Peruvian Dust, Shattered Sidewalks and Night Dogs:Part One of an Apologetically Long Story
Current mood: 
restless
I made it to Buenos Aires without much sleep or any good maps. My legs are too long for those goddamn Continental Airline seats. They showed us a movie where Ice Cube plays a mishap-prone father. I tried to teach myself Spanish on the plane. The food was cold hamburger that I declined to eat.
The guy who had the sign with my name on it dropped me off under grey, foreboding skies in a city of twelve million strangers. On the ride from the airport, through three consecutive toll stops, I saw the villas on the sides of the freeway, battered walls scarred with black writing, demolished ceilings gaping to the encroaching sky, narrow and suffocated streets turning in on each other and leading to median strips where only hungry children lived. This was poverty, he told me. But this was also the middle class. He shrugged. I might have missed the point, I wasn't sure. He himself lived in the Once neighborhood with the Chinese and Korean and Jewish immigrants. That whole area he said is a deafening and dizzying marketplace.
I knew no one, I had a less than feeble grasp on the language and a cut-rate surrealist poet's sense of direction. At first I couldn't sense the door in the unbroken wall of metal grates and darkened windows. I smelled the persistent incense of diesel cut with moldering food. A point of tension glowed between my eyes. With his cabbie vision, sensitive to the million points of nuance necessary to pilot a vehicle in such a labyrinthine autobahn as Buenos Aires, the mode of entrance was made known to me. I buzzed. I was admitted. "Que tal?", she asked me. We exchanged formalities. My room had orange walls and green sheets and a scorching heater. The rattling busses made muted thunder outside my door, followed by dogs whooping and wailing.
I wouldn't know then just how many dogs….
My first day there I stumbled through the Sunday antique fair of San Telmo, a barrio that functions a little bit like the French Quarter. This is a neighborhood dominated by street corners where Bosch murals and fine brush strokes of decay freeze the eye. The shuttered windows open onto tired balconies that burst with tableaux of rusting bicycles and broken umbrellas and rotting plants. All of it is accidental and historical, and we try to capture it as something otherwise. The young people wore shepherd skirts and the bearded ones played bandoneons in the half shade of crumbling verandas. The sun peeked out to relieve the haze, turning the cobblestones to cat's eye marbles in the light. I got lost for the first time that day, and it wouldn't be the last. Within that week I found myself trudging seven hours a day to the Port district and the cemetery and Palermo and Recolletta, dining along the way on moist garlic-infused steaks and prosciutto and cheese sandwiches, swilling at impromptu cafes cheap but delicious Argentine wine and the ever present large bottles of Quilmes, the beer of the Portenos. I met and exchanged exaggerations and premature opinions with interesting transients from New Zealand, South Africa, France, Italy, Brazil, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Germany, Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia. I alone, for the first week at least, spoke for the dog and pony show known as the Estados Unidos. I didn't meet any vegetarians or novelists or members of the Libertarian party. I found myself wine-drunk defending my desire to write fiction with a Scottish journalist in a local's bar that was part Irish and part gay. We went to a rock club where the female fronted band of Argentines did covers of Rolling Stones and Tom Petty in English. Seeing a vivacious, raven-haired porteno woman doing a rousting version of Under My Thumb is a bit amusing. Every night, around 2 in the morning, or maybe 4 in the morning, I fell asleep soundly and awoke to a breakfast of bread and coffee and a soccer game on the television.
The adventure takes a turn on the night before I set off for Peru, having put all my faith in the whimsical advice of the adventuress friend I was planning to rendezvous with eventually. Lucy Valiant, my red-headed scholar in arms comrade, told me that she would meet me in the mountainous town of Cusco. I should be prepared to be sickened literally by the dizzying heights my body would experience. I was suppose to leave for the airport at six the next morning bound for Lima, and then catch a connecting flight to Cusco, but the night before, in Buenos Aires there was a birthday celebration planned at the notoriously delicious and feisty steakhouse known as Desnivel in the heart of San Telmo. That dinner lasted probably five hours and the large amiable man who ran the place, the Maestro, the Major Domo, Mr. Desnivel himself for all we knew, took great pains in massaging us with his horse-strangler hands, pinching those closest to his reach, as well as every twenty minutes bringing us a new overflowing carafe of red wine. The Maestro told the birthday boy that the one thing he was lacking was a "mujer juanita", a beautiful woman we figured, so he turned to the cooks, slapped his hands with authority and asked them to cook one up pronto.
