The driver of the pickup coasted downhill into the bus station in Tarapoto, riding in neutral with the engine off. Gas is expensive. Jesus and I booked front row seats on the upper floor of a large, touring bus. The huge panoramic windows created a greenhouse heating effect in the afternoon sun and the entire second story swayed unsettlingly around every curve and I pulled my bandana over my eyes and tried to sleep. It was an eight hour trip from Tarapoto to Chachapoyas. I woke well after dark, suspended over the road in a glass-enclosed crow’s nest that bobbed on an invisible sea. It wasn’t until the bus headlights flickered back on that I realized why the night had seemed so black. The headlights wavered, off, then on, then off again, at the least reassuring moments. A knot of people crowded the side of the road. Beams from a few weak flashlights shone on the white t-shirt and jean shorts of the dead man laid out a few feet away from his crunched motorbike. People behind and around me rubbernecked shamelessly. Onward we groaned, squeezing past other buses and trucks and around hairpin curves. “Chachapoyas 75km,” said a dented road sign.

Three AM was the magic hour for transport in Chachapoyas. Massive construction projects routinely closed the roads between Chachas and all points north, south, east, or west. Leaving the city meant catching a taxi or combi at three in order to clear the construction zone before it closed at six. Getting back required waiting on the other side until the road reopened at six PM. The city was our base for several days, and Jesus and I became regular customers at the street corner where the combis left. We’d show up at two-thirty AM, buy over-sweetened black coffee in tin cups from the older woman who dozed behind her gas burner and glared at me when I woke her up, and start asking around. Everyone told us something different. “That bus already left.” Or, “Si, si, it will be here, just wait.” “It’s that truck, that one’s going to Coechon,” “No, that one’s going to Luya.” “No, there are no cars to Leymebamba, you have to take this truck to Tingo first then wait there and maybe another bus will pass. What day is today? Tuesday? Yes, I think today there will be a bus in Tingo.” No one wants to say, “I don’t know.” We learned to ask everybody, twice.

One day, Jesus and I visited Gojta Falls, to the north of Chachapoyas, the third highest waterfall in the world. 771m (2,500ft) high, the force of the water as it hits the pool at the bottom creates a hurricane-force wind and drives a wall of mist fifty feet in every direction. Later that afternoon, we sat in the backseat of a taxi in a long line of cars, combis, trucks, and buses, waiting for the road to open. “¡El Perú Avanza! (Perú is advancing!),” read the back of the bright orange uniform of the construction worker holding traffic back. The woman in the front told us they were widening the road to allow the two-story tourist buses to cut through the mountains. “Breaking news,” the radio shouted suddenly. A bus had gone off the road in Luya, the next town over. “Cinco muertos.” Five people dead. We listened to the announcer talk on a cell phone to a hysterical woman who’d crawled out of the wreck. “No one is coming to help us, we are dying,” she said. “Dios mio, oh, Dios mio,” the woman in the front seat crossed herself. A few minutes later, the worker standing in front of us lowered his stop sign and moved the sawhorse barricade to open the pass. We zoomed into the opening, jockeying for position with the other vehicles, speeding around the newly widened gravel curves like racers in a cross-country speed match. The driver steered with his left hand and with his right fumbled in a CD case, selected a disc, and popped it in the stereo, cutting off the woman’s sobs on the radio. Led Zeppelin’s “All of My Love” rolled from the speakers and the driver honked and accelerated to cut off the taxi squeezing in on his right.

On our last morning in Chachapoyas, the cranky coffee vendor glared and sold me cold, coffee-flavored sugar water. I poured it into the gutter, then sat on the curb and leaned sleepily on Jesus’s shoulder. Two abuelitas wrapped in blankets sat next to us, waiting for a car going to Celendín, same as we were. This was market day in Celendín, they told us. We were lucky, because normally there are no cars to this town. But they didn’t know when a car might be coming. “Ask that driver. Maybe you can ride with him.” They pointed to a man who was weaving up the street toward an already overloaded truck. Six young boys and a couple of tired-looking men saw him coming and swung themselves up on top of the merchandise, burrowing into the blue tarp cover. The driver dropped his keys twice as he struggled into the cab. “He’s drunk,” Jesus whispered to me. A different truck, a flat bed with wooden-slat sides pulled in next, and I negotiated passage for the two of us. We crawled in the back, over sacks of grains and corn and mesh bags filled with other wares for the market. The truck stopped a few times on the way out of Chachapoyas, then began picking up speed. I slid into a hollow between the sacks and tried to sleep. It was cold in the back of the truck; wind slipped through the boards and sliced through my clothes. Another passenger settled onto the bags next to me and offered to share his blanket. The three of us, Jesus, the stranger, and I huddled together under the blanket, grateful for the body heat. The men slept. I watched the stars play overhead like a film strip, interspersed with overhanging eucalyptus branches, and I breathed the air of the moment: cold, tinged slightly with diesel and old wood, dust, and romance.

7 – 19 August

I was nervous about coming back. What do I eat? How do I find pay phones? How can I get around without a car? I tried to practice asking directions in my mind – the words formed in Spanish. Strange, this time around, I didn’t hit that point in the trip where I felt glad to be going home soon. Up to my final days in Huaraz, I was still wandering the streets and visiting friends and forgetting, completely, that I should be saying goodbyes. I spent a lot of time talking to people, asking questions, trying to draw some conclusions about what I’ve seen and learned. What separates Peru from the first world? I asked. What is halting the process of development? Juan, an older man I met in the Plaza de Armas in Huaraz told me that Peruvians lack knowledge, education. Max, a mountain guide, said that it’s corruption holding them back. It’s there in every layer of government, individuals working for themselves, thinking only of the short-term: national individualism instead of national unity.

Antonieta, the woman who ran the hostel where I was staying, had spent several years living in the United States. One of her sons was born in Miami; the other earned his citizenship with help from his father’s business contacts. The older boy has done two tours in Iraq. It was disorienting to see an “Operation Iraqi Freedom” blanket embroidered with the American flag folded over the back of a chair in her living room. She described the first time a car slowed down and waved her across a busy street in downtown Miami. “Here, they don’t care, they’d run you down.” She loved being greeted by cashiers in US grocery stores, or receiving a simple “hello”, or a smile of acknowledgement from people on the street. “The women in my church – people who didn’t know me, who’d barely met me! They surprised me with a baby shower. I’d been feeling so alone, so overwhelmed at the thought of having another baby in a foreign country. I didn’t know if I should have it at all.” Back in 1970, when she was 10, her parents were killed in a massive earthquake that destroyed Huaraz and surrounding towns. “I was all alone. Not a soul came to help. Not an aunt, or a friend, no one.” Peruvians, Antonieta told me, “lack humanity.”

Good things for me to hear about the States before returning. Good things to remember against my dread. And, like all good encounters, speaking with Antonieta raised more questions for me to consider. What is my role as a traveler from the US? The neutral observer who learns to blend in? Or the bringer of culture and light to the third world? Is it arrogant to imagine myself teaching through examples, such as not throwing trash on the ground, like ceding passage on sidewalks, like smiling and being open and friendly instead of sinking into the surly masses? In the Amazon I wrote that to know a culture one has to live a culture. But has my romantic traveler’s lens blinded me, awed me into imitating behaviors that would appall me in the US?

