:: viva peru ::

:: Saturday, May 11, 2002 ::

okay. so here's the theory - i'm going to post where i am and what i'm doing on my trip to peru.
:: 2:47 PM [+] ::

my first day in lima. i flew through miami on the way, and, though i've been there before, it was a pretty big culture shock in itself - there are cities in the u.s. where spanish is the primary language, so much that the airline people spoke that and only interpreted into english if you asked. wacky. and really wonderful preparation for here, though way more people speak english than i thought and everyone is fairly forgiving. i think it's the shining white skin.

arriving into jorge chavez internacional was easy. customs was easy. after that it got a little crazy. the travel agencies have people stationed as you're leaving to help you out, and of course one of them dragged me over. they were pretty helpful, called hostels for free for me, and drove me out there after only an hour of waiting for additional passengers - no problem. but they asked me what time i was waking up, which i thought was odd, and told me that someone would 'come by for me then.'

i settled into the hostel - this big affair i described to jody as 'imagine if jesus designed a really big house' for all its religious iconography. somehow - i think because i came in at midnight - i landed the room with four cages full of exotic birds right outside the hole-in-the-wall-slash-window. oh, cool, birds. fast forward to this morning: not cool at all. birds, i found out, get up far earlier than i do, and rather than have breakfast or go for a walk, they warbled for a few hours trying to get me to join them and play. eat me, birds of death. there were some crazy americans there, flopping about and being all touristy - though i do have to say i appreciated the fact that they let me catch the end of the lakers game. rock on lakers. the spanish-language commentators on espn were great, though - they didn't seem to understand the game that well, but kept saying things like 'shaq es grandissimo! que hombre gigantico!' (that's funny because all ethnically latin people are short. come on, be un-p.c. with me, people.)

so i took a little walk, digging the neighborhood. i opted to stay in miraflores, a neighborhood in southern lima, because, as someone put it to me this morning, 'miraflores es lima moderno'. it's newer, hipper, and apparently way safer and quieter than downtown, though i'll be able to tell better later this afternoon when i head into lima central to visit the south american explorer's club. oddly, however, miraflores is full of casinos - when i asked someone this morning, '�mucha gente va?', she paused and looked at me with extreme importance and said 's�. MUCHA gente va.' this is where a lot of the discotecas are too - it reminds me of a cross between the sunset strip in l.a. and atlantic city, with a little bit of willy wonka's playhouse thrown in for good measure. for some reason, they just build buildings unnecessarily large here, and so you've got mcdonald'ses with 20' ceilings and giant burger king playpens that kids could get lost for days in. i'm entertaining the possibility of visiting one myself later. (fast food tidbit: though it's everywhere, i found it funny that drive thrus aren't called that. the drive through at mcdonald's is 'auto mac' and the one at burger king, 'auto king'. i want to be the auto king.)

so i went for a walk and saw all this and found the santa isabel, the local grocery chain, which like every other building had like 40' ceilings. i found a phone and a web cafe, called the moms and discovered that spanish keyboards are really really weird - for example, as i just e-mailed coon, there's an � but no tilde key, so i can't even go to my own website without cutting and pasting. a little wacky. and then i got my first inca kola (which, jody, you're right, does taste just like bubblegum), went home and passed out.

post-birds this morning, i shuffled out for the desayuno gratis that my hostel provided (free breakfast here means one (1) roll. no more, no less.) and found a wonderful little woman there waiting for me. who i'd seen at the airport last night. she told me to breakfast, and when i was ready we'd go. sure, why not. she speaks okay english and understands better, i speak crap spanish but understand pretty well, so we get along. she drags me down to this travel agency in downtown miraflores (not before telling me that her sobrino likes 'itnaspa'. what? 'itnaspa. the singer.' yes, folks, britney spears is gigantic down here.) where they basically sit me down and tell me i have to buy something. she was pushy, but eliu, the big goofy-looking dude who worked there, was pretty cool, and since i needed a ticket from cusco to lima anyway we worked that out for pretty cheap. i told them about the book and luckily had brought a copy with me so i left it with him. which of course meant he flooded me with hostels to check out and recommend. 'no, no, i know this guy, gustavo, go and talk to gustavo' - reminded me of dad's old italian friends who always want me to go talk to *somebody* who'll help me out.

and the agency was in the neighborhood of my favorite internet cafe ('interf@ns' on tarata, if you're ever in miraflores), so here i am. i'm about to put together all my stuff and head up to the south american explorer's club, where hopefully i'll figure out how in god's name i'm going to get to la union tomorrow.

impressions so far are good. last night i thought about it a long time, and figure that right now, i'm not really a traveller. i'm big on having a home base, on getting to know a place really well (knew i should've worked on a city guide) and that sort of thing, not on being everywhere for 5 minutes. and also that, yes, i do get extra-lonely in countries where i don't speak the language very well. but we'll see how these next few weeks change that, if at all - maybe i'll come home clinging even more to the desire to have a set home and stop moving. maybe jae and i will become master's elves and i'll work at the quincy grille for all of eternity?

anyway, off to take on the city (and find some advil - plane food sucks and always gives me like two days of sickness). if you're reading this, write a note of reply - i'm going to check e-mail as often as possible, and i really love hearing from people.

be well, all. much love from peru.
:: 1:43 PM [+] ::

since there have been some questions regarding sports, i thought i'd set the record straight:

lakers will triumph. they are incredible. they are, to the derision of everyone i know, my quote-unquote hometown team, they will beat the kings, and then they will spank the nets, especially jason 'i'm small' kidd.

denmark: similarly incredible. tomasson and co can pull it out over senegal, over france. okay, maybe not over france, but at the very least neeeaaaar france. next to france. holding hands with france? okay, at least massacring senegal. (that's not funny, because senegal has had a very violent history - which makes it funny in that painful way)

thank god for peruvian obsession with soccer. i got to watch the game at a burger king in miraflores today. in fact, i couldn't get served for 20 minutes because people were watching the game, and the girl at the counter asked me to please not get in her line of vision.

the other funny part of today? i left to send y'all my morning update, and when i returned my single had been turned into a double. the bed had been removed and a new bunk system installed. other than that, it looked like it hadn't been disturbed. the guy was just finishing when i came in, and then scurried off. weird.

i attended a church service tonight - there's one with open doors on the parque kennedy in miraflores that is really gorgeous and i just stood at the doors and watched and listened to them singing. i barely know the words in english, wish i knew them in spanish. tons of people wandered up, though; it seemed like the thing to do was at least dig a little bit of the service and then go do whatever business you need to do.

word on the street is that it's going to be tough to get to la union tomorrow. in any case, it's at least a 9 hr trip, and they don't have internet there, so i'll check back in in a few days from huanaco. games to watch in my absence: argentina vs. nigeria, england vs. sweden, brazil vs. turkey. wish i was dan right now, watching the cup 24/7.

take care, all.
:: 9:46 PM [+] ::

what a day. i started trying to get an early hop on things and taxied to the correo central in lima to mail helen some set papers. i forget, however, that it is sunday, and in south america, nothing is open on sundays - except things that shouldn't be open on sundays, and some that shouldn't be open at all. however, my driver was a wonderful man whose name i still can't pronounce who seemed to actually enjoy talking to me, and i conned him into driving me to the bus stations for the same amount of money.

after leaving his tender protected hands - he even advised me, '�tu dinero? �guardalo!' - i met with the hell that was luis from huanuco.

so i needed to get to la union, but the only way to do that was seemingly via huanuco, which i need to cover anyway. so i got my ticket, plopped down in the station and waited for the 9 o'clock bus. 9.30 rolls around and i'm getting a little curious, but there was no way to find out what was going on. you know how bus stations are made for people who use the bus often and so there's not always as much documentation as there ought to be? yeah, well, imagine that you're at grand central, except without the signs and the people who speak english and the people who speak spanish refuse to talk to you in person and only announce things over a pa which takes one part of their voice - the really annoying part - and amplifies that to the exclusion of all else. argh.

finally the bus arrives, but this was i suspected nowhere near the end of my problems with luis. how right i was. the trip is 9 hrs, and here's why peru sucks: it's not the roads, the roads are mostly good (though when they're bad, they're incredibly bad), but a) you're going up into the mountains, and the only way to get there is to go up the mountains, b) your driver 1) has made the trip a billion times, and feels secure on the roads, 2) watched way too many vin diesel movies last summer, 3) doesn't like being on the road any more than you do and probably has a nice llama waiting for him at the end of the line (in this case, tingo maria, another 2 hrs at least from huanuco), so c) you're just going to go as recklessly as possible and pass a million people that it seems to everyone in their right mind that there's no good reason to pass. ech.

things weren't that bad until around 3 when we stopped in la oroya (a nice enough looking city itself) for some lunch. completely flustered by the policy of simply stopping and opening the door, no announcement deemed necessary, i ran out and was so incredibly confused by the menu at the diner that i just had to stand and stare and look gringo-ey for a while. finally i deciphered some chicken with potatoes, ate with some water, and ran to catch the bus before it left me.

this was the worst idea i've had. i was doing okay right off, recovering from my earlier weakness (no breakfast), until at some point i just lost it all. erm, literally. luckily, they had bags for this express purpose, but it was still pretty awful and made the next 4 hrs of the ride even worse than they might otherwise have been. i was saved by the nice woman next to me with the roll of toilet paper up her sleeve, otherwise i fear i'd still be dripping. yech.

again, no announcement when we reached huanuco - i guess you were just supposed to know. similarly, bus stations are often in the dangerous part of the city (can lima, oh kids point to where the greyhound station is? no? it's because your mom never let you go to that part of town, stupid), and this was no exception. some guy with a pushcart warned me to get to the plaza de armas by some circuitous route because the other way was dangerous, and i managed okay. dropped my stuff at hostel kotosh and here i am, worried about trying a second time to eat today. ech.

so the problems with peru: it's really difficult to get anywhere in the mountains because you have to go around, not through them. no one speaks english and very few people are tolerant of poor spanish. there are NA GRINGOS anywhere and everyone stares (woman who told me this was the 'high season for peru' and i would see 'tons of tourists', bite me. maybe in cusco, but DEFINITELY not in huanuco. the book, my only guide to anything, is not terribly great (oh yeah, that's why my job exists). and 'hollow man' is just nowhere near as good in spanish, and that's saying a lot since it sucks in english.

i have thoughts on poverty and american social responsibility that i'll have to leave til next time, since my eyes are blurring and i want nothing more than to hear an american voice. and maybe get the retch stains off my shirt. stewart, return my e-mails, mom, learn how to spell my name, and aaron, stop being sketchy, just to see what it's like. word up.
:: 8:44 PM [+] ::

to any prospective lg-ers out there: this job is waaaay harder than you think at first. there are 50,000 hostels and maybe 4 billion restaurants, and you have to distill that down to the 5 that make it into the guide. buses only run once, and it's at 4.42 am unless the number of the day is divisible by 7 with a repeating remainder. no one has maps of anything - everything is 'por aca'. and warm showers advertised are not equal to warm showers in reality.
:: 11:50 AM [+] ::

however, that does not mean i have not conquered huanuco in just one short day. because i have. because i'm that good. my current plan is to finish up here tonight, adding nightlife to the section, and catch a bus veeerrry early tomorrow for la union. cover la union in one day, then come back to huanuco the next morning and from here catch the bus to tingo so i'm there by mid-to-late wednesday. because transportation sucks, that only puts me one-half day ahead of schedule, but i'll try to make that up some other time. i mean, right now i'd love to be about 47 days ahead of schedule, but that's cool.

my biggest regret so far is that i have nothing intellectually stimulating on the road. sure, it's a gigantic challenge figuring out a city and trying to communicate with people whose language you barely speak, but it's not a challenge to the part of my brain that does abstract thinking - it's more of a trial and error kind of thing. the only novel i brought was the last chunk of linda's she gave me, and i'm probably going to eat up the rest of that tonight. so, another one of those next-time-i-do-this sort of things, i'm bringing a big nasty book by dostoyevsky. (note to anyone who's ever recommended books to me - now's the time. get it to megan brumagim, my editor at let's go, and she'll send it to me to arrive in a short 3-5 weeks.)

i was thinking today about jo, who turned down let's go australia to work somewhere doing something (no judgment passed). i wonder what her experience would've been like, in a country that speaks english but has such a different culture. especially being a girl, and especially especially being jo. no thoughts, just wondering what the differences might be.

