Day 47 - cloud forest.

It’s supposed to be a 5am pickup, but I find myself awake at 3.30am and move my gear out of the room into the main building without waking Niki. See ads for a ‘mystical journey’ involving the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus and decide to sign up for it in June if at all possible. If I’m prepared to travel physically, I should be prepared to travel mentally.

The little bus takes us higher out of Cusco along a narrow dirt road that runs along a sheer drop. There are cultivated patches of land way higher up along the mountainsides; they are not terraced and so steep they look almost vertical.

We pull into a cluster of mud-brick buildings – Huancarani. Nicolás informs us that it’s Sunday market day for the locals, and indeed we can see trucks pulling in with lots of people in the back. Nicolás points out a woman wearing what looks like a giant sunflower on her head: “It’s such a shame; now not many women wear traditional clothes.”

We pass a viewpoint from where we can see Ausangate – the tallest mountain in southern Peru at 6,400m; on June 1st there’ll be a festival in its honour. Next up are the Lupaka tombs, over 1000 years old, which are little rock and dried mud towers with openings through which grave robbers stole everything. Several grubby little girls wearing sandals and trousers under their skirts approach us to sell us some woven bracelets. Some of them look no older than four years old.

“Are they at school during the week?”
“Yes, but I’m not sure what time because some of them are here on weekdays.” So they're not at school, then.

Breakfast at Paucartambo, a large village with a 300-year old stone bridge built from the proceeds of sending coca leaves to Cusco. We get to know each other a little; there are three married couples – one Swiss (Bruno and Cinthia), one New Zealander (Roger and Sarah, originally from the UK), one Austrian (Ernst and Christine) plus myself and Tim from the States. The English couple are in their mid-sixties and have just done the Inca Trail after coming here from Everest Base Camp in Nepal.

Nicolás leads us around the dirt streets. We end up joining a wedding procession and are sprinkled with confetti. The locals beckon us into the church, but there’s no time. An old woman, blind in one eye, waves her cane at us and says something; she doesn’t seem happy about a bunch of gringos joining the wedding. The middle-aged Swiss guy keeps taking photos of people without asking permission; maybe that’s what upset her.

In a nearby bakery, the baker puts round pats of dough onto a giant wooden ladle and pushes them into the eucalyptus wood-fired stone oven, then removed the baked rolls using a long stick with a hooked end. Nicolás buys provisions for the journey; looks like we’ll be eating a lot of bread.

We reach the entrance of Manu Biosphere Reserve – a protected area the size of Wales which is also one of the most biodiverse parts of the Amazon. From the viewpoint we can see the cloud forest – a valley hemmed in by densely-forested mountains which the clouds seem to rest on.

We walk while the drive fixes a puncture and then rest along a bend in the road with our packed lunches, which include granadillas – a cousin of passion fruit. I know how to eat it: I punch a hole in the top of the orange fruit, then open it some more and suck out the insides, which look a bit like frogspawn. The seeds are pleasantly crunchy. There are tiny biting flies everywhere, and Tim gets a leech on his leg. We’re not even in the jungle yet.

We have a couple of near misses as our bus tackles the hairpin bends on the bumpy narrow dirt road; there are cars coming the other way and going way too fast. There are streaks along the sides of the mountains – huge bare patches with mangled dead trees at the bottom. “We had three hours of heavy rain in one day earlier this year, and those were mudslides.”

The air is close and muggy and the vegetation is beginning to look more and more tropical – tree trunks covered in dense moss and creepers, bright flowers, vines dangling down from the thicket of vegetation…

Nicolás leads us to a lek – a covered viewing platform reachable through a locked door. We hear half-warbling, half-croaking, and then several cock-of-the-rock birds appear in a flash of bright red plumage. They’ve been coming to this same spot for years at the same time of day. “When there’s a female, she goes crazy – dancing, singing…”

The San Pedro lodge where we're spending the night consists of wooden huts with thatched roofs, sporadic warm water and limited electricity for three hours at night. Little do I know that being able to charge my laptop in my room will seem like a luxury in days to come...