I spent several days visiting a girl my age named Emely, who worked in the open market, selling jackets imported from Bolivia. From eight to five every day, she sits in the street in front of the rack of coats, haggling with customers, crocheting afghan squares, passing the time with the abuelitas who sell dried corn and flaxseed and other grains next to her. I met Emely when I stopped to talk to the abuelitas; I was looking for someone to teach me a few words in the local Quechua dialect. Emely’s twenty-four, with a three-year-old daughter, and single. And with dreams of traveling to “La India”. “These coats are just for now,” she’d tell me. “I’m from Lima; lots of people in this town are from Lima [the coastal capital of Peru]. If I opened a restaurant, with real food from the coast – you can’t get that here, not good food, well prepared. If you did it right you’d have good business.” She told me about her ex-boyfriend, the father of her daughter. “She will never, never live with him. Even if I have to go to Spain to work and save money, I’ll leave her with my family, or I’ll bring her with me.” The strength of her determination to provide a better life for her daughter, her fears of having to leave her behind to seek better employment, her occasional struggles with depression when life overwhelms her – I heard it all as I sat with her on the cold curbing. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this kind of story from a woman my age, but it still blew me away, each and every time.

Sofia, a Belgian NGO worker living in Huaraz, had suggested that among the women, it’s a sense of self that’s missing. A Peruvian woman of the lower class is the spouse of a, the daughter of b, the mother of x, y, z. “When I asked a group of campesinas what their dreams were, they didn’t understand the question. They thought I wanted to know about what they’d dreamed the night before.” So what about Emely? And Wilson, and the scattered others I came to know who are driven by the strength of their hopes and dreams? How are dreams sown and cultivated? How are they harvested?

I met a young man from Texas at the start of my trip who told me that he believes that those capable of traveling as I do have a responsibility to give back in some way. This idea lingered, and as my encounters became less touristy and more humbling, it returned with a large question mark: how? And is my responsibility to my fellow Americans or to the people I meet as I travel?

I’ve been back in the US for a month now, and the adjusting continues, quicker than I thought possible. Jeni, my Machu Picchu hiking partner, returned to her native North American home several months before I did, and wrote to warn me about “how quickly [the shock] fades and you find yourself buying a coffee that is worth a chicken, a dozen eggs, a bag full of produce, and a massage in Peru.” She’s only exaggerating a little. I’m struggling with our consumer culture, all of the Stuff™ that our economy and lifestyle affords – things I haven’t seen in nine months. This is the point of progress, right? To be able to afford to buy things to make life easier. Wouldn’t Emely jump at the chance to have a washer and a dryer in her own house? Walking with Sian one day in Boston, we noticed a line of people waiting outside a tidy Newbury Street storefront with black awning and pictures of cupcakes with bones crossed underneath. These were young people, trendy, university-types, with hair cut into hard angled shapes to match the plastic jewelry and large square sunglasses covering their faces.  They sat wrapped in fleece blankets in canvas folding chairs, leather-booted feet stretched out and propped up in front of them. Others sprawled on inflatable mattresses and looked up videos on their laptops.  “What are you waiting for?” Sian asked a girl with curly black hair.
“He’s releasing a new t-shirt design,” she responded.
Oh.  Is it free?
“No, no,” she laughed.  “$75.”
How long have you been waiting?
“Since Wednesday.”

This is my culture. Seventy-five dollar t-shirts and leather couches and the $1,000 laptop I’m using to write this blog entry. Now that I’m back, comfortably settled in the belly of the beast, what do I need to do to live up to my responsibility as a traveler? How do I “give back”, as my Texan friend advocated? In the past nine months I’ve lived a different life, an intensely personal one. Traveling alone I’ve internalized everything that I’ve seen and experienced. Now I have to find a way to dig it out and put it in context for the people who ask about my trip. I have to figure out how to teach and show without bragging, to change minds and inspire selflessness without lecturing. And relearn how to live in the United States. And keep in touch with Emely, with Antonieta, Max, and Sofia, to keep the cultural interchange open in anticipation of the day when we find a way to help each other, and maybe even the rest of the world.

The Eduardo VI dropped us at the pier in Lagunas, the town that serves as the entry point for the Reserva Nacional Pacaya Samiria. Here we organized a canoe and two guides and embarked for a four-day canoeing/camping trip into the jungle. During the days, we paddled. Javier and María, our guide and cook, talked over our heads in heavily accented jungle Spanish – a disjointed melody with stops and uplifted notes in an exotic patois. Their voices stayed in my head like a song, working, knocking around until the tune was familiar, pleasant, and I could almost sing along. In moments, our paddles struck the water in perfect unison, propelling us through the quiet, dark water, between narrow river banks overhung with dense greenery. Papagayos (macaws) and parrots exploded from the canopy, feathered fireworks of red, green, blue, yellow. Small yellow butterflies landed on Jesus’ bare back, tasting his sweat. Our guides’ sharp eyes picked out monkeys in the trees and spotted the markings of crocodiles and turtles on the sandy banks. The first day, it rained – poured. I sat in the canoe and tilted my head up, drinking the warm rain, letting it drench me, feeling wild and real and alive. At night, we searched for caimans and hunted the fish that jumped in the shallows, spearing them with a three-pronged lance. We slept on spongy palm branches under tarps and mosquito nets. After dark, we went to the bathroom in pairs, checking the ground and branches carefully for spiders and snakes before squatting. I fell asleep every night listening to the whooping of the frogs and counting the flashes of the lightning bugs flickering through the dark trees. This is the Amazon, the real deal: there are trees that walk, and other trees that kill, clinging with their roots to a healthy trunk like a giant squid wraps its tentacles around a ship, squeezing, strangling, subsuming.

There’s a potent magic in the jungle. Primitive, elemental, it stirs something deep in our bodies, something we already know but have forgotten the words for. Jesus and I returned to Lagunas enchanted. Time passed differently. I caught myself drifting, waking after minutes, hours; four more days slipped through our fingers. We spent hours at “the beach”, and more hours in the town’s only bar, drinking cold beer and watching the heat shimmer on the packed dirt of the main street. There was lots of walking barefoot and playing volleyball in the street with the same group of kids, every afternoon at four. There was nothing to do and so much time to do it in, but no one ever seemed bored. Different to the culture of the States: Do MORE in LESS time – IMMEDIATELY!! Life is simple: simple foods, rice, eggs, fish, bananas, and yucca, simple homes with dirt floors that still need to be swept, hammocks instead of beds. And yet, in the month I spent in the jungle, I saw more people laughing, more smiling and joking, more families at ease: more enjoyment.

I took a lot of pictures. The town of Lagunas is incredibly photogenic, the grass and trees are tall and bright green-yellow against the blue and green houses and the dirt streets that look golden in the baking midday sun. A girl moves through the grass with a bucket of water on her head, a toddler walking at her side. Women use machetes to chop at the grass in front of their houses. Half-naked boys stand on the gunwales of their canoes, leaf-shaped paddles in hand. A fisherman hauls his nets across the river, shouting and stamping his feet to scare off the pink river dolphins that circle his catch. The realization that came to me was simple, but powerful. These images, these faces and scenes in front of me are real. Not from the pages of magazines, romantic, exotic, staged, or contrived. This is life. These people don’t know that they’re beautiful, that what they’re doing is special or photogenic. It’s just life. It’s just the jungle.

Just.

15 July – 6 August

On the Jeisawell.
I rock in my hammock on the second deck next to Jesus, a tall, bearded hippie from the Canary Islands. We met in Pantoja, the only two gringos crazy enough to attempt this trip. We talked as we waited for the launch to depart, about traveling, about dreams. I mentioned Antarctica. Jesus raised his eyebrows, then grinned. “I don’t know you yet, but I think I’m going to like you.” Outside, the world is divided into three horizontal layers: brown water, green trees, blue sky. This, no more, and the air in between so thick it sticks in my lungs and between my teeth. Except for the diesel roar of the engine, the world is smooth, soft, and beautiful. And then the boat stops. The square prow slams against the bank, the crew swarms over the edge and onto the shore, the captain shouts instructions. Dark skinned villagers emerge from the banana trees pulling blindfolded water buffaloes on ropes. Bunches of green bananas are hefted from shoulder to shoulder, bags of rice and peanuts too. Swearing and sweating under the weight of the cargo, the men wrest screaming pigs onto their backs, haul them aboard by the legs, tails, ears and cram them into their pen next to the engine; ducks and chickens are passed up to the roof and stuffed into bamboo cages head first. The action carries on into the night, and for the next four days, the cargo – human, vegetable, and animal – growing with every stop.