(sad fact: i wonder if i spelled 'especially' correctly. i've been thinking 'especialmente' and i'm not sure if that's the right english. and it's only day 3.)

peruvian tv is pretty killer, there's 60 channels in my new hostel and they're almost all american stations with spanish vo. sorry, castellano vo - they don't say spanish here. so i watched some seinfeld in english with subtitles today, and that made me happy and staved off a desperate phone call home for at least a few more hours. (i'm waiting, fyi, until 8 here, because that's 9 eastern and the time when everyone's cell phone in cambridge suddenly gets cheaper.) the new hostel is a step up, but it was a necessity because of a) the nasty bug i killed last night in the old hostel, and b) the lack of hot water and the presence of my shaggy beard. new one has agua caliente between 6 and 11 pm - i'm heading up soon for a shower.

i can't believe the town i grew up in was named after lima, peru. what the heck were you people thinking. they are so not alike, there's no way i can say how not alike they are because why? oh, because they're NOT ALIKE.

the saddest part about this job is all the stuff you learn that DOESN'T get included in the guide. things that aren't touristy at all. a few examples: the RACK business is gigantic here. not pool tables, nor breasts, but pieces of metal to put TVs and other electronics on. apparently no one has furniture for the job, or for some reason there's all sorts of weird places they want to put TVs, but in any case that's the deal. lots and lots of rack sales places, and they look pretty popular. huanuco also is apparently training the technological legions of tomorrow, because there are dozens of computer repair shops scattered throughout the city, and all the booksellers here only sell two things: porn and computer manuals. i've never before walked down the street and had two people in the same block offer to teach me c++; they have programming, they have graphic design, they have hardware, they have EVERYTHING. next time i need work done on my desktop, i'm calling huanuco express.

it kind of makes sense, though. for those of you who don't have a copy of lg: peb handy, the city is so old - ruins just outside are probably the oldest in peru - but also so new, with slot machines on every block and so many cheap electronics stores that it's going crazy. people live in decrepit old-fashioned houses with great stereos and TVs and cable and bootlegs of the nelly furtado tape (which i saw for sale on the street today, just after singing along with 'mr. jones' in a sandwich shop - nothing like america for making you feel at home anywhere).

at any rate, poverty and reeeeallly small-town life - more to come in my next, post-la-union, update. be well, all, and bask in my golden incan love. keep those e-mails rolling in.
:: 7:57 PM [+] ::

ay mami. what a couple days - this is going to be one heckuva big long update because i've been jotting down things since huanuco (the 2nd time, not the 3rd). and garsh, i just have to make my updates exciting to keep the fans happy... (he he. hey, i wonder from where in the world people are reading this - word up if you're in a non-us locale). anyway, have patience, as this was written in freezing cold hostels, on crazy buses, and in the jungle. that's right, folks - the real live jungle.

---

i'm dead tired and writing this on my laptop from la union. wanna know what sucks? la union sucks. i'll write more about it when i have the patience, but it's more or less awful.

so, a brief synopsis of what's happened to our hero. when i was in huanuco yesterday, and wouldn't buy some stupid candy from a kid on the street, he kicked me in the leg. yeah, right on, mini-brotha-man. part of me wanted to kick back, but part of me
was like, yeah, why can't i give the kid some flow? big whitey with the mad cash-money, can't help a kid with a growl in his stomach?

which got me thinking back on the poverty track. i just had to turn in an article to lg, where i focused on poverty in peru. it's crazy, it's all over the place, and they're 100% used to it. see, the people in peru see poverty every day. i mean, sure, maybe they comment on the abject cases, maybe the lima high-rollers say 'hey, those are the goat people of forest 272 with the infant mortality rate of 80%' (yes, that's an actual rate from parts of peru, including the one i was in yesterday). yet americans see the same thing, and, in contrast with the quote-unquote poor pit kids who need to get something else pierced, find themselves completely indignant at the kind of money these people have. we get pissed. so here's my sermon: we need to understand that we're the only ones in a position to get, not a little concerned, but downright INDIGNANT at this kind of thing. and we need to use this understanding to help these people, in whatever way we can.

but anthony, you say to me: how's your ipod? your laptop, your cell phone? (i'm assuming, for the purposes of the exercise, that 'you' are kieran.) okay, fair enough. so i realise that i'm not walking the proverbial walk as of yet, but these are just realisations i've had, and i need some time to think them over and think about how in living my life i can work towards bettering things like this. i know, lots of you who eat granola and live not in cambridge but in somerville will call me a spoiled middle class white kid who's finally found a cause and whop-dee-friggin-doo - which i guess is a fair critique - but i'm seeing things firsthand here - particularly in yesterday's trip to la union - that i never at all came close to understanding in my harvard $16,000/yr apartment (which will, in a completely ironic twist, contain a jacuzzi. wait, let me dive into my swimming pool of gold coins.)

ay. okay, enough of that. so what's happened since huanuco: i got on a bus. buses here leave at around 7 or 8 am, so i was up pretty early to hop on the omni to la union. the bus ride was fairly uneventful, excepting three small things. first, the bus did in fact get stuck in the road, and we did in fact all have to get out and help push. i know they put this in gene wilder comedies of the worst vacation ever, but we did it and it was really fairly passe - i mean, every day of my life i'm scrambling over chickens who are running around the floor of the bus to help a 150yr old quechua woman push a 1954 omnibus out of a ditch. old hat. second thing, and pretty amusing to me - on bus trips of a certain distance, by quote-unquote respectable lines, there are people who hop on to sell something and then hop off. these people, almost always men, really are the best salesmen i've ever heard - i'm talking the days of mystery cures and liver oil in the american west. the guy on this particular trip hopped up to sell a book to teach students english phrases. he stood next to me. it was all i could do to stifle my laughter as he tried to pronounce the words for colors, true - and, on that note, i'm getting a real sense of the peruvian english accent, and will from now on speak like i'm a foreigner to you if i don't want to talk to you - but i was incredibly impressed. here are a bunch of people who, not satisfied with the education their children are getting, hop on buses to sell for thirty cents little books to help them adapt to the information age. pretty awesome, if you ask me.

finally, the bus ride was six and a half hours long. now, la union isn't super far away - it's something like two hours american - but we have to drive around the same mountain like six times to get up to the top, then take the connection over to the next mountain, then go all the way down that one, etc etc etc. aye.

finally, la union. the city has around 7000 people, so i wasn't expecting much, but it really is like two streets and a dead cow or something. the only reason the city is in the guide is for huanuco pampa, ruins of an ancient incan headquarters about 10 km outside of town (right, i know, i talk in km now, and have no idea how many miles anything is. it sucks.). now, i didn't get up to huanuco pampa, but i saw a video and pictures. it's pretty, but it's not worth spending a night in this town. the townspeople are CRAZY - they were up shouting in the streets until 1 am, and they started knocking at every door in town around 4 am. i don't think they took kindly to the expletive i used when they knocked on mine, but then again i don't think they understood it. in addition, being a reasonable distance up in the mountains (like 2 miles or something), it was FREEZING COLD, and i had to sleep with all my clothes on. researching hotels was an exercise in futility - i saw tiny room with huge draft after tiny room with huge draft. i finally managed to pick for myself a tiny room with a huge draft in a BUILDING THAT WAS BUILD ON AN ANGLE. every time i tried to put something on the desk, it fell to the ground. i hated la union.

looking for a restaurant there, i was acosted by a woman. thinking her an annoying local, i humored her for a little while, but i soon found out she was a teacher at the nearby school. and liked to talk. a lot. so i'm a bit torn about this woman, because a) she was incredibly weird, talked to me forever, and followed me around, ultimately to my room until i had to ask her to leave; but b) had some really interesting things to say about the state of the peruvian educational system. we talked for a while about the lack of infrastructure, and the fact the the government of peru was just another MAN trying to keep the brothers down by funneling them into one of two or three occupations that needed little brains (and the most important she mentioned was coca production - more on that in a sec). she feels peruvians need to learn how to think for themselves, and the biggest responsibility is on the individual at this point to educate themselves and really make them better. i was singing right along with her, and got a lot of her schpeel down on my interview - if the wonderful helpful lg staff happens to send it to me once they transcribe it (nudge, nudge), i'll post it here. one last note on education: the kid in front of me on the bus back to huanuco was reading about philosophy. about the vienna school. i was wicked impressed, because he sure acted like he was trying to smuggle something in a TV box that was clearly not a TV. those crazy kids.

so from la union, i hopped a bus at 6.30 am to return to huanuco on my way to tingo maria. my advice, written on the bus, to travelers in bus-ey nations:

there are two ways to deal with bus trips. well, three, but i wouldn't suggest the route i've taken.

number the first: obtain a South American Bus Simulation Device. these may be lacking at best buy, but are not difficult to build at home. simply find two incredible smelly people to stand around and yell at each other in a language you don't understand. pull up a chair roughly 1/2" from them, though closer if at all possible. in fact, it's best if you sit in their laps. now, have your friends firmly grasp the legs of the chair you are in, lift it off the ground, and shake it violently to and fro in a completely unpredictable manner. practise this for 12 hrs a day in sessions of at least 6 hours until you learn to successfully fall asleep during these proceedings. when you have mastered this: add vomit.

number the second: bring something to do on the stupid bus. this seems obvious, but it's actually tough - books are regarded with suspicion, electronic devices make you target for thieves. masturbation, i found out today, might be an option, but that might only work if you're old and indian - i'm not going to recommend it unequivocally just yet.

now, the third route, which i've taken, involves perfecting the defensive manoeuver woman who've visited italy know as the Blank Stare. the pros: incredible scenery which will, sooner or later, pass through your field of vision. the cons: time goes by shockingly slowly, stops, and sometimes manages to reverse direction entirely. i swear it hovered around 10 am this morning for a while before returning to 9.45 and hanging out there until we stopped for breakfast.

needless to say, that bus ride was a pretty unpleasant experience, though with some great views and a couple decent-smelling people somewhere on the bus whose scents were masked my the animals running underfoot but whose presence i appreciated on principle. also, they were girls.

that got me back to huanuco - but wasn't i there already? yeah, in case you didn't know, peru operates on the hub system - that is to say, when you go somewhere, you almost always have to go back to where you came from to get to somewhere else. hopefully i'm going to skip some of that in the near future with lesser-known options, but generally it's like a series of wheels. wheels that suck. wheels of SUCKAGE.

