One afternoon, determined to be helpful, I cooked lunch with my mom. It was just the two of us. Her older daughters, Estefani and Vanessa were away at university in Cusco, Sabino, her husband, was driving a group of tourists to Lake Titicaca, and the younger kids hadn’t come home from school yet. I had bought way too much fruit the day before, and had a pineapple left over. I’d placed it on the kitchen table with a note scribbled on a square of toilet paper and skewered onto the spiky crown, Para mi familia, un beso, Susana. Feliciana got the hint. Something else about Ollantaytambo that is different from my home in huge, desert-y Utah: tropical fruit is dirt cheap here, and most of it is grown less than 100 miles from Ollanta. But despite the cheap fruit, Andean cuisine consists of starch, protein, more starch, and few vegetables. Potato soup with rice, chicken, and shredded carrots. Fried potatoes with rice, fried eggs, and two slices of tomato. Boiled potatoes with pasta, ground beef, and onions. On this day, we used my pineapple to make a fruit salad, adding apple, papaya, and banana, then pouring fresh-squeezed orange juice over the fruit as an extra sweetener. Heavenly, sweet, and fibrous! Feliciana also made a squash-based vegetable soup (with chicken and potatoes, of course). Feliciana ran out to buy dishwashing soap, herbs, and vegetables, and I sat on the tiny, rectangular stool in the corner of the kitchen and pared the skin away from white and yellow potato flesh with a keen, home-sharpened knife. Dropped the dirt-encrusted half moons and spirals into the brown wastewater, dug the tip of the knife into the odd divots, flicked away the eyes and spots of rot.

Feliciana came bustling through the door. Peruvian women bustle differently than women from the United States. US women sweep through their hurry, rushing with long, efficient movements. Peruvian women scurry, taking smaller steps the bigger a hurry they’re in, holding their body close to themselves as they rush. Like mice. And they smile while they do it, as if amused by their tardiness, excited to get where they’re going, or embarrassed, smiling to let the world know that they’re appropriately abashed and are moving quickly to make amends. Bustling through the door, Feliciana smiled at me, down on the floor. She said something I didn’t catch. “Como?” She paused. “Susana, you can do things! Rebecca” (Rebecca was the family’s very first – and most favorite – homestay volunteer) “couldn’t do anything. You can wash your clothes, you can help cook. Rebecca always said, ‘Oh, I’d love to help, oh, but I can’t.’ She just didn’t know how to work.” This may be the best compliment I’ve ever received.  Scooping the peeled potatoes from my bowl with rough brown hands, she dropped them quickly into the water boiling on the stove. “It goes so much faster with the two of us!”

The floors in Feliciana’s house are painted concrete. Stone and mud mortar make up the bottom two thirds of the walls; the upper third is adobe brick covered in plaster. Trying to be helpful one morning, I swept the kitchen floor, then the dining room floor, then the hall, then my downstairs bedroom. I ran the broom over the rafters to break loose a few cobwebs I’d seen. I poked at the plastered bricks near the ceiling, and then swept the stone walls. Chunks of dried mud crumbled and fell, and brown flowers of dirt dust bloomed. Ah, I thought. Don’t sweep walls made of dirt. The ceiling is wooden and doubles as the floor of the upstairs rooms: round eucalyptus trunks support simple two by six planks. There is no insulation. Heels clicked and tromped over my head as I wrote in my journal at night. Jeans with change in the pockets thumped onto the floor. Light dripped through the cracks. Pillow fights made the bed creak and the kids shriek. Feliciana and Sabino have four children and three bedrooms (including the one I used), but only use the two upstairs, even when their volunteer room is unoccupied. The kids (aged 6 to 24) sleep three or four to a bed and often climb in with their parents, well beyond the age when American parents strictly establish the importance of personal space. During a visit to the Awamaki weaving cooperative in Patacancha, I met a girl named Magdalena. She and the other women of the cooperative were learning how to make placemats, a piece of household frippery that doesn’t exist in Peru. Sixteen years old, Magdalena is already the secretary of the cooperative. I admired her placemat design, and she began to ask me questions. “Where are you from? And your parents?” Still living, I explained, but in a different part of the country. “But…” her serious dark eyes were perplexed. “How will you know when they die?” I didn’t have the words to explain that in my culture, it is expected that children will leave their parents and forge a life apart.