Every ten minutes a new friend of a friend from a different country saddled up to our table to expound on rare and/or common routes that penetrated through Colombian jungles, from Lost Cities to sweaty, cacophonous metropoli, from cocaine factories to dickfish-infested waters, from vacant black sand beaches to jewel-encrusted high rise hotels perched like falcons on the sides of cliffs.
That night I stayed out till four, woke at five, caught a cab at six, got in the airplane, flew five hours to Lima, jumped on a one hour flight to Cusco and stood dazed in the crystalline brightness and the rarefied air. The flight from Lima to Cusco feels like you're going straight up an incline and the cabin fills with an eerie milky light that makes your eyes hurt.
Although I didn't succumb to actual altitude sickness in Cusco, I still felt "wonky" for the first couple days—a word that I take to mean a strident mixture of disorientation, dizziness, slight euphoria, the butterflies and an aggravating ability to abuse alliteration.
In Cusco everything is slippery cobblestones and gigantic clouds touching down on Spanish steeples. I quickly and very definitively lost all sense of direction which caused Lucy Valient no small amount of aggravation! I do remember that the most foreboding alley, populated mostly with trails of urine and haggard dogs, was called Purgatorio
The hills above Cusco are speckled with the glinting roofs of reddish yellow shantytowns. A dead ringer for Rio's famous Christ the Redeemer peaks above another hill. You almost slip on your ass every time you take a step. The cabs can sever legs if you miss the next cobble. The town finds breathing room in numerous squares and plazas and then shoots off down the thinnest, steepest alleyways. We stayed those first two days at a 5 dollar a night hostel. At night I discovered pisco sours and stuffed avocadoes. Everyone wants to give me a shoeshine or sell me some coke. Meals heavy with carbs kept me resilient. We ate a breakfast at a local warlock's café, a fortifying meal of granola and papaya juice. We even ran into a friend of mine from Santa Cruz, crazily enough, in Cusco, preparing himself for a shamanic undertaking.
In the hostel, I was a bit confounded by the "electric showers"—figuring that the proximity of electrical wires writhing out of the showerhead and the water that gets heated in the selfsame showerhead could induce "danger." Hot water was at a premium anyway—and some nights we didn't have any water at all—but at that point I was fine with not showering. I can generally resign myself to the notion of living filthy and when I do, I tend to revel in it like any common warthog. I didn't pack that many clothes anyway, only a pair of jeans that would eventually turn brown after being spattered for days by miles of Peruvian dust and a handful of free t-shirts, one of which I had to use as a towel because the towel I had brought was lost in my Buenos Aires hostel. Regarding lost clothes, I faired better than Lucy Valiant who, during her three months of South American travel, somehow managed to lose nearly 8 pairs of underwear, due to the prevalence of nocturnal clothesline bandits, or so she told me, in a fit of most charming hyperbole. I hope she forgives me for posting this endearing fact….
At some point, we're in the high red ruins of Pisaq, our eyes lost in terraced waves crashing down into the farms and watery inlets of the Sacred Valley. Shadows tossed pell-mell on distant mountains morph into alchemical insignias. There is a sense of abandoned holiness in the nooks and crannies of this long dead fortress.
Some shrewd little boys are our guides in getting us back to the town of Pisac. Without them we would have got lost in the hills. The moment you hit the town you're sucked into the meat-smelling ruckus of the marketplace which winds down side streets and empties into a central plaza. All these Peruvian towns have central plazas. The brightness is exhilarating and the fruit and meat shine from baskets and hooks. It no longer matters what's for sale or what's been cast aside, its all looks imbued with life and quite tasty—and although we're winded and cast in sweat and thirsty and caked with sunblock, it feels terrific—and we find ourselves upstairs dining on a steak buried in eggs, French fries and plantains. A dish that translates as "beef piled with other stuff".