so i generally have to give transportation in peru two thumbs up. in huanuco, i ran around really quickly - e-mailed copybatch, wept at the kind letters of friends and family, sent copybatch by post, and hopped a car to tingo maria. the cars are pretty much the coolest thing ever - whenever there are 5 people in them, they go, and it's a nice little daewoo auto (yeah, the company that we americanos know as making crappy stereos is actually the leading supplier of autos to south american) and a quick comfy trip with the windows down in the eternal springtime. we drove for about half an hour to a tunnel in the mountain. when we entered the tunnel, we were in the highlands, but when we came out it was the jungle. kind of weird. tingo's a weird sort of town, maybe ninety-some degrees as i write this and full of mosquitoes - but it's got a definite charm, and i'm covering it for the cave of bats and owls that i hope to see tomorrow morning. or, not see rather, shrouded as it is in darkness. way to pick verbs, anthony, way to pick verbs.

i met the craziest man on the road up, though. a former agriculture minister (dunno on what level), he spoke quechua originally, learned castellano (spanish), and also speaks pretty decent 'i'm a foreigner' english. we talked for a long time about toledo (president of peru, mom, not city in northern ohio), about ohio, and about the coca production in tingo. yes, it's the gateway to the world's largest empire of coca. here's the thing i don't get, though - the government of peru is firmly against drugs. yet the infrastructure is such that the roads to huanuco from lima and to la union from huanuco, for example, are dirt and absolute crap, but the road to and from tingo maria, the biggest producer of illegal drugs, are perfectly paved and with nice side bars and are really what you would imagine if you put, say, a jungle in vermont. i think i detect a little ambivalence here, no?

heard some latin tune on the radio today that completely stole carlos's solo from the song w/ the matchbox 20 guy - almost note for not. sheisty latin musicians stealing crap like that. i only write this because my thoughts are interrupted by some kid in the net cafe playing the spanish-language video for ricky martin's 'la vida loca'. c'mon, kid, that was so four years ago. or whenever.

anyway, back on track. i'm going back to my room to work on the book, get some sleep, and head to pucallpa tomorrow. i'm one day ahead of schedule, and i'm probably going to try to keep speeding up. the ride to pucallpa is 8 hrs, but i'll be on e-mail after that and will try for another fun-filled report. as always, e-mails are appreciated more than y'all can imagine. be well, love each other a little bit, and send me highlights from the lakers/nets whooping/game - espn.com loads slowly here.
:: 10:15 PM [+] ::

hoo-wee. pucallpa, and what a day it's been.

got up early this morning to hit the caves in tingo maria - there's a beautiful cave in the hills just north of the city that has three layers. i forget the order (because i was ducking from guano bombs), but one layer has bats, one layer has stupid ugly birds, and one layer has pretty birds. i know, i'm incredibly eloquent today, but i only know the spanish words for them right now and will have to learn the translations. the cave is really gorgeous, but the walk up there is particularly intense - through this absolutely wonderful national park that apparently only 5 people enter a day. i mean, on the one hand, okay, the footprint of humanity is small, but on the other hand, nature could definitely withstand more people enjoying this beautiful beautiful wildlife! moral of the story: visit tingo maria, and go to the caves.

hopped on the bus then for what turned out to be the longest journey of my life so far. i don't really have words to describe this trip, but let's put it this way - what was supposed to be a long 8 hrs in the jungle turned into a long 11 hrs in the jungle when we blew a tire and the entire male population of the bus had to change it. some university students and i ended up grabbing a taxi from the last breakdown point, so we were racing in a little mini-daewoo over the rocks for an hour and a half at an additional cost of more than the bus ticket. this is the only thing i'm mortally afraid of here - there's really absolutely no support system, and if something like that happens, it could be days before it's fixed. cool if you live here, veeeeeery uncool if you don't.

moral of the story: dan, when you found your island republic, remember INFRASTRUCTURE. veddy important.

pucallpa's a weird city. it's the biggest so far since lima, very spread out, and ... well, it has lots of prostitutes. that's pretty much all i know, since i showed up late at night. i'm about to hit up the disco scene (for the guide), so i'll give y'all the lowdown on the DRUNK prostitutes manana.

upon leaving the taxi at the plaza tonight, i was followed by this kid. being warned about the dangers of the city and thinking he wanted to rob me, i sped up ... and he sped up. he shadowed me for like two blocks before coming up and trying to talk to me. i was a bit weirded out, but i felt him out and he seemed genuine. he's a 17 yr old kid from pucallpa who is learning english in school and wanted to practice. he helped me check into my hotel, helped me find a place to eat, helped me learn about the prostitues, and even invited me to his house tomorrow to meet his parents. i had to sadly decline, but he says he's going to come by the hotel tomorrow to have lunch. the part of me that my father raised is a little cautious in case he comes back with 12 big friends who beat the crap out of me and take my lunch money (because i don't have much more than that at this point), but the rest is thinking - wow, pretty cool, even if i don't have time for it.

also, walking out of the hostel with him, there was a white guy watching tv. i walked past, and his radar must've gone off, because he ran after yelling, 'hey, man, gringo! gringo!' thank god - finally someone to speak english to. he's this southern italian kid who's from cali, drives a truck and i think used to be in the service, who just dropped it all to hit the road and go from the bottom of the americas back up. he doesn't speak a lick of spanish and now finds himself hating pucallpa, so i'm going to try to help him find a way up to ecuador tonight. that's right - i am officially a travel expert, given my job title. er...

anyway, i'm covering nightclubs tonight and pucallpa tomorrow, then heading to the lake for a day to see the sites before getting on another veeeeery long bus to puerto bermudez (on sunday). i realise at this point that my schedule looks nothing like the itinerary on this site - but i happen to think that's a good thing.

had more deep thoughts, but can barely see straight so i'll end this update. until tomorrow, from your man in the selva - be well, and send e-mail.
:: 12:18 AM [+] ::

okay. so, the roughest day yet so far. this morning i made a new friend, mr. cucaracha, who started my shower for me and gave me a good talking to - that's cockroach, by the by, for you gringoes. i've never showered in boots before - but, as my parents always said, there's a first time for everything.

anyway, the horrifying discovery of last night was that my computer's down. there's power going through the convertor but the computer isn't receiving it and won't turn on. i'm afraid for my life for two reasons: 1) i HATED doing this job by hand when i had to do two little restaurants, i can't imagine doing it for town after town. i have NO DESIRE to do that and will basically just behave in a really pissy manner should that work out that way. 2) my copy for tingo maria, which i stayed up until late late two nights ago to finish, as well as my rather witty and clever hot topic, are both stores on that computer. locked away in a box that doesn't turn on. meaning if it is in fact irretrievable and my life is over, i will have to RETURN to tingo (remember, it's an 11 hr trip) and then back to pucallpa and then on to bermudez. yech.

so the last hour or so was spent at the tourist office asking rubi, who speaks english, to save my life for the love of all things holy. she pulled some strings and i have an appointment with a genius computer engineer at 2. everyone, keep your fingers crossed and hold your breath. it's obviously not that absolutely devastating, but i'm poised to pull a full 3 days ahead of schedule (finished pucallpa in a day, using my rest day to travel to bermudez) and i'd rather not instead get BEHIND by a day or two. aye.

anyway, i'll try to keep y'all posted. i've finished pucallpa except for the parque and the discotecas - i'm going to the park post-computer appointment and clubbing tonight. everything else is going swimmingly, i just hope we can clear this problem up.

also: fanta tastes awful. die a slow painful death, coca-cola s.a.
:: 12:47 PM [+] ::

oh, i almost forgot: toll free numbers aren't working from public phones in peru 'this week'. dunno when i'll be able to call anyone, hopefully we'll straighten that out soon too. i'm kind of happy i had to find out about that, though, because it meant half an hour in the heavily air-conditioned telefonica office - and air conditioning means a LOT right now.
:: 12:49 PM [+] ::

another episode in the bruce saga... this is the kid who turned up yesterday as i was hopping out of the taxi, followed me to my hostel, checked me in, followed me out to dinner, and then hung around until i asked him to please leave. he showed up at the old hostel (i'd checked out due to disagreements w/ sr. cucaracha) and, when i wasn't there, wandered the city looking for me, finding me in a phone booth talking to my editor (hence the inability to discuss, megan). he insisted on accompanying me, and since he speaks okay english (he was furiously looking up words during our conversation, meg; i think 'wuss' perplexed him for a while) i figured sure. so we headed up together to the escuela de la pintura usko ayar, so far the weirdest place i've been in perhaps my whole life.

so this guy, don pablo, used to be a shaman. and as a shaman, he took a whole bunch of this drug, ayahuasca (sorry, probably poor spelling). it's the south american peyote, you get sick and you hallucinate - it turns out lots of tourists come here to do the drug, and tour guides (megan: rubi particularly, i guess) specialise in seeing their clients through drug trips. wacky.

anyway, don pablo did a lot of the drug. one day, he got 'hurt' by a 'spirit' - this part i'm not really sure about, but i think the drug made him really sick - and so he realised that we needed to treat the drug with care. he stopped doing it, and has since advocated that people not do it. HOWEVER, around the same time, he did start painting the scenes he saw when he was tripping. this is where it gets a bit weird. i walk into this wooden shack out in the boondocks and this chick, eyes glazed over, details at length the symbolism of the day-glo colors and the windy psychedelic curves in the paintings scattered around. one tree symbolised the god of jam, for instance, and another the most powerful spirit in all of belgium. most of it was earthy love-everything-around-you kind of stuff, which i've seen in paintings by folks on shrooms and such (footnote 1), but then there were the incans. the incans creating ufos, that is - not your standard incan, gold hat, yadda yadda, but the big brown dudes creating giant flying saucers and such. i asked what that symbolised, and she said 'martians.' 'aliens?' (�extranjeros?) i asked. no, no, she was adamantly specific, MARTians. the incans created the spacecraft, you see, which the martians use.

o-kay.

so a lot of me is thinking, this is a far different culture, shamanism is rampant, blah blah, cool. nod and smile, believe whatever you want but don't condemn them for their beliefs. but when she repeated in that trance-like tone that the incans and the space aliens were in it together and only the ayahuasca enabled don pablo to see it, i really had to stifle my smile. i can understand why so many people in the 70s found it so easy to believe marginal religious groups were 'brainwashing' their followers - it's difficult to come into contact with such a very different belief system and respect it. then i remembered that i went to high school with kids who believe that the incans and the aliens were in it together, so really the jungle isn't that different. anyway, the guy is putting his painting skills to good use, at least, creating a style he calls 'neo-Amazonica' - which basically means modern paintings of the jungle with really vivid colors. he's preaching to stay away from the drug, and i agree given what i saw. oy.

bruce and i hopped a taxi back to town. i insisted on getting off at a soda fountain, to grab a drink and, secretly, to not let bruce know where i was staying. i mean, he's a nice kid and all, but it's getting annoying. he stayed for the soda, though, and followed me home, once again going in my room without invitation. i asked him if he didn't have stuff to do. 'nope,' came the reply; 'usually i study or clean my room. you're the most fun i've had in a long time.'

that's sweet, kid.

so bruce, knowing that i have to go to the discos tonight, wants to join. he's going to come back to my hotel in a little while to find me. i ... am hanging out on the other side of town, avoiding him before i go there. lo siento, bruce, but you scare me and it's kind of frustrating to have to teach this kid the english word for everything i say. mostly he scares me, and i'm still convinced he's going to try to kill me or something; not only that, but he makes my job way more difficult to do. i'm a loner, baby, all the way.

anyway: the computer is in the shop. we got some lights, but no start up - please please send hopeful thoughts all tonight, as i find out my fate early tomorrow. my heart has been in my throat all day.

my mother just told me how many people she knows who read this site. thanks all, for coming along with me - you guys i don't mind having along for the ride. i'll try to get more in tomorrow night, but if i have to write this stupid book with a pair of scissors and a gluestick it may take longer than anticipated. be well, and don't forget the ufoincans.

