Adventure on the Camino Inca

So we had quite the little adventure today on an Inca road.  We wanted to hike on this particular old road that goes from a town called Levanto, about 20 kilometers by car from Chachapoyas, down to the main road near Chachapoyas.  The trail itself is about 5 miles long and goes down about 1000 feet in elevation.  To get to the top of the road you need to go to Levanto, which has a lovely small hotel that we stayed in.  We were the only ones in the hotel and were treated very well by the lady who works there, Juana.  They didn´t have a whole lot of food to serve us, so Juana made us some nice scrambled eggs for dinner, along with coca leaf tea.

The whole reason for going up to Levanto was to hike the trail.  So we started down the trail at 8 this morning.  It was quite beautiful, with amazing views over the Andes, .lots of small villages and agricultural fields climbing up the mountains.  We got to one point where there was a small Inca ruins with a couple of high school age boys sitting on it.  They looked a little shifty to us, as they were smoking cigarettes and just didn´t want to talk to us much (as opposed to everyone else here, who are for the most part very chatty and nice).  They were sitting on this little ruin and since we wanted a picture of the ruin Amy asked if she could take a picture of them.  They said that was fine.  We sat down on the ruin to have lunch and the two kids took off down the trail.  Amy notice them texting right away and that made her nervous, but I thought nothing of it (duh!).  So after we finished our little lunch we then started down the trail.  About 20 minutes or so later, Amy was ahead of me on the trail when she hurried back to me and said, `I think we´re in trouble`.  She overheard one of the kids on his cell phone saying to someone,´`Hurry down here!`  Then she saw another of the boys climbing the hill right next door, obvious to us that he was some kind of lookout.  Well of course we´ve heard all sorts of stories of tourists being mugged in Peru and robbed of everything, money, credit cards, clothes, belongings, you name it.  So we immediately decided to get the hell out of there and head back up the way we came.  We were about 2 hours from the town we started from, so we were pretty sure we couldn´t out run them going up hill.  But we ran up anyway.  Looking back down the trail, we saw a third person, in a red shirt, hurring up the trail towards us.  Shit!  So we thought the only way out of this was to hide off the trail somewhere.  Lucky for us, there was a small trail that went off to the right and we took it, looking for a place to hide.  We ran about 200 yards and then climed through some brambles to a very small little space, where we sat down behind some bushes.  We were pretty sure they didn´t see us go off the trail, so we figured if we just sat there for a couple of hours they would either think that we went back up to town or that they just lost us and they would leave.  We knew they had called other people to come help them, but we weren´t sure where these other people were coming from.

So we just sat there, under the brambles, on some grass, with a light rain falling.  We were thinking, what the f**k are we going to do?  Well, the first thing we decided is that we would hide most of our money, our credit and cash cards, and our passports.  So we put them in our socks, at the bottom of our feet, thinking this is the last place they would look unless they stole our socks.  We kept $40 and some Peruvian soles in our pockets which was kind of day money, thinking we would tell them this is all we had.

After two hours, which actually went by very fast, we decided to go out and go down the trail.  It was about a 90 minute hike down to the bottom and at one point Amy thought she saw someone up above us on the trail, so we found another side trail and hid in some bushes for another 30 minutes.  But then we decided just to get the hell down and although we were totally freaking out the whole way down, we never saw them.  At one point coming down I thought of something to tell the robbers in case we came upon them.  I would tell them that I texted our hotel manager the picture I took of the two boys, where we were, and if we weren´t back at the hotel by 3pm that you would know we had been robbed by these two.  But luckily we never had to tell this story and actually the whole rest of the hike was pleasantly uneventful.