A Burnham-On-Sea walking enthusiast has raised more than £2,500 for charity by travelling thousands of miles to Peru and trekking along the picturesque Inca Trail.
Debbie Miller, pictured above at the end of her trek, raised the money for Breakthrough Breast Cancer by trekking across the mountain tops of the South American country, which borders the South Pacific Ocean.
Having just returned home this week, she told Burnham-On-Sea.com: “It was absolutely fantastic. This definitely was the most physically and mentally exhausting thing I have ever done. It was just incredible.”
Debbie was there with a group of 15 other walkers from across the UK raising money for the cancer charity.
“On the longest day we’d walked the equivalent height of two Ben Nevis’s by 3pm and still had two and half hours walking to get to our camp. We got up to 4,215 metres – it was incredibly tiring, but an amazing experience.”
She was in Peru for ten days and spent four days trekking and three nights camping in what she calls “highly changeable and extreme conditions.”
“One night, a deluge of rain came down for several hours and water gushed through our tent. It was non-stop and cold with it – then in the morning we had blistering hot temperatures. We saw all four seasons in just one day!”
There was a heart-stopping moment at one point during the trek when she cut open her leg while helping a fellow walker across a stream.
Her doctor said on Tuesday that the inury could take up to a month to heal, but Debbie told us: “There’s no way an inury was going to stop me from finishing!”
Our photos show (top) Debbie at the end of her trek at Machu Picchu with the fortress city of the ancient Incas in the background. Above, Debbie is shown at the highest point – 4,215m – on her trek.