--
footnote 1. i once saw a series of paintings of a cat by a paranoid schizophrenic - they're pretty famous, and were in a psych textbook or something i was studying. if anyone can find the pictures online for me, they get ... i dunno, some kind of prize. c'mon, they were cool pictures, and i've always wished i had a copy for my apartment. i'll post them here if you find them.
:: 8:40 PM [+] ::

4 pm today. it all comes down to this.
:: 11:46 AM [+] ::

NOOOOOO!!!! a solid blow is struck to our hero in the midst of his greatest stride when he finds out at the aforementioned hour that his computer is beyond fixing, and all the work he did wednesday night in tingo maria is lost to the world forever (or at least until return to the US). ah, but that is skipping ahead - first thing's first.

last night, for the first time in my, uh, one-week-two-copybatch stint in south america, i went to the discos. i had to check out the club scene in pucallpa for the guide, and as you all know i was leaving from the net cafe last night to avoid bruce. i found a mototaxi driver willing to humor me for a while, and we set off. i hit up four clubs in a total of about half an hour, talking to the owners, getting a feel for the place, asking kids hanging around outside what they thought, etc. i bounce back to the plaza, and who catches me coming off the mototaxi but... bruce.

i'm fast with the story, so i make something up about really being taxed by the broken computer thing and blah-blah-blah. oh, but i waited for you, bruce says. oh, gee, i'm sorry bruce, i had to run. in fact, i've got a long night's work now, since there's no computer i've got to do it all by hand, gotta run, bye! bruce follows me up to my hostel. i'm getting the key, and he's telling me that he'll sit with me while i work. finally, i have to put my foot down.

'i'm sorry bruce. i've got a lot of work to do, and then i'm going to yarina tomorrow morning early. i can't hang out with you. it's just not going to happen.'

the kid really got hit hard. it took him a couple minutes to find his voice, and then he swallowed and said, 'it's all over?' kind of melodramatic, i thought. i'm not an epic, i'm not even a miniseries, but in bruce's life i was something pretty big. he grabbed his stuff and ran home, almost tripping over himself on the way out. i felt marginally bad, but incredibly sketched out, considering he'd waited for me around my hostel for almost an hour.

i retired to my room and did, last night, almost all of my pucallpa copy by dead tree. for those of you who don't know let's go, that means i had a glue stick and a tiny scissors, and i snipped away at last year's book and cut and pasted the words in a rather more pleasing and correct manner. we hope. anyway, a lot of work, but pretty good, and i passed out early.

woke up this morning with painful ears. that's the crappiest thing about being in noisy places, my earpugs stick out a little from my ears and so they always make me hurt in the morning from getting moved around in weird ways. however, thanks be to dan stewart and virgin atlantic, my eye covers work wonders and it is always dark when i sleep in peru, no matter what time it is.

so today i hit up puerto callao, the trashy port city on the edge of beautiful lake yarinacocha. by trashy, i mean there are dozens of vultures circling the beach picking out trash. the city was crap, and the attractions are all on the lake, so i hung out for a few hours talking to people and doing work for the guide. blah - not particularly interesting stuff. i realise that a lot of people go in for the indigenous-people-in-their-natural-environments-crafting-their-hand-crafted-crafts, but that's really not my thing at all. either a) that's their life, doing their daily thing, and so not really interesting to me - except in a meta sort of cultural way, which i'll never see anyway because b) by having tourism, it coopts this way of life and they start to live in a certain way in order to appear quaint and folksy and get your money. to me, it's far more interesting to see the cultural products of a society, what it presents for itself, rather than what it presents to get your two soles. which is my argument to meg for letting me spend the rest of my itinerary in cusco watching peruvian tv.

anyway, bounce back, call up my bud rubi at the tourist office, and go to interview her about ayahuasca (see yesterday's post on ufo incans). the clock rolls around to the painful 4 pm mark. i run - don't walk - run to the computer guy's place. it takes him a minute to say anything - what's with pregnant pauses this week? - and then he tells me that there's no hope for the thing, that it's absolute crap.

so i break down in tears a bit in this shop and walk back to my hostel like i'm holding a dead body. which i sort of am. okay, i don't want to write about it any more. at any rate, on the way back, i consider my options. i could keep all the info i've got, including the hard facts on tingo maria, and write my copybatch while in bermudez, mailing it wednesday in la merced and possibly forgetting everything about tingo in the meantime. or i could bust now, knock it out, and take bermudez as a pretty posh vacation. guess which one i picked.

so i spent two intense hours at my hostel doing my copybatch, and was just running to mail it in when i ran into who else coming up the steps of my hostel but, uh... oh yeah. bruce. aPParently (i emphasize the ps because i say this word with that sort of one-eyebrow-raised-lips-pursed expression my mom always used to have when i was telling her something that sounded pretty dubious) he went to the discos last night after leaving me, and was ROBBED of his backpack. that's right - big scary peruvian men took the backpack of the 17 year old because they wanted his math textbook. uh, odd, that. at any rate, i had given him my card, and he was apparently so worried that he would never have the info to contact me again that the first thing he did today was seek me out to find out how he could get in touch after i leave. he followed me to the post office, where i sent the copybatch well on its little old way and scrawled down my e-mail info. 'you have beautiful handwriting,' he said, standing on his toes to peer over my shoulder. yech. so rather than leave any opportunity to socialise more, i ran, saying i had to go call some important people for many hours. he nodded, knowing the time would have to come, and said 'yes. some day, though - we'll see.'

two options, the way i figure it. either a) he's at my hostel right now, wearing my clothes and speaking english while holding a butcher knife, or b) he's going to show up at my doorstep some day in the next year with an expired visa asking for my hand in marriage.

so, sadly, there ends the story. i went into a phone booth, watched him walk away, and then ducked out to come to the net cafe. goodbye bruce. hope things work out for you.

at any rate, tomorrow i head to puerto bermudez, which meg swears up and down is the coolest jungle lodge anywhere. i'm excited because rumor has it they have a library, and a book in the english language will be the most incredible thing in my life right now. i would trade anything for it. even a computer.

sadly, the downside is that puerto bermudez is 9-10 hrs away, and is only accessible by 'colectivo'. in spanish, this is any vehicle which takes a bunch of people in a sort of chaotic non-ticketed leave-when-full sort of way to a destination, but in this case, it's the back of a pick-up truck. oh yeah, i'm psyched. i'll be off e-mail until tuesday night/wednesday day, so i look forward to a full inbox - including pictures of schizophrenic cats - when i log in from la merced. tell your friends about the site - hey, maybe i can become an underground phe-nom. be well, all.
:: 10:38 PM [+] ::

the best thing i can say about peru right now is that it keeps proving me wrong. for example, it has proved me wrong every single time i've said 'today is the worst day of my life.' sunday was by far the worst day of my life, so bad that it was allowed an extra 12 hours just because it was that bad.

we last left our hero taking an early bed in preparation for morning travel to puerto bermudez from pucallpa - after all, it's an 8 hr trip. i boarded the truck at 6.30 am or so - the cabina (cab) was full, so i was riding in the back along with 700 lbs of baggage and 13 other people. this is not absolutely awful, i think, looking at the scenery and enjoying the fresh air. i mean, it would be worse if it were to, say, start to rain.

now, i'm in the jungle. also called the rainforest. it was hot in tingo and pucallpa, so i hadn't realised this before, but there's a really good reason they call it rainforest. it rains. and it did, on my trip, start to pour down rain. nonetheless, i am the intrepidest of intrepid travellers, and can humor a little bit of rain as long as my let's go papers are covered, which they were. no big thing. i mean, it's not like the truck broke down in the rain...

putt. putt. putt. kapoot.

alright, so i'm here, i'm in the back of a truck, it's raining, the truck is broken. some people might think - wow, what a crappy day. me? i feel hugely vindicated by the opportunity to bust out my cloudburst umbrella - the very cool very special umbrella i'd bought from eagle creek with its own little keep-dry pouch which justin had called 'gei' and which i now gleefully opened over my own head, drawing death stares from the army grunt and farmers getting wet around me.

20 minutes or so, some special peruvian mojo is worked, and the car is pieced together in some sort of working order - i mean, i wouldn't have called it 'working' to begin with, and it still putters and we can't let it get below a certain rpm or it dies, but it'll do. breeze through to a little town called Von Humboldt. quaint place, we stop for lunch - oh yeah, that's really standard for every peruvian car-truck-combi-colectivo-bus trip, stop a few times for lunch and don't tell people, just stop. anyway, we stop for lunch and the truck races off, presumably to a competent mechanic. i muck through the heavy mud, have a quick plate of rice and watch this neat ceremony that's going on - it's some town holiday, and everyone's dressed up in costumes and dancing in the square, having a good old time. i of course completely lose sight of everyone from my truck, which is an awful idea because they're prone to leave unexpectedly - or, that's not fair. i'm sure it's expected, just not by gringoes. unexpectedmely.

the truck comes back around, presumably fixed and now with even more goods to transport. i hop in, but, true to form, it's like half an hour before we actually start rolling. sadly, my sunscreen is packed away in the bag, which is unreachable, so i open my umbrella as a parasol after a few minutes. actually less dirty stares this time - i think the sun protection thing is big here. and, finally, we roll.

things are going well. i'm getting a little hot, but the car's not making the putt-putt noise any more. it's around 12.30 or 1, we've been quote-unquote on the road for about five hours and i expect have completed half or a little less than half of our trip. the day has not been awesome, but i'll live. so we make it about 30 minutes outside of von humboldt - humorously, i consider later, just far enough to make walking back to town not a real possibility - when we break down for real. and when i mean for real, i mean for REAL. the car will not even turn over. yet again, all the males in the car jump into the engine with tiny screwdrivers, taking apart anything that can't run (though i swear i saw the young kid almost take apart a chicken). i hang out with my parasol for awhile, before sauntering out into the shade.

this is the point i realise that i am traveling to bermudez with Devil Child. Devil Child has been sitting in the back of the cab so far, but everyone makes it out once the car's down for the count, and he emerges along with the rest. the poor child is young - i mean, talking age, but young. he is mostly normal, but one of his eyes is a little squinty. the other eye is not so much an eye, but a giant swollen thing the size of a coconut - almost the size of his head. it is literally this giant misshapen obviously painfully infected part of this child's head that looks like it is from the mind of some demented hollywood puppeteer - like, things like this don't happen to people in real life, do they? it turns out the cinematic conception of horror is actually inspired by poverty - all these things can and do happen to the incredibly poor when there's no health care around. i feel an incredible overwhelming surge of sympathy for this kid (sympathy? empathy? sympathy? can't remember which is which). i feel so bad for his existence. i wish an incredible amount i could lay on hands or had some other sort of healing power to solve this child's problems right now. i'm saying all this because you're all going to think i'm insensitive for calling him Devil Child, but let me reassure you - by the end of what followed, i was quite sure he was the unfortunate sign that my day was to be ruled over by the dark forces of the earth. the sign that i should've known from the beginning and stayed home.

