We progressed slowly through the ancient villages of Chinchero and Ollantaytambo, the driver seemingly perplexed by the crunching noises emanating from the gearbox. Ironic peels of laughter relieved the tension as the bus crawled towards the crests of steep, winding roads. The driver, a crusty-looking grey whiskered man in late middle-age remonstrated with us, but we comforted him with stories of depressing incidents in our own truck. Mark, our driver, remained fast asleep on the front seat.

Soon after, we stopped for lunch in a narrow coppice where a spurting waterfall divided clumps of willow and eucalyptus. Sitting on a boulder, I was joined by a boy of about six years, who wore torn and muddied trousers and a ripped cotton shirt. He was barefoot and had short, black, spiky hair. He possessed a warm and innocent smile, yet his presence made me nervous. The rocks were strewn with open rucksacks, money-belts and cameras as the guys paddled in the waterfall's pool. Even in this secluded spot, we had to be on our guard twenty-four hours a day. In Spanish, I told the boy to go, but he sat there staring at me with intense and vulnerable eyes. He probably did not understand Spanish - Quechua being the lingua franca of the indigenous peoples.

The meal was served in light-weight plastic cups and bowls. They were small and multi-coloured, like a child's tea-set, but these were old, drab and wearing thin, almost at retirement age. Lunch was excellent: fresh fruit for starters, followed by mixed salad in a sauce with sweetbread. I had eaten my fill half-way through the salad, so I called the boy across to me. He had passed along the stepping stones to the other side of the pool where he sat firing stones into the undergrowth from an evil looking catapult. He did not have the malnourished aspect displayed by the children earlier down the trail, but within moments of offering him the plastic bowl, its contents were comprehensively cleared. He smiled, burped, and disappeared back up the track.

As I tightened my lace, I looked down at my Marks and Spencer's boots and noticed that the right heel was at an early stage of separation. Salous handed me some string from his rucksack and I carefully wrapped it around the heel and over and above my laces, before tying it in a double bow. An improvised solution perhaps, but there was no alternative. In the afternoon we walked hard but sensibly took breaks every thirty minutes or so. The heat of the day was intolerable but it was placated by a stiff, cooling breeze.

Yellow Flowering Cactuses

The views from the hilltops looking down into the valley were unimaginable. The river was narrow but wild with foaming brown water. Steep cliffs and weathered outcrops were dwarfed by sharp sloping mountainsides. Every parcel of land was terraced, under cultivation and bright green in colour. From the rocky path sprang yellow-flowering Tuna cactuses, giant specimens, strong enough to maim a careless trekker. Across the stream was an impoverished graveyard. Jagged rocks plucked from the mountainside framed each resting place. Within lay a series of white rounded stones, distributed in some unintelligible pattern. There were no marble headstones or figures of angels pointing towards eternal acceptance. Most had nothing to mark the deceased's name, others had crude wooden crosses without inscriptions. The pick of the bunch was that of Beltran Escobedor. Painted in white on a small broken blackboard was his name and date of internment 29.7.88.

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