11/7/05
Testing.

11/10/05
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

The travel jitters-- the shock that nobody called my bluff and as a result I'm in South America-- went away on the highway into the city. Buenos Aires looks bright and flat, full of trees, churches, and balconies. My hostel is in San Telmo, apparently the birthplace of tango, a neighborhood where the sidewalks are coming apart and the buildings are losing paint. These are colonial buildings on narrow stone streets, one side sunlit. You buy goods at hole-in-the-wall mercados, and you dodge the cars barreling around blind turns. It's an invigorating city. The locals are kind to my terrible Spanish.

It's not the Third World, because nobody carries stuff on their head, but it's not Europe either. Street markets sell knockoff clothing and weird brands-- a camera called "Skink"? The city is so busy that it looks chaotic. It smells like bus fumes and steak.

Politics are everywhere, judging by grafitti, posters, and doors labeled things like "Pueblo Peronista." A collapsed economy will do that, I guess. Today I happened across a socialist demonstration-- small, but with big flags and facing a wall of riot police. Leftists were getting "disappeared" only a couple decades ago, and here they are with hammer-and-sickle flags. It puts the American Left in perspective.

Random:

Public displays of affection/emotion border on the theatrical. Occasional wailing.
Favorite magazine title: "Muy Interesante."
The three food groups are pasta, pizza, and steak.

11/13/05
MAR DEL PLATA, ARG.

A British backpacker tipped me off to volunteer work at a Bolivian wildlife refuge. She says she got parasites there (¨One of the spider monkeys likes to give kisses¨) and that you pretty much walk around with mosquitoes in your skin, but one of the duties is to walk the puma. This is why it´s nice to have an open agenda. Walk the puma, good lord.

I left Buenos Aires knowing that I´ll be back in six months with better Spanish. The bus toiled through an hour of sprawl and slum before coming out in green ranchland so vast that you could just about see the curvature of the Earth. Aside from a wetland or two, the view didn´t change for hours. Argentine cows have it good.

The only animals I saw in Buenos Aires were stray dogs, pigeons, and the rat in the hostel kitchen. Outside the city, it hits you that you´re in a different hemisphere. Trees are different. Grasses are different, the sky is different. Birds are weirdly different. You recognize their ecological niches-- leggy marsh bird, raptor, scavenger-- but the birds themselves are bizarre in shape and color. There´s a screechy green bird whose nest looks like flood debris stuck in a tree. There are gaggles of bulbous waders, seemingly half heron and half goose. From the bus I saw some hulking vulture thing that could barely take off. Also: rheas. These are the ostrich-like birds that the locals used to hunt with bolas, weighted ropes flung at the legs. Hard to picture that actually working.

Mar Del Plata is a beach resort town gearing up for summer, and my second-to-last stop before heading inland. Sunburn makes the backpack a painful thing.

11/15/05
MAR DEL PLATA, ARG.

Internet cafes exist even in bus terminals. I´ve got forty minutes before El Rápido leaves for Bahía Blanca.

Before bed I mumble into my phrasebook, trying to get my tongue around the R´s. This morning I had a breakthrough conversation with some older local guys. Bush was in town a few weeks back, and apparently everyone hates him except for this guy Norberto. I couldn´t follow Norberto´s explanation except for when he cupped his hands between his knees as though carrying a sack of oranges. It was as good an analysis of the 2004 election as I´ve heard.

I haven´t yet learned my way around the food here. There have been meals that I wanted to scrape off my tongue. Lots of bland, bready stuff. One waiter in Pinamar indicated enthusiasm for something called milanesa, so I got a plateful of it. It was the grossest thing I´ve ever eaten half of. I packed a napkin down over it and ate rolls. Milanesa means ¨schnitzel,¨ so I´m not sure if fault lies with the Germans, the Argentines, or the restaurant. Empanadas (turnovers) have become my safety food, also steak and pasta. And the complimentary packets of cookies on ómnibuses. Not exactly adventure eating, and symptomatic of what makes me want to get into the mountains.

Argentina has an effusive and public relationship with music. On the boardwalk here, people dance dances that have names while a singer bursts into the microphone. You see rotund older couples orbiting each other with smoldering looks and perfect steps, whipping scarves around. I will not be learning those dances. Fun to watch, though. People just aren´t embarrassed by music here.

The Boca Juniors won the other day, which made the streets boom with exclamations like, ¨HIJO DE PUTA!¨ Soccer is frothing mad in Argentina. Even the Europeans sound taken aback. I was in the country only two days before learning-- quite passively and from various sources including a T-shirt rack-- how a national hero called Maradona cut through the British in 1986 to kick in a World Cup victory. The game cuts to him on the sidelines today, a stamping bulk with a cigar and a crucifix, and the locals go crazy. He´s like the Pope on a motorcycle.

