I fall asleep again and we don't leave the hostel until 10 to have coffee and breakfast at Jack's again. It is really nice there, good atmosphere and good coffee, although today I already know about Starbucks so I am fine. :)
Breakfast for me means either some eggs, toast with jam, muesli or Pancakes/ French Toast... Breakfast for Arzu means cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers and this morning it means Steak sandwich with fries and mint lemonade.
After we laugh off the cultural differences we head to the Llamapath office to pay the rest of our trip. We also rent the sleeping bag for Arzu, walking sticks and more comfortable mattresses. Now all my cash which I collected in the ATMs all over Ecuador is gone... Maybe not the worst since ATMs here seem to work and once I am in the US I won't need all those dollars in cash.
We get a little pamphlet with the details of the trail and we are both a little more shocked than we want to admit. We will walk more than 1000m uphill, not in length, but in height!!! What were we thinking? We are not hikers and we think we can do this?
But none of us will admit this to the other one and so we follow our shopping list and get snacks, medicine, rain ponchos, coca candy, baby wipes, deodorant,...
For lunch we sit on a nice balcony, just for the two of us, overlooking a busy street and of course we are spending some time in Starbucks and some time shopping souvenirs and a new jacket for me since Delta apparently never found mine which I left on the plane.
Then I decide I still want that bag from the one shop and we have to go back. He let's us pay in Euros and this way we easily change some more money.
We are not hungry yet and so we go back to the hotel to pack our things into the duffle bags we got from Llamapath for the porters to carry.
And this is where the big mess starts. I decide to take this opportunity to pack everything plane ready, especially the souvenirs I didn't send home. So I unpack literally everything, dust off my backpack from the Bolivian desert and start all over.
Arzu is doing the same thing. By 10pm we are ready, have taken showers - the last ones for a couple of days - and turn off the light to try to sleep. I hear Arzu dozing off, but I am wide awake. This is bad. I need to sleep. So I am watching a show on my ipod to make me sleepy, but it doesn't work. I get more and more worried that starting a four day hike with no hiking experience at all might not have been the smartest idea. The later it gets and the more I watch Arzu sleep, the scarier this whole thought gets and I am working myself into a nice panic attack. All of a sudden I am sitting in bed, breathing heavily, heart pounding very fast. I cannot breathe anymore, I get dizzy and don't know what to do anymore. I have never experienced something like this. I try to think that these are only 45km I need to walk in 4 days, so it is really no big deal. Slowly I get calmer again and try to sleep. 11:50pm, 01:30am, 2:15am, I am still awake and the heart starts pounding fast again. I try to calm myself down by reading about people who thought they couldn't do the Inca Trail and find a blog by a girl who also thought she was not fit enough. But did she also not sleep the night before the first day? I am hungry and I feel weak. I have no energy to even get out of bed to go to the bathroom. This way I will never make it and I am thinking of ways on how to explain to everybody that I cannot join. I am wondering if Arzu will still go and I am hoping she will. She should't miss this experience because I am too weak to go.
At 3:30am the alarm clock goes off and Arzu wakes up. She sees me sitting in bed, breathing heavily and I tell her I can't go. I have a very strong feeling that I cannot come and I won't make it. She tells me to finish packing my things and at least come to the bus to talk to the guide. My heart is pounding fast and when I come out of the bathroom I have to sit, I cannot breathe and I really don't want to go.
I know from my nightly online research that the first two days you can be brought back by horse if you twist an ankle or can't do it anymore. With this knowledge and Arzu's motivational speech I am at least willing to come to the bus.
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