At the start, there were six hammocks on the second deck. By day three, Jesus counted thirty-eight. Strings overlap and intertwine; it’s impossible to move without jostling someone. Families sleep four to a hammock; chickens and turtles rustle and coo in woven bags among the piles of luggage. A pet parrot climbs up and down the hammock ropes. Little kids run and duck between the hanging bodies, grabbing randomly for balance. Below, the pigs fight and root and scream between towering stacks of bananas and lengths of bamboo. The engine bellows and spits and spilled diesel floats on the water like sooty marbles. At the back of the cargo deck is the bathroom, a dark closet with a seatless metal toilet and a water tap overhead to shower. Water sloshes around the floor and drips from the walls, and there’s a bucket of water with a scoop to flush the toilet which I’m pretty sure empties directly into the river. Next to the bathroom the cook, Carlos, sweats barefoot in his tiny cement kitchen, cooking rice and bananas and meat for our three meals a day. To wash the meat (wild boar or chicken) he scoops a bucketful of brown water from the back of the ship and squats over it to scrub, then empties the bloody waste water directly onto the floor, where it mingles with the water from the bathroom and eventually washes back over the edge into the river. Women scrub clothing in the same space off the back. I gasped in pain the first time I saw a plastic bottle pitched over the side, followed by a dirty diaper. Then a plate of food scraps and greasy napkins. Then I quietly bound up my environmental conscience and spat my toothpaste into the river alongside everybody else. To know a culture, one has to live the culture. Judgment halts the learning process. The bones and food scraps, at least, the piranhas will eat.

Sunrise: tiny, searing, and orange, seen through a loose jigsaw of clouds over a great distance. Jesus and I watched from the roof as we ate breakfast: tacachos, huge balls of banana dough, mashed with cooked onions and garlic and salt, simple and delicious, and served with thick, sweetened milk and oatmeal. We’d been warned about the questionable sanitation on the boat, and had brought supplies to feed ourselves for the four days, but curiosity and an unwillingness to be those snobby gringos mastered our fears of stomach infections. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I reasoned, and I ate what Carlos scooped into my tupperware bowl. As the light of day grew on the horizon, so did the heat, slowly but insistently, until midday, when being hot became an activity that required all of my attention. The passengers lay in their hammocks, eyes closed, paralyzed by the heat. A few scraps of a tabloid newspaper were passed around. The roosters crowed ceaselessly from the roof. I wandered the decks taking pictures and I could feel the eyes of the cargo boys following me. I offered to show them the shots I was taking, and suddenly I had an audience. They crowded around, mesmerized by the instant replay of the digital screen. I handed the camera off to a couple of them, showed them how to use it, enjoying their excitement as they snapped pictures of each other then hurried to see how they looked on the small screen. Seeing the images they chose to capture with my camera was like being allowed to sit behind their eyes for a minute, to see the world with their same focus.

We stopped at one village located away from the main flow of the river. The water of the tributary was a clear, dark green, and as Jesus and I stood on the deck, roasting in the midday sun, Sofia, one of the women who worked on the boat, suggested a swim. The wharf was a temporary structure, made of massive floating tree logs chained together, waiting to be floated downstream to the sawmill in Iquitos. I walked across them, balancing against the pitch and roll of the trunks. Later, I would stand on a pile of sawdust in Iquitos and watch other hundred-year-old trees like these being turned into boards and chips. This was the closest I came to the old growth Amazon jungle. The water was smooth, cool, and delicious on my hot, two-days unbathed skin as I swam in place against the strong current, like a water treadmill. Sofia followed us out and took a sponge bath from the edge of the tree-wharf, lathering then rinsing, the white foam bubbles drifting down the tributary to mingle with the brown water of the Napo’s main flow.

Arriving in Iquitos after four days on the river is like landing in the middle of a dream. Houses float in the harbor with bright yellow walls and blue roofs. A hundred dugout canoes paddle between massive, sparkling oil rigs and sagging fishing boats. Jesus and I climb the stairs from the port to the street, passing through a hazy indoor marketplace. Yellow light filters through the open windows and catches in the dust and the thousand shouting voices that stir the exotic, steamy air. We pass through in our bandannas and sandals, four days of sweat and river water on our sunburned skin, and we are one with the teeming crowd. My eyes are full, my shirt is sticking to my back, and I feel like a traveler in the third world. Iquitos itself is una locura, a crazy thing, the largest city in the world inaccessible by roads: a jungle in the middle of the jungle, a city of 400,000 people and 76,000 motorbikes. It is impossible to hold a conversation on the street. The bikes move in hordes, lining up five and six across at the stoplights, revving their engines. On the edge of the city, the stilted shanties of Belén lean over the muddy river banks. It’s the dry season, and the famous floating houses are grounded on their wooden raft-like foundations, warped and slanted and waiting for the winter rains to raise the river and lift the houses. The hotel that Jesus and I find overlooks the ghetto, and beyond it, the low river. In the evenings, tiny lights glow from below and smoke from five thousand cook fires rises in the faint breeze off the low river and blows up the hill into the city proper.

Lives are lived in the open in the jungle. Chairs are hauled out onto the sidewalks, TVs, dining tables. The buses have no windows. Passengers in the moto-taxis can wave and converse with each other across the lanes. Everyone, everything is visible. One night, traveling across the city, I leaned on my elbow out of the window of the bus, into the heady sunset air, watching the families in front of their houses as we sped past. Children running, a couple embracing. A woman bathing at the public water tap, shampoo running from her hair over her wet clothing. Two girls poring over a love letter, men shaking hands over a table. A smile, a look, a movement. Women rest their chins on their hands on the window frames and a teenager rocks backward in his chair in the doorway, a serious man studies a test booklet. One hundred stories in one hundred seconds.

Two things Jesus and I did with our time in the city. One was to spend three days with the Cupay Peña family, members of one of the indigenous tribes of the jungle near Iquitos. We ate at their table, slept under their roof, and watched the flow of their life: cooking and cleaning, occasional trips to the city in the peke peke (the slow-moving motorized canoe), fishing, school, and visits from the community’s shaman. Andres, the one-year-old grandson, wasn’t sleeping. It might be an evil spirit, they told us. The shaman sat in the kitchen, ate a fried fish at the table, and then held the child on his lap, smoking a pungent, hand rolled cigarette and blowing the smoke over the boy’s skin and head to cleanse him, whispering to the child with one breath, exchanging a joke with the mother in the next. The family wore ordinary clothes, watched telenovelas (soap operas) at night, behaved like a family anywhere in the world, but their energy was something different, something more in tune with the jungle on their doorstep. This plant cures this ailment, one would explain. Hear that bird? It’ll rain tonight, another pointed. Serenity flowed through the wooden house with the open walls.

The other thing we did was visit Belén, the floating ghetto. It was like walking into a dream. And as in dreams, better not to ask questions or pass judgment, better just to observe. Even with eyes wide open, I saw some things and wished I didn’t see others, understood parts but often couldn’t grasp that the things I was seeing were real. The filth was unbelievable, indescribable. I watched black scavenging birds circling the reeking stream beds between the houses, diving into the floating piles of refuse along the riverfront. At the port, shirtless, barefoot men staggered across rickety plank bridges carrying two hundred pound bags of rice on their shoulders. Others lugged wooden crates of pineapples and papayas on their backs, the weight of the fruit supported only by a strap around their forehead. Necks bowed at forty-five degrees, tendons popping, stomach muscles writhing under sweaty brown skin. Their jaws clenched, their eyes focused only one step ahead. In the market, the wealth and the irony of the region are plainly displayed: bananas, fish, and fruit pour into the city, every day of the week, a non-stop harvest, and in the alleys between the stilted houses, children go hungry. I watched people shitting into the brown water, tossing bags of trash off of barges, mothers pouring buckets of water over naked children on the beach fronts.