so the car is busted, and we all take up seats in the shade - mind you, we're on a dirt path in the middle of the jungle - to wait this out while a couple people keep work at it. a car drives up going the other way, and our man - most of these cars have a driver and someone i call the 'man', who works for the bus line and runs the show on the road - hops in and rolls away. only some of these people speak castellano, or spanish - the rest are natives or playing dumb - but i'm not too nervous yet - i just figure he's gone off to get a mechanic. at this point, it's 2 pm. we've been broken down for quite the little while.

around 3.30 - now, this is a vague estimate - he returns with a mechanic. we've just gotten the car to semi start and were on our way back to von humboldt ourselves, but we stop when he comes back so the mechanic can get a look. out of the car again, this time next to a little roadside stand that has a couple beverages and a few pieces of bread but not much else. Devil Child and his mom wander over for a bit, and we're all just chilling when one of the guys - heavy sunglasses and open shirt with tufts of hair - gets into a heated discussion with the guy working at the stand. they seem to reach an agreement, and he brings out, oh, a giant bag of drugs, filled with little baggies. he gives him one, they exchange money, and i try to pretend i didn't see. no, really, i'm sure it was just some natural herb and not, say, a controlled substance this man riding in the truck with me has been selling.

at the same time, i'm starting to hallucinate. i must've looked really pitiful, because the man invited me to sit in the cab of the truck - two people had already gotten fed up and hailed passing cars back to von humboldt or pucallpa - and, when i did settle in, i saw that i had an incredible giant sunburn beginning to cover my body. staying covered would be a priority for me for the rest of the day, i could see. i soaked my old bandana - because of course i always travel with two and was already wearing one - in water and spread it around my head out a la lawrence of arabia. i was about to start waving my scimitar around when...

the car is miraculously fixed. the mechanic swears to god. it's around 4, 4.30, 5, and i'm pretty happy because i can still get into bermudez before it's too late. i ask the guy who clambers in next to me how much longer the ride is - 4 hrs, he says. sa-weet. nothing more could possibly go wrong here, right?

we cross the Devil's Bridge. this is not the technical name of the bridge, but, living up to my role as a south american conquistador, it is now. this is one of those very small, very poorly built bridges of like three wooden planks over a large stretch of water, except it has very clearly been hit by, say, a passing city, and is now essentially bent entirely in half. to cross this bridge will - yeah, it will mean turning the truck at an almost 90-degree angle, parallel to, well, the river. this is not, to my small gringo mind, a good idea, but we persevere, throw everyone we have hanging off one side in the back, and we cross the bridge. i assume it was smooth - my eyes were closed. in fear. because, in addition to the bridge, Devil Child decided to pop his head up next to me in the cab at that moment. mortal fear are two words that come to mind.

we soon realise the road is a little tougher than we thought. it's been clear and hot since morning, but that rain comes back to kick us around a bit. the road has been doused pretty thoroughly, and it seems the first vehicle to go through afterwards was a giant truck. giant trucks leave giant tracks in giant mud, so this is going to be a little tough going - rocky, up and down kind of thing.

which it is, until about sundown. at sundown, we're behind a tractor that's stuck in the mud. we are ourselves stuck in the mud, and have to figure out a way to get the tractor out and then get out ourselves. it is at this point that the occupants of my truck decide that i, their most affectionate Gringo, am bad luck - and to pay for my inadvertant sins, i'd have to get out and help push.

which i do. and it's not that bad, the first time through. the mud's only up to my ankles, i've got big nasty boots on, and i definitely weigh more than any of these tiny tiny people. so we do some pulling. we do some more pulling. nothing's really going anywhere. and then it's dark - in a span of like five minutes, the sun has set. and i'm here, on a mud road, in the jungle, very very far from any sort of city.

i panic and run to my pack. see, there's a huge malaria risk in the jungle, but i only told my doc i was going to the central highlands and so didn't get treated for malaria. he laughed and said, 'hey, we don't need to worry about that, it's not like you're going to be spending the night defenseless in the middle of the jungle, right son?' i laughed too. god, i hate having conversations like that come back to haunt me. the pack isn't just gingerly set atop the truck - i mean, they needed to pack it to withstand the Devil's Bridge, after all. i would either have to completely remove all the other packs, or be incredibly dextrous and remove just what i needed from a pouch buried deep inside this pile-o-equipaje. clearly, being the dumb gringo, i pick option three - grab my bag and pull with all possible force until it bursts out of the pile with a resounding plop, weakening the structure and later causing us to stop yet again to fix the luggage. nonetheless, i am eminently satisfied, grab my 95% DEET Jungle Juice and, thinking ahead, my rain poncho as well - storm clouds are gathering overhead and i'm worried about losing my papers. funny, the next morning i was hoping my papers had been lost so i'd have an excuse not to be able to do my job and so go home.

sprayed with Jungle Juice, i was the invincible jungle warrior. the other plus of the darkness was ... the darkness. loss of visibility + Devil Child = a good thing.

two hours later, we got the car out.

twenty minutes later, we got stuck again.

i'm going to leave aside words, because there's really no way to describe my perceptions of that night. in a cramped truck with 15 on the back and 8 in the cab, we spent hours and hours continuing to get stuck in and pull ourselves out of mud. i emerged completely covered, boots and socks soaked through, dead tired. 'emerged' isn't really the word, though, because it never ended - we just happened to get to near a reasonable-sized village. altogether, by 4 or 5 in the morning when we called it a night, we had gone maybe 3 miles since first getting stuck. i have to reiterate, yet again, that this isn't like getting stuck in the US - the roads are wide enough for only one car to pass. there is no triple-A, and there is no cell phone to call them on. there is no chance of salvation except by sheer luck. the peruvians, as they told me that night, are used to it and have become incredibly resourceful people with a great patience and sense of humor about it. sometimes, though, it just doesn't work out, and that is a chance everyone here lives with.

i say we called it a night at 4 or 5. i mean to say, we parked the truck on the side of the road in this village and the driver went to sleep. i took that as my cue to try the same, but by the time i was just about to drift off the sun rose and we were off again. i will not describe the rest of that trip, except to say that it was at noon, 29 hrs after we left, that we arrived in pulcalzu. and it was more of the same.

pulcalzu, you say? but i thought you were going to bermudez? ah, true, but pulcalzu is where you make connections to bermudez. i asked the man, with whom i had grown pretty friendly over the course of this grueling ordeal. 'diez soles mas, por coche' he said and pointed. okay, i thought, fishing out 10 soles - this was the price i'd seen on the board in the station in pucallpa, anyway, so i was prepared to pay it. no prob. this being another one of those typical stops, i sat down to grab lunch and wait for us to get on the road.

two hours later, i finally went looking for my man. my patience was up. i knocked down the door at the transport company's office, and started interrogating everyone i saw. finally i cornered one guy who happened to speak english, and he helped me out. turns out that company didn't go to bermudez, another company, a car company did. this i had no idea of. but i'd already given 10 soles, i explained! being the kind soul that he was, he actually hopped on his motorbike and went to find the man i'd given the money to. the story he got was this: at a certain point in the trip, i switched from riding on the back to the cab. this is true, i said. but, he said, the price for the back is s/30. the price for the cab is s/40. the money you gave him was for that. pero no me dijo, i kept yelling! he didn't tell me that! i wouldn't have paid for that! finally i had to pony up the extra s/10 for the car ride to bermudez. by the time this gets rolling, it's around 3 pm. grand total so far: s/50 and 32 hrs.

okay. fine. car to bermudez. 2.5 hrs. i'm chatting, i'm trying to stay awake but i'm positive, thinking nothing more could go wrong. the road is pretty rocky, no chance of getting stuck - so instead the tire blows. it's not a big deal, but it's the icing on my proverbial cake. i finally arrive at puerto bermudez, into the careful, capable hands of jesus - who recalled meg in a similar state a year ago - the english-speaking spaniard who ran this hostel. 35 hrs total.

okay, i don't want to talk about it any more, except to say that it was the most difficult, most frustrating, most exhausting, definite worst day of my life. i barely restrained myself from hopping the lima-bound bus today from la merced and booking it out of here.

on a lighter note, jesus opened my eyes to fascinating info about the peruvian ecology - i'm going to try to write my next hot topic on that, and i'll post it for your consideration tomorrow. in the meantime, i covered la merced and san ramon in my transport day, and leave for oxapampa tomorrow, so my itinerary is way out of whack. here's my technical and optimistic itineraries for the next few weeks:

day - tech. - opt.
12 - Oxapampa - Oxapampa
13 - Yanachaga - Yanachanga
14 - Yanachaga - Pozuzo
15 - Pozuzo - transport day / tarma
16 - transport day - near tarma
17 - tarma - junin
18 - day off - huancayo
19 - near tarma - huancayo
20 - junin - huancayo
21 - huancayo - huancayo
22 - huancayo - izcuchaca
23 - huancayo - huancavelica
24 - huancayo - daytrips
25 - day off - ayacucho
26 - huancayo - ayacucho
27 - izcuchaca - vilcashuaman
28 - huancavelica - transport day
29 - hyancavelica daytrips - andahuaylas
30 - ayacucho - abancay
1 - ayacucho - near abancay
2 - day off - transport to cusco
3 - ayacucho
4 - vilcashuaman
5 - transport day
6 - andahuaylas, pacucha
7 - abancay
8 - near abancay
9 - day off
10 - transport to cusco

optimistically, i'm in cusco by the beginning of july. things of course always come up, but that's what i'm shooting for.

okay, i'm dead tired and they're closing the store. i gotta run. be well, all, and please send e-mails - more on the environment next time.
:: 11:19 PM [+] ::

grr. so for once i actually don't have much to post. i've been in oxapampa for 3 whole hours, which in let's go time in a small town is essentially infinity. i've covered everywhere, including the really hard-to-track-down places, and now all that remains is to go back to my hostel, shave off my giant red beard and watch cable. the beard is actually a funny story. i haven't shaved for a few days because of the nasty sunburn i got on the road from pucallpa to bermudez (wow - that's three towns ago now), which now has taken to peeling in a less than sexy manner. so i go this morning to shave in my very very cold la merced shower, only to find that my razor blade has broken in a non-fixable manner - the actual blade itself, not the razor, my ever-incredible gilette mach 3. i didn't pack a replacement, but whatever, they have to sell them here.

point of fact: in south america, very little facial hair is grown. razors do not do a big business. additionally, it appears that the gilette company has yet to infiltrate the continent. q.e.d. - no replacement blade. i know it sounds stupid, it's a tiny difference, but it meant a frightened populace as the giant whitey waded through the sea of peruvians today. you see, when i do grow a beard, it's a nasty tufty red thing that proves my danish heritage - i look like i should be wearing a big sweater and sailing, which right now sounds kinda cool. my dirty hair also gets redder and wavy-er, and i must've been quite the sight. on the plus side, i'm near pozuzo, which is a settlement of austrians and germans from waaaaay back, so i actually probably look more peruvian than gringo right now with my northern european good looks, dirty dirty dirty pants and crazy hair.

sadly, my two days to be spent in yanachanga, the reaaaaally gorgeous cloudforest near here, have been cut to zero. access is restricted because they're restructuring it to be more tourist friendly, which is a great thing but bad for me because the reopen isn't until august 29th. i could've gone for 2 hrs tomorrow, leaving at 4 am, and hung out in the dark forest by myself, but i decided to pass on that - not actually because of the lack of guide or anything, but because when i looked up the part of the park i'd be restricted to, it's like the bit at the entrance with the benches. granted, i could sit and finish my rolling stone - again, thanks most gracious genithia at the office - but it's not really worth the day. (on a genithia note: i must admit i ate the entire bag of skittles yesterday. my stomach hurts now. but i'm happy.)

instead, it looks like tomorrow i'll get up early, hop a colectivo to pozuzo, cover that town in a few hours, and then catch the next colectivo back here in time to hit the 4.30 bus to tarma. a pretty intense day, but if i get good sleep tomorrow i should be able to pull it off no problem, especially because i'm getting a lot of my primary source stuff from an incredible guidebook i got at the tourist office here. which would mean three cities in one day, something i haven't done since la union-huanuco-tingo. i got it in me.

i was going to, at some point, try to track what percent of my life i am spending on buses right now, but when i started to i got intensely depressed and stopped. maybe i'll start marketing myself as 'absurdly patient' on my resume - do companies look for that? would that help? will i ever have a real job that i need a resume for? who am i kidding?

anyway, thought i'd send you all the first draft of my hot topic for this week - some really interesting stuff i learned this week about the forest ecology down here.

