Nobody Asked Me If I Wanted To Climb A Mountain

Surprise! You may have thought the Perez Family in Peru with my dad's final post as guest blogger for Perú It May Concern was wrapped up with our Machu Picchu adventure but, alas, the story goes on! My younger sister, the lovely Miss Marlee Perez, sent me a hilarious story recounting her personal view on our hike up to Machu Picchu. She is an amazing and talented writer and I am so stoked to have one of her stories to share on this blog. You can find one of her previous works of genius (and the best Christmas present I've ever received) here. Enjoy!

As you all know, this past June my parents and I embarked on a two week adventure to Peru to visit Jamie. Here are some parts of our story (sparing the details you've already read in my dad's blog entries) from my perspective:

Though we had to take a few flights to get there, our journey didn't really begin until we were reunited with Jamie, a perfect McWeeperson family reunion at the airport in Trujillo. From there we went on to spend the first few days of our trip in Guadalupe, where I got to stay with Jamie at her host family's house. My favorite part about our stay there was helping out at Jamie's school with the University of Oregon students. Mostly I just liked that they seemed even more confused than I was to be in a place so different from home. A couple of them mistook me for a local while I was serving them lunch and struggled to form the sentence, "¿Que tipo de carne?" The look on their faces when I answered in English was priceless. 

It was really cool to see the work being done at the school, and it was especially neat to see Jamie's cocina mejorada in use for the first time. I'm really proud of the work my sister's doing in Peru, even though it means she has to be 4,200 miles away from me. I had a good time there, but I'm pretty sure Jamie was tired of sharing her room with me and was ready for the vacation to really start.

I'll spare you the details my dad's already described nicely in his entries and skip to the exciting part: Machu Picchu. It may sound very exciting to climb such a famous mountain, but I was completely unprepared. I'd consistently forgotten to take my prescribed altitude medication throughout most of the trip, and that morning in particular, the only "breakfast" I'd had was a small cup of peach juice on the train we'd taken that morning. I had been under the impression that we were to be taking a bus to the top of the mountain (thanks, Mom), and didn't realize we weren't until it was too late. Needless to say, it was a difficult endeavor, and it's still surprising to me that my lungs were still intact when we reached the top. It was an extremely rewarding experience, however, and in the end I am so proud that I can say that I climbed Machu Picchu (and Huayna Picchu, for that matter). But the very best part of this particular adventure came to pass early in the day as we were clambering up the uneven stone steps of the mountain. I like to refer to it as "The Pants Incident".

At this point, perhaps halfway up Macchu Picchu, Jamie and I were deeply regretting our decision to put on jeans that morning, jeans that were now soaked with our sweat. We stopped for a short break and let the rest of the group go on without us for a few minutes. Jamie decided she wanted to change into shorts, but was apprehensive about changing on the path where people could see her, "people" being the random group of three people that were slowly making their way up behind us. 

My mom told Jamie to go for it, and I decided that I wanted to change as well, so we waited for the other group to pass. Now, we were all a little dehydrated, but my mom seemed to be growing especially delirious; the group was moving excruciatingly slow, and she jokingly whisper-yelled to Jamie and me, "Andale, jovens!" We burst out laughing; not only was the phrase grammatically incorrect (the correct terminology would have been "jóvenes"), but the way she said it was so indescribably funny that we laughed until tears came out of our eyes. The group passed and, still recovering from Mom’s outburst, we set about helping Jamie get changed into her shorts. The task proved to be much more difficult than expected; Jamie's jeans were completely plastered to her legs with sweat, so she had to sit down on a dirt-covered rock while my mom and I each pulled a pant-leg off of her. The whole scene was so completely ridiculous that it ended up being prolonged even further because we were laughing so hard. 

We finally got her into her shorts, and after helping her, I wasn't sure I wanted to go through the same process, even though I was practically about to melt and become part of the mountainside. I began to voice my doubts to my mom, but she had already dug my shorts out of the bottom of my backpack and chucked them at my face. "Just do it, Marlee, you just gotta commit to it!" she told me. (I did say she was getting a bit delirious.) She then turned to Jamie and shouted "Help your sister with her pants!" It was quite an ordeal. Jamie tugged at my pant legs while I clung to that rock and my mom furiously shoved our clothing back into the backpack. There was already way less oxygen up there than we're used to, and we were using all of it up, gasping and wheezing in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Even after we had changed, we stayed for a moment and continued to laugh ourselves silly. We finally started climbing again and, well, you know the story: we made it to the top, explored the ancient city of the Incas, it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, blah blah blah. 

Celebrating our successful ascent and mountainside wardrobe change

I'm just kidding, it really was amazing. I was practically breathing in history. My favorite parts of the trip were petting some of the llamas (they're literally everywhere), watching my dad cling to the side of the mountain like an extremely terrified and sweaty version of Spider-Man (he's not overly fond of heights), and, of course, The Pants Incident.