Hiram Bingham Has Nothing on Us

Prelude

I am sitting in an apartment in Santiago, Chile now, listening to El Condor Pasa, covered by one of the many traditional pipes and all bands that John and I saw on one of our obnoxious tour groups. We’re not entirely sure if Paul Simon wrote a song in the vein of Peruvian music and it has now become a popular and familiar tourist lure, or if Paul Simon in fact stole a traditional tune and put some 1960s chic lyrics to it.

August is the first month of the Andean year, a time for planting, for new life. And at the end of this week, we will have reentered American time, settling back into routine that can be both comforting and stilting.

Reunited with Joaquin, one of my best friends from spring semester sophomore year, and met his lovely fiancé Pancha. It was fairly evident from gaps in the conversation that three years had passed, but I look forward to a week of human interaction outside of John and myself, outside of asking for directions or buying things, the tourist place we have relegated ourselves to.

Pancha’s apartment is full of flowers and candles, is sparse, clean, spacious, inviting, and well-appointed, as creative an tasteful as she seems to be in person. We have come a long way since our days in the Arequipan hostels, choking one night on smoke eminating from drunk men burning trash outside.

Pancha has relinquished the entire place this week so that John and I can feel at home in a space to ourselves.

Santiago made us pay a $100 tariff to enter the country, which is equivalent to the visa fee Chileans have to pay for entering America, so I suppose it’s fair. The city from our night ride here gave off the aura of many other cities, American, European. There’s even a Starbucks on the corner. We really have no idea what the city holds yet, except the probable vague historical residue from dictatorships that we helped to instate.

Recently another, perhaps more adventurous, friend implored me to stay in Peru, to get to know and love Lima the way that she did. I am still certainly full of wanderlust, and I do love Peru, despite the last month’s rockiness. But we are weighted with six months’ worth of luggage, and not a whole lot of time to plan. Spontaneaity and mountains of crap hardly go together.

I made John put away his “lucky” elephant hair bracelet, because so far it has seemingly given us, if not bad luck, certainly no fortunate advantage.

When we got back to Cuzco, we spent the afternoon watching “Amores Perros” in a delectable Danish and Peruvian owned café/theater where you can order soup and project whatever DVD you want.

We took a bus ride through the little town of Ollantaytambo, hiking up through the ruins of the Temple of the Sun. Somehow the Incas moved rocks from just south of Cuco all the way to the top of the mountain, because the kind of rocks used in construction were not native to the mountain itself. The town below these majestic and baffling ruins has a colorful market and canals running through the city. A little girl trying to sell dolls follows me, imploring, “Miss America!” The Urubamba valley is filled with pastoral villages, soccer matches, and diligent brick masons.


Playing Apus* Little Game

*a popular Simpsons character famous for saying, "Silly customer! You cannot hurt a twinkie!", Apu is different from Apus, which are mountain Gods.

When we returned, we booked our highly anticipated trip to Machu Picchu with a travel agent whose name, coincidentally, was Alexis, something I mistook as being a good sign.

Turns out, when you meet someone who shares your name, you should run in the other direction.

Our first warning sign should have been the change in method of transportation and time of departure, a mere twelve hours before this was all supposed to take place. At 6am Saturday morning, a frantic woman whose broken English was only slightly worse than my broken "Spitalian," took us to a shady garage rental place where a wily driver sped us through bumpy roads at a breakneck and careless pace that was to serve as ominous foreshadowing for the next 48 hours.

We descended into the smokey haze of the outskirts of Cuzco, our driver honking at everything, including the potholes, as we passed a truck with immortalized Che mudflaps and screeched to a halt at the train station, walking past little puppies being carried in cardboard boxes, told to wait by the "Servicios de Seguridad," or as the emblem on their cuffs said, "S.S."

I spent the morning trying to read up on Machu Picchu. Hiram Bingham, the Yale professor and archaeologist who served as the real life basis for Indiana Jones, is still credited for "discovering" the city, even though the local people are the ones who lead him up there in the first place. He mistakenly believed Machu Picchu to be the lost city of Vilcabamba, the final refuge of the Incas during the Spanish conquest. At any rate, no one knows to this day what exactly Machu Picchu´s story is, though apparently every guide leading groups around makes crap up. "And here is where the king sat, and his shadow went down through the valley making a signal..." It is all bullshit.