Two days into my Peruvian trip, it was decided, after glancing at a crudely-sketched map and swilling down a couple Coca Sours, that the two of us would bravely embark on "the back way" to Machu Picchu. The watchwords were "seat-of-the-pants" and "hare-brained." By doing this we would cut costs, avoid the tourist mob and experience the scenery and local color along the way… We also knew that the "back way", as we creatively called it, was a relatively new, experimental, largely-improvised, unlicensed, dodgy and generally sordid method of getting to one of the newly christened Seven Wonders of the World. So of course it had to be taken, wild dogs and adversity be damned.
We woke at six in the morning and tumbled groggily into our clothes. No time for coffee or cold water dousings. Random acts of fireworks wake us up. This town is crazy for fireworks. A cab to the loud, dusty bus stations where dogs and hens peck around in the garbage and men haul luggage onto the cracked tops of old busses. Lucy knows how to haggle with cabbies and hostel owners in very good Spanish, which impresses me to no end. I loiter by her side, feeling like a stowaway.
We decide to get a combi instead of a bus, which I'm told is a faster way to get around the country. The car itself is a four door Toyota and Lucy and I are in the backseat, next to a very quiet gentleman listening to his headphones. The driver is a raffish young man in an Iron Maiden shirt. He is quiet and friendly and I don't envy his job once we're underway. At first the streets are smoothly paved and wind very gently around slight turns. The feeling is something almost "idyllic." The scenes outside the window are women crowned in white top hats, wearing kaleidoscopic skirts, hauling heavy equally colorful loads on their backs or else children herding sheep and donkeys through the golden pastures. We pass small farms and adobe buildings. At every turn there is another gorgeous vista, another reason to feel thrilled about what we are leaving behind.
Eventually the streets become dirt roads and the tires no long just revolve but bounce along. The bouncing becomes more like pogo-sticking. The dirt turns to broken rock as the road ascends into terrifying mountain country and we leap and bump along, more rocks breaking under us, as the streets get narrower. I learned early on that there are not seat belts in cars here except in the driver and passenger seat. I also learned that our driver was crazy. Crazy-brave as I explained to Lucy Valiant who was popping sedatives as our combi took mountain switchbacks at a breakneck pace, passing other combis and narrowly missing oncoming cement trucks. The edges of the road grew more precipitous, more prone to landslide and structural collapse. I could watch the driver's eyes in the mirror, darting and dashing every second, taking in the nuances of the road with hummingbird swiftness, as he steered the car in almost zigzag formation to avoid boulders. What I also learned is these roads that veer through the mountains here are often still being constructed even as they are in use. Many times we had to stop on a dime to accommodate a bulldozer in reverse or a crew of men jackhammering in a strong wind. We took a government sanctioned break at the foot of a snowy mountain and men in droves pissed along the edges of the cliff and the air tasted good. The piles of snow looked impossibly close to where we were.
Four hours later, our audacious combi driver dropped us off in the village of Santa Maria. School children, hundreds of them it seemed, ran in the car's wake of dust, shaking their satchels at us. We just had time to eat soup and ice cream cones before hailing a combi of a different stripe—a minivan that was aptly filled to beyond maximum capacity with people—women breastfeeding, men with heavy bags of grain, men with tools and us, the lone gringos brave enough to take combis instead of busses proper. It was very hot and blinding in Santa Maria. We were going through bottled water without censure because you can't drink the water in Peru. My legs were losing feeling because of the cramped necessity of the van. This second leg of the drive went through more forested territory—on equally invigorating switchbacks, through a constant green and blue overlap of mountain and valley—until maybe five more hours? Maybe four? We arrived in the even smaller town of Santa Theresa, a town I recently learned was half-destroyed by an earthquake.
Santa Theresa is a beautiful, charming village in one of the loveliest valleys we have seen so far, but on that first stop we didn't make time to really explore it. That would come later on our triumphant return. But as soon as we got there, and the light was dying, we made haste to find someone who would point us to the road that would lead to Aguas Callientes, the town at the base of Machu Pichu. An excited young man rushed us down a stone staircase, across a soccer field to the shores of a rushing river.