Though the destruction of Peru�s vital rainforests by large corporations may get the most press, a stickier problem faces the selva these days: trees cut down by local Peruvians themselves. Peru�s jungle areas are often split between two cultures � the indigenous tribes with their own traditions and languages and the more modern-living Spanish speakers � and the tug of war is a dangerous one. The modern Peruvians, typically ignorant of the ancient ways of living, cut down and burn large swaths of forest to produce farmable land or clear areas for village expansion, destroying thousands of hectares of forest ecosystem and shorting the jungle dwellers of their resources. The Peruvian government has firmly stepped in this year, however, by declaring an initiative which makes agreements with communities to preserve forest land. Towns and villages sign a promise that they won�t cut down a single additional tree, and in return the government sets up an ecology fund which goes towards education and reforestation in that area. It�s ultimately a great deal all around � a recently-released government study shows that an area of forest land produces 30% more, in monetary terms, than the same amount of land when used for agriculture.

that's of course the sound bite version - but still, pretty interesting, right? turns out the non-indigenous people, in a desire to be modern and western and whatnot, love to cut down forests and then build concrete towns in them, when really the same level of comfort and modernity could be established with natural materials. which they've just destroyed. luckily there are groups down here working on education of these facts, but unluckily - and the recurring problem i think you'll note me harping on - the lack of infrastructure means its hardest to get the message across to the people who are doing the most of it. international justice is one thing, dan, but it's pretty meaningless without fundamental economic and social reforms because the situations from which awful indignities arise will simply continue and self-propagate. want to be a politician? don't do that smiling-shaking-hands senator thing - go the real hard road and work on USAID or other programs like that.

okay, i'm out to go work on my copybatch and watch world cup ('juego mundial' here) highlights. be well, all, and pray none of my bug bites contain real nasty tropical diseases.
:: 8:17 PM [+] ::

yesterday: oxapama-pozuzo-oxapampa-la merced-tarma. today: tarma-junin-tarma-huancayo. i'm dizzy.

so yesterday i combined my pozuzo day with my travel day, for 12 hrs of travelling and 2 hours in beautiful pozuzo. that's definitely been the highlight of my trip so far. i'll write more later, because i'm only in tarma and have to book it to pull this off. word.
:: 1:54 PM [+] ::

okay, i realise i have an incredible amount to update y'all on, but i'm trying to do my job for a change (i know, right?). minor news first: i'm in huancayo, the coldest place on earth, and have just switched hostels to the casa de la abuela, the coolest hostel on the face of the planet. i wish i could photograph the 70 year old foosball table in one of the common rooms but - and you'll find this funny - my stupid point-and-shoot camera doesn't have a lock on the trigger and so has taken about a dozen shots of the inside of my backpack. at any rate, i'll be in residence here for a number of nights (possibly... 3? we'll see how the afternoon shapes up - this is an exhausting city), and calls are always welcome, post-9 pm - 064 (country code) 234 383.

now major news: you all don't know this - because most of you are in countries far more concerned with the arthur andersen case than anything else - but protests over the privatisation of two electric companies in arequipa, peru, have turned violent this morning, with several cases of arson and lots of anti-police violence. the only report i can find online for y'all is at the good old BBC, but keep posted - arequipa not being terribly far from where i'm headed, i'm a little worried, but mostly as the shining path return becomes more and more of a reality this could be the kind of gateway thing - if it escalates - that could lead to revolt. newspapers here already carry the headline 'revolution in arequipa'. except in spanish.

while looking for more info on that, i found this nice article about the very city i'm in and its role in the new truth and reconciliation commission. the most interesting thing for me has been seeing the trc (ctr here) propganda - huge well-designed posters with collages of villagers speaking and lots of 'we can't fix it, but we can help make it better' kind of copy. best of luck to them - their struggle to figure out exactly what happened is such an uphill battle, particularly in this land where everyone's trying to forget.

i'm going to go research this crowded city. original itinerary had me in pozuzo today - optimistic assessment from la merced put me in tarma, but here i am in huancayo. i now look to be landing in ayacucho by next weekend at the latest, and in cusco by the weekend after. more stories later tonight - be well, everyone.
:: 3:18 PM [+] ::

my poor denmark was torn up by those lousy brits (though, i must say, i'm reading uk gq right now and d beckham is a pretty interesting guy), so my spirit is too low for an actual posting about my life. mostly i've been trying to finish up my copybatch and fend off this canadian anthropologist in my hostel who, so terribly thrilled that tourists might take an interest in her part of peru, wants to show me every single rock that was maybe around when the incas were here. i, meanwhile, am far more interested in d beckham and my newly received copy of bros. karamazov (oi - what an awesome team i have back in cambridge looking after me), but i am going to suck it up and spend the afternoon exploring - sunday market, parque de identidad, and hopefully some out-of-town craftsman kind of stuff. yes, bob villa, this old house. (oddly, bob villa does speak fluent spanish, and there are commercials down here with him advertising craftsman tools en espanol. freaky.)

much research on truth and reconciliation to do for my next hot topic, but maybe i'll post later with some of what i find out.

for your esteemed consideration - because i'd feel bad letting a day go by without a little time wasting:
+ an update on the protests in arequipa - courtesy of nandotimes
+ it's about time. i've always been a proponent of sainthood for padre pio - i mean, the guy spent more than half his life bleeding out of his hands and feet, and all he gets is forbidden to say mass?

more later. be well, and remember to tell your father how much you appreciate him - mine's finally gotten around to e-mailing me. punk.
:: 2:58 PM [+] ::

a few news items before we get rolling today:

+ USA! USA! USA!
+ hey guys, we've got these incredibly earth-shaking problems that need to be addressed politically before more innocents die - i know, let's build a fence.
+ headlines in today's aja: 'at the brink of WAR!'. okay, granted, aja's known for being a little over-the-top, but a state of emergency has been declared by the government. about $100m worth of damage has been done, and 66 are injured. seemingly the smart thing for me to do is travel closer, which is what i'm doing tomorrow morning. on the plus side, the violence there has meant a huge increase in army presence in the streets here, which makes me feel a) safe from thieves, and b) like i could be shot at any moment. the somewhat giant problem with peru's army and police force is that, fifteen years ago, they were responsible for many of the atrocities during the years of terrorism. and they're still incredibly corrupt - i mean, the country is the leading producer of coca in the world.

i just hope no one from let's go is in arequipa.

so the real reasons i haven't been updating much are twofold. i've been a bit less focused on peru lately as i've fallen into a heavy groove with my travels - possibly a result of them being far easier and less painful than previously. and i'm also having actual interesting e-mails from some of you which take me forever to reply to and use up all of my limited supply of words. nonetheless, i must please my public, so i will push on with what's happened since pozuzo.

pozuzo is this gorgeous little town which reminds me of the swiss alps - not because i've been to the swiss alps, but because there are mountains and a lot of people who speak german. it's the only austrian and german colony in peru, where a bunch of people came over from europe about two hundred years ago to essentially score some free land. while one might be tempted to say it was the color difference - there really are simply more white people there than brown - that made my time there more comfortable, i rather think it was the hospitality. while many peruvians have been very gracious and my current landlady, the Abuela (grandmother), is incredible, the people here were just so much kinder and gentler than those i have encountered elsewhere in peru. which makes me wonder if the outright hostility i've met with elsewhere is really a cause of my skin color and reaction to its connotations, while in pozuzo everyone is my skin color and so they don't know how to treat me. either that, or the german hospitality was just passed down. in any case, i had a great talk and a wonderful lunch cooked by an old couple who, though they speak german fluently and i think amongst themselves, consider themselves peruvian to the core. interesting look at the clash of two cultures, but it seems largely the traditions of europe have remained while the daily life has had no problem acclimating to the peruvian climate.

that being one of my immense travel days, i hoped on a number of buses and ended up in tarma by midnight. ironically, tarma is a gorgeous city, while the guide's intro says 'tarma is brown and not altogether unlike feces'; needless to say, this author extraordinaire put a fat black line through that one and rewrote, rewrote, rewrote. sadly, other than nearby locales - like an image of christ carved into the rock by a revolutionary soldier 200 years ago - tarma doesn't really hold any interest, so i booked i through there and landed in junin.

never, ever, go to junin.

it is cold, it is flat, and there is nothing there.

that is all i will say about junin.

so now i'm in huancayo, which is super-bustling. it's got about 350,000 people, which isn't huge in american standards but is one of the bigger ones down here. there are hints of business, there are men in suits and briefcases, and there are any number of city-type affectations that make me miss boston or new york. it's got a definite funkiness about it too - no, not an unusual odor, but really a vibe of being connected to its history while moving into the future. i know that makes little sense, but, for example, the walls along the overpass nearby are decorated with drawings of the indigenous wanka people, right up to the internet cafe with the student standing out front reading about cutting edge biotechnology. this is exactly the sort of thing the guide discourages you from writing about - and yeah, i sort of agree that it's trite to point out that a city is old and at the same time modern. the problem is, across the world cities are like this, and we americans don't know what it's like to have history. as eddie izzard says: 'we've restored this building to how it used to look over FIFTY YEARS AGO! no, it's not possible, no one was alive then.' the thing i'm just getting on the edge of is that it really does seem that this history lends a certain gravity to life here, to culture and politics particularly - like they have a perspective on where they've been and so are more interested in where they'd like to go. of course, it's a country with an incredible amount of problems, so it's easy to develop a platform of where you'd like to go, but how many americans can make sweeping statements about where they want the country to be, artistically and politically, fifty years from now? is that why we're the biggest innovators, because we don't have a direction we're aiming at? all these questions.