11/19/05
PUERTO MADRYN, ARG.

Plans changed for elephant seals. Puerto Madryn is a wind-blasted beach town in Patagonia just south of Reserva Faunística Península Valdés. The peninsula is almost an island and draws elephant seals, sea lions, Magellanic penguins, right whales, and orcas. A whale-watching boat proved worth the money when a mother and calf eased underneath, multicolored and enormous. The slow, oily curl of a whale´s tail over the water is so perfect that it renders irrelevant whatever is on your mind. I couldn´t even take a picture.

The elephant seals are great. They don´t move much, but when one does, waves of blubber roll along its body, like when you nudge a water balloon. Fat grunting sounds come from the pile, and occasionally a male rears up and bellows-- a throat-flapping belch that must tire him out immediately. Another male might do the same, but it´s a short spat. Mating season is still a couple months away.

Penguins are even more watchable than we´ve been led to believe. They wobble uphill with their wings out, and to get into their burrows (?!) they just stoop down and waddle. They hoot together. They wander around. They stand if they´ve forgotten something. Then one flops into the water and becomes a torpedo. One paralleled the shore and shot out of the water three times. How have I never seen footage of an airborne penguin before?

Puerto Madryn has big, whooshing eucalyptus trees and a tide that lays jellyfish across the beach. Locals got me to try yerba mate, a bitter tea thick with tongue-in-cheek superstitions-- spilling some down your shirt means your mother-in-law is crying. Backpackers swap stories over beers: a Canadian 40-year-old farmboy wide-eyed about Chilean fishing, two either Mexican-Israeli or Israeli-Mexican women, an Irishman who ends his sentences with things like, ¨bless 'er cotton socks¨ (this about the woman who gave him tuberculosis).

Today is another bus day-- fifteen hours south to Río Gallegos. Thankfully, the ómnibuses are cushy affairs. They´re good for scenery, the phrasebook, and weird naps.

11/27/05
USHUAIA, ARG.

Backing up a week:

Inland Patagonia is yellow-green and dotted with sheep. I went to El Calafate, a tourist town in mountains and lakes. It´s small enough that you get to know the stray dogs that roam the cafes. A few blocks off the main street, burly horses graze and ibises poke at the weeds. On an evening walk I was dumbstruck by a lake full of pink flamingoes.

The main tourist draw is the Moreno Glacier, an hour away by steep roads. Filling a wide valley, it´s a field of ice two hundred feet tall, echoing with crunches and pops. The crevasses glow blue in the sunlight. Every now and then a tower of ice-- thousands of tons-- breaks off and plunges hard into the water, the waves knocking icebergs against the rocks. Amazing, but at the same time you´re clumping around on a boardwalk with hundreds of camera-toting Germans. So much of nature is turning into Disneyland.

El Chaltén is four hours northwest via rattling bus. It´s a mountain hamlet that was founded to end a border dispute with Chile. Essentially, Argentina built some A-frame houses and said, "See?" It sounds like something that would happen in the 1800s, but this was 1985.

Jagged mountains loom in the clouds over town. Streams run pale turquoise from glacial flour. I stayed four days and hiked, getting snowed on, sore in the legs, and thoroughly aerated. My last day on the trails I watched three dark birds as they turned slowly on updrafts. They swung low and close, pumping huge white-backed wings: Andean condors. These mountains simultaneously thrash and exhilarate you.

In town, houses are walled with wavy boards split from beech trees, and vehicles are old trucks pieced together from older trucks. Evenings I sat around windburned with other backpackers. A few hours late I realized that my Thanksgiving dinner had been pasta cooked by a German woman, yogurt, and a liter of Quilmes beer.

Back to El Calafate and to Río Gallegos, a run-down oil city, to catch the morning bus to Ushuaia. We ferried over the Strait of Magellan in freezing wind. On Tierra Del Fuego the bus wound through gnarled forests hung with Spanish moss, huge vistas opening up as we climbed. The Andes run all the way to Cape Horn, which makes Ushuaia a seaport backed by snowpeaks. If it´s not the southernmost city on Earth, they need to change the sign.

I´ve been traveling with Israelis for the past couple of days. Good guys, but there are some cultural disconnects. Over dinner in the hostel kitchen, one was proclaiming a certain restaurant in Tel Aviv as the best place for shawarma. "Before the bombing," another clarified, and they raised their eyebrows and nodded.

11/29/05
Now with pictures, added retroactively. Rain days are good for this sort of thing.

12/8/05
PUERTO NATALES, CHILE

Ushuaia is steep and maritime, and I could´ve stayed a month. The wind makes you walk crooked, but every now and then the clouds part and the mountains light up over the rooftops. You can hike in the peaks all day and then plod to a restaurant with lamb stretched over an open wood fire. The meat melts around your fork.