Above the river stretched a rope to the opposing shore. Attached to this cable, was a rickety box. He gestured and we stepped into the box and he stood next to us as we sat trembling and pulled us across, above the rushing water and the sharp rocks. The experience was more fun than terrifying. And more terrifying than comfortable. He assured us on our way back we would have to manage the sky car ourselves, which would be interesting.
Once across we began our hike. Several locals told us it would only take four hours. It was getting dark fast. We had a flashlight, a bag of granola, some chocolate cookies, some oranges and a bag of chocolate covered peanuts. We had some water left too. We'd be fine.
The trail meanders and we do as well. A trail of rocks growing darker. Enclosed on either side by mountains, large and small and somewhere, following us like a stalking bear, a quiet river with all its inlets and eddies and falls, obscured by plantain trees and dark little shacks with rock gardens.
The stars arrive when there is total blackness—they are spectacular, and there are planets among them, more green in their shining--and only our weak flashlight shows us the less rocky parts of the path. It is muggy out. I am damp and I feel the dust and sun block congealing into a puff pastry on my face. I'm eating orange flavored cookies and my body is glad at least not to be bent double in a cramped car. We stop at a rest spot and, famished, open our bag of chocolate covered peanuts. I take one bite into a rock-hard bitterness and curse my very existence!
My god! They are not chocolate peanuts, they are raw beans. We have been humiliated by the merchants! We laugh heartily and leave the beans as offerings to the dogs.
We run along the slats of uncertain river bridges. We hear dogs whenever we can make out the lean-to bungalows crouched in the green entanglements of the tall grass and plantains. We pick up rocks in case we have to fend off the dogs! It is common for people to be attacked by them. I used to be appalled by dogs, having been chased down once as a wee lad by a Doberman the size of Secretariat. I revert to that fear and damply clutch rocks as my heart quakes. But the concertina wire deters them from giving us rabies.
We veer under rocky overhangs where landslides are guaranteed. We run under them not wishing to loiter. We hear more dogs and cross more bridges. We see no one else on this clandestine trail. Who else but crazy kids would take a night hike with a poorly-rendered map, a one dollar flashlight and two bags of inedible beans to a destination that, give or take a couple hours, is four hours away?
And then suddenly there is magic. The last time I saw them I was five years old, eating popsicles in Cleveland, Ohio, sticking my fingers into the holes of the screen door. Lucy Valiant has never seen them and she is taken with euphoria. We turn off the flashlight to see them better.
Fireflies.
Fireflies everywhere. Their little flashbulbs describing arcs in the air and luminous colonies in the black foliage flanking us.
We follow them as they hop down leaves and flit across the path. They give themselves away beautifully. They spin circles in mid-air right between our eyes. We are two kids again lost in the woods without a map. And we are congregating with these miniscule glowing things.
There are little gazebos along the way full of relics and empty bottles of water. And shrines and signs that make no sense and darkness unrelieved by the stars. Sometimes the water we hear roars, at other times we can't hear it at all.
We make it to our first landmark where we must deviate from the path: the hydro-electric energy plant. The waterworks growl beneath us. Water manipulated and turned into light and power. Approaching the plant we scrutinize the face of a mountain that is entirely bright white. We suspect the whiteness to be rushing water down the face of the mountain. We get closer to the guard station. The guard is friendly and points us across the bridge. We see a leaf bug cowering in the light of security lamps and the slats vibrate under our feet.
The hydro-electric plant at night takes on the crepuscular ambience of the Penguin Encounter at the San Diego Zoo. ("Crepuscular" is a word I remember from the GRE.) What we mistook for water was just a spotlight shone on the sleek face of the mountain. This sickly white light is smeared over the dark crags enclosing us. And seriously you half expect penguins to emerge from the mountainous hollows and start waddling along like they're getting paid for it. We rush along the metal bridge to the next leg of the hike. So far we've walked two hours and I, at least, am soaked and shifting gears into a fairly functional deliriousness.
Now we are following train tracks for the rest of the way. That's the deal. There are men ahead of us standing around. It looks suspicious. Dark silhouettes of men on night train tracks often conjures up fear. But they are off duty train operators and happily point us to where we want to go, which is along more train tracks in darkness.