i'm excited, too, to head to ayacucho soon, although a little hesitant. it was the center of the terrorist movement - the shining path essentially started there - but was also the hardest hit, losing tens of thousands of people to the violence. it's still known as the big university town in peru, and the center of intellectual activity. it'll be interesting to see how a place like that operates - is it a bohemia of coffee bars? where do peruvians hold their philosophical debates? i should be there before week's end, so i'll let you all know.

sadly, the day dwindles while i tell you all my interesting stories. i've got to go seize it. be well, all, watch more football, and keep me updated on your lives - give this gringo traveler some perspective, will you?
:: 12:31 PM [+] ::

first, a brief, um, brief on the arequipa situation - i had to reprint this because there's pesky registration requirements, so please don't sue me chicago tribune (in the words of many girls i went to high school with, 'as if'):

Troops in 2nd-largest city as violent protests enter 5th day
AREQUIPA, PERU -- Hundreds of soldiers took control of Peru's second-largest city Monday amid a government-imposed emergency to end violent protests against the sale of two state-owned electricity generating companies.
The protests began Friday and are the largest since President Alejandro Toledo took office 11 months ago. They prompted the government to ban public protests and suspend constitutional guarantees for 30 days in Arequipa and the surrounding province.
The protesters, worried that Friday's $167 million sale of the regional companies, Egasa and Egesur, to a Belgian company would mean higher utility prices and layoffs, spilled into the center of Arequipa. Police fired tear gas Monday to try to disperse hundreds of residents in a fifth day of violent protests.
The government sent in 1,700 police and soldiers to secure the city of 1 million, about 625 miles from Lima, which has an overnight curfew after clashes that killed one man and injured 122.
Officials said 10 people were hurt Monday, and seven were reported arrested.

the last two bits are by far the most interesting - one dead, and oh yeah 1700 police in the streets. american embassies are warning our countrymen away from there. cnn has yet to pick up the news, but is reporting on britney's next film, complete with clever headline pun. oh you wild american media you.

also, three observations i've been meaning to put up for a while:
one. PERU HAS FLODEBOLER! right, okay, i know i didn't spell that correctly and those of you from the states will have no idea what they are anyway, but they're the most delightful scandinavian chocolate bon-bon type candy and peru has a version of them. i originally found this out in oxapampa but just remembered my excitement because i bought one on the streets today. i haven't exactly been eating candy - as those who follow my gastronomy know, it's been a bread-and-water month - but i had to snag one today for s/.50, or about 15 cents. beat that, capitalist northern europe.
two. peruvian rockstars do sound check with 'uno? dos? uno ddossssssss?' i find this absolutely hilarious, but i doubt the rest of you do.
three. peru, for being the most beautiful country landscape-wise i've ever been in, is a giant garbage heap. the peruvian people have no sense of ecology, seemingly because they've got such a giant amount of land that's been taking good care of itself for, well, ever. any trash? thrown on the street, out the window. it's not like said trash is cleaned up at a later date - no, no, the most beautiful train ride i took today which featured spectacular mountain vistas was in the end marred by the giant landfill that is everywhere next to the train tracks. kind of sad, and i hope they shape up here before they get into trouble in 3000 years or so.

so as we figured, i'm in huancavelica, having traveled by train with a brief (veddy brief) stop in izcuchaca, which is, thank you nzt, a real nowhere land. the town is small (about 35,000) and the tourist office super-helpful, so i've been able to cover most of the town in the early early afternoon, dig the out-of-town sites until just now, and finish up tonight, including some live regional music that i found out about on the d.l. which means i leave at (gah!) 4.30 am tomorrow for ayacucho - though i am proud because both lg and lonely planet insisted there's no way to get to ayacucho from here, while i have unearthed a dozen bad ways and one good way. i am king of the r-dubs.

ran into some french travelers on the train - he speaks spanish, she doesn't, she speaks english, he doesn't, which made for some fun. i realise most european adventurers have this down pat by now, but there's a real unspoken code amongst international travelers that gets pretty deep. for example, you don't usually ask names, unless you're going to be traveling together - it's a waste of time when you could be sharing interesting travel tips. that's another one: you share all the travel tips you know, and go out of your way to be helpful to each other. you swap guidebooks for a while (as i've done numerous times with lonely planet users - we are SO way better, except for the fact that they have three times as many maps). if someone doesn't speak the language and another traveler does, you have to offer to help them at least get settled into the hostel before leaving them on their own. i'm sure there are many more - because i'm sure in other situations 'you get drunk together' is an option, while here it's a little more granola and a little less, well, roma bella.

which reminds me: i am now read in italy, denmark, the uk, possibly india, norway, and rural vermont, as well as more familiar state-side locales. i am the coolest person i know this week, which granted isn't saying much but still makes me feel better.

it is sort of a tragedy - well, not a tragedy - that my trip is winding down. it's definitely made me think long and hard about what i want out of travel experiences, and how to have the best i can. peru, i realise, is not a destination i would pick for international exploration alone. i would definitely come with someone, but alone there are other things i would look for. hopefully, however, my summer options are expanding to include a lot more travel, and that will be so informed by this trip. and of course, my genius writing will be published this fall and all of you who, um, send me money will be proud owners of let's go: peru, ecuador and bolivia, complete with my sexy snapshot and to-be-determined-by-my-editorial-staff-which-is-a-frightening-prospect bio. if you met my editorial staff, you'd know why that scares me.

oops - dinner time. i still have a couple restaurants to check out and want to make this concert tonight, but i'll give y'all a yell from ayacucho. i'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this privitisation thing, because it's really interesting to me that the reaction has been so strong, and it's been fascinating to ask people for the news every day and see how they spin it. also, the peruvian government has already issued a series of tv commercials trying to encourage order, and lil-old-fascinated-by-propaganda-me is delighting in watching how they do it - big rippling peruvian flag, sotto voce announcer, etc etc.

oo, i also wanted to talk a little about public vs. private lives, which i'll get into next time. most people's lives are spent i think largely in private, in small groups of our choosing and not in the vast public. most travelers are a little more fifty-fifty, i think, while let's go researchers are pretty much 95% in the public and 5% in private situations. interesting how it changes your behavior.

tune in next time - same bat time, same bat station. be well, everyone.
:: 6:52 PM [+] ::

*yawn* so i had to send a brief post because it's been quite the day.

got up at 4, in plenty of time to make my 4.30 bus. get everything packed, wander downstairs to discover... i'm locked it. oh christ. two padlocks on the door, no other way out. i am panicked. i am searching everywhere. finally i figure out that the door to the administrative office of the hostel is open, where there are key rings hanging out. i grab three key rings, and start trying every key in the locks - making, i think, a huge amount of noise in the process in the hopes of waking someone who can help me.

not so much. not exactly light sleepers, it seems, and only after 20 minutes (and two locks down) does the owner, who is sleeping in the ROOM RIGHT NEXT TO THE DOOR, wake up and help me out. finally. so i sprint down the street to a taxi at the plaza de armas, who senses my rush and RACES me to the bus station.

... to find out that i've missed my bus. luckily, there were so many people who wanted to go that they got another one, and i get a decent seat on that. bravo. unfortunately, my ticket that i purchased the night before is now worthless and i need to shell out another $3 for the trip. whatever - sugar momma let's go will cover it. genius.

now, the bus only goes to some city i've vaguely heard of, from which i have to catch another bus to ayacucho. or at least, that's what i thought. it turns out the bus only goes to some random bridge with only a drinks stand and a police car around to show it has any greater meaning. and, as i find out standing around with a dozen others waiting for a ride, we're not expecting a bus per se. what we're participating in is state-encouraged hitchhiking.

finally a truck comes along that's full of bags of rice. we toss in our baggage and climb on top - it's not like a u.s. truck truck, but like an open-air sort of multi-purpose jobby-doo with enough space for maybe 100 people packed peruvian-style.

so i'm riding in the back, all is good. and then we start going into the mountains. it turns out the route, although on a paved road (huge bonus), goes through the highest bit of the andes, and here i am, in my very little covering, going through a completely snow-covered landscape. i saw perhaps the most incredible beautiful landscapes of my life today - i can't even begin to put it into words - but parts of my body are only now thawing out.

there's a little more to the story - including a feared mutiny on the bounty when one of the guys figured out i was a backpacker and figured 'that must take a lot of money, huh gringo?' - but i need a nap.

speaking of gringo - it just hurts me how often i'm called ethnic slurs here by kids - as in like mid-20s - who think it's funny. i'm trying desperately not to rise to the bait, but it's so painful to try to promote better relations with people this resentful. a lot of me would be happy leaving them their country and never looking back, which i know i need to fight.

anyway, before i go, coolest thing i've found this week: take corn, and pop it, but don't let the kernel actually EXPLODE - just have it, still sealed, but popped inside. then eat. it's hard to explain, but it's basically popcorn as we know it, inside out. and it's wicked good.

obligatory arequipa news...

and i'm out. be well, everyone, and ... never, ever watch the show 'the sentinel.' that's the moral for today. until next time...
:: 7:17 PM [+] ::

Peru's Interior Minister resigns over the privatisation protests, and Arequipa's mayor is on a hunger strike in league with the protests. me, i just sent in copybatch 5, so i'm off to do some real work. more soon.
:: 11:56 AM [+] ::

grrrrr. cold. really really cold.

oh, korea, how did you win that game despite playing terribly? why oh why are you in the semis? at least turkey is playing an excellent game - did anyone see the senegal game? incredible, these turks.

anyway, i'm in andahuaylas. yesterday was a wonderful travel day. i got up at 6 to catch a 7 o'clock combi to vilcashuaman from ayacucho, but, because of the way combis work, we didn't end up leaving until closer to 11. which is cool if the trip is only 3 hrs as i was promised, because i can turn around and still make my 7 pm bus to andahuaylas. instead, it takes us almost 5 hours to get there. wonderful.

i cover the city and hop my ride back, still clinging to the obscure home that i can catch the bus but mostly figuring i lost $20 thanks to the peruvian transportation system, between my void ticket and another night's hotel stay. alas.

but we turn a mountain (you don't so much turn 'corners' here) and i can see ayacucho. it's 6-something, and i get excited, thinking there's still a chance. it's 7 when we actually get into town, and about 7.05 by the time i hop out and catch a taxi.

i really enjoyed saying 'to los chankas, johnny, and step on it.' the drive, on the other hand, had no idea what i was talking about, but once i applied the appropriate translation he was perhaps the best cab driver i've ever had. we almost mowed down a transit cop, went the wrong way down one way streets and went around giant roadblocks to make it to the station. the bus was still there. my luck was awesome. unfortuantely, my luggage was still at the hotel. i got them to promise to wait, and we had another batmobile-type drive to the hotel, where i literally jumped OVER a group of peruvians to get to the door quicker.

hey, they're a short people.

back to the station, luggage in tow, we found out that the bus had left. but - wait - a little kid told us it'd be at grifo miraflores, the gas station on the COMPLETE OTHER SIDE OF TOWN. again with the batmobile schtick. long story short, i'm convinced we're halfway to andahuaylas but we catch up with the bus and pull it over, and i hop on.

only to discover someone in my seat. i was planning to sleep on this trip, so i caused a little trouble, insisting on seeing people's tickets. people were stubborn, and they ended up stopping the bus and checking everyone's ticket. it's difficult to understand from a north american transportation perspective, but there were maybe 100 people and 30 seats on this bus, so it was fairly vital that i snag one if i was hoping to nap on the way. we sort out the mess, a bitter old peruana is forced from her seat, and we get on the road.