In the hostel I met an American guy who was spending the afternoon making a rubber band ball. In an Irish-Argentine pub, we met three Israeli women with a rental car, and after a couple days the five of us rolled north and into Chile. We got into Punta Arenas in the middle of the night and had to sleep in the car. Not comfortable. We adopted a dog for a couple hours, feeding him empanadas out the window. He had white eyelashes and managed to climb halfway inside. Strays here are well-treated and friendly, as if they´re community pets. Hard to tell which ones are domestics.

The next day happened in a stupid, sleep-deprived haze; looking at glassed-up portraits in a fancy cemetery, wandering around town, trying to figure out the money. The day before, a dollar had been worth 2.9 (Argentinian) pesos; now it was worth 530 (Chilean) pesos. The city was shaking with election brouhaha-- hundreds of posters and banners were staked about the plazas showing smiling candidates. Trucks hauled giant amplifiers blaring campaign songs. A busy corner featured a troupe of cold young women in feathers and G-strings samba-dancing for the Socialists. Chile seems to have rebounded from the Pinochet years.

We drove to Puerto Natales. This is a sleepy town with shops to outfit gringos for Parque Nacional Torres del Paine. The American and I stocked up on food and gear, and in the morning the two of us left in blowing sleet for four days in the Andes. At the trailhead we joined up with a German guy, partly because he was packing stuff like avocados. We stamped uphill.

It´s a staggering, towering landscape. You earn the views by wrecking your legs, back, and lungs. By the end of day two I was taking a needle to blisters. Worth it, of course. You drink straight from streams, can graze on calafate berries, can suck the nectar out of orchids. We watched little torrent ducks swimming in rapids-- they dive, pop up elsewhere, bob around like kayaks. A 70-year-old British naturalist explained them, clearly elated and hugging a giant zoom lens. We saw condors and puma scat and turquoise lakes in bare rock. It snowed in sunshine and trees blew sideways in the wind.

12/14/05
ANCUD, CHILE

After Torres del Paine, taking my boots off felt like peeling an especially tricky orange. From Puerto Natales I tottered onto the ferry Magallanes for a four-night, three-day trip north to Puerto Montt. A glance at a map shows the appeal here-- the Chilean coastline is lacy with fjords and islands. Wet weather socked in early, though. The sea and the hilly shapes blurred together. Determined to get my money´s worth, I stood on the deck, leaned into the rain, and caught a cold. Or maybe the cold came from camping with two other guys and only one spoon. Either way, I got a lot of sleep. In the open ocean, where the boat was rolling in broadside waves, mealtimes looked like silent comedies; people weaving around rubber-legged, silverware skating off their trays. The crew showed movies, tried their best, but at times it felt like being trapped in a cafeteria.

The weather broke on day three. Everyone went topside and gratefully turned pink in the sun. The coast is beautiful. We saw the continent´s biggest glacier, rainbows, waterfalls, a creaky little fishing village, and seabirds skimming inches above the water.

We disembarked early morning in Puerto Montt, and I caught a bus to Ancud, on the island of Chiloé. Chiloé has houses on stilts, barn-like churches, rolling pastureland, and folklore about sea monsters. Ancud sounds like dogs barking.

12/22/05
SANTIAGO, CHILE

Once off the bus in Valdivia-- a pleasant, German- influenced university town-- a Dutch guy and I were shown an unlicensed hostel on the river. It was an airy old estate in need of carpentry and weed-pulling. The proprietor, Juan Pablo, spread his hands proudly at the view from the backyard: downtown over water. The guestroom had a high ceiling, farmhouse doors, a shaggy dog, and no beds. Juan Pablo waved this last detail away-- he´d put a couple beds in there.

As we realized over the next few days, Juan Pablo was apparently starting a hostel just so he could throw barbecues, show us around town, take us to the salsoteca, and chop strawberries into white wine in the middle of the day. He mixed us with his friends and topped off everyone´s glass, over and over. The locals took us in rowdily.

To greet a woman in Chile, you do the simultaneous cheek-kiss (go left). When greeting a guy, if your hand is messy from oysters, you can just offer a forearm and he´ll shake that. At the salsoteca, men wear white shirts and women wear shiny things. The singer, with a voice like ringing bells, keeps time with her legs in front of the conga player, and when the club slows down at 4:00 AM you can take a cab to a dark restaurant run by a short lady and sponge up chicken broth with fried rolls.

So mornings were pretty late. I did get up early one day to go sightseeing with four Colombian women from the day before. We jostled on minibuses, sloshed on ferries, and meandered around Spanish forts. A grandmother in Corral took us in, put a giant bowl of cherries on the table, and talked about each framed photo in the room. I listened harder when she talked about Pinochet. He wasn´t that bad, she said sweetly. She´d adored his wife.

