Day 1: Don't Feed Horses Bananas

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Lao Tzu

I have trouble believing I'm awake when suddenly I find myself cruising across a wide open plain at a flat-out gallop. I have absolutely no idea where we are. The landscape looks like something the Riders of Rohan would have ranged in The Lord of the Rings. To my left, a pair of sheep are charging along beside us, either panicked or infected by our energy. To my right, ancient Incan corrals fragment the pasture into enormous squares of drystone walls. Straight ahead: nothing. The valley unrolls before us like a sage-green carpet. The only sound is the pounding of my heart in my ears, impossible to distinguish from Sufa's hoofbeats as he eats up stride after stride of hard, dry, flat ground.

Three days earlier...

I first met Mary and Mary at Hosteria de Anita in Cusco, a few nights before my departure. I was sitting in the lobby, writing, when I overheard them speaking two languages in which I was fluent: unmistakably North-American-accented English, and horse-speak. They were talking about the animals at their barn back home, who they had ridden in the past, who they were riding now, who was still 'green' and who was 'sound'.

I eavesdropped discreetly, my eyes still on my journal, until I heard them mention "eight-thirty Saturday morning". That was my departure time for the horseback trek.

"Are you guys going riding?" I couldn't resist boldly interrupting. They replied in the affirmative, and I told them I was, too. As it turned out, there were only three of us scheduled for the tour, and they had booked the four-day trek featuring the Sacred Valley. I would be going on to Machu Picchu alone. There was Blond Mary and there was Brunette Mary. Blond Mary preferred to spell her name M-E-R-R-Y, though that wasn't how it appeared on her passport. They were both from the Southern U.S., in their sixties and retired. They'd met at the barn where they boarded their horses, and had taken to accompanying each other on multi-day tours on horseback in foreign countries. The last one they'd taken had been in Iceland.

Edwin, our Peruvian cowboy guide (complete with jeans, chaps, leather vest, hat and bandana) picked us up at the hostel and drove us up a mountain to the middle of nowhere to meet our horses. Brunette Mary was paired with a handsome white gelding named Tornado. Blond Mary: an ungainly sorrel with only one whole ear called Chambo. I was partnered with Sufa. Edwin turned in a tight circle as he told me this, looking around. "Where is he?" He grumbled under his breath, then cupped his hands around his mouth and called, "SUFA!"

The pint-sized gelding pushed through a line of shrubbery at the far end of the field, fully tacked in a weathered stock saddle and hackamore, and jogged toward us at an unhurried clip. Edwin muttered something to him in Spanish about it being time to work, then handed me the reins. He would later tell me that 'Sufa' was a Peruvian name meaning 'ash'. It was perfect for the pony's unidentifiable rose-grey, roan-ish coat. The closest colour label I could give him was paint. Although he had no spots to speak of, he had a white blaze that covered most of his face and stockings, one of which was only a patch on his knee and didn't stretch all the way down to the fetlock.

Edwin instructed us to pack everything we needed in the saddle bags and helped us mount up. With that, our little convoy set out - three riders, two wranglers, one guide, seven horses (a support vehicle rendered a packhorse unnecessary; I hated to think what the extra horse was for) and a dog. Zorro's job was to help the wranglers guard the horses at night, Edwin explained, though, an incorrigible trouble-maker, he seemed more interested in getting into fights. In the first hour I watched him take on a pack of twenty feral dogs in a snarling, yelping hurricane of flying fur and snapping teeth. Before I could even voice the fear that they would tear him to shreds, one of the wranglers called him back in a Spanish inflection that sounded something like, "Zorro, get your ass back here you scoundrel!" And he did, jaunting along behind us as though nothing had happened.

The mid-sized red mutt looked like he was part fox, with his bushy tail and white chin and chest. Besides wild and potentially rabid dogs, he defended us and his horses (and they WERE his horses) in the days that followed against rogue alpacas, six-hundred-pound pigs and territorial rams, among other threatening beasts.

I was astounded by how many animals there were. Leaving the pick-up point, it seemed we'd stepped back a few hundred years. We passed through a village of thatch-roofed, mud-brick houses with no doors and clotheslines slung between dead trees in the barnyards. Along the sides and in the middle of the narrow dirt road were chickens, sheep, cats, dogs, donkeys, goats and piglets the size of kittens (which there were also lots of). Watching them scatter at the sight of us, ears flopping over their eyes as their tiny hooves skittered on the mud-brick, I swore I would never eat pork again. I saw a lot of sheep wearing halters. The sad-looking horses, however, were bare-headed and hobbled in fenceless yards. One screamed as we passed, hopping pitifully with both bound forelegs in an attempt to follow.

