Today, we were woken up at 4:45 with a Peruvian wakeup tea and left our camp at six o’clock. From the camp, we had a steady uphill trail for several hours. After a short time, it began to snow. And soon we were walking in several centimetres of snow. I would say that our group was fairly well prepared, but there were lots of other people on the trail in jogging shoes and jeans. Apparently, Peruvian trekking companies are not as strict as Icelandic ones who wouldn’t let people in such clothes hike into the highlands.

It was a beautiful landscape though and rather spectacular with so much snow, which was a first time even for our guide Susan who has guided this trek a hundred times.

We reached the Salkantay pass, our highest point of the trail at 4600 metres, at ten o’clock. And somehow I managed to overtake our team without noticing. I thought that most of them were still ahead of me, so I continued towards the spot where we were going to have lunch. After a while, I realised that they were probably behind me. But by that time, the weather was so bad that it was better to jus my continue to the lunch spot. The group arrived some time after me, and they hadn’t been waiting long, but realised that I had probably been ahead. So everything was good.

After lunch, we had three more hours to walk. And while it was still cold and rainy when we left after lunch, we soon got from the mountainous landscape into a rainforest. The rain stopped and the sun came out, and it seemed unbelievable that we had been in a snowstorm just a few hours before. I eventually took off layer after layer and walked into our camp in a t-shirt today.

Tomorrow will probably be a warm day and possibly one with moscitos. But at the end, there are supposed to be some hot springs we can sit in. So that seems like a very nice thing to look forward to.