Day 85 – Cusco, Peru and Rainbow Mountain

April 29th, 2019

Today we had a day trip to “Rainbow Mountain”.  We had to be walking out the door of our hotel at 4:15am.  I had a rough night’s sleep with my cold symptoms, but overall woke up feeling the best I had in four days.  Thank goodness!  We walked to our meeting spot and drove about 1.5 hours to a place where we stopped, and they fed us breakfast.  After that, it was about another 1.5 hours to make it to the trailhead.  On our travels through Central and South America, crazy drivers are a given.  This was the worst ride I have ever been in though!  By now I know when I get in a car they are going to drive too fast, too close, and ignore any general rules of the road.  Today, I felt like our driver was just plain reckless.  The last hour to the trail was on a very small one lane dirt road.  The worst thing that happened was there was a group of little kids walking to school and the driver whips around a corner and just starts honking as he speeds up! This road is very narrow so there was not anywhere for a pedestrian to go except in the ditch. We were so close!  I saw the look of fear in the children’s eyes as they were literally diving out of the way while our maniac driver was speeding up.  We were right on top of them practically, and I literally cried out “Oh my God!” as my hand went over my mouth and I shut my eyes as I thought we were going to run over a child.  Thank God they were able to dive out of the way just in the nick of time, but it was awful.  He did this again with a group of local women, also forcing them to run off the road.  Then he got behind a small red car and instead of just waiting for an opportunity to pass he got right on their butt and laid on the horn!  He didn’t let up and was trying to run them off the road.  The red car finally had enough and slammed on its brakes forcing our driver to slam on the brakes, causing everyone in the shuttle bus to be tossed against the seat in front of them.  When we both came to a stop, the drivers began arguing at each other through the windows.  Our driver finally sped by them only to have them pull up right behind us, and then go in front of us when we were stopped at the gate to the entrance of the park.  I felt very bad for the people in the car as when we were stopped at the gate, the driver gets out and further keeps arguing with them acting like it was their fault!  He was just a complete bully.  I have never made a complaint before on this trip but tomorrow I will turn in a complaint about this guy as someone is going to get hurt or killed.  Brendan wanted to say something while we were in the car and I persuaded him not to; let me go directly to the company as this was our driver for the rest of the day who was flying us down windy, single lane cliff roads with no shoulder or guard rail. The edge of the road was just washed out rocks that go off the cliff.  I was afraid if the driver got any more irritated, we might go off the side of the cliff going too fast around a corner.  I just kept telling myself that people go up this cliff every day and surely there have not been buses loaded with people flying off the cliff or else they wouldn’t be in business, right?  We made it safely…

Rainbow Mountain!  It was awesome.  The hike was not bad until the end when it was a steep incline.  During the entire first part I was just so thrilled to feel good, and my body was handling it after being so sick for a few days.  Once we got to the incline, it was tough for sure, but it was just for my lungs.  It was hard to catch my breath and I could feel my heart just pounding away.  We had taken the altitude medicine starting a couple days previous, and I felt like it helped.  Unfortunately, Brendan got a bad headache.  The side effect of that medicine for me is it makes my hands, feet, and face feel numb and tingly so I kept touching my face on the hike to make sure it was still there.  We made it to the top though and it was really beautiful.  Different than any other mountains I have seen.  The colors came from minerals and that was really cool.  We reached 17,000 feet and the highest we have ever been.  The walk back was MUCH easier going down and really beautiful. 

We had another white knuckle bus ride back, and I was super relieved once we got off the cliff road.  Even Brendan thought the driver cut it way too close on the cliff side a few times, and he is used to living on the edge. 

We got back to Cusco around 5pm after we had stopped for lunch and went back to the hotel.  We were both exhausted.  We have one more day to rest tomorrow without activities and then we start our 5-day trek to Machu Picchu!