At the riverfront fish market, you can gulp oysters using a knife and a lemon and a concrete table just now hosed free of slop. Sea lions hang around a few feet away, also cormorants and gulls and pelicans. Now and then a fishmonger waves a wooden crate at a sea lion to back it up-- it bellows and undulates and maybe flops back into the river. I tried barnacles. Barnacles. Red, puckering, not nice.

After day three, the Dutch guy (Sjoerd) and I realized that we had to get out of Valdivia. We got a familial goodbye from Juan Pablo, his wife, and his kids, and we caught a bus to Pucón.

Pucón is in the Lake District. This is both as pretty and as touristy as it sounds-- forested hills, sunsets over purple water, Fuji-like volcanoes, wooden guesthouses. On Pucón´s main street, signs tout all kinds of excursions. It glazes the eye. The experiences are packaged for you, and, according to the photos in the windows, people like you are crazy about them. Fellow backpackers are speaking in checklists: done the Volcano Thing, doing the Hot Springs Thing, etc.

As advertised, the Volcano Thing is impressive. It´s a five-hour ascent with snow boots and an ice axe, and at the rim you´re hit with noxious waves of gas. The vent below is an orange furnace, breathing and glowing and spewing lava. The bigger eruptions kick black crystalized bits hundreds of feet into the air. To descend, you leap onto your butt and slide, fast, using your axe as a brake. The next day your shins are tender from those stupid boots, but you´ve gotten good photos and burned off the avocado that you´ve been heaping on sandwiches.

One day and one long bus ride later, Santiago. It´s overcrowded, has been repeatedly destroyed by earthquakes, and is so smoggy that you can only see the ghosts of the Andes to the east. I like it so far. Early travel experiences (Cairo) gave me a soft spot for urban monstrosity. Santiago has a great Precolumbian art museum, Chinese restaurants, grafitti murals, King Kong, and an antique hostel with hammocks in a big grotty backyard. Christmas will be here.

1/6/06
ARICA, CHILE

After Santiago, I meant to finish off Chile with a few marathon bus rides. Events conspired against me: a bacteria-laden churrasco sandwich in Valparaíso, overbooked holiday buses out of La Serena, New Year´s malaise, a nice beach.

Valparaíso is described as Chile´s cultural capital. Cobblestone alleys and stairs climb between brightly colored houses, and hundred-year-old elevators groan up rails on the steepest hillsides. While walking around looking at murals-- which are everywhere-- a British guy and I followed the sound of drumming up to huge, crumbling prison walls. Reclaimed by an artists collective, the ex-prison is now multicolored and half-full of sculpture and paintings hung on chains. Slack-jawed we entered a booming, three-tiered cell block where a drum corps was pounding away. The cells held easels and paintings-in-progress and jugs of thinner. Outside, people were prepping the exercise yard for a music festival. Chilean death metal and ska thundered out of there for the next two days, apparently not bothering the old ladies with baskets. Valparaíso was an easy town to like.

North from there, La Serena has 17th-century stone churches, good chicken, and not enough buses, as mentioned above. Businesses were shuttered early and I had to piece together a meal from knick-knack stalls: ice cream, stale empanadas, gross corn pie.

The next morning I squeezed onto a minibus that clattered into the desert. My seatmate was a cane-shaped old man who said he´d lived there his whole life, aiming a finger at a line of brown hills. He gave an emphatic nod and added, ¨Muy tranquilo.¨

In Ovalle the rural buses sit in a dirt lot and cook in the sun. People sit around for hours waiting for them to go. I tried hitching, after asking a laborer if I was on the right road. In the bed of a pickup and burning wind I reached El Valle Del Encanto. Carved into its rocks amid cacti and lizards are 1,500-year-old petroglyphs. The heat takes the moisture right out of you, and you start blinking your eyes and seeing glyphs in every pitted surface. A park worker refilled my water bottle by submerging it in the drum near his shed. I considered asking, "Es potable?" but was chugging away before I could bother. You have to pick your infirmities.

I took an overnight bus to Antofagasto and reeled onto a bus to Iquique. Iquique is a beach city built from nitrate mining and under a wall of desert mountains. It has palm trees and ice cream, but the surf pushes around thousands of big jellyfish. When a wave curls, you see them shooting up by the dozens. They bump blobbishly into your legs, trailing tentacles as they sliiide around. I gave it thirty seconds and exited the water in a trot. No swim in Iquique.

