It was my partner who was most direct: “I keep trying to get away from a terrible smell, and then I realise that it’s me.” After three and a bit days on the Inca trail we had made it to Machu Picchu and should have been overwhelmed by its magnificence.

In truth we felt only relief that the privations of the previous days had ended. Never again will we do anything like this, we said. No trekking at altitude, no staggering up thousands of ancient steps, then down a few thousand more and realising that it’s still only 10.30am.

Absolutely no camping at temperatures that require us to sleep in six layers of clothing and still feel as though our innards are being penetrated by icicles.

This isn’t how you’re supposed to respond to Machu Picchu. It’s sold as a lost city, full of mystery and mysticism, even though since Hiram Bingham tripped over it in 1911 it hasn’t been lost at all.

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Obviously we’re philistines. If we couldn’t appreciate the majesty of this site we didn’t deserve to be there. To be fair, even in my depleted emotional and physical condition I could see that the setting in the midst of sheer-sided peaks is the most dramatic and impressive of any historical ruin I have seen, and I have been force-fed many.

It was the trek that was so grim, so joyless, that I am baffled as to why nobody has slapped it with a misery warning.

We thought that the trip would be an adventure. I’m not sure that we swallowed the romanticism that infuses guidebooks, though if we recognised the euphemistic use of “challenging” we screened out the thought.

We can ski hard for a week, cycle 50-odd miles at a stretch and trot up and down Lake District mountains. We thought we’d cope.

What the literature doesn’t tell you is that the Inca trail is a 49km stone path with the uneven surface of a river bed, much of it arranged in steps so irregular that the only way to navigate them is to constantly eyeball your feet and plan where to put them next. This means that you’re not getting much of a look at the scenery.

We had followed the rules on acclimatisation, spending five days at altitude before the trek and doing practice walks, but this neither stopped me getting altitude sickness nor prepared us adequately for slogging up the aptly named Dead Woman’s pass to 4,200m.

I felt like Fanny Robin as she made her painfully slow way to the workhouse in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd.

And while our new companions (we were in a group of ten) were pleasant enough, they didn’t know me well enough to understand that when they entreated me to catch up by yelling “Come on, Penny!” I felt so humiliated that I wanted to punch them.

I could mention the blisters behind the toenails, the night time, ground-shaking thunderstorm so violent that the porters used stones to secure our tents, and how, if your guide considers your group fit, he makes you walk 18km on the first day and 14 much steeper ones the next day, which makes the trek much tougher than the one you’ve bought.

The currency of the trip was toilet paper: at 4.30am on the final day (yes, of course we were up) when one of our party accidentally dropped her toilet roll, a hand whipped out from under the adjacent cubicle and stole it.

“I hated every minute of it,” one of our friends said. “It was only like that all the time,” my partner said.

Most people reach Machu Picchu by train. Now we know why.

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