"The thing about sickness bugs," said Peter, somewhat presciently, yesterday, "is that they are over quickly, but while you are having them, you feel like you are going to die."
And how right he was.
Predictably enough, I spend the entire night expelling what feels like all the food I have ever consumed in Peru or anywhere else in the world, violently from alternate openings. I don't sleep at all.
Ironically, it happens to be the worst example of a sickness bug, or food poisoning, whichever it is that I ever remember suffering from.
Have you ever tried having uncontrollable sickness and diarrhoea in a tent, right next door to the tents of the eleven other people you have just begun to bond with, and another twenty two porters plus chef and guides? Let's just say your dignity is the first thing to be violently ejected, and the bonding is rather forceably sped up. I end up doing my various business in a large paint pot positioned just outside the inner opening to my tent, but inside the outer 'porch' area. The concerned guides find me in my pants throwing up into it at least twice and a lucky porter manages to walk in on me perched in flagrante on top of it. I more or less sleep either on or over that paint pot, which contains, by the morning, a potent mixture which I am terrified of knocking over. There are clothes which I simply throw away, there being so little chance of cleaning them in time to salvage them and so much in the way of soilage.
"How are you?" Ask my fellow travellers when I stagger, lime green coloured, to breakfast.
"Oh OK." I say with an attempt at breeziness, "although I was a bit ill in the night."
"We heard." They say.
The guides are wonderful, both in the night and in the morning, magicking up herbal concoctions to settle my stomach, giving me special liquid which you pour on your cupped hands, rub in and then breathe deeply. It is used, they tell me, by mothers who have sick babies and want to calm them enough to send them to sleep. I want, more than anything in the world, to be a sleeping baby.
But really, sickness simply is what it is, takes its own sweet time to resolve and however clever and concerned the guides are, there is little they can do.
"I am going to do this trek," I announce determinedly, trying to make myself eat a half forkful of breakfast and instantly losing it. I make jokes and laugh. I talk about how pleased the mountain will be with my pilgrimage.
"You have such a great attitude," say the guides admiringly, "you would barely know you were ill."
I blush and preen in this glamorous portraiture, becoming ever more obsessed with being brave and cheerful.
I feel absolutely awful. Moving in any way makes me dizzy. My stomach is churning. I am running to the toilet at five minute intervals. Even sips of water are forceably ejected almost instantaneously.
"Probably just altitude" I say brightly, "I should drink some coca tea. I will be fine."
We are camping at a lower altitude than I have been sleeping for the last three weeks. And the coca tea barely touches my tongue before it is removed indignantly by my internal organs. I have a resting heart rate of 110.
"What do you want to do?" Asks our guide, gently.
"Carry on." I say.
Predictably, this isn't possible. The second hiking day of the full Machu Picchu trail is by far the hardest. It involves at least four hours of hard, constant uphill climb, at times with steep steps, at other times on narrow paths with steep drops, climbing to an altitude of 4,215 metres. Everybody struggles.
"I will give it a go." I say after I have walked a few metres uphill, on the easiest part, barely leaving our camp, and then passed out on the ground.
"OK," says our guide.
"You can do it," says M, I think unable to bear the disappointment he knows I will feel if I have to turn back.
I walk a few more paces, repeat the performance.
On the third try my positive attitude is waning.
"I don't think I can do this," I say, lower lip wobbling.
It's a horrible decision. I have been looking forward to this trip for literally years. I have been ecstatically happy doing it. I have barely stopped remarking to myself on how great it is, what a memorable experience, how beautiful, how much it is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Later, at the end I will be presented with a candid photo taken of myself on the first day of hiking. I look like an advert for the tour, I am so clearly choc full of happiness to be doing it.
Now I am making a decision which is, realistically, barely a decision at all. I will have to turn back.
Of course, having made this decision I have imagined, aside from the crushing disappointment and a sense of personal failure which I cannot quite shake, being more or less scooped up and placed in a bed, in a hotel room with an adjoining toilet. More or less immediately. I am not sure what deity or fairy I am imagining is going to achieve this for me.
It is at least a five hour trek back to the nearest town. At normal, healthy, human speed. Half an hour in to my slow, painful, stagger back, punctuated by dashes into the bushes and using a pair of hiking poles someone has loaned me like a zimmer frame, the sun starts to beat down on the shadeless path and I lose anything resembling a positive attitude.
It is a miserable journey. I am staggering on a gentle downhill slope. The five hour walk takes me all of the day (we began at barely seven), and I am tortured by the idea that perhaps I made the wrong decision. If I still have to walk this far, I reason, couldn't I have walked the uphill path with the others, coaxed on and buoyed up by them, awed by the scenery?
The answer, as M later tells me, having walked the path himself, is 'no'. It was tough even for him. I would not have made it.
But as I toil my way back, resting dejectedly when told to by the second guide, who has the fun job of escorting me back, drinking rehydration drinks and energy drinks and only just keeping them down, I don't know this. It all seems a terrible decision or a cruel mistake. I keep thinking I might wake up any moment and remark on what a horrible dream I had.
"Come on Katti," says my guide, sympathetically, in the manner of a farmer talking to his favourite horse, labouring it's way uphill, and squeezing my shoulder, "come on chica."
The poor man. The fact is, it is really not the end of the world and I know it. I am travelling, in ridiculous privilege compared to two thirds of the world's population, and I will not die from this. There are people in this world who will, and who do die, daily, from something similar, already so weak and so under nourished that they will literally face death from diorrea. And they will be walking at least this distance in hotter sun, on a daily basis, and in worse physical condition.
I know all of this. It doesn't make me any happier.
I fight my way back, 'fighting' here being used in the losest possible sense of the word, somehow manage not to puke on a local bus once I reach the outskirts of town, just about manage to accompany my guide to buy a train ticket which will take me to Aguas Caliente, the town at the foot of the Machu Picchu mountain tomorrow, in the hope of being well enough to take the 'wuss' bus to the top to join M and the rest of my group on Saturday, and then collapse in my hotel room and burst into tears.
I have, as I may have mentioned previously, some really, really good friends. I send them a message, and they respond immediately and say all the right things.
"It's fine really," I say through tears which rather give the lie to this statement, talking to one of them over a dodgy internet connection, "its still an adventure. Just not the one I imagined I would be having."
Or maybe she says that and I repeat it like a mantra over the next couple of days.
Either way it is this that sustains me. I calm down and get on with it. My life remains fantastic. The world has not ended. I have been looked after wonderfully, my guide takes me out to make sure I eat something that evening, ordering a clear soup for me. Which I manage to keep down. In the morning he meets me, makes sure I eat lunch in a similar vein, forces more dehydration drinks down me and is basically like a stand in Mum. Who, incidentally, is also fantastic, and sends me a lovely sympathetic email almost instantly she receives my plaintive one. I collect sympathy, get stronger, and move on Friday to Aguas Caliente, ready to meet M again in Machu Picchu. The guides even arrange a phone call with M when he has reception on Friday, using their satellite connection, and I am relieved to speak to him then rather than in my more tearful stage on Thursday. He had to be forced to carry on the trek and not to come back with me. I insisted. It made no sense for us both to miss out. And I need photos. I reassure him, tell him I love him (eliciting a burst of school boy giggles from my guide!) And prepare to wrap up this rather dejected tale with a Machu Picchu reunion and a suitable happy ending tomorrow.
After all, every experience is worth something. Even the bad ones are a story to tell. Just consider how much I have enjoyed relaying the drama of it all in this blog.
This, I tell myself, falling asleep on Friday night, is going to provide me with pub anecdotes for decades.
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