(Bad judgement or just bad timing) Day 9 of week 3 on TEMBR

September 3, 2022

While in Achupallas, we realized that we were on UNESCO's Achupallas-Ingapirca Inca trail. A local guia who's daughter cooked us dinner the previous night, kindly offered to drop us off to the starting point of this 25-mile hike and then bring the bikes to Ingapirca next day for a small fees.

So, instead of biking on Pan-American, we chose to hike Inca trail. What a life-changing/threatening decision this was.

We had to dry tents, sleeping bags from previous day's ice/snow and then pack all the essentials for this "easy" 2-day backpacking trip into a backpack. So we hit the trail only at around 12:30pm or so. For trail maps, we had the following without much details such as miles or elevations.

We started at around 11500 pies and walked on impedrado kind of Inca trail, through paramo grass. It was beautiful even though after some point the trail was lost and we started walking through "swamp-cities", which's grass growing on puddles of water. No way but to walk through and get wet. This is why locals wear knee-high water boots.

After we found our way to Los Tres Lagunas, the weather had suddenly changed to lluvia, viento. This was our first option for camping but there was no sheltered place to camp here. So we pushed on beyond Cerro Loma.

Cerro Loma is the highest point at some (14500 pies) and as the name describes this peak is very loamy but even more windy as it's the highest point. At this point, wind was blowing at full speed along with rain, sleet and cold. To get to our next camping site, we had to cross this and we crossed this in very dire, serious conditions. By this time, sun was setting and visibility was pretty low.

Soon we hit the descent and started loosing elevation fast on a trail filled with switchbacks but only "swamp cities". By this time, we were discussing the fact that we should just keep walking for the nect 6-8 hours and get to Ingapirca since pitching tent in this blowing, freezing rain would be disasterous.

Fortunately we were well prepared with the following:

tents,
sleeping bags,
change of clothes,
stove with fuel
Food and machica

But mother nature wasn't willing to give us any flat, sheltered place to pitch our tents.

By this time, we were using headlamps and fully prepared to hike all night while fully soaking wet and possibly hypothermic.

As we got closer to the "flatter" part of 12500 pies, suddenly we saw one and then a second headlamps.

I was yelling, "hola -Ayuda" and so was Brian.

Miraculously, mother nature decided to forgive us as we had come across a group of 10+ students from a Canari Spiritual group. They had a fire going and gave us some warm boiled eggs, coffee liquor, hot herbal tea, a hot vegetarian empanada and biggest of all, hope. They were godsend.

After pitching our tents amidst cowdung, I got changed into dry clothes, wore plastic bags as socks. I had a dry pair of socks but shoes were soaking wet thanks to "swamp cities". So I wanted to save the dry socks.

Then I went out and joined them as they sang for some 5 hours songs that truly were spiritual, nature oriented than any religion. They had guitars, leathered organs and some traditional instruments. This was going on around fire as the weather still throwing rain, wind at us.

So we not only got to witness,be part of a Kañari spiritual retreat, celebrations but they also saved us. And, I stayed up atleast until 1am or so, before deciding to hit the sack.

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