I watched my values lose their meaning. To the people who live at the waterline, the jungle and the river are not important for their beauty. They are resources: jobs, money, and transport. Developing a sustainable way of life in harmony with the environment takes money and energy that the people of Belén don’t have and that the government of Perú isn’t willing to spend. It’s more profitable to keep drilling for oil, chopping down trees, dynamiting for fish and over-planting cash crops like rice and sugarcane. Conservation is a luxury, a ludicrous gringo imposition. No wonder they look at us as they do. A wry grin here, a turned back, a shy wave or a shout of “Hello!” full of bravado from a gang of teenage boys in a doorway. How we must seem to them, we foreigners. Whatever our intentions are, whatever we tell ourselves, whatever reasons we give for being there and however appropriately sympathetic we feel afterwards, the truth is that we are exactly as we seem: rich gawkers. I’ve never felt so off balance, so muted. I struggled with a moral vertigo, as my eyes continued to observe and to record.

The four days on the cargo boat, then the ciudad loca, Iquitos and its floating ghetto, Belén, and time with the Cupay Peñas: this was the beginning.  Next, another boat ride into another village, and a camping trip in the Reserva Nacional Pacaya Samiria.

As usual: too much. And all of it far too delicious to spoil by rushing. Oh no. This dish has to stay in the pot til it’s good and done. But perhaps this will whet your appetite.

A month in the jungle:

- four days living in a hammock on a boat on a river in the Amazon!

- arriving in the largest city in the world accessible only by water and air!

- eating a kilo of fruit every day for breakfast, and a different kind of fish every day for dinner!

- learning to shoot tribal blow darts while wearing traditional clothing!

- showering in the rain!

- shitting in the river!

- being devoured by mosquitoes and having a crocodile pee on my hand!

- floating houses and pink dolphins!

- and magic…

Oh, so much magic that I’m having a hard time fitting it all on one plate. At the moment, I’m in Chachapoyas, Perú. I’ve just finished a week of trekking around several pre-Inca ruins, and am slowly making my way to the coast, via Celendín and Cajamarcas. I could write about all that, but every time I sit in front of the computer, the words I write keep circling back to the jungle. I’m caught up in the mists and vines and lost in the green. I’ll try to cut loose soon, but I’m not making any promises.

¡Viva la Amazonía!

Two weeks after writing my last blog entry, here I sit, back in Perú, the month and a half spent in Ecuador a brief blip on the radar of my memory, an excellent interlude, but wedged so tightly between the wonders of the Peruvian mountains and jungle that it’s hard to truly savor, like a thin slice of mild cheese between two slabs of hearty seed bread.  Alison, the little sister, had been studying in Quito, Ecuador on an exchange program since February, living with a local family and making weekend trips with her class to cloud forests and the Galapagos Islands.  June was her last month in the country, and I showed up on the first to share it with her.  Alison was my city guide, teaching me to use the public transit system and orienting me so I could find my way back home.  I watched with pride the ease with which she navigated the city, always three steps ahead of me, confident, fearless, direct.  In the evenings, after classes and homework, we talked, shared photos, watched DVDs.  We took a weekend trip to the famous artisan market at Otavalo, and she brought me to La Esperanza, a tiny mountain town where an afternoon fog drifted between the eucalyptus trees and the cobblestone streets.  One afternoon we climbed to the top of the tower in the city’s basilica, and another weekend we spent at a friend’s cabin outside of the city, riding horses and dancing late into the night with the local boys.  The stress of finals and a busy university schedule restricted our excursions, but I was happy just to be there, to experience a bit of Ecuador at my sister’ side, and even more happy to learn more about the vibrant young woman that my little sister is becoming.

For a week or so I tramped around the central highlands south of Quito.  I summitted El Corazón (4790m) and hitchhiked into the Parque Nacional de Cotopaxi and slept in the refugio (4800m) on the edge of the volcano’s glaciated cap (5897m – Ecuador’s 2nd highest).  The altitude had begun to wear on me, and for once in my life, the peak didn’t tempt me.  I nestled in my sleeping bag in the kitchen area and talked to the ice-encrusted climbers as they returned, one after another, foiled in their summit attempts by high winds and fresh snow.  Breathing the icy air as I crossed the frozen volcanic rocks to reach the separate bathroom, I remembered Antarctica.  Recently, everything reminds me of that place.

In the city, and on the mountain tops, Ecuadorian culture was elusive, distant.  I missed the closeness to the people I’d had in Perú.  Ecuador is much smaller, the size of Colorado, and three fourths of the population lives in less than half of the land.  It feels more crowded; the hills are patchwork quilts of farmlands, whereas in Perú there are more trees, more uninhabited spaces.  The predominately cement construction lends the countryside an unfinished look.  Re-bar spikes protrude from the roofs, and roofless or windowless houses stand empty.  Pollution clings to the walls, staining them dingy gray to match the perpetually cloudy skies.  Winter means rain in the highlands.  As I moved south from the capital and down from the alpine region, however, the country gradually opened up to me.  There were more days of sunshine.  I discovered the market in Latacunga.  I learned a few words of Ecuadorian Quichua, caught some rides with local families.  Sebastien, a Frenchman I’d met in Quito, caught up with me in Latacunga, and together we traced a six-day circuit through several small towns in the western Andean foothills.  It was a smaller, less remote version of my adventure in Perú with Wilson, and here more than anywhere else, I felt like I was finally experiencing Ecuador.

The market at Saquisilí, the one that began with a bang, or rather the clatter of hooves on the roof, was the other highlight of our circuit.  We wandered through the animal market, watching the interactions, the bartering, the posturing, and the exchanging of wads of greenbacks for the tethered, terrified sheep, goats, cows, llamas, pigs and their young.  Cuys (guinea pigs) and chickens chirped in net bags on the ground and herbs and grasses lay in huge piled hedges to be navigated.  The rest of the market spread across four different plazas and spilled over into the streets and alleyways.  Under tents and behind booths, men, women, and children hawked their wares.  Fresh butchered meat, health drinks, veggies, fruits, fried fish.  Grains and pastas in great sacks, spices in colorful piles.  Enormous cauldrons of soup and rice and boiled chickens.  Utensils for the kitchen, the office, the car, the bathroom; things for cleaning, locking, organizing, decorating, chopping, storing, and hauling.  Shoes, clothes, jewelry in piles, batteries and pens held out between arms draped with shoelaces and ribbons.  Pickpockets and shoeshine boys and beggars plied the crowd.  Uniformed ice cream salesmen raised their voices to compete with the aproned “gelatina” ladies.  And everywhere, the crowd of buyers, indigenous and modern, the purposeful and the gawkers, dodging, ducking and weaving, mingling in a tapestry of culture and commerce.

Day fifteen: Mawayani (4050m – 13,200ft), a tiny village northeast of Cusco, the starting point for the three-day pilgrimage/festival in the name of Señor Qoyllur-ritti (coy-or-REE-tee) de la Nieve.  The town’s two dirt streets were a sea of temporary blue tarp shelters and buses.  Wilson and I, joined by Maxi (a twenty-year-old German, tall, lanky, blonde), merged with the current of people who streamed through the town and up the dry, steep hillside behind, toward the encampment where the festival would begin.  The entire world was on the trail, with supplies piled high on horses, mules, and in mantas on the backs of men, women, and children.  Women wore traditional, bright, embroidered skirts and vests, layers and layers of wool, with flat-top hats held on with beaded chin straps.  As the night drew on they added blankets, piles of them, until they resembled walking clothes heaps.