One last leg to the top of Chile. The Atacama Desert is drier than the Sahara, and the view from the bus was bleached and desolate. A few of the hills had geoglyphs-- like petroglyphs on a gigantic scale, made by lining up stones or by digging through a dark crust to show brighter sand underneath. The bus attendant-- the guy scampering up and down the aisle proffering cookies-- took every spare moment to ask me if the US has deserts, if we have ¨tornados¨ like that one (pointing to a whirl of dust), if I like the local cola (yellow, super sweet), if I knew how cheap girls were in Peru (two, three dollars, he said after looking around, and the older guys in front of me had by this point slung arms over their seatbacks and were confirming with nervous grins). I was glad to get to Arica.

Arica had few jellyfish, good bodysurfing, and a mellow hostel run by a New Zealand-Chilean couple. On the rooftop I got to talking with an Aussie who, it turned out, has spent the last several years hunting ruins in the Peruvian highlands. He kept his notes on his person the way other travelers keep their passports. He extracted photos of undocumented Inca roads, Wari ruins where there aren´t supposed to be any, the skin of a cattle-killing brown bear that isn´t supposed to live there, the near-inaccessible mountains he´s exploring. He stays on top of the literature, knows both academics and looters, and believes that there are tens of thousands more sites out there. He was a trove. I amended my Lonely Planet map with names and arrows: Caral-Supe, Toro Muerto, Sechín. Six months is too short a trip.

One morning I pedaled a rented bike out of town to the geoglyphs in the valleys. Most were visible from the roads, but seeing some farther off I pushed the bike up old tire tracks in the sand. After half an hour there was moonscape in all directions. I kept trudging towards the hill with the three human figures, and I came to a dune topped with spoked, concentric circles of rocks. In the US it´d be called a medicine wheel, but here I had no idea. I asked the Aussie and the Kiwi back in town, showing them the pictures. They were stumped, and the Aussie said he´d follow my tracks. Sites just poke out of the sand here. The aridity preserves bone, wood, basketry, grains, cotton. The oldest mummies in the world are from right outside Arica; they predate Egypt´s by two thousand years.

Later I realized that I drank 3 1/2 liters of water on that bike. The sun here will kill you.

1/21/06
LIMA, PERU

My trip changed as soon as I entered Peru. People here scratch a living out of the earth; baking bread in domed clay ovens, turning a family pig into pork, mending that Yankees cap with yarn from the flock. In the mountains people wear wide felt hats, the women in layers and layers of skirts and textiles, with broad Indian cheekbones and soft handshakes. They remind me of Tibetans, as if both adapted similarly to high altitudes. If nothing else, that explains the hats.

My entrance didn´t predict all this, though immediately the food was better. Tacna is a shabby border town-- cement buildings with rebar sticking up, garbage blowing in the streets. I'd been warned: don´t listen to anyone who approaches you. Sitting at the bus station, I was pestered by a jug-eared shoeshine kid. I convinced him that he wasn´t going to shine my sandals, so he experimented with English, repeating "Hawartu!" until I got that he was trying to say "how are you." I told him how to say it and what it meant, then put my nose back in The Ancient Kingdoms of Peru. The kid got bored and picked up his stool. "Hawaryou," he said as goodbye, making me think that neither one of us had understood the conversation.

The bus was a squeaky thing that climbed and climbed. It stopped in dusty towns where locals surrounded it holding up pig feet and roasted corn and bottles of Inca Kola to people opening their windows and digging for money. It reached Arequipa late and I took a horn-bonking taxi through cobblestone streets.

Arequipa is a fun city. Its Plaza de Armas and cathedral are built of white volcanic stone, thus the White City. There´s an ice mummy museum and three Turkish restaurants. At the half-roofed market, butchers bandsaw lamb bones, you can buy a wide variety of hats, and a row of women pushes fruit through juicers. The mango-banana was fantastic.

On Sunday morning the Plaza de Armas overflowed with military pomp: saluting, guns, and promenades of singing, goose-stepping soldiers. At night in the street outside the Monestaria de Santa Catalina, a brass band romped while people set up a three-story bamboo scaffold rigged with fireworks. When lit, the structure spun wheels and waved its arms and gushed sparks and rockets in all directions. It was a saint´s festival. One guy bucked through the smoke wearing the husk of a papier-mache bull over his head, fireworks shooting from the horns while the costume exploded.

My hostel was run by an entrepreneur named Kati. She took me and her little brother into the mountains to investigate a mummy as a potential tourist draw and to check up on her knitting ladies-- she wants to export rustic alpaca goods to Europe. We crunched through the streets of little Sibayo and were taken into mud-brick houses with chickens scratching in the yards. The women sat on the ground chatting, each bundled in layers of embroidery under a ribboned hat, some wearing toddlers on their backs slung in striped mantles. Their hands blurred hooking strands of wool around whirling spindles.

