Revisiting reservations

See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how to *hold* the reservation and that’s really the most important part of the reservation, the holding. Anybody can just take them.

Well, after the booking problems with the Inca trail we woke up prepared to give our  bags to "hop chicken" to take ahead for us to  catch up when we did the first tow days of the 4 day trek in one day.. What hop tells us is that we will no longer be picked up at 6am the following morning, and rather it would be 8pm that night to camp at the trail head.  It’s about this time where Steve and I look to each other and start to wonder about our already seemingly shady trek.

But that night as promised our guide, Norma, showed up to take us to the bus.  Mind you there has been no explanation of our change in plans as of yet.  We arrive to pile on the bus with about 7 other backpackers and as many porters.  The confusing bit, Steve and I thought we were doing the trek alone, with only our guide.

After we all piled in the van started up and went to make its first turn, well try to make its first turn down the narrow street which turned out to be too tight.  After a dozen or so attempts, we throw it in reverse to try another corner.  The same insanity continues and after negotiating 6 points of our 10 point turn, someone yells for the porters to de-board the bus, (for the first time), so we can drive on the curb around the corner to get us onto a major street.

After an hour or so through dark streets and deserted towns we pull onto a river front gravel road barely big enough for one car.  We continued down this ditch littered riverside road, pausing to de-board and board porters at particularly rough spots.  However this tiny road did prove to be large enough for our bus as well as another full size bus seen below bearing down on us.

Every so often I exchanged confused and concerned glances at our other hikers and
listened to the not so soothing sound of steve snoring away, pondering
if this was the "normal" route to the trail head. 

We finally got to camp around midnight to catch a few hours of sleep before waking up to start the trail at 5 am.   It was tough to tell the night before but not a bad view to wake up to.