Just back from a rally with 50,000 of the capital’s citizens at Plaza de Mayo, observing the national day of remembrance. Many marchers, dancers, speakers, music, drum corps, and haunting eyes staring from faded fotos…those of the men and women who disappeared 30+ years ago.  Evita is still safely in her mausoleum in the Recoleta cemetery. Dancers are still tangoing at Plaza Dorrega.  And meat is still what’s for  lunch and dinner in nearly every restaurant in this city of 3 million.   With a national average of about 180 pounds of meat to be consumed per capita, everyone must do their bit.

As with our last foray into South America, this one ends in unplanned fashion, in Argentina.  And as with our last trip in this area, the tone of our trip has changed dramatically, from being defiantly on back roads, picking our way bit by bit, to highway pavement with all the ease that implies.   No longer is this trip about the getting there, the roads and experience of being in transit.  To me, Argentina is a heaven made of pavement and large, legible signs. Now I tick off the day in 100km increments and it’s all about the destination, the achievement of an end point.

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Our trip has taken some interesting twists and turns and believe me, I’m not talking about roads here.  We’ve been surprised that our experience is not, at a gut level, what we expected it to be.   Actually, this notion of gut issues brings up an interesting memory.

Take, for instance, the first week of our trip, which seems of another era.   Those first few days I was what you could call a toilet addict.  This phenomenon was no different from any addiction.  I needed frequent fixes and if I didnt know when or where I could next get to a toilet I got sweaty and nervous.   I´ll leave the rest of the details to you.   Then it occurred to me that for three years I’d been carrying the same packet of pale green pills in my first aid kit and never used them.  Why not try one now?   After that, my needs plummeted to zero, which is an equally alarming situation.  Again, I´ll leave the details to you. After a few days of this, I wasn´t so desperate that I needed a curandero, but a serious talk with the village pharmacist seemed in order.    She fixed me up with a miracle liquid.  And ever since, there´s been no sign of  the addiction returning. What a relief.

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At last we have found a city we like.  But it’s not in Peru.  It’s La Paz, Bolivia.   And truth be told, we’re actually in love with a barber there.  More about him in a moment.  Right now, I want to tell you about my most traumatic day on the trip so far.

It began happily enough, with us having the entire Inca ruins of Pisac to ourselves for 2 hours on a sunny morning.  That no one else was there is thanks to the bridge between Cusco and Pisac still being closed as a result of the devastating rains that also wrecked the rail lines to Machu Picchu in December. As we needed to head east, and couldn’t take the normal short route through Cusco (Brunhilde didn’t ship with water wings), we were forced into the high country once again. Which is our preference anyway. I had a brief palaver with some bus drivers at the Pisac parking lot, adding some persuasiveness on my part that indeed a road did exist where we wanted to go and, yes, we would be able to manage the curves, before they finally pointed out the road we wanted. For awhile it was a fair romp over the good dirt roads, except we were driving under ever darkening skies. Literally around a bend high in the altiplano we entered a torrential rain storm.  Red rivulets poured down the hills, joining to form pulsing streams and cascades which leapt onto the road, flooding ditches and swamping the byways, gathering force as they raced down the next hill.

Rain like I never want to see again

The road was awash, villagers in plastic ponchos desperately building crude rock diversions to keep water from coursing into their homes.   The only thing running through my head was “This is how landslides start.” Any minute I expected to see earth moving or worse yet, feel it sliding under us, carrying us off the road and down the mountain.   With no sympathy whatsoever, Bernard insisted we stop the car and photograph what the scene looked like (see attached).  Since at the time it was all I could do to keep myself breathing I was unable to open my mouth and protest that we really should drive as fast as possible out of there, photos be damned.

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Eleven days now that we’ve been driving, and while I haven’t been able to bond with any Peruvian cities, (except a tiny bit with Cusco) the countryside is getting under my skin in a way that in the beginning I couldn’t imagine.    The  landscapes we pass through are immense and impressive,  the scenery an astonishment, so enormous and convoluted it’s as if the slopes are loathe to reveal their secrets.  These days I get depressed when we return to the drab, sprawling towns and cities that are an inevitable part of our route, and can’t wait to return to the mountains.

An ordinary road

Despite the sculpted sheerness, and vast overlapping secret valleys, every slope is densely farmed.   There’s nothing I’ve seen in this world to compare with Peruvians ability to grow things in seemingly inaccessible places.  Yet, traveling with Brunhilde has brought things down to an intimate scale that I don’t think would be available any other way.  The dirt roads are narrow and as twisty as a snake with a stomach ache.  It’s impossible to go fast, thus I have time to look into the eyes of villagers moving their pigs and sheep up the road, to glance into courtyards, to holler “Hola” to kids playing by the roadside, to smell sweet smoke from a household fire.

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It’s a long and winding road……Even though we’ve only been driving for 5 days, it seems like forever.  And there’s nothing we needed as much as a rest day here in this lovely hotel in the village of Concepcion, 20 minutes north of Huancayo.

The only part of our plans that has come to fruition is that we did indeed drive north out of Lima on February 16.  That we were able to do this took many miracles and much assistance from a gracious warehouse manager at the customs docks in Callao (Lima’s port), who faced down the placid, “who cares about you” stonewalling of our assigned custom’s broker as he held our car papers hostage for 4 hours.  Triumphantly securing the last stamps on our carnet at 7pm, we retrieved Brunhilde from the farthest corner of the enormous port warehouse yard, where she sat huddled and covered with black grime.  Hand-scribbled map in hand, we wove our way through Lima’s dark streets, doing pretty darn well until we got muddled around one too many ceremonial plazas.  Was this 2 de Mayo?   San Martin?   And how could we tell?    When I asked a policeman for directions, he and his troops jumped in their patrol car and gave us a full-sirens, flashing lights escort to our hotel.   From that moment on, we’ve thought quite highly of Peru’s police, except for one unfortunate encounter the next morning.

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