Toilet paper goes in the trash can instead of in the toilet, and hot water for showers trickles from a terrifying electric shower head. I washed my hair three times in the four and a half weeks that I lived with Feliciana. Differences abound, but in the end, Ollantaytambo felt like home. This is the challenge that keeps me traveling. Plopping myself down into a foreign situation and figuring it out is thrilling, because it’s always different, always new, always enlightening. Learning how to respect and enjoy the way of life in Ollanta and other towns and countries makes me a better, stronger, broader person. I’m addicted. Viva la diferencia!

Someone turned the music up: waino, the music of the campesinos (a word that translates literally as “peasant”). A male emcee shouts the name of the singer, usually a woman, repeatedly throughout the song. Sometimes shouting directions to the crowd, “Manos arriba, manos arriba, manos arrrrrrrrrrribaaaaaa!” (hands up, hands up!), sometimes calling out names of Andean towns and communities, sometimes repeating the main themes of the song. Harps, drum machines, and high-pitched vocals add a unexpected dash of oriental flavor. The songs are either about tragedies, heartbreak, or about getting drunk. Tonight, at least, there were no tragedies. More chicha, more beer, and soon I was apologizing to the woman who cleared my plate, still half full of potatoes, noodles, and meat. Too loud to talk, people continued raising their glasses, clinking them, mouthing ‘Salud’, then refilling.

I ducked out for a bit, running through the rain to meet up with a few of my fellow volunteers. I told them about the party. They rolled their eyes. “At least you missed the dancing,” one said.
“Oh, no, I’m going back. I promised my host mom.” My friends blinked.
“Really? Have you been to a waino party? This is how they dance – ” one friend grabbed another’s hands and started shaking them. “One time I tried to move to the rhythm of the music with my dance partner, but she shook her head and made me dance like this! Nah, no no no. I just don’t like it, I don’t want to do it.  You know they’re all going to want to dance with you?” I shrugged. This is why I’m here. To dance waino and eat too much starch and drink too-sweet beer and pour the dregs at the bottom of the bottle onto the floor.

An hour or so later, I was back at the closed restaurant, knocking on the window to be let in. The boy who answered was one I hadn’t met yet, and he was confused, thinking I was looking for the internet café, or the restaurant. “No, no, we’re closed,” he said.
“No, no, I’m invited,” I said.
“No, it’s a private party,” he said.
“Yes, yes, I know, Maria invited me. I’m living with her sister, Feliciana,” I said.
“Oh…” he said. Inside, drunkenness had proceeded with abandon. One uncle dozed where he sat. A cousin sat with his face on the table, passed out. Feliciana and my host sisters had left, but Maria recognized me and invited me to have another beer. I sat with Balthasar, Feliciana and Maria’s brother. His wife, Adela was deep in conversation with another woman across the table. The drums and harps were still thudding and chirping away, but I’d evidently arrived at a break in the dancing. “Salud!” Balthasar clinked his bottle against mine. I couldn’t find a clean glass, but Adela pushed hers over to me. “Where are you from?” he shouted. I told him. “Ahhh. And how do you like Peru?” I nodded and smiled, and gave my well-practiced line about how I’d been here three years ago, and fallen in love, and how I was called back by the country’s magic. “Ahhh. Si. And what places have you visited?” More well-practiced lines. “Ahhh. Do you like this music? This is our music, the music of the campesinos. Should we dance? Let’s dance.” We joined Maria, another woman, and the elderly aunt of the pink sweater and soft, wobbly hat. The elderly aunt shouted along with the emcee on the stereo, and others gathered around, clapping a rhythm. We held hands and danced in a circle, stomping our feet, swinging our hands and hips from front to back and side to side. The movement made perfect sense to me, and I relished the trembling of the wooden floor beneath our heavy steps. The elderly aunt drove the whole circle, swinging her arms vigorously, pounding her heels in time to the music until the nylons on one leg began to sag and slip down off of her knee. She let go of the hands next to her and spread her arms like a child pretending to be an airplane, and spun in a circle, kicking with one leg and pivoting on the other. The crowd loved this, and shouted in time with the music, “hay, hay, hay, hay, haaaaaay,” shouting giving way to trilling tongues and cheers. Moving along with the rest, I laughed, and smiled at the strangeness, the unselfconsciousness, the faroucheness of it all.

