What Trekking to Macchu Pichu Taught Me About Strength, Surrender, and the People Who Make It Possible

Cusco, Peru, is asleep. The van is not. It’s 4:30 AM on the outskirts of the city, and the air hums with cold breath and the shared weight of what lies ahead.

The trek I’d committed to was no small thing: six nights, seven days, and 55 miles with Alpaca Expeditions — a hike that weaves together the snow-capped Salkantay route and the sacred steps of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. It promised a “moderate to difficult” challenge with cultural depth and sweeping vistas.

I chose this particular tour because it was run by a local, Peruvian-owned company whose mission was unusually clear: pay and equip porters fairly, educate tourists about Inca culture, and give back to the mountain communities from which its workers hail.

It felt like a responsible choice. It also felt very far from my life in New York City, where hiking means dodging potholes on the way to the L train.

Thin air and the shock of the Salkantay

Photo: Wakaba Oto

The van drops the five of us — me, my three hiking companions, and our guide — at Marccoccasa, a sun-drenched patch of earth folded between green valley and forest. Twenty steps in, I’m gasping for air like I’ve never used lungs before. At 10,826 feet, the altitude hits fast and without mercy. Sol — our guide, short for Soledad — sets a patient pace. She pauses often to show us herbs and roots and to let us breathe without having to admit we need to.

There’d been an avalanche on the usual route, so we’re on a detour, which takes us through a steeper, longer, less shaded path. My legs shake. My brain negotiates: just to that rock. Just until someone else stops. I chew coca leaves like they might save me. For a while, I focus on nothing but putting one foot in front of the other.

Then, mercifully, one of the others throws up. It’s the best thing that’s happened all day. Not because I enjoy his suffering, but because it means I’m not the only one falling apart. This trail doesn’t care how many races you’ve run. Up here, we’re all cracked open.

By the time we reach Soraypampa at 12,631 feet, I’m dizzy and certain I won’t survive another day. And yet, our tents are up, our duffels waiting, hot soup ready. A full-course Peruvian meal with fresh avocado salad, garlic bread, grilled trout, rice, and potatoes follows.

That night, too tired to wash my face, too awed to sleep, I begin to understand what it means to be held up by someone else’s strength.

The team behind the trek

Photo: Wakaba Oto

Every afternoon, every night on the trail, our tents, toilets, meals, and duffel bags magically await us when we arrive at camp. This magic has a name: the Green Machine. That’s what Alpaca Expeditions calls its team of porters. They carry our tents, gas burners, bathrooms, duffels — everything you could ever imagine. When the horses leave after day four, they carry everything.

It’s because of them that we hikers only need to carry daypacks — and the smaller, the better. I used an 18-liter pack with a two-liter water bladder and stuck to the essentials: my passport, trail cash (for tips, snacks, and bathrooms), sunscreen, chapstick, layers, hand sanitizer, a solar charger, and toilet paper.

Each porter is limited to 20 kilos (44 pounds) — already staggering when you consider the altitude and terrain — but still less than the government’s legal maximum of 25. It’s a deliberate cap, enforced out of respect. Alpaca’s founder, Raul Ccolque Ccolque, began his career as a porter. That legacy runs deep. The company treats its porters not as labor but as kin.

Alpaca employs over 250 porters from across the Cusco region — Pisac, Lares, Calca, Ollantaytambo — and equips them with proper shoes, sleeping bags, insulated pads, and hot meals. They’re paid above the industry average, and not just through tips.
On our trek, we have eight porters. Pedrito, our chef from Pisac, bakes a cake — an actual cake — from scratch at 12,500 feet. When the four of us inhale the entire platter of popcorn at teatime one night, he returns the next evening with two platters.

Joel, Pedrito’s sous chef from Urcos, jokes with us in Spanish. He’s studying to become a guide himself. On a few mornings, he’s the one who wakes us up — gently, with hot coca tea and a smile.

Then there’s Sol. Sol is also from Urcos. She’s one of the few women guiding high-altitude treks. Alpaca Expeditions recently launched a women-only trek — female porters, chefs, guides, and assistants. Sol has led it twice. She points out a female porter to me on the path — one of the very few — and grins. “We’re getting there.”

Seeing the trail through a guide’s eyes

Photo: Wakaba Oto

Sol doesn’t eat guinea pig or alpaca, both staples in the Peruvian diet. I’d followed the advice to spend at least three days in Cusco before the trek to acclimate to the altitude. During that time, I tried alpaca stew — rich, tender, almost like lamb but earthier. I tell her about it and she laughs.

“I feel bad,” she says. “They’re just so cute.”

Later that day, we spend 20 minutes watching a llama try to escape a pen. Everyone is invested, but none more than Sol.

She teaches us the names of each plant. What heals. What poisons. What’s used to cook the very guinea pigs she refuses to eat. She tells us about the apus — the sacred mountain spirits. About offerings wrapped in coca and tied with string. About the gods that live inside glaciers.

At one point, she pauses beside a sheet of lichen crawling across a boulder and says, “For you, it’s pretty.” She turns to me, her finger still on the moss. “For us, it’s life. It means the air is clean.”

Later, in my tent, I think of Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, how healing the land begins with learning to listen to it.

Photo: Wakaba Oto

On the second day, Sol leads us to Humantay Lake in the morning — one of the highlights of the trek. She turns to me and another hiker, both born between April and October, Cusco’s dry season, and tells us to blow the clouds away. We laugh, but do it anyway. Slowly, the fog begins to lift. And then, as if obeying, it clears.

Before us lies Humantay Lake — a glacial pool of milky turquoise, still and luminous, with the white-capped peak of Humantay reflected perfectly in its surface.
Later that day, we reach two more lakes near Ichupata — wilder basins cradled between the arms of two mountains. The air up here turns blue and sharp, as if even oxygen has to earn its place.

