LLAMAS! Part #2

After sleeping in a tent in a parking lot in the middle of nowhere Peru and a delicious breakfast, complete with eggs, toast and coca tea (mmmm), we began.

Queenie, Fritha, Midori and I took "before" pictures as we began and set a few goals for the hike: 1 - Be "the fun girls". Take every advantage to have a blast, enjoy each other and keep up the spirits of ourselves and our group. Oh yeah, and make sure that everyone in our group thought we were as much fun as we did.
2 - Earn "street cred". Demonstrate hiking prowess and earn the respect of our group by flaunting our athletic abilities, stamina and outdoorsmanship. Or expert-looking outfits, pretty hair and fancy (matching) backpacks.
3 - Survive.

By lunch on day one, we were making solid progress on all 3 goals. We spent most of the day in the "chasing pack" of the group and got comments from our group members on how professional we looked in our outfits. Check.

Lunch on day one was AMAZING. Or maybe we were just starving by the time we got there. Either way, it was awesome. Our totally BA porters carried the food, the table, the stools, the equipment for cooking up the same mountain up which we carried our sorry selves. To say we were humbled would be quite an understatement.

After lunch we encountered some rockier terrain and several other hiking groups, but we kept traversing onward and upward (literally) and made it to camp ahead of schedule. And I smelled. The trail was hot and dusty and despite the dri-fit shirt and zip-off shorts, we were pretty sweaty. First order of business, wash up. Fortunately our totally BA porters had set up camp already and had bowls of warm water waiting for us when we arrived.

We then led group stretches and headed to happy hour, which consisted of coca tea, hot chocolate, popcorn and cookies. We had a great time chatting with our group members and snacking until dinner. We continued bonding with our group members over dinner and beyond, until bed time. Which was approximately 6:30pm. It was dark and quiet and we were tired, so at 6:30pm we brushed our teeth with bottled water, crawled into our tents and went to sleep.

Early the next morning (by early I mean CRACK of dawn, like 4:45am) we got up, did group stretching and began to prepare for the hard day.

To be continued...