We left anything resembling civilization behind and climbed two thousand feet to the top of a ridge. Cresting it, the Sacred Valley swept out before us like a scene from Planet Earth: impossibly grand, virgin mountains and grassy plains. Far below, Andean geese paddled on a wide black lake. In its mirror, the clouds roiled, casting sharp shadows on the landscape and increasing its colour-contrast until it was high-definition vivid. I tried to find an end to the sky but couldn't.

We stopped here for a snack and quick re-shoeing of one of the horses. Blond Mary gave Chambo the rest of her banana and paid for it later, when he was zigzagging across the open field at a happy-go-lucky trot while she gripped the pommel and called that she wanted to get down. I don't know what she was so worried about. It wasn't as though there was any direction in which he could take off without us watching him run for three days. Lesson learned: don't feed horses bananas.

The clouds looked dark and pregnant, a sight I could barely stand this early in the ride. If it rained now, we would be wet and miserable for the remainder of the day. Before long, the heavens did open up, releasing a cold, dry gift which pinged off our helmets and hit the ground in BB-sized pellets. Hail. Thirteen thousand feet above sea-level, we were too close to the clouds for the precipitation to have time to melt. Five minutes later, it stopped. The sun came out and it was sixty degrees again.

Down by the lake, the swampy turf was pockmarked with wallows made by wild pigs. On the other side of it, we passed through a herd of what had to be hundreds of llamas (I know the difference now; llamas are bigger than alpacas, with longer legs and shorter hair). I expected them to shy at the sight of us, but instead of running, they pricked their long ears and moved closer, curious. Creeped out by the sight of a thousand pairs of Magic-Eight-Ball eyes on me, I leaned forward in the saddle and quipped to Brunette Mary, "Why do I feel like we're being watched?"

Once we cleared them, the valley opened up at our feet in a vast, flat, tempting expanse. The terrain was solid. There wasn't so much as a gopher hole in front of us. As if reading my mind, Edwin spurred his horse into a run without a word of warning. I seized the opportunity, not even having to be told once. Sufa's shoulders surged forward, flooding my veins with endorphins. I remembered loping in desperate, pathetic circles in the soggy hayfield back home and thought, 'This isn't real'.

When we stopped for lunch in the lower valley of Chinchero, it really did rain. Poured, actually, with a sprinkling of hail thrown in for good measure. We waited as long as we could for the weather to let up. Finally Edwin said we had to keep riding or we wouldn't make it to the lodge before dark.

We climbed back into wet saddles for the afternoon ride, the horses visibly shivering and their breath forming clouds in the chilled air. I was having trouble controlling the muscle convulsions as we skirted the Chinchero rim. By some miracle we managed to avoid getting rained on again, but fell victim to an irrigation sprinkler crossing through farmland. That was also the place where we encountered the bull, tied - for what it was worth - to a flimsy-looking peg in the ground by a nose ring. "Careful around the bull!" Edwin called over one shoulder. I wasn't sure exactly what this meant. The only way I knew to be careful around a bull was to not be around one in the first place.

The snowcapped mountain range came into view on the way to Urubamba, where we would spend the night. Edwin said the highest peak was seventeen thousand feet, and my only reaction was to think that we weren't much lower than that now. Brunette Mary took in the rugged, bone-like serrations cloaked in wisps of clouds like spun sugar. "They're mean-looking," she remarked.

I think 'ominous' was the word she was looking for, though it wasn't the one I would have used. "I call them 'hauntingly beautiful'," I amended.

"Oh, okay," Mary snorted, remembering I was a writer.

We arrived at the lodge in Urubamba and the wranglers set up the tents where they would spend the night, close to the horses. Already chilled to the bone, the notion of sleeping outside was unthinkable to me, especially after the sun went down and the temperature plummeted. I wasn't even that interested in dinner. The first thing I did when I got into my room was strip naked and take out my toiletry kit. What I was most looking forward to was a hot shower. I turned on the faucet, held my hand under and waited. It never got warm.

I washed my hair as fast as I could, teeth clenched and elbows pinned to my sides. My muscles were already tight from riding for eight hours. A frigid shower, following getting dumped on by icy rain and sprinklers, didn't help. Scrubbing my scalp in rushed, jerky motions, I tried to concentrate on the memory of the mud-brick houses we'd passed that day, tried to imagine going every day of my life, in this climate, with no hot water or electricity. I thought about the wranglers sleeping in tents outside. I recalled nights in the Amazon basin in Ecuador when we had no shower at all, and our only options for getting clean were the piranha-infested river or a garden hose.

I was shaking violently by the time I pulled on my long underwear and climbed into bed. 'You will survive', I told myself, too spent to come up with better words of encouragement. Thankfully the exhaustion meant a quick, merciful end to consciousness. I thought about the earplugs I had in my carry-on. I saw the extra blanket on the chair in the corner, but I drifted off before I could retrieve either of them. Falling asleep, my balance pitched and my body twitched, thinking I was still on the horse.