In the morning, Feliciana and I walked to Balthasar and Adela’s house to hang laundry. Both brother and sister-in-law were outside, nursing hangovers. “Ahhhh, buenos dias, Susana. I was drunk last night. But I remember what we were talking about. Today I, today the cerveza is a bit too much, but there are other interesting places here. Much history. Today I can’t, but next Sunday I will tell you about our customs and show you the places I know.” I worked in the morning, and arrived home for lunch late, but Feliciana wasn’t there, and the stove was cold. An hour later she arrived, bustling in her very Peruvian way, obviously upset. “Oh, Susana,” she tsked. “I’m so sorry I’m late. Ahhh, but what bad children my sister has! Five children she is raising, paying for them to go to university. And they don’t appreciate it. They don’t understand. The oldest daughter left school because she got pregnant. And now Maria is supporting her grandchild and new son-in-law. And now, the second oldest, ahhh.” Feliciana picked up a pot, put it back, picked up another pot and started boiling water. “The second daughter, she’s pregnant, too. Five months! Five months pregnant, and she’s been keeping her belly wrapped up tight so her mama wouldn’t know. What was she thinking? How is she going to finish school with a baby? She just thinks her mother is going to take care of her? And the baby, too?” There had been an intervention this morning, Feliciana told me. Certain family members who knew about the pregnancy had decided that it was time for Maria to be told. Feliciana had walked in expecting to have a drink with her sister and relive the party the night before, and instead had found the entire family gathered, several crying, older brothers furious, other relatives preventing them from taking to the streets and finding their sister’s boyfriend. “My sister was in shock. She fainted. Her brother had to catch her; her husband is in shock, too.” Feliciana was chopping potatoes. Small chunks shimmied off the cutting board and onto the floor. “Five months, without saying anything to her mother! Oh, Susana, what was she thinking? Maria was so happy yesterday! Drinking, dancing, with all of her friends, and today, well.” She sighed, putting both her hands on the edge of the counter and resting her weight against them for a moment. “Poor Tia Maria.”

That’s life, the waino musicians sing. The world can change that quickly. One minute you’re drinking with friends, spinning, soaring, the next, trying to forget the pain of being human. The contract that we sign by default, being born, requires us to live each moment. Opting out means escaping the bad times, but missing out on the good ones, too. But, this is why I’m here. To drink the sweet chicha and the bitter dregs, and to move along with the rest of the circle, squeezing the hands of the people next to me as we swing in tune with all the songs, even the ones I don’t like.

My own jointed bones and square inches of flesh are feeling stretched taut, full of love and friendship. Full of the happy sadness and sentimentality of leaving a place one loves. Last night thirty-odd favorite ski bum friends poured into my home with arms full of food, drink, gifts, and good wishes. Chris set it up as a surprise party, but with so many friends excited to talk about my trip and share their support, the secret was never going to be kept for long. It was a great sending-off; tomorrow as I lift off from the Salt Lake airport, I’ll imagine that the plane is being buoyed by my friends’ excitement rather than jet fuel. I’m excited to leave; I believe as Muir does, that it is easy enough to live out of sight of one’s friends, but only because I know that I’m bringing their love with me, and that they’ll be waiting for me when I get back.