Hence, one of the wonders of the world, which the emblematic Che himself called "a place that drives any dreamer to ecstasy."

We arrived at 11am in Aguas Calientes, a tiny town comprised of 90% tourists, a fact that makes it feel a bit like Peruvian Disneyland, with almost nothing but Pisco sour happy hours, and then a hot springs at the top of the hill that overlooks the river. The hot springs are overpriced and with all the crusty backpackers arriving for muscle relief, the water is a rather disheartening smelly green-brown water.

A drizzle brought us to our hostel, a noisy, confusing upstairs section to a pizzeria, complete with taped holes in every nook and cranny, and a groundfloor window that would neither shut all the way and certain not lock.

We had been told that a guide would meet us that evening, after enjoying all that the fabulous Aguas Calientes had to offer (which was mainly John beating me at chess and us passing the time by spending money on knicknacks to take home--oh the adventure!)

When the guide came, however, he was unable to provide us with train tickets for the next day, and said that some other woman in some other hostel, whose name he didn´t know, was "working on it." He did, however, tell us to wake up bright and early (430am) the next day so that we could see the sun rise over the mountain and Machu Picchu.

Our alarm clock, as neither of us own any timepiece, was our sheer nervousness, and that useful quality woke us up at 445 on the dot. We packed up our things, John taking a generous portion of the weight so that my back wouldn´t need to be reconstructed by any Hiram Binghams any time in the near future. We walked outside to the bus station and, just as a precaution, called our agency...

The conversation turned ugly, as I added sol after sol into the little payphone, hardly believing the burning sensation in my ears, that we would either have to leave our passports, basically the only thing of worth that we had in our posesssion, with the sleeping attendant at the desk of our indifferent hostel, or there would be no ticket back. "It´s not my problem if you don´t leave your passport (with a complete stranger while you go to Machu Picchu)," the horrible woman said in her forced sunshine.

I came stumbling back to John with the usual water flood that accompanies bitter moments. He had kept our place in line and everyone was finally starting to move into the buses that would take us into breathtaking dawn on the mountain.

"Uh, excuse me," said a sour faced woman with frizzy hair behind us who could have only been a Roald Dahl character come to life. "Uh, we´re kind of waiting here." I turned to her with as much patience as I could muster, "Yeah, well, we´ve been waiting a lot longer than you and anyway we´re probably going to leave the line in a couple minutes."

She rolls her eyes and says in that obnoxious "I´m going to pretend to say this under my breath but loud enough so you can hear" voice, "well you don´t have to be a BITCH about it." I turn to her and look into her eyes, wishing that I could slap her, "Excuse me?" John immediately returned, "Lady, you really don´t know what you´re getting into." I should have thrown water on her. While I tearfully and hysterically explained to John that we would need to try and get out of Aguas Calientes this morning, and now, I could hear the self-important complaints continue from her entitled little mouth.

We did leave the line, and watched the sunrise from the back of a line that took almost two hours to get through. When we finally had our turn at the window, with about ten people "translating" behind us, we ascertained that there were no available tickets back to Cuzco until Thursday. Our flight to Santiago was on Monday.

Feeling trapped and betrayed, we crossed the bridge back to our hostel in a daze. Handling it with as much grace as possible, I screamed expletives at the top of my lungs for about twenty minutes as John patted me on the back, and we moved on.

I sat down, not wanting to move or think, incapable of envisioning a week of being stranded and anonymous. And at just that moment, like something out of a movie that I would scoff at, a stray mutt came over to me and began licking my face, placing his head on his paws right next to me. He then curled up at my feet as I began to laugh, and just like that, the heaviness had been lifted. The dog walked us back to our hostel, looked back once, and then disappeared into the crowd.

And it was then that we discovered an alternate route out of Aguas Calientes, cheaper, if not on your body and mind then certainly on your pocketbook.

A young man at our hostel who spoke no English (again, I emphasize how poor both of our Spanish is, especially when fatigued and upset) outlined a Sound of Music esque escape route that would involve us taking an hour long train ride to the Hydro electric plant, climbing for two hours up to Santa Theresa and then taking a bus. It leaves at noon every day.

Elated, we jumped onto the first bus going to Machu Picchu not caring what the rest of the day would hold, and got a taste of how massive and awe-inspiring the site is as it capped the tops of the trees about half way up.