Spectacularly situated, in a natural amphitheater at the base of the sacred glacier, the base camp was heaving.  8,000 people, Wilson estimated.  We arrived as the sun was disappearing behind the steep sides of the valley and the cold bite of nighttime above 4300m settled in.  Wilson, Maxi and I hurried to set up our tents, then worked our way through the crowd to the heart of the camp.  Lining the wide principle pathway, under blue tarps and between low stone walls, cave like temporary “restaurants” were wedged.  Alongside and in between sat the vendors, ensconced in their wares, candles, blankets, rosaries, banners, gloves, whips, hats and plastic keychain idols.  Women sat in front of huge cauldrons, pouring coffee or selling tamales and candy apples.  Smoke from a hundred different cooking fires burned my eyes.  Tents crowded the edge of the main thoroughfare and climbed the sides of the valleys.  Horses and mules grazed in between, and kids ran to collect water from the icy streams that ran from the peaks.  Firecrackers exploded from all sides, the smoking sticks dropping among the crowd.  Where there weren’t tents or food stalls, there were people, camped under blankets and bits of plastic, among the rock walls.  Candles blazed in front of makeshift shrines, flowers littered the streets.

And then there was the music.  The festival revolves around the dancers, 2,000 strong and in costumes, and each group of twenty with its own band.  These are the men and women (mostly men) who are imbued with the power of the holy Señor for the three days of the festival, worshiping through their dancing, purging themselves of their sins, exhausting themselves in the thin air in the name of their Andean lord.  The ground shook with the beat of a hundred different drums, sang with the melodies of a hundred tubas, accordions, trumpets and flutes.  The various tunes hung thick in the air, clashing and mingling, swirling above and around dancers who paraded in groups up and down the street.  The pilgrims are Christians, but the Christianity of the Andes has long been intertwined with the ancient traditions of the Inca, and the resulting rituals are complicated and unique.  Sequins, feathers, masks, capes, ribbons and flags spun around us like a color wheel, shades developing and evolving as the dancers leapt and bowed and sang.  Shouting men in long tunics hung with black and red string led the processions.  These were the pabruchas, the jefes, the festival police.  Whistles between their teeth and whips in hand, their faces flushed and serious, they directed the dancers and pushed the crowd to make way, take off your hats, kneel!  The event was all-encompassing; the sound and energy rolled and bounced between the valley walls, rising even to the stars in the clear sky above.

There was frost on the tent at four AM as Wilson, Maxi and I pried ourselves out of our warm sleeping bags to climb to the base of the glacier.  The music and the dancers had carried on through the night, and were already well ahead of us.  By the time we reached the top of the moraine wall, the majority of the dancers had already paid their respects to the god of the ice.  We watched as the last two groups carefully marched up the face of the glacier, their stalwart musicians following behind.  No one wore crampons.  The sharp, rocky walls around the ice were ringed with the faithful and the curious alike, held at a distance from the ceremony by the whips of the pabruchas.  Only the dancers are allowed to touch the sacred ice, but a few determined souls managed to climb up onto the edge of the glacier and snap a quick picture before the red-and-black clad jefes came skidding after them, whistling frantically and cracking their whips against the calves of the offenders while the crowd jeered and shouted, “¡Dale! ¡Dale!” (give it to ‘em!!).  The last group finished their prayer, and as they descended, the rest of the dancers formed lines behind their flag bearers and in a renewed burst of music, began processing back to the base camp.  The pabruchas ran ahead of the lines, whistling and shouting, herding the spectators down the steep, slippery incline.  Dangerous?  Of course.  But we ran anyway.

It was impossible to move back through the main street of the camp except to move with the crowd.  From above it looked like a rolling sea of colors and flags, and the noise of the celebration was even louder than the night before, exploding from mouths and horns and pounding against the walls of the rock amphitheater.  This is when the pilgrimage truly began.  We left camp at noon, joining the musicians, mules, and mantas flowing away from Mawayani, above the base camp, heading for the mountains on the other side of the valley.  We hiked under clear skies, across the grassy brown highland with its protruding black rocks and muddy tarns, and after three hours arrived at the secondary base camp.  Smaller, the pilgrimage now reduced to about 3,000 diehard followers, the energy and sound nonetheless remained high.  Wilson and I set up the tent and tried to sleep a bit, while the music and explosions continued on all sides.  The beat of the drums vibrated through my earplugs, and the repetitive melodies wrapped themselves around the wrinkles in my brain.  I dozed as the sky grew darker, floating in a limbo of recollection and realization, the spirit of the festival stirring odd memories.  A crash of thunder far louder than the fireworks shocked me out of my half-sleep, seconds before the sky opened up and emptied itself of ten million perfectly round dime-sized hailstones.  By nine the sky was clear again and the moon was full, with pinpricks of stars showing through the deep purple ether.  Wilson, Maxi and I were among the last to leave the camp.  In the distance we saw the lights of the dancers and cross bearers.  Music drifted back faintly.  The moon was bright enough to cast shadows and illuminate the path, and slowly, slowly we progressed.

At midnight we reached the highest point - 5,000m (16,400ft) - and caught up with the main body of the pilgrimage.  The cross, draped in orange feathers and embroidered fabrics, had been laid down among the rocks atop the pass, where the faithful placed candles and offerings of flowers before kneeling to make their requests.  For prayers to be fulfilled, the adherents of the cross must return to make this pilgrimage three consecutive times.  People rested on the icy rocks nearby, and again the dancers took turns spinning and singing in lines in front of the representative of their Señor.  Maxi reheated the nearly frozen coca tea from my Nalgene bottle while Wilson watched the dancers and I pounded my fists on my thighs to keep warm.  I taught the guys my Antarctic “stay warm dance”, and we shared the tea, holding the bottle close to our chests to absorb every degree of its heat.

The festival reached a quiet point.  Although the bands kept playing and the walkers kept up their chanting, the cold and the exhaustion lowered the tone, subdued it somewhat.  In the half-darkness, and the icy unearthly glow of the moon, I lost track of Wilson and Maxi, and walked alone, passing and mingling with clusters of worshippers, some walking with musicians, others pausing to rest around campfires, kindled with wood hauled from Mawayani.  I saw the cross being carried, passed from the shoulders of one man to another in regular intervals.  The lead pabrucha blessed each new bearer before he continued slowly among the crowd of reverent supporters. They held tall, flickering candles and called to each other, ”Chakeeri, chakeeri, hiyo-hiyo-hiyo,” (move your legs, keep going, don’t stop, keep moving).  The mountains, in the cold hours after midnight, so rarely seen by human eyes, seemed to become larger, darker, and radiated an overpowering energy that I could feel in every step.  Behind me, the sky flickered with silent lightning, and vicious fingers of stronger bolts traced lines in the low mushroom cloud of the storm that had already passed.  Cold, and then colder still, we walked.

As the trail began to descend, the mountainside dropped away in front of me.  The snowy peaks of Ausangate (the 6th highest peak in Perú) and its surrounding nevados dominated the entire western horizon, rising above the thick clouds that swathed the valley below, glinting in the light of the full moon.  Here, on the edge was another resting place for the cross.  People were scattered across the frozen ground, musicians and dancers waiting for the cross, pilgrims asleep under tarps and blankets.  It was pure Dante: Paradiso, Purgatorio, and Inferno, fitted together in one epic scene.  The stars and heavens and the Apus (mountain gods); the marchers, carrying weights and whips in penance; the sea of unfortunates, shivering in an endless night.  And Wilson, Maxi and I in the roles of Dante and Virgil, the onlookers.  From here, it was a slippery hour downhill on the frosty path to Tayancani, where the whole company would gather to wait for the sunrise.  Arriving at three AM, I pulled out my sleeping bag and arranged a rough bed next to Wilson and Maxi, on the crest of a hill, facing east.  Two, three hours later, I woke as if from the dead.  The sky was lightening, and the world stirred around me.  A man with a kettle and tin cups ran past, selling hot, sweet coffee at 50 centimos a cup.  I woke up Wilson, flagged down the coffee man, and then sat in my heavily frosted sleeping bag, grinning at the world and marvelling at my being in it.

