinner, I piled my plate with enough rice and potatoes to feed a teenage boy going through a growth spurt. “Hol, are you feeling better?” Amanda paused momentarily between bites, glancing at my heaping servings.

After swallowing a mouthful of rice, I said, “I'm starting to feel like my old self now. How about you?”

“Whatever the doc gave me was like some miracle black-market drug—I actually feel better than before I was sick,” Amanda said as she dug into a minimountain of potatoes.

The three of us polished off dinner, placed our dishes in the wash bin, and strapped on headlamps to cast a cone-shaped path of light toward our tents. It was only 8 p.m., but the exertion from breathing in the high altitude and all that walking made us want to collapse into our sleeping bags.

The temperature had dropped well below freezing, and the more body heat we could muster, the better. We could've slept in separate tents, but we laid out our sleeping bags—all three of them—inside a two-person tent and then pulled our alpaca hats farther over our ears. We stopped abruptly when we heard something brush against the tent. “What the hell was that?” I whispered, turning my headlamp in the direction of the noise. The intruder squealed as it hooved the thin plastic wall.

“Jesus, it's a pig!” Amanda exclaimed.

“Are we on the Inca Trail or Old MacDonald's farm?” Jen said, slapping the tent wall and yelling, “Get outta here—go away!” We heard grass rustling as the animal retreated, probably in search of our dinner scraps.