The Adventures of Andrew Maurer

We woke up and Alex said that he had hardly slept last night. He was feeling sick, so we started the morning relatively slowly, though keeping in mind that we were to have an 8 hour day ahead of us.

We had breakfast and realized afterwards that Alex wouldn’t be able to make the day’s hiking. Through the morning he continued to be ill and we decided that we would re-assess the next morning to see whether or not we would continue. It’s unlikely that it was altitude related since we have been well-acclimatized for a while now. We think that it was food poisoning off either street food or restaurant food from cheap restaurants (with symptoms of vomitting, diarhea, fever, weakness).

There is a shack on the barrier of the lake where a man works (15 days on, 15 days off) and takes readings of the water level and regulates the flow of water to generate hydroelectric power. The man, Miguel, was very kind and gave me some medication to bring back to Alex. He also lent us a thermometer, and found that Alex had a fever of 37.7. He ended up walking over to our campsite, a few minutes from the building, and I spent most of the day talking with him (up until then I had been reading my book, Mexico). He also said that later on we could stay in a spare room in the shack/building that had spare beds.

Around sunset we headed over to Miguel’s place and he made us dinner of chicken soup, eggs with bacon, and yerba. Note that there is a distinction between yerba and tea in Peru, where yerba is generally dried or fresh herbs that are steeped with water. Alex hadn’t eaten all day and still wasn’t able to eat at this point.

We watched sunset, finished talking, and Alex and I headed to bed. It was very comfortable – I was happy that we had met someone so hospitable.