People milled about everywhere, waking, dressing, eating, the costumed dancers grouping in a line across the crest of the hill as they finish preparing.  A few whistle-toting jefes cracked their whips meaningfully in our direction as the line of dancers grew, and Wilson, Maxi and I were quick to break camp.  The cross was placed in the center of the costumed celebrants who danced in place in the line that now stretched from one side of the valley to the other, as far as the eye could see.  Three and four people deep in places, thick like an Incan wall, the column hummed with anticipation, energy, devotion and faith as it built, rising to a crescendo that was cut off just before the climax.  Ten seconds before the sun crested the horizon, everything stopped.  The world dropped to its knees, held its breath, and goosebumps lifted the hair on my arms.  And then the sun, Inti.  After the long night of cold, exhausting efforts, the culmination was a wave of transcendent power that washed over the entire valley.  No longer about God or Señor Qoyllur-ritti or any church, but rather a manifestation of the unfathomable energy of the universe itself.

This was Day seventeen (without rest!) for Wilson and me.  We marked it at sunrise before descending the last three kilometers among the pilgrims in a wild, colorful dance to the finish.  Seventeen days, from our first rice-with-eggs and nearly-killed pig in Cachora, to the lessons learned in Quechua and in life, to the hours in the back of the coffee truck, to these final, jubliant moments below the snowy face of Ausangate.  This was my Perú – different, stunning, awe-inspiring.  Excellent.

The first five days, we hiked up, then down, then up, then down.  River valley to river valley, straight up and over the peaks in between, descending 1000m then climbing 1000m.  Like climbing over a 4,000-footer in the White Mountains, without switchbacks.  Straight up, then straight back down the other side in one day, five days in a row.  Unlike in New Zealand, the rivers at the bottom of these valleys were crossed once, easily, with a rough log bridge, then forgotten.  No trails meandering along the valley bottoms, circumnavigating the hills in the middle – we traveled direct, and at an average altitude of 3300m (10,800ft).  It’s impossible to talk about the trip without dwelling on the elevation.  Our maps were poor and we didn’t have an altimeter, but with every step, I knew that we were high.  My lungs knew it and my heart beat out protests in Morse code.  Up, up, up, then down, down, down.

In between breaths, Wilson taught me words in Quechua, the language of the locals.  We’re passing through their land, he reasoned.  We should speak their language.
“How are you: imaynalla cashanky,” he’d prompt.
“Ee-la-mayna…eee-ya-llama…how was that again?”
“Imaynalla cashanky.  And the response: aliyammi cashany, I’m fine, thanks for asking.”
“One phrase at a time!” I’d protest, and put one foot in front of the other and pant the unfamiliar syllables like a mantra.

We carried no food, only a bit of bread, cheese, fruit and nuts, and I brought my emergency jar of peanut butter and a spoon.  Our meals Wilson begged and bartered from the campesinos who lived along our route.  On the third night, I sat next to Wilson on a wooden bench inside a tiny mud and thatch hut.  On the rickety table in front of us, our hostess placed two bowls heaped with rice, runny fried eggs and boiled yuca root.  Nodding to us that we should start eating, she settled back on her low stool next to the cook fire, tucked her skirts between her legs, and poked another branch between the rocks, sending a fresh wave of smoke into the already thick air.  I took a pinch of salt from the bowl and applied it liberally to the egg before mixing the bright yolk into the rice.  Starved at the end of a long day’s walking, the simple carb-and-protein blast made my stomach sing.  The white, potato-like yuca was dry and starchy, but with a thin layer of salt, delicious.  Satisfied, I leaned back against the wall and sighed.  Straw fibers from the mud bricks tickled the back of my neck, and a curious cuy (guinea pig) startled me as he brushed against my toe, cooing and burbling to his brothers, huddled in the corners of the small cook hut.  The only light came from the small fire, dim, but enough to make out the shapes of the family sitting by the fire, watching us eat.  I felt shy under their gaze, a gringa, wearing in my synthetic-down jacket and head lamp.  When the daughter stood up to clear our bowls and serve tea from the kettle, Wilson nudged me insistently under the table.  “Practice your new language!” he said in English.  “Sool-pie-coo-ee,” thank you, I murmured to the daughter, who froze and looked up from her pouring.  My stomach fluttered and I tried again, “Ee-mahn-soo-tee-kee?”  What’s your name?  She turned to her parents, and the three began to chatter excitedly.  “They want to know where you learned to speak Quechua,” Wilson translated.  Suddenly I was under the spotlight.  I blushed, my eyes watering from the smoke, excited, overwhelmed by a sense of unreality.  They asked me questions.  I could barely get the answers out.  I smiled nervously and tried to breath.  What was I afraid of?  How different these people are?  How much I stood out?  They laughed at my poor attempts at Quechua phrases, but Wilson beamed, proud of his “gringa”, showing me off.  “They love you now,” he assured me.

Three days later we crossed the next pass, Abra Choquetacarpo, 4500m (14,700ft).  It was cold and I was having a hard time breathing.  My senses were on overdrive; every step registered: soft squishing mud, the brush of dew-soaked tussock blades against my leg.  Every blink, every breath had its own savor, and everything I saw sent my mind zooming back through the people and places of the last three years.  New Zealand: Graham, Jasmine, Dr. Gonzo, Lumir, Aussie Bob, long solo hikes when I felt invincible; Antarctica: André, all the good and all the bad; Wyoming: Cal, the Tetons, Jan.  Chile and Argentina and Patagonia and the recent days with Wilson.  Rich, I whispered to myself.  As if here in Perú I’ve finally stored up enough experiences to recognize it.  Rich.

On the other side of the pass, I skipped alongside Wilson on the long Inca road.  It’s seven feet high, five feet wide, a smooth stone highway built into the rocks on the side of the valley, built to speed along the Inca chaskis (foot messengers).  The even white line of the road stretched out ahead of us, and our conversation wound around to become a monologue: Wilson dreams of traveling the world - wants it so bad he can taste it – but money and family problems weigh on him like sandbags on a hot air balloon.  I listened, impressed by his determination and maturity (he’s three years younger than me), and at the same time humbled by the sudden, clear realization of how easy I have it.  I listened, but something in my head was breaking free.  All the times I’ve talked about how money’s not necessary to live, bragged about my minimal living expenses.  How easy, how trite, when you don’t have medical debts or a family to support.  Every moment I’ve spent whining about “too many options”.  I want to bury those thoughts, erase them from existence.  An abstract vision of what my future might be spun around in my head, something rattled and clicked into place.

Two days we spend in Huancacalle, the first town we’ve seen since leaving Cachora a week ago.  It’s one dirt road, lined with whitewashed adobe houses, but there are two or three hole-in-the-wall shops where we buy bread and cheese and bananas through the grated door, and a hostel with electric hot water in the outdoor showers.  It’s Sunday, Mother’s Day, and we wait in line at the top of the hill to use the town’s one telephone so that Wilson can call his mum.  A tiny, baseball-cap wearing woman serves us dinner and breakfast in her kitchen.  The plastic chairs and stained tablecloth, the bare light bulb that hangs over our head, the sink where she turns a tap to run water and rinse our dishes, these are unspeakable luxuries after the past week of smoky bamboo shacks.  Dinner is beef loin, with rice and tomato slices.  Breakfast is the same, with fried trout instead of beef, and black coffee to follow instead of tea.  Our hostess has a silver-rimmed fake tooth and a bright, smiling face that she has to keep uplifted when she talks to us; she barely comes up to my chest.  She, Wilson, and the man who works with her keep up a running commentary while we eat, about me, excluding me.  I’ve spoken Spanish to them, even tried out my Quechua, but I’m a gringa, and our hosts insist on believing that I understand nothing.  It’s harmless, joking, but I feel trapped by my appearance, accent, and culture.  They won’t look past the stereotype.  Still, I like this woman, with her electric laugh, and her efficient way of chopping washing talking cooking all at the same time.

