Death comes to us like a memory.

The day after my recovery I meet Lory in the Internet room and he opts for hiking to Machu Picchu through an alternative route. The trains and busses are on strike and I would hate to wait until tuesday to finally get up there. I have lost enough time as it is with the visit to the clinic and all. So, meet you back here in one hour? I start packing my things, check out the hostel, have my big backpack put up in the storage room and pay my bills up till then. When I remeet Lory, two girls decided to join us: Candle and Heather. Now we are four.

We bus to Urubamba and then further only to find out that it is dangerous to walk along the tracks during the day. Guards prevent people from doing it and they would send you back. We didn't bring any camp material and walking during the night in the jungle isn't that attractive, so we decide to bus all the way up to Santa Maria, then Santa Teresa and walk a mere 4 hours from there.

At the hostel I was supposed to meet two girls from Chile for breakfast: Constanza and Valentina. I hadn't met them that morning and had left on a fast spontaneous moment of opportunity, with these three to go to Machu Picchu. I hoped that they would still be in the hostel by the time I would get back. While I'm thinking these thoughs four people enter the bus towards Santa Maria. There are no more seats left so they have to stand up. They stand next to my seat and being who I am I start chatting. Guess what? They come from Chile and when the one calles the other Connie; I am again, amazed. They have the exact same names: Constanza and Valentina. It makes me laugh. We decide to travel together and now 4 have become 8.
They laugh loud enough to keep the entire bus awake while we drive through rivers, pass abysses in a way that the people sitting in front next to the driver, come out and show their scared pale faces during the stops.

We arrive at midnight in the middle of nowhere. A small jungle town with 5 inhabitants where we find a hostel for 5 Soles a night. Giant rats make their way down the stairs as we go up. The toilet protests for having to swallow anything by vomiting rays of water back into the bathroom. I sleep like a rose and don't even notice the jungle rain that wipes out part of the road we would still have to travel.

At 06:00 A.M. sharp the Chileans wake us up and we get a mini van to drive us up to Santa Teresa. We buy supplies, get in and we are off. The air reeks of Marihuana. A river gulfs wildly in the depth of the valley. The road we are on is made of gravel. It gets more narrow as we go up. After some amazingly curves we seem to be on the deathroad. The distance between the wheels of the mini and the abyss of certain death, if we would fall, becomes smaller and smaller. On top of the road being narrow... it has been raining the entire night and mud and gravel is coming down the other side of the road.

Imagine yourself in a minivan. Is shakes while driving up a steep road and when you look to your right outswide of the window you see a staring depth of about 1 kilometer vertically down. 170 to 160 degrees probably. Fear creeps up on you and the feeling of having lived your last day on planet earth starts growing in your stomach. It is like expecting that your plane might crash, but worse, more real. It seems more inevitable. When death comes to us, it seems to come as a memory. A really bad memory. Adrenaline rushes through your bloodstream and your breath gets cut short. You lose the connection with your diafram and panic starts glowing from your eyes, first mildly, then severely. The mini gets stuck. It tries to escape a rock that is in its way and waves from left to right. To the left: mud coming down, to the right: an abyss of death. Images of the van, rolling down the mountain with you guys in it, getting smashed into a human pizza, where there is no knowing whose eye belongs to whom afterwards, is playing in your mind. You are freaking out. It is all a bad memory of something you have lived before. You cannot believe this will be your ending. Your spirit rebells while the facts seem to be merely happening and you cannot stop the movie. Hold on a minute, STOP! Stop the movie! STOP! Let us out!! Are you fucking crazy!

As wild animals we start screaming against our fate. We do not want to die. Not here, not right now, rolling down a mountain with strangers where the result would have been an impossible mission to find which organ belongs to what person. The door opens and we get out in one piece. We are all shaken and shocked. I tell the driver; any next situation like that: you let us out inmediately on forehand, or I will shit in your minivan right there at the spot! He laughes. A minor consolation is that the driver goes up and down here every day. He knows what he is doing. We find out that there has never been any minis falling down the mountain. However, that did not make our experience one easy to forget.

From that point on, more and more people get into, or on top for that matter, of the mini. At the time we are 29 with 6 of us on top of the roof; we meet another point of destiny. A massive landslide that came down because of the rain destroyed part of the road and there is no way continuing by car is possible. The gravel/mud is fresh and it sucks in your shoes when crossing it. Besides there is the risk of more material falling down. There is no other way. Forward. We have to cross it. We do so with the speed of as if we were being chased by the devil himself and when we are all safe at the other side we cannot believe how exciting our morning has been.