It knocked the wind out of me. Rows and rows of fastidious craftsmanship perfectly preserved, llamas grazing in the central "plaza," and history seeping up through our shoes at every step. Panting tourists and all, it made us forget everything for just the two hours that we had to explore.

The train to the hydro plant was crowded, not with tourists as we had been used to, but with Peruvians. We were told that it might behoove us more to take a Cambi, a little van in which unthinkable amounts of people are "smashed inside," as John put it, to Santa Maria, where we were assured there would be a "ton" of buses to take us to Cuzco.

The Cambi saw us squished in the back next to an elderly man and a woman and her baby, dust flying in our faces, stomachs churning at every little bump in the road, twisting and turning on unpaved roads with no guard railing, with the kind of drop that instantly fills you with a graphic image of your own mortality.

Halfway through the two hours of terror that we would plummett all together and make little more than a thud as we landed, we arrived in a tiny outcropping of shanties where, despite the protests of everyone inside the vehicle, two screaming kids were pulled up by their father to sit on the roof for the whole way to Quillabamba, a jungle town lying in wait at the end of the route.

When the Cambi sped away, we could fully take in the nature of Santa Maria. It reminded me of descriptions in Graham Greene´s "The Power and the Glory," the kind of desolate remoteness that I had never experienced before. One bus comes through the town every day, at 9pm. Our escape plan had just narrowed by 99%.

Across the dusty plaza, we spied a group of obvious foreigners like us. Three Brazilian twenty somethings with a Cusqueñan guide, all looking exasperated. Their story was worse than ours. The night before, their bus had broken down for five hours before they arrived in Ollantaytambo to take the train into Aguas Calientes. Then the agency had screwed them as well, but at least they still had their guide.

They convinced a local guy to give us all a ride to Cuzco, five hours away, for the hefty sum of fifty soles per person. He would have made a killing that night, if it weren´t for the smoke and hissing that began eminating from his engine an hour into the trip.

I made John take off his "lucky" elephant hair bracelet.

We walked up the road, feeling cursed and forbidden from ever reaching Cuzco again, arriving at a town called Huayopata, with population of not more than 200 people with all the phone lines dead, and one bar blasting top 40 dance music across from where we bought our bus ticket, a bus that would not wind up departing until 11pm that night, over six hours past when we arrived in town.

People walked by with passing curiousity at the spectacle of stranded foreigners sitting indefinitely on a wooden bench, but we hardly felt threatened. The woman who sold us our tickets also made delicious warm cake, one sol for a slice, and her son, not more than ten years old, showed us the tricks he had trained his earless dog to do, and wrestled with his younger brother in the ditch where one truck driver publically relieved himself at least five times in front of us.

We considered leaving in a produce truck, but there was no room, and no guarantee of that, too, not breaking down. It was humbling to learn that no matter how much money you can potentially throw around, sometimes you are just stuck. And in a country where over 50% of the people live below the poverty line, that is a good experience to have as a bigshot American.

The most gregarious of the Brazilians bought two bottles of wine and drank them both astoundingly fast, crying out for his "girl," his bed, and a Big Mac, as the little boy in the shop played a pan flute and told us of his aspiration to buy a saxaphone someday.

Boarding the bus was surreal, almost like the wrong ending to a play (say, Waiting for Godot). A creepy man with a few screws loose had been talking to John (who unlike me has too amiable a nature to just ignore people he doesn´t know), offering us a place to stay for the night. Shivers.

Moments before it showed up, John was beginning to break down, believing the entire deal to be just an illusive phantom.

At about 1am, our bus stopped without any explanation next to a police car. It was pitch dark but you could still see all the way down the mountain as the engine cut off. Someone explained that the road was only one way. They would have to let everyone from the other direction go first, and then we would get a turn.

Finally, it was our turn to ascend, the side of the road crumbling and the bus tilting so far, I clutched John´s hand with the knowledge that this was the end. Three or four times, the bus started and then backed down the hill, unable to get up the momentum for several attempts.

I thought of my favorite people, even sang a few verses of "Maria and the children"... when the bus tilts, when the car breaks, when I´m feeling sad... I simply remember my favorite things and then I don´t feel so...

We got into the enchanting city of Cuzco at 530am, and said a stunned farewell as we sped back to our hostel, the orange cast cobblestone streets quietly ushering us back into normalcy.