To reach the mummy we hiked three hours from the village up a rocky valley. It sat in open air under a crag. I poked a couple potsherds out of the sand, but they didn´t tell me anything and I poked them back. There were other remains. One child´s skull was elongated from cranial binding. Longbones were scattered about, the bundles having been cut open by looters. Huaqueros-- pothunters-- are rampant in Peru, and given the financial rewards they´re easy to understand. Kati wanted to know how to preserve the site, and I couldn´t give a good answer. You can bury it, or you can help the locals to profit from keeping it intact.

We got a ride through Chivay and spent the night in Yanque, which has bamboo-and-mud fences, hot springs, and a single phone for the whole village. Incoming calls are announced via loudspeaker. Apparently the occasional lost donkey call goes out, and at night the announcer sang a little.

Cabanaconde is four hours from Chivay on a bus that stops for anyone with a bundle of sticks. A mother and three kids slept on a single seat, heads rolling as the bus jiggled. Compressed in the aisle stood at least thirty people. Out the right-side windows-- what I could see of them-- yawned the Cañón Del Colca, terraced for agriculture since before the Incas. Below the alfalfa, the canyon walls drop yellow and orange to the river. They say that Colca runs twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, but that´s counting the mountains on either side.

In the morning I hiked down to the river and an oasis of palm trees, then climbed back in time for a thunderstorm and dinner. My waittress had a baby on her back, and the tablecloth was hand-woven in stripes of bright color-- not the kind of thing we´d use back home to absorb dinner spills. The standard Peruvian dinner is soup (meat on bones under a slick of grease) followed by roasted chicken (or lamb, beef, or alpaca) on a plate with rice, fried potatoes, and some tomato and onion slices (skip the tomato and onion slices). This costs three soles; less than a dollar. Outside at in the night market, you can get a mugful of hot cider-like, tea-like emoliente from a woman with a cart of bottles and a steaming tureen with a ladle. That´s another fifty céntimos. My room, overlooking a humble Plaza de Armas and a dog barking on a roof, cost ten soles. Cheap and quiet and I slept like a bear.

The bus played '80s pop videos as it lumbered into Corire. Toro Muerto was up in the dunes, a landscape of boulders and petroglyphs and dead still air. The glyphs number in the thousands: llamas, jaguars, snakes, condors, spirals, zig-zags, dancers with zoomorphic heads, geometric faces radiating squiggles. Eerie.

I bused from Corire to a desert junction, rode to Camaná squashed into a colectivo (taxi with a set route) with six locals, then got a bus up the coast to Nazca. Nazca is a small town with arms open to grab at tourist dollars. You have to check your change for counterfeits, but your big tourist money lets you do ridiculous things here: fly in a four-seater Cessna over the Nazca lines, sandboard down the world´s highest dune. Exhilarated, you later clump onto a Cruz del Sur bus and hope that your window isn´t stuck shut.

A few days ago I arrived at the center of Lima, a city of some nine million people, a city like Santiago or Cairo or Jakarta or New York, if New York were surrounded by shantytowns. The city minibuses shudder up to curbs with jockeys hanging out the doors hollering destinations. I took one to Miraflores, a shiny posh suburb. Backpackers here sit around a box of Dunkin Donuts watching new-release DVDs, taking vacations from grit and flies and Spanish, from anything challenging (though I did accidentally eat cow heart last night). It´s the Island of the Lotus Eaters. Tomorrow I´ll have to get moving again.

2/6/06
CHACHAPOYAS, PERU

Morning at the market in Barranca, the cook asked, Head, or chicken? The locals at my table were bobbing up pieces of tongue. Chicken. Behind me a colectivo sat waiting to fill seats for the Supe valley, where it could drop me near the site of Caral. The driver lounged on a wall. Leaving in a colectivo is a back-and-forth process: the driver taps the horn, shuts the engine off, talks to associates, etc. I thumbed at my dictionary and ate my soup.

Peru is investing a lot in Caral. Archeologists shovel pyramids out of the desert while builders hammer together lunch stands. The site is America's Ur. In 2000 they carbon-dated fibers from mud bricks, and the resulting dates-- back to 2900 BC-- made Caral-Supe the third oldest civilization on Earth. One of the archeologists showed me around. The site is laid out like Peruvian cities to follow. They've found all kinds of tools and crops, musical instruments, sun-baked clay figurines, quipu (strings knotted to record information), and seats carved out of whale vertebrae (?!).

From Barranca it was a day's journey east and up to Huaraz. Huaraz is a climbing mecca in the Cordillera Blanca, a range of 20,000-footers shining white out of the clouds over gorges. Thunderstorms roll in every afternoon, so I stuck to day hikes. There are some dizzyingly blue lakes up there, and the pre-Inca ruins of Wilkahuain and Chavín. Coca leaf tea lightens the altitude sickness.

