Flashback: Salkantay

I’ve spent most of today glued to coverage of the inauguration like everyone else in America, or, for that matter, the world. But euphoric as I was feeling all day long, I couldn’t help feeling slightly nostalgic. Today marks the one year anniversary of my departure on what was to be the hardest and most phenomenal journey I’ve yet to take in my life.

On January 20, 2008, I rose early with three friends I’d known just under six months, and joined four strangers and a guide on a van that would take us to the start of our five day trek. After breakfasting in the backyard of what appeared to be part general store and part someone’s home where one hut served for guinea pig roasting), we piled into the back of a rickety truck and careened up a narrow road in the verdant, craggy, dodging bushes, and holding on—to the side and to each other—as we toppled this way and that on flimsy plastic stools. Like so:

That evening we huddled together for warmth, drinking sweetened coca tea in hopes of fending off altitude sickness, in a food tent below the Salkantay glacier. After dinner we shivered outside in the black night and the mountain revealed its secrets: the mist cleared just enough to reveal the jagged peak of the glacier, icey, majestic, and unfathomable in the moonlight.

Nothing short of magic.