And on the eighth day, it rained.  Wilson and I crossed our final pass in a cloud, a few hours along the road from Huancacalle, a mere 3700m (12,000ft).  The wind whipped the cold rain into our faces.  Three local women passed us as we stopped to dig out our heavy rain jackets and warmer layers.  They carried large bundles on their backs in their traditional, colorful mantas.  Pausing a few steps beyond us, they reached over their shoulders to pull bits of plastic out of the top of their bundles, which they wrapped around their shoulders like capes.  Rain pooled on their wide-brimmed felt hats and their sandaled feet squelched in the red mud as they smiled at us and kept walking.  After about seven hours, our easy, well-graded road petered out in the middle of a lush, green hill.  Houses dotted the hillside and the heavy clouds trailed between tall eucalyptus trees.  Pampaconas.  A chorus of little kids appeared out of nowhere and extended shy hands to wish us “buenas tardes.”  I passed out pieces of hard candy and gum, bought for the purpose in Hunacacalle.  The younger kids were terrified, and I was too, a little.  We sat in another tiny, smoky cook hut to wait for our rice with eggs and potatoes.  The woman cooking for us squatted on a cinder block while she scooped hot oil over the eggs.  When she stood up to pull down bowls from the shelf, I could see a tiny white cuy sleeping under her skirts inside her cinder block seat.  Outside, kids played with our bags.  One of the braver boys poked his head into the smoke and held out my adjustable walking stick.  “What is this for?”  Wilson grinned.  “For killing bears.”  The boy shrieked with glee and ran out again, shouting to his friends.  The rain closed in again before we left, and I hugged my arms to my chest in the sheltered doorway of the cook hut, steeling myself.  I noticed one small boy sitting in the doorway opposite, playing quietly in the mud with his bare big toe.  A pink knitted hat dwarfed his thin, dirty face.  Out of the rain, but not the cold, the boy’s nose was running, and he watched us, the strangers, with huge eyes.  Wilson made him laugh, teasing the chickens, and I resolved never, ever to complain about anything again.

Below Pampaconas, we follow a river we don’t know the name of, through countryside we don’t have a map for.  Directions are asked of the men and women we pass on the trail.  It’s the harvest season, and mule trains pass us, carrying potatoes down to the river, corn up into the mountains.  “Chht…chht…hup, chhhhht,” the campesinos blow through their teeth to keep the animals moving, flicking small sticks and long pieces of grass against the mule’s flanks.  They pause to clasp our hands and say hello as we pass, their deeply lined faces turned upwards in easy, sometimes toothless smiles.  Half-chewed coca leaves tucked into their cheeks distort the sides of their faces and turn their smiles green.  The women wear multiple layers of skirts and sweaters, and under their hats, their hair hangs in long braids down their backs.  The men wear jeans and t-shirts with incongruous slogans in English.  Everyone wears rubber sandals made from recycled tires.  Cracked heels and dirt-crusted toenails testify to years spent working hard in the chakras and running the trails behind the mules.  My Quechua is improving, and draws laughter and occasional confusion from children and adults alike.  I am repeatedly struck with awareness – where I am, what I’m doing - like a bolt of lightning, grounding me in the moment.  I’m absorbing knowledge faster than I can process it.  I’m trying not to romanticize what I’m seeing, I’m trying to understand it and be a part of it, but it’s impossible for me to blend in, and I’m uncertain of my role and how to relate.  My culture is a filter; everything I see and think is run through twenty-five years of life as a US citizen.

On day thirteen, when we rode out of the jungle and into Kiteni, my eyes bulged at the site of pavement, cement sidewalks and internet cafes.  Wilson steered us toward the outdoor mercado for a late dinner.  The meat and french fries were served out of an industrial sized pot that sat over a portable gas burner.  One month in Perú, two weeks in the boondocks, and this was normal: eating dinner at a bench in front of a “restaurant” strapped to the front of a bicycle vending aparatus.  We’d arrived with about thirty other people in the back of a truck loaded with sacks of raw coffee beans.  Coffee grows wild in the jungle, and the villagers who live close enough to the road harvest the beans to sell.  Those who don’t, pick it, roast it, and grind it in their own huts for their families - and serve it to the rare gringa passerby.  ¡Riquisimo! We caught the truck in a small town on the edge of the jungle in the late afternoon.  Five young boys sprawled across the bottom of the truck bed and looked at Wilson and me curiously as we hauled our packs over the wooden sides.  The road, still very much in the jungle, was narrow and rough.  Dust rolled back over us every time the truck slowed to turn a corner.  Palms and lemon trees hung low and encroaching and threatened to knock us from our perch atop the sacks of coffee beans.  The smell in the back of the truck was both rich and repulsive: humanity, raw coffee, dirt, plants, damp wood.  It was slow going.  We stopped every ten or fifteen minutes outside of small houses or along the side of the road where people gathered with their overflowing bags of raw beans. The driver’s wife, a large woman with a meaty face, climbed out of the cab to negotiate, paying cash per kilo. The boys leaped to the beat of her harsh voice: “¡Pan, dos soles! ¡Cinco sacos! ¡Papas, cuatro kilos!” The two older boys strained to heft the tremendous sacks to the top of the pile, while the younger boys swung like monkeys from the center beam, rushing to fill orders for vegetables, riced cans of condensed milk, passing bags of supplies down to the waiting campesinos. They hammed it up for my camera, absolutely brilliant, entirely a part of their surroundings. We picked up more passengers, and the boys shouted to them to move forward, look out, make room!  We resembled immigrants: families, belongings wrapped up in blankets and plastic bags, a box of peeping baby chickens, men straddling the wooden sides of the truck.  Later, the five boys sat in a row on top of the truck’s cab, silhouetted against the back glow of the headlights on the lush jungle foliage.  A nearly full moon rose just before we reached Kiteni.  It was a beautiful night, the end of the first part of the adventure, a prelude to the next four nights to come…

(Don’t forget to check out the photos)

There are two Cuscos. One, which includes the central Plaza de Armas and the adjacent streets with their “turistico” restaurants and tour agencies, belongs to the extranjeros (foreigners), and vibrates with the heavily-accented English of a hundred different touts and vendors swarming around the tourists, looking for money like mosquitoes hunt unprotected skin. Postcards, watercolors, handmade jewelry, painted gourds, finger puppets and musical instruments are paraded and displayed; young girls stand in the middle of the plaza passing out cards, “Massage, lady?  Waxing?  Pedicure?  Manicure?” Restaurant employees hover in the doorways with menus to attract clientele. “Yes, lady, yes, we have a free drinks for you!  Free drink!  You want Mexican?  Or you want tee-pee-cal foods?  Si, yes, we have, only ten soles!  Please, lady, come, come!”  Competition is fierce and therefore prices are low, but even so, the cost of one meal in a tourist restaurant would buy five in a local place.

