Peru: Inka trail, day 3

The night was pretty miserable. It rained throughout, and the tents aren't 100% waterproof. As such much of my stuff got soaked, including half of my sleeping bag and mattress. I wasn't even the worst off though, both Katie and Claire and Steve got their mattresses completely soaked, along with a lot of their stuff.

We were all glad of our warm breakfast in the dry dining tent, but not so glad to get going again in the rain. Most people went for ponchos, but I trusted in my cargo pants and new 'North Face' coat, and they did a pretty good job to be fair. The waterproof cover from my big rucksack, which I adapted with electrical tape to fit my small rucksack didn't hold up as well however, and a lot of the stuff in there got wet. Thankfully my passport only got ever so slightly damp!

We only had 300m to climb to the final pass, so the uphill today was very gentle compared with what we have been used to, but on the other hand we had approximately 3800 steps to climb down. Still at only 10km this is the shortest full day, and if it weren't for the rain it would've been pretty easy.

Thankfully the rain eased off towards to end of the morning, and the day warmed up too, so things weren't as bad as they could've been. Still the stairways had basically turned into waterfalls in a lot of places.

We went through some rain forest and cloud forest today, and generally it was a lot greener than the previous 2 days. A lot cloudier and rainier as well, so we couldn't really see far at all. Still I guess that is the authentic cloud/rain forest experience; the clue is in the names.

On the way to our campsite (Wanay Wayna, I remembered a name!) we passed one more archeological site (whose name I can't remember), which was basically a place to experiment with different crop at different altitudes. The place was *huge* with probably approaching 50 terraces, each around 3 meters tall and wide. Looking up from near the bottom was amazing!

It wasn't much further to our final campsite, and we indulged in lunch before walking a few minutes to look at another, even more amazing Inka ruin (called Wanay Wanya, the same as our campsite). Again terraces were involved, as these were the only way to be able to farm enough food to feed a mountain settlement, but this was a resting place for the Inkas on their way to Machu Picchu. Below there was a small town for servants, and there was also a temple.

Only Katie and I were interested in exploring from our group, and because of the rain (which had just about stopped by this point) no other groups had even bothered coming along, so we had the whole place to ourselves (aside from the llamas) to explore, which was pretty amazing, given that this was definitely the second best ruin, behind Machu Picchu.

We went back after an hour or so, and had a little time to relax before afternoon tea (popcorn, and cheese pastry things). We then just sat in the food tent chatting for the hour until tea.

Owen told us about some of his fascinating life, he has been to 97 countries, including 3 years solid travelling, starting from New Zealand, going via Australia and South East Asia before living in India for some months, then through war torn Afghanistan and Iran (where he nearly couldn't get out of!), before seeing Europe.

Straight after tea it was an early night, since our wake up time in the morning was 3.30am. Urgh.

I have seen better weather than today