On the mucky roads over Huaraz, little communities straggle downhill in crumbling walls and pigs tied by one trotter. A one-toothed old woman sitting on a step told me to give her money and squawked, ¨Chicha!¨ when I didn't. A fedora-wearing guy named Donato led me on rock-hopping shortcuts and invited me to drop by his village someday for fish. One evening in Yungay, a restauranteur showed me his AK-47 and insisted I stick around to watch a Quechuan bullfighting DVD-- they tie a live condor to the back of the bull. At night in the Yungay market, people bunched on a curb lit by a bodega's TV, lipping popsicles while watching a Chuck Norris movie. The juice lady got to know me after a couple nights. Banana and papaya with milk.

The roosters crow at dawn, but only because they've been crowing nonstop for the past three hours.

Transport in the country is done by colectivos and combis, set-route vans with decals across the windshields that say, "JESÚS PRÍNCIPE DE PAZ," or, "EL SEÑOR ES MI PASTOR." You sit in rattling metal while the jockey barks up business and the driver beats the horn. Once full (full) and with sacks tied to the roof, the enterprise barrels out in a flurry of gestures at competing vans. They pick up more people on the road. Garbage is wadded out the windows and the van interior becomes a cyclone of dust.

Peru's presidential election is this coming April, and walls are painted with campaign logos. In Huaraz, a rally for Alan García filled the Plaza de Armas. García already had a presidency, marked by hyperinflation and (alleged) human rights abuses. He's still hugely popular. His campaign slogan is Siempre Con El Pueblo, meaning that he's a man of the campesinos, despite the Paris education and bribery scandals and so forth. Fireworks banged against the sky and García emerged wearing a peasant's mantle, his arms held high. Known for his oratory skills, he stirred the crowd right up. Also running is ex-president Alberto Fujimori, who currently is held in Chile for murder, kidnapping, and crimes against humanity while Peru tries to extradite him. Fujimori's supporters market a cola, Fuji-Cola. Today I saw a house painted with Fujimori's slogan and, below, Whether he's coming or not. It's best not to talk a lot of politics here.

From Huaraz I long-hauled back to the coast, passing through Trujillo and getting a room in Chiclayo, a big city with a labyrinthine market. I found the haircut street and sat for a barber who wouldn't stop shaving. In nearby Lambayeque I visited two closed museums and failed to see the hoard from the Royal Tombs of Sipán. One combi later, I trailed sweat around the site of Túcume. The mud-brick pyramids were worn to mounds with bits of pottery and shell eroding out. It was far too hot; all I could think of was cold water.

On the overnight bus to Chachapoyas, I awoke in the dark to the engine off and rain on the roof. Road washed out, I thought, and fell back asleep. Next I opened my eyes, it was daylight and the bus was churning through brown water. Above us, thick cloud forest hung from cliffs spraying waterfalls. We were on the other side of the Andes-- all this water flows into the Amazon.

From whitewashed Chachapoyas, lumpy roads go to mossy-roofed villages. You're apt to share a ride with fighting cocks or a sheep hoisted upside-down onto the roof, and you might have to help roll rocks off the road. The driver fiddles with the radio as he cranks the car up hairpin turns high over the Río Utcubamba. Eventually you're on foot and relying on the friendliness of the locals. Walking footpaths between villages, you may be laughingly offered a puppy, given your first taste of chicha (home-brew fermented from masticated corn and yucca-- tastes like hard cider), offered a communal plateful of hot beans (eat with fingers), or just given a lot of gold-rimmed smiles. The scenery is wet and spectacular.

The Chachapoyas and Chillaos held out for a long time against the Incas thanks to the terrain and a penchant for high walls. They even interred their dead on sheer cliff faces. Painted clay sarcophagi stare out at huge valleys, looking like they have something to keep quiet about. On hilltops cluster the circular foundations of Chachapoya buildings, and Inca roads are still in use-- though the villagers apparently just know them as old stone roads.

The citadel of Kuélap stands on a ridge blurring out of a sea of fog. You climb three tiers of huge limestone ruins where mossy trees stoop under red bromeliads. The air smells of orchids and chatters with birds. I'd gotten up at 3:30 AM for this. It was otherworldly. Some wonder if history would've been different had the Incas chosen this place for their last stand against Pizarro.

Rain poured during my descent from the ridge-- the trail was a mud sluice and I spent three hours slipping and windmilling my arms. I finally groaned onto a bench in Tingo and took a soggy Xerox map from my pocket. It was now in two pieces, which concerned a little kid. He went into a house for a bottle of glue and hunkered over this slop of paper, beaming when he was done with some careful work. You just can't get into a foul mood around these people.

This was the day-- about an hour later, while bouncing in a combi alongside a heaving river-- that I decided to not return to the coast just yet. Things are too good out here. I'm headed east, will buy a hammock, and will hang it on a boat.

