AFTER a gruelling four-day charity trek in the mountains of Peru an intrepid Macclesfield traveller was glad to be back home... but only so she could use a proper loo!
Liz Hadfield had trained hard for the 25 mile hike in which she climbed to over 14,000ft but said nothing had prepared her for camping without showers or toilets.
"The toilets were disgusting - they were worse than the loos at the Glastonbury music festival! They were just a hole in the ground.
"I think it would have been more hygienic to go behind some bushes," she said.
And after going four days without a shower she said she felt "a bit grotty".
"When we got back to the city after the trek we met tourists who had gone up by bus - they were looking at us as if we were aliens!"
But Liz, 32, who raised an impressive £3,000 for the Children's Hospitals Trust Appeal, said she would not have missed the experience for the world.
"It was an absolutely wonderful and unforgettable experience. I feel I have achieved something really amazing," she said.
"The main reasons I did it were because it was for a good cause, and it was a personal challenge. But it was also great fun, and I met a lot of brilliant people."
The trek followed the Inca Trail from the city of Cusco to the ruins of Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas in the Andes Mountains.
She said: "Because we followed the trail to the city, it felt like we were the first people to discover it. It was amazing."
Liz, who works in the urology department at Macclesfield Hospital, said the sheer altitude of the trek was a hurdle in itself.
She said: "We spent the first day acclimatising ourselves to the atmosphere. If you climbed the stairs, you were out of breath, because the air is so thin.
"I was so nervous because we knew we were going to climb another 3,000 feet during the next four days."
And climb she did. Although the total distance walked was only 25 miles, Liz marched up endless stone steps and along rocky tracks to a dizzy height of 14,000ft.
