We slept well, the familiar sound of rain drumming on the tent is soothing. In the morning we weren't woken by the porters (bearers), but by a rooster that walked around between the tents screaming like an idiot. That earned him death threats in several languages.
Ever since the start of this trek I keep comparing it to the climb up Kilimanjaro. It also starts in tropical rainforest, we also have compulsory porters (though fewer). The food is likewise served in a dining tent on a folding table and fishing stools. We all also feel that it's nonsense to lug all this up here, you can eat perfectly well on the ground in the tent on your sleeping bag.
Our tents in the camp are separated by trees and are on a different terrace than the others, which is significantly better than 250 tents on a bare plain below Kilimanjaro. But that was considerably higher up. The porters here are only a bit bigger than the Tanzanians, but much better equipped. They even have proper boots and most of them have a backpack, simple though it is. On Kili they carried everything tied to their backs. Here they get much better food, I saw them eating roast chicken, rice and vegetables for lunch and spaghetti with sauce for dinner. On Kili they had porridge (orhowthehellisitspelt, basically oat flakes).
_So now there are three pages of something that Honza will either have to redraw and retype, or scan. It's all in foreign languages and doodles :)_
What is absolutely identical here, though, is the harsh hierarchy. At the top stands the guide. He eats with us, carries nothing, has a tent to himself, speaks several languages. Below him is the cook. He already carries something, sleeps with the dishes and the stove in the kitchen tent. The lowest sort, driven hard by the previous two, are the porters. They all sleep in our dining tent as soon as we leave it. In the afternoon I met one of them here, he stared in disbelief for several minutes at the fact that I was writing something for so long. When I handed him the diary to write something in it, he at least scribbled down the names of all the porters.
Now to our food. They spoil us unbelievably. For breakfast pancakes, bread with cheese, bread with jam, tea, coffee, cocoa. For a snack a bag of mango juice (the same as on Kili!), fruit, a biscuit. For lunch a great soup (Peruvians are wizards at excellent soups) and then several bowls of food, today for instance risotto, chips, a vegetable mix with pieces of beef. For dinner first a starter, slices of puff pastry drizzled with fruit syrup and freshly picked mint, popcorn, then another different soup, spaghetti, vegetable sauce, kish (a kind of potato pie), grated cheese and salsa, and to finish pudding and 5 kinds of tea (including coca leaves, of course). Well, that was a bit of a digression.
In the morning we were packed up in about ten minutes. And then waited half an hour for breakfast. After breakfast we waited another half hour for the blondes to pack. The way they bent over into the tent in those black leggings, at least there was something to look at :) .
Ahead of us was a nonstop climb up to 4200 m, starting at 2900 m. Only just below the top did the rainforest end, leaving only grass and shrubs. Since the morning we'd all (except Patrik) been chewing coca, this time upgraded with a substance resembling plasticine. It's made from the ash of some kind of wood and you chew it with coca because the calcium in the ash allows better release of the alkaloids in the coca. We finally worked out the right way of using this 10,000-year-old medicine, which only got its bad name from cocaine production. You wrap a pinch of that plasticine in about 12 – 15 leaves and roll it into a ball. You stick that in your cheek and let your saliva work on it for 10 – 15 min., which breaks down the structure of the leaves. By that point enough alkaloids have been released that the harsh taste doesn't turn your stomach, like it did when we chewed it straight away. After those fifteen minutes you start chewing the ball normally and swallowing the saliva. The result was roughly that my mouth felt like after an injection at the dentist, but my backpack weighed half as much and even on a medium-steep climb I didn't have to puff like a steam engine, I breathed through my nose only. Everyone described similar effects on breathing. Little blonde Claire, who yesterday dragged along like a bad smell, put headphones in her ears and coca in her cheek (at that moment she looked like a porn actress with something in her mouth :) ) and set off at such a pace that she was at the top a quarter of an hour before us. Towards the end of the climb to the top the terrain got so steep that everyone was puffing like a steam engine, coca or no coca. Nevertheless nobody had symptoms of altitude sickness, not even me (and that's saying something). It's probably also because we've been moving between 3000 m and 4800 m nonstop for over a week.
At the top the blondes dragged me into messing about with the camera. They exclusively take photos of the "Auntie Ema in front of Karlštejn" type. Here they also wanted a shot of "Two blondes jumping with a valley in the background" :) .
On the way down to the camp where lunch was supposed to be, I got that descent energy, like on Kili. It was supposed to take two hours, but I decided to run. Natural stone stairs, I overtook several dozen gringos and finally (and that took some effort) even one of the porters. Since I have a big and pretty heavy backpack (with the camera and co. about 18 kg) and on top of that we'd taken our little stools in the morning, it was a fairly fair contest. So I turned two hours into 42 minutes. It caused quite a commotion among the porters, because they want to have everything ready in advance. They always arrive well before us and by the time the gringos turn up they have the dining tent set up, tea in it, tents pitched, etc. I disrupted it a bit, so they started running around like mad with a pot and shouting "pasajeros" (apparently the clients). The guys arrived about 20 min. after me, the blondes about 1.5 hours later and Lucy with Bred about 2 hours later. Then came the problem of what to do with the time, because it was only two o'clock and a long way to nightfall. We filled the time with two feasts, a short trip after micro-catches (flowers and insects) with Luci and Lisa (the taller blonde) and several diary entries from everyone. Tomorrow we're getting up at six again (and I talked them down from five) so it's half past nine now and apart from me everyone's been asleep since eight.