Outside of Tourist Cusco, pollerías line the streets, selling rotisserie chickens in pieces (an eighth of a chicken with a plate of French fries and buffet salad costs four soles – USD$1.50), and in the mercado (market) there are dozens of abuelitas and mamichas (literally: little grandmas and mamas) standing over small gas ranges cooking up almuerzos completos (complete lunches: a huge bowl of thick soup with corn or potatoes to start, then a plate piled with rice, salad, and the main course of chicken stew, or a piece of fish or beef or sheep, or with French fries cooked with tomatoes and onions) for less than one US dollar.  Clientele have their favorite stalls, and at the popular ones the benches overflow and people eat standing up, passing the bowl of ají (hot sauce) back and forth, shouting for kachi (Quechua – the indigenous language – for salt). A roll of toilet paper is provided to wipe the grease from your fingers.  And in the same mercado: dried pears, spices, shoe polish, rugs, chocolate, flowers, cheese, fruits, corn, woven fabrics, ceramics, flour, vegetables, backpacks, cleaning products, pig heads, shawls, fruit juice, towels, herbs, quinoa bars, freshly butchered cow portions. There are metal drains in the cement floor for washing down the fish guts and cow blood and spilled soup. In this Cusco, they speak Spanish and Quechua only.

The city is a carnival, and everyone in it is a barker.  Women stand on the corners wearing yellow aprons, holding cell phones, selling air time, announcing their wares, ”llamadas llamadas llamadas llamadas“. On the outskirts of the city, combis (crowded, battered vans) rattle through the potholes with a man or woman hanging out of the open door shouting the destination, “chin-CHAIR-o-chin-CHAIR-o-chin-CHAIR-o!” but barely slow to admit or deposit passengers.  I watched one woman in stilettos and a business skirt run full tilt after a combi destined for Urubamba while the caller held out an arm to help her aboard, all the time commanding her to “sube-sube-sube-sube” (“get on, get on!”).  I love the combis.  They’re slow and they’re crowded; they stop for anyone who waves an arm from the sidewalk or shouts “¡Baja!” (“Stop!”) from the inside.  “Too full” isn’t a concept that the combi drivers acknowledge.  People sit on top of each other and stand in the space between the seats where your feet are supposed to go.  Abuelitas with five different bags of farm produce doze in the back seats while clean cut business types pass dirty-faced children back to sit on top of the bags of potatoes.  Young mothers carry infants on their backs in brightly colored mantas, the little ones nearly invisible in the folds of fabric, until a tiny grasping hand fights its way clear or the van jolts through a pothole and suddenly you find yourself staring into two curious brown eyes.  I love the crush and the proximity, the smell of the earth in the clothes of the old men, sharing smiles with the other passengers when the road gets rough or when the sliding door gets stuck and both the driver and his helper have to get out and yank it open. Peruanos seem always to be smiling.  There’s a saying here: in Perú, everything is possible, but nothing is certain.  I like Perú.  You can’t drink the water or find paper in bathrooms (a roll of TP in a Ziploc bag is a permanent resident in my daypack), but for thirty-five cents you can buy hot corn on the cob with salty Andean cheese from a woman on the street corner, and if the combi is too full, you can always ride on the roof.

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The country is poor, but the people are descended from the Incas, from kings, and they are strong.  Their ancestors constructed stone citadels on mountain tops at elevations greater than 3000m (9,800ft), quarried, carried, shaped, and stacked rocks, some the size of cars.  They carved steps out of the hills steep enough to give tight-rope walkers vertigo, but I’m willing to bet that they didn’t need to use their hands to climb them. Jeni and I, however, out of breath and without shame, perfected the “four-appendage” climbing method over our six days approaching and exploring the most famous Inca ruins, one of the new seven wonders of the world: Machu Picchu. Why did these people build in this place?  So high, so remote, so difficult.  The strength that must have been required and the ingenuity - a marvel.  I must admit my knowledge of the history and the culture and the methods is lacking.  It was not the details so much as the overall honda of the ruins that brought tears to my eyes, once, twice, three times, surprising and unexpected, welling from some vein in my soul as yet untapped.

Our approach to the site took four days.  The anticipation grew during the hike. Long, full days, each one better than the last.  It was a different experience for me: hiking with a group of twelve; mules to carry the packs; breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks all provided and cooked and served under a tent with chairs, a table, napkins, cutlery.  Many in our group had never been on a multiple day hiking trip.  For one young Korean girl, this was her first hike. Ever.  One guy had half-healed broken ribs, and two contracted altitude-aggravated stomach bugs.  Even Jeni, my fellow hard-core hiker chick, was suffering from bronchitis – yet no one ever complained.  We took it slow, we took a lot of rest stops, we talked, we bonded; we had a blast.  I learned a good lesson in anti-snobbery, and the slow pace meant that I took heaps of photos.  It took us two days to climb from Mollepata at 2900m to the 4600m (15,091ft) pass below Mt. Salkantay (6271m / 20574ft).  The word “WOW” was never far from my lips, though I rarely had enough breath to speak it.  Atop the pass, we built a cairn of rocks to honor Pachamama (the Incan mother earth).  Dozens of other small rock towers stood on rocks across the barren saddle.  Clouds drifted between our legs and among the rocks: Pachamama tasting her offerings.  On the other side of the pass, the route meandered down the side of a valley past small farm houses of branches and stone and thatch.  Locals rode past us on horses or stood in their doorways, watching us pass.  Families live in huts on the sides of the mountains, raising their children and their crops kilometers from roads and from their neighbors, linked only by rough foot and hoof paths.  There’s no such thing as “wild” space, it seems.  The land is used, inhabited, despite the altitude, the remoteness, the difficulty of the life.

As we descended, the terrain changed abruptly.  “Welcome to the Jungle” began to play in my head as banana trees replaced alpine grass and bamboo and flowers and creepers crowded the trail.  I had to step aside to let a spider the size of a lime with dark hairy legs pass.  Wilson, our guide, picked grenadillas for us to try, a type of passionfruit with a hard shell and pulpy seeds inside that look like frog eggs: sweet and juicy.  On the fourth day we reached the train tracks and got our first view of the mountaintop fortress of Machu Picchu.  It was hot, and we were sweating, surrounded by banana trees and the sound of insects, and there it was – Machu Picchu – right there.  I could imagine Hiram Bingham and the original explorers in 1911, bushwhacking through the jungle and then suddenly noticing some interesting terracing on top of the peaks.  And then we were there!  Day five – we made the steep climb to the ruins to arrive at six AM when the gates opened.  Jeni and I lagged behind a bit, hesitant to look.  After so much time and planning and energy, here we were.  It was a bit silly, but we held hands, looked at the ground, and shuffled towards the edge of the first overlook, then counted to three and raised our eyes at the last moment…awesome.

Words and descriptions are pathetically inadequate.  There are rock walls and buildings and structures, there are gardens of orchids and a temple that resembles a work of abstract art, all shapes and designs blending into one another, in harmony with the surroundings and with Pachamama.  The ruins are literally built into the top of a mountain.  The walls give way to cliffs which drop dizzyingly to the river below, and in all directions are similar peaks, steep, green, and dramatically independent of the valley and each other.  Jeni and I spent one day, then came back for a second full day, paying extra for the privilege, exploring, climbing the surrounding peaks, relaxing, absorbing, meditating. I don’t remember ever being so content, so utterly at peace in a place.  On the day before my birthday I was sitting on top of Montaña Machu Picchu with Jeni, mixing guacamole in a plastic bag and staring down at the ruins and at the mountains around above and below. And I was smiling.

So ends chapter one of the Peru Story.  Stay tuned for more, and check out the photos.  Two new albums: “Argentina” and “Peru #1″.

I’ve met up with a good friend, Jeni from Vancouver (we met on the Cabo Froward trip – we were ‘Team Awesome’), and mañana, we go to Machu Picchu.  Four days of trekking via the Salkantay trail – an alternative to the overcrowded, overpriced Inca Trail.  We’re excited.

Off to pack!