According to the travel advice we pulled off Thorn Tree, we must cross the tracks at the third sign and follow an uphill path through some woods, until we are dropped back down again onto some other train tracks. The accuracy here is questionable but at this point I am saying yes to everything.
We cross at the third sign and suddenly we are on crude stone steps curving up through a thick tangle of woods. Night woods are intimidating enough without having also the added challenge of negotiating your footfalls with loose rocks and faulty steps.
I am giddy at this point, because I stupidly think we are almost there! The ridiculous nature of this particular crumbling staircase…it feels like an initiation, or a scavenger hunt, or a….trap!
We pass through the dark woods on the broken stairs and arrive on more train tracks. We have no choice but to follow them.
The night remains consistently dark and we follow the tracks as they loop trough the valley, toward some largely theoretical destination. Poor Lucy's shoes are getting fairly decimated by the rocky terrain we are traipsing across. We balance ourselves on the beams of the tracks, arms holding each other up and move forward that way, thus avoiding the piles of gravel that are eating away at our treads. We tell ghost stories along the way, moving under scary overpasses, getting surprised by bats but nothing human.
Hours pass, more than four and still nothing like city lights ahead of us. By now our legs have achieved a gelatinous state and we move on automatic pilot, having exhausted our food supply and most of our water. We start laughing but in that demented way that means we are over-tired. The fireflies have left us. The stars are blanketed by clouds, mimicking the ribbon of the Milky Way. We fear we might have made a grave error in our calculations or taken a wrong way. At one point the tracks diverge like in that Frost poem. But they come back together again to our relief only minutes later.
We start imagining that the destination is around the next bend. As long as the tracks veer right we know we're going the right way. But they start veering left and we panic but then we laugh. We shut off the flashlight and take a water break. Four hours becomes five hours. Time itself is a joke.
City lights! I scream. But no, just a reddish fog receding the more we walk. Panic is now being discussed in no uncertain terms. But we hold forth to the "trail" because there is no other option.
The tracks at this point are completely blotted out by gravel. How can trains manage these avalanched tracks? We force our bodies forward. No dogs at least.
City lights! I scream. And it is a light…and it's getting bigger….and bigger…and…very large, almost like an eclipse or a rhinoceros--
IT'S A TRAIN COMING AT US….
And we jump down the embankment as the train speeds by. We emerge again and we see another train ahead of us, idling, about to lurch forwards in the opposite direction, towards where we want to go.
A man with a distinctive hat emerges like a ghostly sentry from the steam and the darkness. He asks if we're going to Aguas Callientes. We answer in the desperate affirmative. He gestures wildly. We run along the gravel, through steam and odd orange light, and he coaxes us on to the train, and we presume it is about to take off. It is after hours and there is no one on board. We have, by all accounts, hopped an off duty train by virtue of a benevolent switchman cloaked in mist.
Thankful and giddy, we collapse into the train seats and wait for it to embark. It doesn't budge. We wait. Then we hear the doors opening and it's a security guard, not the switchman. Angrily, he tells us to get off the train.
We've been kicked off the train!
As we get off the switchman is trying to tell us to get in a different car before the security guard notices. The train starts moving forward and whistling. We've missed the chance. We keep walking. But luckily the second landmark is ahead of us. A bridge.
We see signs for Machu Pichu. We try to decipher the remaining directions. We start following a random road that is going up a hill. Then the flashlight dies on us and we are grappling along with a little keychain light. I mention that I saw another road that goes parallel with the train tracks and maybe that's the one we want. But at this point we are both discussing the real possibility of sleeping in a nearby parking lot we stumble across. It sounds like a fine idea because we are beyond tired. I'll sleep in a gutter if need be, wrapped in the moist wool of my ratty peacoat.
Instead we try the road I mention…and lo and behold, real city lights greet us and we have made it. And it's almost midnight. We wake someone up, a hostel that's inside a restaurant and we are hysterical at this point, with both happiness and exhaustion, bewildered by our nearly 7 hour hike, as well as the 9 hours of madcap driving preceding that.
In the morning we will go to Machu Pichu we tell ourselves, but don't say much more because we are asleep and dead to the world in hostel beds as soft and accommodating as sheet rock.
drained 
energetic 