His entire speech on the subject took at least one full hour. I tried with little enthusiasm, and perhaps (as a doubter) this was the placebo effect, but it wouldn't work miracles on me as I was soon to find out. That day involved a lot of climbing in the minibus, to a top elevation of 16,109 feet.
We saw vicunas roaming free at these high altitudes, froze our butts and were almost ready to touch the nearby glaciers coming out of the surrounding 20,000 feet (6000 meters) peaks. We went through Yura Village, the Aguada Blanca National Reserve and the Pampa Cañahuas before making it to the little town of Chivay located around 12,000 feet.
That day, we traveled along with a group of gregarious Belgian tourists and we had a wonderful time in terms of our battling symptoms of nausea, headaches and shortness of breath. The hotel we had that night was the Anrawa Colca and both my wife and I were both stricken by a bad case of altitude sickness. In retrospect, we shouldn't have drank alcohol the nights before and stayed away from coffee.
While my wife was able to sleep some, I just couldn't do it as my body seemed to have lost the natural ability to fall asleep; as soon as I would start losing consciousness, I would gasp for air and wake up... Great, wonderful hotel, but terrible stay because of “soroche” the Quechua's name for the ailment. ,
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