It is a bumpy, unpaved road and our driver carefully maneuvers around the potholes. Joan laughs and says this is her weekly massage. We pass dry, dusty shells of buildings, box-shaped with flat roofs. It seems as though it hasn’t rained in forever. Joan points to a truck coming the other way. “That’s our weekly water delivery”, she says.

I stood in the middle of the famous Inca Jungle Trail and felt only nauseating fear. Every two minutes for two hours straight, someone would yell, “Lights up!”and ten small torch lights would point to the mountain towering straight above us. The sound of rocks falling had started again, but luckily they were still twenty meters behind us.