I think it would be considered justifiable homicide, dont you? (Inca Trail Day 3) - 18 March 2009

We camped in a valley last night and there were already clouds when we woke up:

And while visibility came and went through the morning, it was still a nice, albeit strenuous, hike - for the morning.

If you recall the trials and tribulations of Patagonia, then you'll probably remember Calafate berries, which look a lot like these:

Only these are poisonous. Thankfully we didn't sample them before asking.

In addition to the berries, there are also Lady Slippers along the way:

Early during the hike we got to go into our first ruins, Runkurakay. This was an egg-shaped structure along the Inca Trail, used for storage, lodging, and as a guard post. Here's a view of it from further along the trail:

We made stops at two more ruins during the morning - our last stop cut short by the start of the rain. It rained on us the last 3 hours of the trek, which (not so) happily coincided with 3000 steps down. Our merry little band was decidedly less so during this ordeal. Jeremy is suffering from the effects of Chocolate Outrage flavored Gu (I mean really, why would you ingest something we the word Outrage in its name?) and took off in front of us to try and find a private place. Jen slipped and twisted her knee, and suffered through the rest of the day. Making things even more enjoyable (and leading to this installment's title) there was a couple that insisted on matching our pace and singing the same song for over an hour. We stopped and offered to let them pass, but they declined. We gave them dirty looks, but they declined to notice them. I, at least, pictured terrible things happening to them, but evidently they weren't mind readers.

Oddly enough, I don't have a lot of pictures from this part of the hike. I did see a frog, though:

But you know what makes everything better?





That's right - CAKE!

You know, I never realized how much a shaved head and a head-mounted flashlight resemble those pictures of girl babies with the bow attached to their head - that's really not a good look.

Tomorrow we're supposed to get up at some ungodly hour to make it to Machu Picchu by sunrise, but we talk with Oscar and say that if it's cloudy to just let us sleep.