Feb 1, 2009 – This is the remarkable story of a group of humanitarians who found love, hope and strength in an ancient civilization. In the morning of October 6, 2008, I woke to the sounds of the Pacific Ocean. I’d slept soundly, something that would be almost universal during my time in Peru. Was I that comfortable in this small family home in Playa Arica, or was I that exhausted? Abbe, Colleen and Meghan — three fellow Colorado trekkers who’d decided we should start in this beach town in order get our feet on the ground — were already at the table, enjoying small plates of eggs, rolls and fresh carambola (starfruit) juice. This morning, we were up at 3:30 am to catch a plane to Cusco to meet the other 58 members of Love Hope Strength and to spend a few days getting used to the altitude. Cusco, the ancient capital city of the Inca Empire, sits 11,000 feet above sea level and is where we prepared for our four-day adventure to Machu Picchu.
Before the trip, I estimated it would take 57,000 steps to hike the Inca Trail from the gate at kilometer 82 to Machu Picchu — 57,000 steps to glory, to salvation, to a cure. Truth be told, these are just a few of the millions of steps Love Hope Strength has taken since its founding in January of 2007.
Love Hope Strength is an international cancer charity based
in Denver and made up of hundreds of people from dozens of countries. On this trek to Machu Picchu, there were 62 cancer survivors, friends, family, rock stars and the ashes of one cancer victim. The group was founded by Mike Peters, lead singer of The Alarm and a two-time cancer survivor. Love Hope Strength was created on the idea of recovery as a climb back from cancer and has grown substantially in its two short years. As Peters was recovering from cancer in Wales, he looked out his window onto Mount Snowdon, the highest peak in Great Britain south of the Scottish Highlands, and told his friends and family he was going to get better and climb it.
When Peters and good friend and fellow cancer survivor James Chippendale, president of CSI Entertainment Insurance, made that promise a reality in June of 2007, Love Hope Strength had begun its charitable quest, which has taken them to the base camp of Mount Everest and the top of the Empire State Building.
The 2009 Kilimanjaro Rocks event is scheduled for late September. The trip to Machu Picchu is the fifth such climb, and it raised a total of $300,000 that went toward the improvement of Lima’s INEN Cancer Treatment Center while spreading a message of hope, testing and treatment.
The Glorious and the Profane Our group was broken into six smaller units to make things more manageable. Mine was led by Marco and Celso, locals with 14 years’ experience on the Inca Trail between them. They led the way while taking care of us, finding porters, making sure we had water, keeping us informed and entertained. They laughed and joked through the rough spots and, in a moment of celebration, produced a bottle of Peruvian rum as we crested Warmiwanuska — Dead Woman’s Pass — a 14,000-foot arch that rivals the tallest mountains in Colorado.
These two had the camaraderie of brothers and seemed to be at every turn when we needed them, keeping us on the path and telling us stories about what was going on and what had gone on before. There were other guides (there were nearly 200 people in our group, including porters, trekkers, cooks, guides and a production crew), but Marco and Celso were the most fun, like the kids who caused the most commotion in class but who still outscored you on the SATs.
The trek alternated between the glorious and the profane. The night before our first full day of hiking was restless. I spent the night packing, unpacking and reworking my load, wondering if I was ready. Is my bag too heavy? Will I be able to drag it up the hill? I started worrying that there must be things in my bag I could do without, things I could sensibly leave behind.
I worked hard on these climbs, on many of which we’d gain thousands of feet in elevation over the span of just a couple of hours. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a dinosaur peek its scaly head out of one of the many small moraines that split off the sides of the beautiful and ancient Sacred Valley or to see treasure hunters come crashing through the brush chased by Indiana Jones. The plants were amazing, tropical and, in my personal experience, illogical: so tall, so vibrant, so alien. I didn’t have reference points for the greenery and the rugged peaks or, for that matter, for the food, the music, the kindness of the Peruvians and the teamwork of the group as a whole.
By the end of our first day, thrust as we were into such a massive undertaking, we got to know each other over a wonderful dinner, one of 10 fantastic meals we would have on the trail. Over rounds of Cusqueña beers and
a game of Truth or Dare that went far beyond the boundaries of our group’s budding friendships, we forged bonds that would carry us through to the gates of Machu Picchu.
On the second morning, I stood outside my tent and stretched, feeling the cold in my bones and listening to the guides talk just under the rush of a nearby river. A cup of coca tea warmed me, as it would every morning I was in Peru, and then I realized what the guides were talking about. A tarantula sat at the edge of the clearing within a few feet of where I’d been sleeping not 10 minutes before. I smiled and almost threw up. The altitude, the exposure, the effort, the morning, the tarantula — all of it was working on me.
Soon, the rest of the crew would be up, and we would be on our way, but I had a few minutes. I’d carried my bag the day before, dragging my life skyward in a vain attempt to be manlier than I really am. Today, I’d enlist the help of a porter, a local Quechuan (native Peruvian) man who I never actually met but who saved my ass for a paltry $24, so I could really participate in the trip. Many of the people I was with, including a number of my fellow Coloradans, carried their own gear. I quietly applauded them; I just couldn’t do it.