The adventure begins tomorrow…

I’ve only three weeks left of any work, anyhow. I pulled the trigger tonight on $1,000 plane tickets to Lima and Bogota to work for Awamaki, the Peruvian non-profit. March 14-May 9. Felt a bit more fluttery about the whole thing than I think I ever have for an international trip. Last night I waffled around on kayak and expedia and LAN websites, making notes about small price differences if I arrive in Medellin instead of Bogota, cruising the traveler’s forums on Lonely Planet Thorntree learning about no-go areas in Colombia, running bus routes in my head for feasibility. Looking at the map, at the surprising distance between Lima and Bogota, I recalled the 28-hour misery marathon riding from Santiago to Arica: a head cold aggravated by constantly changing altitude, legneckbackfeetarm muscles cramping as I twisted myself into a thousand different positions across two bus seats. This time around, I decided, I would splurge on the plane tickets.

Three journalists from Vermont, Chicago, and New York are staying in the hotel tonight, on a all-expense paid ski vacation underwritten by Ski Salt Lake. During the course of our conversation, I mentioned my own writerly aspirations, and gave them the address to my website. In return, they gave me some advice: join Twitter. So I did. Twitter and Facebook in one month – look at me, joining the world of the internet! Ted (or, Traveling Ted TV) is my very first follower! Taking a minute to look at his website in return, I found this simple and convincing list: Five Reasons why more Americans Should Travel Abroad. Reason #4 was my favorite: see that we are lucky to have what we have. Oh, yes. Lucky that we aren’t picking our worldly possessions out of the rubble that’s left of our house. Christchurch has been foremost in my thoughts these last few days. Here’s my addition to the list. #6: more Americans should travel in order to know cities like Chch, in order to understand the images on the news, and to have an impression of the city before the quake to balance the sensationalism and pain being broadcast post-quake.

To end on a good note:  20-36 inches of snow predicted this weekend. Life is, well, it’s pretty good.

Follow me on twitter! @susanmtraveler (I think that’s how you put it…this is new for me)

My job while I’m there will be to create a guidebook of local trails, day hikes, and longer treks that will attract more Western tourists.  Hiking AND writing?  It’s perfect.  When I read the job description back in September, I thought, this job was made for me! And then I thought, I’m going to make it happen.  I’ve been working three and four jobs since I got back to Utah in order to save enough money to make the trip a possibility, and it’s finally coming together.  Two years ago I spent four months hiking through the Peruvian Andes, practicing my Spanish and learning Quechua, the language of the indigenous mountain people.  I was lucky to meet many locals who helped me to trek far off the beaten tourist path and explore regions rarely visited but unparalleled in their history and wildness.  It was this experience, as well as my passion for writing, that I described to Awamaki to indicate my unique qualification for the guidebook job, and they agreed to take me on. I won’t be getting paid, but I will be a hired writer.  Being able to put the experience on my resume is going to be worth every penny.

Like most non-profits operating in the third world, Awamaki is constantly seeking donations of time, money, and supplies.  In order for me to participate in the program, I will be paying a one-time donation of $650.  This donation will cover my first month of room and board in a homestay (almost half of the funds go directly to the local family that will host me), project materials, and a donation to the guidebook project. It also covers the expenses that Awamaki incurs in hosting volunteers and running the volunteer program.

Now that I know for sure that I’ll be going, I’m reaching out.  I’m talking to my contacts at REI, and planning presentations to talk about my past experiences in Peru as well as seek donations and sponsorship for this upcoming trip.  I’m talking to the owner of Brighton Resort to request permission to hold a fund-raising bake sale and to see if Brighton would be interested in being a sponsor of the trip.  And I’m asking all of you to consider supporting me and Awamaki.  The program is currently requesting baby and kid’s clothes, prenatal vitamins, school and art supplies, used digital cameras for a community photography workshop, and a used laptop computer.  I know many of you readers are far from Salt Lake City, Utah, but if you have any of the above supplies and would be willing to mail them to me, I know that Awamaki will be exceptionally grateful, as will the local Ollantinos who receive your donations.

Thanks for reading, and thank you for your support.

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.

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