That night, we camp at around 15,000 feet. I wake to what feels like tiny men crashing cymbals against the inside of my skull. My eyes feel like they’re trying to leave my body. Still, I do what I’ve learned to do: chew coca leaves, drink water, keep moving.

The coca — dried, bitter, a little numbing — is sold at every roadside stall and market in Cusco. It helps with altitude sickness. I’d also brought altitude pills — Diamox from home — though there’s a local version called Alti-Vital, sold in every pharmacy for a few Peruvian soles.

The hardest climb, the biggest view

Photo: Wakaba Oto

We climb toward the Chiriasca Pass, the highest point of our entire trek. The landscape strips itself down to rock and sky. Sol reminds us: one step at a time.
Eventually, we reach the top: 15,700 feet. That’s over a thousand feet higher than Mount Whitney, the tallest peak in the Lower 48 states.

And the world opens.

On one side: snow and sky, blue shadows carved into black stone. On the other: endless ridged hills, green bleeding into gold. Far below, horses graze like punctuation marks in a sentence too wide to read.

I stop and swallow the air. People call this beautiful, but that feels too small a word. Beauty wants something from you — your gaze, your praise, your agreement.
But the mountain doesn’t invite admiration. It demands surrender.

There’s a kind of mercy in how little it cares. It doesn’t measure your strength or your story. It’s not waiting to be impressed. And in that indifference, something in me lets go — as if I’ve slipped outside the need to matter. The stone beneath my feet was here before names, before stories. It will be here long after. There’s no comfort in that, but there is freedom: to belong to something you don’t have to hold.

This, I think, is awe. Sublimity — that quiet mix of fear and reverence when the world refuses to shrink for you.

Humantay Mountain, which loomed so large from below, now feels like it’s watching with something gentler. Not approval, exactly. But recognition. Like it sees the effort. Like it knows we’re not here to conquer anything — only to witness.

Maybe that’s what this trek is about. Not to summit, not to conquer, but to walk with the mountain. Not above it. Not against it. With it.

After the pass, everything softens. We descend into a valley of black sand and yellow moss. We pass llamas, cows, prehistoric ferns, and more dung than I care to admit. It feels like The Sound of Music if the Von Trapps had altitude sickness.

Joining the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu

Photo: Wakaba Oto

We merge with the more popular Inca Trail on day four. The Salkantay section had been wild and raw — sometimes barely a path, more like a suggestion. But the Inca Trail is something else entirely: carved, engineered, and enduring. Five centuries old and still holding fast. The air turns wet again. We’re back in the cloud forest now, high-altitude jungle. The kind that beads sweat at the base of your neck and makes the rocks bloom moss.

“The Incas didn’t move the big rocks,” Sol says. “They built around them. That was their way. You don’t fight nature. You adapt.”

The steps are uneven. My knees snap with each descent. But the lesson lands hard.
My hiking group starts flying by other groups — big tours in bright ponchos, trekking poles clicking like metronomes. After four days in the mountains, we’re faster, tighter, hardened by shared blisters and scenic (and untimely) bathroom breaks. Sol shakes her head, half-exasperated, but there’s pride in her eyes.
Inca sites appear one by one: Sayacmarca, Phuyupatamarca. Cliffside fortresses, towns in the clouds. Sol tells us their names, meanings, and uses.

On the fifth day, we reach Dead Woman’s Pass — 13,828 feet, the highest point on the Inca Trail. The name comes from the ridgeline’s silhouette, which looks like a woman lying on her back. Fitting, maybe. But despite the name, I feel more alive than ever.

This section is brutal, even after four days of mountain legs. Some people train for weeks beforehand — long hikes, stair machines, loaded packs. I didn’t. I definitely should have. But pain is a good teacher. So is stubbornness.

I am the first to reach camp later that day. The porters give me a look I think is respect.

The next day, we reach the Sun Gate, the original Inca entrance to Machu Picchu. It was designed so that, on the solstice, the rising sun passes perfectly through its stone arch and lights the city below.

Below us, Machu Picchu emerges from mist — stone bones draped in moss, sharp lines softened by cloud. It looks both impossibly deliberate and entirely organic.
I can’t believe my legs got me there. But they didn’t — not alone.

The next morning, Sol gives us a walking tour. She explains the geometry of the site, how the Incas built their temples with stones that interlock without mortar, earthquake-proof and engineered to last. The city had homes, observatories, baths, temples, agricultural terraces. It was never found by the Spanish. It stayed hidden for centuries.

We stay until our legs ache. And when it’s time to leave, I find that I don’t want to.

What the Salkantay Trek and Inca Trail teaches you

Photo: Wakaba Oto

I began this hike with something to prove — a hunger to push myself to the edge and see what I was made of. But the mountains weren’t interested in my reasons. They didn’t care about ambition or resolve.

If anything, Pacha Mama — Mother Earth in Quechua, the Andean highlands’ native language — conquered me. Again and again. At every pass, every ascent, every cold, aching morning. And I let her. That was the lesson.

This trek didn’t create strength. It revealed it. Not the loud kind, but the kind that looks like heavy breathing, sore knees, and choosing — over and over again — to keep going.

Through it all, it became clear who makes journeys like this possible.
Sol, with her encyclopedic knowledge and the rare ability to make you laugh mid-ascent. Our porters, who carried our weight so we could carry ourselves. Pedrito and Joel, who somehow baked a cake from scratch on a mountain.

As we descend the last ridge, I spot a patch of moss clinging to a boulder. I press my fingers to it, the way Sol did. It’s soft, alive, humming with the cold. For me, it’s still pretty. But now I know better. Now I know it means the air is clean. That we were here, and the mountains let us pass.

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