Jitters before a hike

Imagine if you had only one arm, and you were tasked to carry 16 sets of 4 heavy textbooks and go on a fifteen minute walk from your house to the library. Imagine the nervousness you would feel before performing the task? That is exactly what I felt when my family was going on a trip to Peru to hike up Machu Picchu. During the several months before our trip to Peru, my dad kept on saying things like “We are going to have to hydrate up for Machu Picchu.”, “Machu Picchu is going to be a really hard hike.” and “There will be so many stairs in Machu Picchu''. His repetition of those phrases made me think _How am I going to survive this hike?_ It all started when we finally got checked into our hotel room in Aguas Calientes, Peru, and my mom said “Ok we have to get plenty of rest for our hike tomorrow, so everyone go to sleep soon.”  _ Sleep soon?! It’s only eight o’ clock! How much sleep do we need? How bad is this hike going to be? _I thought. I went to my bedroom, turned off the lights and fell asleep. When I woke up we immediately started prepping for the hike. After we triple checked that we had everything, we drove to the site. When we got into the car, I got the feeling that I mentioned at the beginning again.. _Ok I have everything prepared. I got this._ When we arrived at Machu Picchu, we scanned our tickets. Then we entered the hiking trail. The entrance consisted of a rocky pathed forest with a bunch of  trees with green leaves and ladder-long trunks. The sky was blue and crystal clear of clouds. Then we started on our eternity long journey of climbing white and rocky stairs. The first set of stairs were a breeze, but then when we got to the tenth set my heart started beating. THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! _Oh no…This is only our tenth set…I can't be tired ALREADY!… Ok … keep … going._ I made it through the eleventh set then the twelfth and with tons of encouragement, the sixteenth set. After that set, we Finally. Took. A. Water. Break. Whew! That was WAY too many stairs. I gulped down my water like I haven’t drank water in two days. Our view at the break consisted of bigger than Mount everest- heaped  brown mountain with plenty of grass and gray and black rocks. _There is going to be an even better view at the top. _I thought, _I WILL get up there! _After our break, we hiked up another sixteen sets. In those sets, the stairs weren’t just plentiful; they were also these curvy, rocky and high steps with no railings at all. It was like walking on a curvy tightrope while carrying weights repeatedly  30 times. However, I knew that I HAD to tackle those stairs to reach the top, and I could NOT complain. I clung on to the walls and stabilized myself before taking my very first step up those swirly stairs. I kept saying to myself _Reach the top!_ _I can do this!_ I repeated those actions for each step up those swirly stairs.  There was this set that was EXTREMELY swirly and narrow, so I grabbed onto my dad’s hand to tackle those sets. After our thirtieth set was over, we were finally just FINALLY at the top. Beneath the crystal clear blue skies lie the whole entire brown swervy mountain topped with green grass and a multitude of gray rocks and house outlines. It looked as big as two Mount everests together. When I saw this view all of my leg soreness from the hike disappeared. Remember how I mentioned that the feeling before hiking up Machu Picchu was similar to the feeling that you would get if you only had one arm, and you were tasked to carry sixteen sets of 4 textbooks on a fifteen minute walk from their house to the library? Well how would you feel when you are done? That’s exactly how I felt at the end of this hike.  I had done something that I never thought I would be capable of doing before. I now knew that I no longer had to fear big tasks like this one.

Not Haikus but an ancient civilization!!