I was a little worried about giving up my bag until I realized that what I “needed” — water, power bars, meds, passport, money, layers — I could cram into a daypack. A good portion of the way through day two, Peters gave me the nickname “The Doctor” because he said every time someone needed something, I had it. Peters, who wrote and sang some of the most important songs of my high school years made my trip with Love Hope Strength feel serendipitous. As our group began to hike a particularly tough piece of trail they call “The Stairs,” Peters and I sang The Alarm’s 1990 anthem “Unsafe Building,” an experience I will never forget.
Even without my bag, I wasn’t a speed demon. I seemed to move at pace with the rock stars — including the boys from Fastball, Cy Curnin from The Fixx and solo rockers Brien McVernon and Nick Harper — and subsequently ended up hearing great stories of their lives in and out of the spotlight. McVernon, a rockabilly star from Australia who hiked the entire trail in black jeans and a leather jacket while sporting an Elvis-sized pompadour, was amazing, down to earth and extremely caring. Although Harper and I only spoke a handful of times, during our brief interactions, the English songwriter didn’t give off a single whiff of rock star attitude and openly called me “chickenshit” for not attempting Everest with the group the year before.
By the end of the day, when I cramped up and most of my crew was ahead of me, I had time to myself, which was rare. The Inca Trail is four rough, beautiful, hilarious, breathtaking, crushing, enlivening days through the Andean jungle that makes most of the difficult things in life seem so much easier, so much simpler, so much smaller. We were blessed, according to one of our Quechuan guides, and we brought our energy with us and were sharing it with the valley. I knew the pain I was feeling, the sweat, dehydration and cramps were all passing and didn’t come accompanied by tubes and wires and chemicals and hospital stays. My problems began to fade into the background as the mountains rose around us.
The Ancient City After an uneventful third day of hiking, our fourth began before the sun and with my decision to carry my own gear through Inti Punku, the Sun Gate, to view Machu Picchu. This glorious relic of the Inca civilization sits across the Urubamba Valley on a ridge between the two mountain peaks of Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu. By the time we’d gotten to the ancient city itself, the sun had risen, and as we’d found all along in our dealings with Peruvian bureaucracy, roadblocks occurred when a crew the size of ours is toting guitars, drums and professional recording equipment throughout an ancient empire. As much as we tried, we couldn’t convince the guards we were there for charity, and we ended up having to leave some of our gear behind while we spent the day inside the city walls. We were able to spend time looking around the nearly 550-year-old site. In the mortar-less style of the Incas, dry stone walls ring a city the Spanish conquistadors never found, one declared a historical sanctuary of Peru in 1981. There we took the time to say goodbye to Otto, a cancer victim whose ashes his friends carried and then released into the sacred air during a morning ceremony.
After our time in Machu Picchu and a couple of days in Aguas Calientes — a small resort town at the base of the mountain — we headed back to Lima, where we spent two days gathering footage and photographs before we headed to a seaside discotheque for a final fundraising concert, where the musicians played long into the night. The next morning was the most important element of our trip: visiting the volunteers and the kids at INEN.
A Guitar with Angel Wings The INEN Cancer Treatment Center is a Peruvian state-run research and treatment center in Lima and ground zero for the implementation of Love Hope Strength’s fundraising efforts on this trip. Although I knew our trip to INEN was the heart of the reason we had come to Peru, a part of me didn’t want to go. I don’t like hospitals. But after breakfast, and a bit of personal reflection, I got up the energy and motivation to get on the bus with the others and went to help these Peruvians write a different ending to their stories.
Around 30 of us arrived at the facility. I watched as a high school–aged boy kissed his mother and aunt goodbye. Although he was rolling an IV down the hall, he seemed remarkably unaffected, and the two women seemed to draw strength from him. I knew I couldn’t cry; I decided instead to enjoy the hell out of myself.
In the chemo ward, I met a girl named Olivia. I stood by her bedside, holding her hand while we listened to Tony Scalzo of Fastball play guitar. As the chemicals dripped slowly into her arm and the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, my mind raced back through the days and months leading up to this moment. Even under the best of circumstances, our trip wouldn’t have been easy. I’d had days that measured other people’s years, and here, in a South American chemotherapy clinic, I had to concentrate just to bring the moment into focus.
I wanted to leave the kids with something, a remembrance of our visit. I had a rub-on transfer tattoo of the Love Hope Strength logo on my forearm and several others to share. We had just walked into a ward for teenagers, and I turned to a few of the young patients and asked, in terrible Spanglish, if they wanted one. The logo, a guitar with angel wings, serpents and a punk banner, were a lock for the teens. I put them on the forearms of two boys and turned to a third.
Sitting cross-legged on his bed, watching the proceedings, he smiled as I leaned in with the rub-on. As I reached for his arm, he shook his head no and didn’t roll up his sleeve as the others had done. Instead, he removed his woven hat and pointed to his bald scalp, smooth from the chemotherapy. So while the doctor looked on somewhat disapprovingly, I tattooed his head, leaving him with a satisfied smile.
Later, as Scalzo finished playing another song and we were getting ready to leave, I realized I’d been on a pilgrimage, a journey to save my soul, to find hidden truth, to find the cure. I knew I’d probably been more selfish than selfless as I fulfilled one of the great dreams of my life while helping bring a little hope into the lives of these cancer patients. These kids, high school age at most, looked up at me from their beds, smiling — sick, but smiling — happier at that moment than it seemed I could ever be.
Written by: Ilan Baril.
Photos by: Gary Noel.
