July 26-28, 2007
Day 666-668
I met with the teaching gang some more, but unfortunately, they were getting sick just as I was starting to feel better. They were the most interesting group of people I had met in a long time, a hodgepodge crew assembled from different corners of the globe to teach international kids. They all flew back to Lima to go back to their adventures at home.
Just as I was preparing to do the Choquequirao trek solo, I got an email from an Australian girl who was interested. When we met to discuss the trek, I learned that she was on a two-month holiday from her job as a natural medicine healer. After seeing that ridiculous holistic conference a few days ago I was skeptical, but I could tell she was very much grounded in reality and hadn't completely abandoned mainstream medical care. I had found at least one friend to trek with.
We both continued looking for others to join us and ran into a German couple who wanted to do the same trek. They seemed like very nice people, but the only problem was that they wanted to go with a guide that carried a hefty price tag of $1000. There was no way I was going to pay even a tenth that much, so I wished them luck and continued looking. We found another Australian girl named Kim who was traveling around on her own with a mountain bike. She had done lots of mountaineering and biking around Huaraz before coming to Cusco, and liked the idea of trekking for awhile. And so we were three.
The three of us got together a couple times and did some final preparations like buying our bus tickets and food. I immediately liked the idea of having girls to trek with because they bought a ton of vegetables and spices to cook. We won't have to worry about going hungry. They only problem will be carrying everything with us.
