Day 5 Part 1 - WARNING: NOT FOR THE WEAK-HEARTED

WARNING: THIS DAY IS TRULY NOT FOR THE WEAK-HEARTED.

DISCLAIMER: For all mothers, fathers, prospect parents, and anyone with a caring bone in your body you MUST be sitting down to read this real-life account.

So, we didn't go to bed until late after the festival. By "late" I mean anywhere between 10 pm and 12 am. Now I know that's not too late, persay, but we had to get up at 12:30 am to begin our adventure to Tres Cruces. Tres Cruces is a place to watch a beautiful sunrise. The travel time from Paucartambo - where we were - was approximately 2.5 hours...

Since it was so early in the morning, most of us fell asleep on the bus ride there. Usually there is a lot of traffic, that is why we left so early to get there in time for the sunrise.

I was awoken by an unusual sound in the middle of our trip. An unfamiliar female voice was rapidly speaking in Spanish informing our tour guide and bus driver that we were lost.

Let me set the scene for you.

It was dark.
Pitch black.
There are no "street" lights on the curves of the mountains.
The terrain is rocky.
On our right is the rocky, rigid wall of the mountain.
To our left is blackness...leading to the unknown. AKA a cliff.

Now, supposedly there are two ways to get to Tres Cruces. One that is the typical way, that has a lot of traffic and one that is the "road less traveled by," if you will. {shout out to my man, Robert Frost}. We were supposed to be en route for the road-less-traveled-by way, but it turns out we didn't take that road. Instead, we took the road NEVER USED BY ANYONE ESPECIALLY IN THE DARK. Go figure.


 From the point of my waking up to the Spanish lady's warnings that we were going the wrong way, it took our bus driver another hour to finally turn around. I can't blame him too much for that though because it is extremely difficult to turn a giant bus around on a one lane, tumultuous, road in the dark.


Would you like to know what the final, convincing straw was that made the bus driver turn around? Of course you do. A man, who came out of the forest - yes we were amidst a forest - was on the side of the "road." We stopped to ask if we were going the right way (ha). He informed us that we weren't. In attempt to thank him for his advice, we picked him up and took him to his desired destination. 


Now. Don't tell on us. Yes, we picked up a hitch-hiker. However, we would like to rationalize it as "returning a favor" to someone who helped us out... ; - )


I digress. Back to the returning end of this adventure.

We were extremely disappointed that we were not going to make it to see this marvelous sunrise. But I think my disappointment was highly overridden by the fear for my life. Yes, you read that correctly.

I set the scene for you. But let me give you some more in-depth examples.

1) The bus driver frequently pressed on his breaks. He pressed on his breaks, and then got out of the bus with a flashlight. Why? To make sure that the bus's WHEELS WERE NOT HANGING OVER THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF.

2) There was a truck occupied with sleeping men blocking the "road." We honked at them. They were groggy and shooed us away. We continued to honk. After a fair amount of honking they got out of the truck. With shovels. What were the shovels for? To BUILD MORE "ROAD" SO WE COULD GET BY THEM.

Okay, so those were the most tramatic parts of the trip. I tried to make myself sleep for the rest of the trip back to Paucartambo. All-in-all we spent 7 hours on the road to do nothing but risk our lives.

By the time we got back, we all slept, and then ate, then got back on the bus for another longggg bus ride. This time, our desintation was back to our homebase, Cuzco.