Today we started hiking at 7am for our longest day so far. It was a truly beautiful morning, without a cloud in the sky for the early morning start. The sun started to rise on the summits as we started hiking up the Salkantay valley. With the cold ever present, it felt like a classic alpine start. We met other hikers that we had seen since choquequirao, and there was quite a big group of people zigzagging up to the pass. I felt really good so I started racing up,...

Today we had a lazy breakfast, waiting for our minivan to transfer us to Mollapata and start the Salkantay trek. The drive was pretty uneventful, until we got past Mollapata. We then realized that the meeting point with our new team of muleteers was higher than the village, and the driver had to take us there on a dirt road, without a 4WD vehicle, but with old slick tires. It worked well for at least 25 minutes, past incredibly muddy sections, and past other grou...

Today was a pretty hard day because we reached 4600 meters going through the Salkantay pass. There was lots of snow on the mountains. It was a quite beautiful hike. We started in the valley and continued to go up until the pass. I didn't walk slow as the guide suggested, but tried to keep up with JN, who was way ahead of me. It was very difficult to breathe. This was the highest point I'm been to in my life. Beartrice was very worried up to now, but she was relie...

As we were getting started for the long trek up to Cachora, we heard a huge landslide on the other side of the river. It was close to the bridge but did not spill to the path. So no one was in the way. We hiked up, but always looking up and listening carefully for any rock fall or landslide... The weather was changing, with more sun than the other days, and the path seemed drier. I took numerous photos of clouds and mountains. We finally arrived in Cachora wher...

Of course it rained overnight, as it had been all the over nights since our arrival in Cusco. And it rained quite a bit. Erick woke us up and immediately asked if we had felt the earthquake at 4am. What earthquake?? Second earthquake in a few weeks for us after the one in Santiago, but this time we slept through it. Erick confirmed that we would visit choquequirao in the morning, without the mules, and the we would backtrack to Chiquiska. We started in a misty ...