twenty minutes in, they turn on very loud native music. they never turn it off. for the entire trip. despite my earplugs and my virgin atlantic 'cat nap' eye mask, i cannot sleep. for 11 hours. i arrive in andahuaylas tired, unhappy, and very argumentative when the driver told me they didn't have my luggage. (footnote 1.) i go to the nicest hostel in town, i beg the owner to let me have a room until noon, and i crash.

of course, they're renovating the hostel, particularly the room next door, so the hammers started about five minutes after my head hit the pillow.

i'm very tired. and cold. and looking forward to heading to abancay tonight.

in the list of things for me to talk about in the future, yesterday was a great education on dropping the h-bomb in peru - saying you go to harvard. it's both good and bad, for interesting reasons - i'll explain soon.

okay, off to finish up the quote-unquote city. i'm almost done with this crazy let's go thing - hope you're enjoying the ride.

be well, everyone.

footnote 1. they did have my luggage. it's just that there was a man sleeping in the luggage compartment under the bus, and he wouldn't wake up, so they couldn't see it where it was - that is, providing him with a pillow.
:: 2:24 PM [+] ::

okay, so some of you may be worried about my welfare due to my lack of writing. rest assured: i am in cusco, at an internet cafe where the keyboard is finally in the english format, listening to 'wake me up before you go-go'. i'm going to see satyricon tonight at a movie theatre across the street from my hostel, and i ate pizza and had a (non-alcoholic) strawberry daquiri tonight. *i* know that's just strawberry and ice, but the peruvians don't.

anyway, i will share more as soon as i'm done writing my let's go stuff - it's just taxing to write all day and then entertain y'all at night, because frankly the book needs my moderate amount of wit far more than you do.

just a little piece of my amazement, however: cusco is the craziest of cities! it's entirely gringo oriented, a huge change from the rest of the country where i was often the first white person these people had seen. and the gringoes here are particularly funny - they'll buy an entire new set of 'native' clothes, where them around the inca trail, and hang them in the closet when they get home. a), we know you're white, idiot; and b), we wear north face and rei stuff because it's WARMER THAN ALPACA. i swear to GOD, it's scientifically proven. you people don't blend in, and you're freezing at night. as my high school physics teacher always said, it must be nature's way of weeding out the stupid genes. mr. mason and his sardonic wit were sadly right.

okay, wish me luck on finishing my last copybatch - because then i'm all yours.

he he.
:: 8:59 PM [+] ::

hi guys.

*waves weakly*

i'm safe and sound, back in cambridge massachusetts. i know i've been away for a while, but you have to understand - between being hospitalized in peru, getting bumped from my flight, and returning to the us to find almost $5000 worth of my things stolen, i'm a bit demoralised. yes, i was subject to the pokings and proddings of the peruvian medical system, and still have the bruises to prove it; yes, i stayed in a $250 a night hotel in lima where the concierge offered to sneak us out the basement past the cops; and yes, both of my computers were stolen from storage here while i was away, with everything i've ever written or composed or designed or photographed contained therein - and if you know me, you know that's a lot.

so i'm hoping i'll recover enough soon to tell you guys the rest of my fun stories, but for now i'm relegated to frequent trips to the computer lab and lots of calls to insurance and police and that sort of thing. plus my show goes up in a week - anyone in the boston area, come see it? - so i need to iron all this out before i can fulfill my promises. still, hullo from the northeast, and felicidades to everyone.

be well.
:: 7:05 PM [+] ::

well, we - and by that i mean 'me and my invisible friends' - made it into the lima (ohio) news. adrienne mcgee did a nice story on page b1 a week or so ago highlighting my travelogue, mostly because who from lima ohio ever ends up in lima peru?

i say 'a week or so,' but really i have no idea. time is now measured in pre-computers and post-computers. because in the last two days i've gotten two new dells, a laptop and a desktop, thanks to my insurance who came through with some funds for all my stolen equipment. i still need new eyeglasses, et cet, but the new laptop means i can escape the noisy tumult of pforzheimer house and write from places like where i am right now, in the gorgeous bright philips reading room in widener library, harvard u, cambridge. so the lima news article was pre-computers. today is the second day of post-computers. thank god.

also pre-computers, i received my first e-mail from someone i met in peru. dalmiro was a cusco guide who i met at my hostel in abancay - he was there to see his girlfriend, who was in charge of breakfast, and we got to talking because he thought my spanish was grand and i thought his english was pretty darn good. he was supposed to get me a map of cusco, but never found me in the city. last week i got a great e-mail from him, super-typical for peruvian correspondence. the phrase 'my foreign friend' recurred extravagantly, and he hoped we might be able to exchange ideas about our two countries over e-mail.

that really strikes me, the wanting to discuss things and exchange information and general hopeful earnest open-mindedness coming from peruvians right now - just people who are really concerned about the way things are and making them as good as can possibly be. sadly, that often means idolizing the u.s., because we are the model of 'success'. while we are an economically sound nation, we're not necessarily where you ought to be looking right now if you're a third-world nation, because all we're going to do is exploit you. okay, maybe not all...

i've been reading a book, 'the night is dark and i am far from home,' by jonathan kozol, a boston teacher and social worker. he echoes a lot of what i took back from my experiences in peru - that so many things are awful in this world, that it's easy for us to remove ourselves from them if they're not in our face all the time, that the american education system - he particularly criticizes harvard - trains you to be a good citizen but not a good free-thinker and world-changer. all of which i mostly agree with. kozol echoes sort of a nietzschean morality, where we're forced to realise that we construct the rules.

kozol takes off on this by saying that we should construct the rules to help these people, to topple the current system and work hard as we can to make things better. yet on the flip side of the coin, i'm reading anton lavey, church of satan founder, for my thesis. lavey sees the world in essentially the same way, but with a self-interested spin. look, he says, the world is awful, the system is really crap, but it IS that way. you're going to waste a lot of your energy if you try to reform it, so why not exploit it? why not work it the best way you can to use the system against itself?

most people will read this and feel an intrinsic bias against lavey's view. but why? kozol doesn't actually say why we should work so hard to overthrow the system - his motivations can be filled in by the reader but are cloudy in the text. is it some sense of moral indignation? (if yes, give a groundwork for this morality, says lavey, i don't feel it!) is it pity or sympathy? (see above) kozol doesn't come up with a reason why we ought to look at things his way instead of lavey's - and, in fact, few do, because the texts aren't normally placed against each other, i'm just ornery about this. kieran, again, would read this and say, 'operating only according to self-interest and taking advantage of the weak for that reason? you're a soulless human being.' don't get me wrong, as he usually does - i agree. but it's important to me to figure out WHY it's disgusting, what REASON i find for kozol to be inspiration (if slightly anarchic and insane) and lavey to be marginalised. maybe that's the half of me that's still a philosophy major. or maybe it's important because, until i do, i still have that seed of doubt, that too-often-paralytic seed of doubt that stops people from doing good because they have to make sure that it's doing RIGHT as well.

in a more pragmatic conflict, however, it forces the question: given what i've seen in peru, and what i know about how bad things are in the rest of the world, how can i justify my chosen life path - as an artist, in the form of film and stage - instead of directly working to solve these problems? kozol makes a big point of the american education system helping us distance ourselves from things - out of sight, out of mind is, he says, taught from an early age. and maybe that's true in my case. maybe i'm forgetting already all the diseased and dying people i saw, those who didn't eat but a few times a week. those who were killed by the handful by the terrorists. maybe that's the only way i can turn my back on a life dedicated to that and instead hope to solve society's problems through art - because, although that's my reasoning ('unconscious paradigm shifts,' i've been known to quote myself as saying, 'are brought about only through radical cultural producers'), i know the chances of making as big of a difference as one peace corps worker or even one radical reformer on u.s. soil are slim. yet, today, i call julliard to ask about auditions for their directing program. am i doing this right?

so i feel that this isn't just about peru any more. i'm going to go through, in the next week, and hopefully fill in the stories i promised but missed. then, i'm starting a new blog. elvis is my new inspiration: 'a little less conversation, a little more action, please.' and i guess we'll just see, where i go from here.
:: 3:41 PM [+] ::

on 'dropping the h-bomb' - or letting it be known that you're from harvard. while south america at large may be inundated by american culture - television, movies, nikes and ralph lauren, et al - there's no reason for people to know much about the american education system. most rural peruanos never make it to college, and so few of those who do go to university outside of peru, that they've never heard of harvard. except: big man ali t (toledo, president of peru) was a teacher at harvard for a brief time, and that made big press. most people who read the papers know that he's linked to hu. so if you're from there, and you're in peru - well, it stands to reason that you're friends with the president, right? i wasn't at all aware of this until the combi driver on the way to vilcas asked if i was a friend of toledo's.

that said, it's maybe not the safest association. opinion about toledo was sliding when i was in the country and has completely dropped off since my departure, so there's a strong possibility friends of toledo would be regarded with fear and maybe even in danger.

the mutiny on the bounty. i mentioned that the road to ayacucho from huancavelica was a sketchy one, and that i found myself in a dangerous situation. this was a case of hitchhiking, where i was probably at the most risk, but as there are few regulations to govern any sort of transportation i was pretty much at a constant risk. what happens is that those providing transportation, or those helping with transportation in some way, might find out along the way that you have more than a few soles, and they'll then stop halfway there and demand more money, else they won't let you off the car or they'll drop you off early. i only had it happen once, going from puerto bermudez to la merced with some guys from maryland; the white guys ended up talking so loud and fast that the peruanos gave up just to get them out of the car. i was lucky, but when the people i was with on the road to ayacucho started guessing how much money i had, i a) curled up into a little ball, b) played as dumb as possible, and c) grabbed my knife from my bag and started cleaning my nails with it. well done.

public vs. private lives. i have no idea what i was talking about. i think i was doing massive amounts of ayahuasca in huancavelica (kidding mom!). this is why this journal was so important to me, though - record everything that's going on as i think of it, rather than having to reflect afterwards. bravo me.

my mistakes. rereading my text, i realise they are frequent. i blame it on speaking spanish all day every day - english was getting harder and harder for me, and i make more and more mistakes in my text. oh well.

ayacucho as an intellectual haven. from huancayo, i meditated on ayacucho as a land of coffee bars and berets. alas, it is not at all - in fact, despite having a few wild clubs, ayacucho was a fairly tame city socially. i got the sense from being there that the intellect was still there, but it took place either in the classroom or in the home - groups of young people just didn't have the opportunity to gather publicly outside of those situations, something we take rather for granted.

percent of my trip spent on buses or in other forms of transportation. roughly 50%, including sleeping hours. i'm not sad enough to figure it out, but it honestly ended up being that much. not a day went by that i didn't travel at all, and, as we all know, i once took two days to travel between two towns. this isn't to say 'oh, i was super-busy traveling,' but rather, 'oh, peru's a GIGANTIC country, it takes forever to get anywhere.'

and that is, i think, everything i wanted to include to finish up this, as dan wrote, 'genius travelogue'. i'll take requests for a little while, but then viva peru gets backed up to make room for my new blog - all about a girl in the city, trying to live the crazy life and find love. oh, wait, that's cathy. stupid comics.

shoutouts to all my homies. be well, everyone.
:: 10:32 PM [+] ::