2/25/06
CAJAMARCA, PERU

The road from Tarapoto loops through foggy green mountains before dropping into the rainforest. It's a mess. The car fishtailed, clambered, and pounded up and down. Cussing through this was Ian, a Brit who's been traveling since the 1950s. When we opened the doors in Yurimaguas we were swarmed by motocarros (motortrike rickshaws). We picked one fast, threw in our gear and went blasting through town. Slowing into the harbor, a mob wrestled the trike to a stop, hollering the names of boats and grabbing at our packs. With a lot of barging and yelling we made for the water. There's no dock at the harbor; just muddy planks flopping under the bare feet of porters. We boarded the Eduardo IV and made arrangments.

The Eduardo IV is a three-decked metal cargo boat that smells like a grease trap and a farm. In spots the floor klunks under your weight and bongs when you step off. Its top two decks are for passengers to hang their hammocks. From the top railing we watched men dragging cows onto the bottom deck in a torrential slop. It left at night. The moving air was a relief.

Okay: boat travel. You can scoot a plastic chair outside and put your feet on the rail and watch the jungle slide by. The warm beers from Yurimaguas didn't last long, and the '80s action movies didn't even rate as background noise. The other passengers were a friendly lot. After the first day Ian often had a little kid climbing on his lap, and it was hard to get any reading done. I chatted in pidgin Spanish, watched the cows squash around, and looked out on the sun-smeared water.

The boat was pulling a long motorboat that would now and again peel off to pick up people waving from palm-thatched houses. At a couple villages, the Eduardo itself nudged into the mud, prompting a rush of activity: villagers hopped on with bowls of grilled fish and bunches of plantains, selling in a hurry while passengers and supplies bounced over the planks. I bought fruit that I'd never heard of, like giant seed pods with a sweet white pulp. The shipworkers fed green plantains to the cows. Pushing out again, the last vendors got off and the boat eased back into the broad brown currents.

By nightfall on the second day, I was blissed. I sat hypnotized by the endlessly scrolling, moonlit jungle. Sometime while we slept, the Río Marañón merged with the Ucayali to become the Amazon.

By dawn everyone was struggling out of hammocks and packing-- we'd reached the harbor at Iquitos, an overpowering sight. We watched the chaos from the railing. Locals let a motocarro driver friend up the stairs, saying that he wouldn't try to rob us. That sounded good, so Fernando drove Ian and me from the harbor to the Plaza de Armas, where a big sign says No To Child Sex Tourism. Jesus. I got a room at a hostel with taxidermized jungle animals.

Iquitos is a city shipped into the jungle by river-- it has no road links. The streets scream with motocarros and the stuttering engines of old wooden buses. Poverty is everywhere. The squalor is at its worst on the Amazon, where tens of thousands live in floating shantytowns. Kids there essentially swim in the toilet. Hookers make kissy noises from boats.

After days of blown tires, riding with chickens, and the river, I was baffled by the sight of so many gringos. They fly in: tourists, missionaries, and steak-fed expats here being big shots. I ate breakfast at The Yellow Rose of Texas, which the owner bragged is "like the embassy-- this is American soil." He got rid of a shoeshine guy by pointing. The rubber boom would've been great for him.

Exploring the innards of the market, I felt my watch pinched off my wrist. The kid splashed down an alley of muck, and I stood there with a too-late adrenaline rush. I actually looked at my wrist. Some of the vendors showed sympathy, but I just felt culture shock.

It was a cheap watch, and an hour later I was haggling over a cheaper one. "It's very good," the vendor was saying. "Casio!"
"It's not a Casio."
"It's the same as a Casio."
"It says 'Cassiq.' What's a Cassiq?"
"Very good watch. Look," and he showed me how the buckle works.

Iquitos puts you in a colonial role whether you like it or not. History was bad here, and you are walking foreign money.

Ian and I booked a three-day rainforest trip with two guides, Raul and Saulo. We traveled two hours by bus and three hours by motorboat up the Río Ucayali to Raul's village: drowsy houses on stilts, banana trees, orchids. The heat was sludgy. Raul sawed a couple planks as seats for the dugout, and in the morning we paddled hours up a tributary overhung by foliage, amazingly thick with wildlife. Multicolored birds whooped and clicked. Some shaggy black howler monkeys crashed from tree to tree.

It's high water season, and the river was a swamp flowing halfway up tree trunks. To find ground meant squeaking the canoe between branches that pull your hat off; in the bow Raul whapped at vines with his machete. He staked his paddle in the mud and tied the canoe off, and we went on foot into the mosquitos.

I've never felt grosser than when wrapped in that hot slithering vegetation, soaked in a slime of sweat and DEET and swamp gunk. At night in the mosquito netting I could smell myself fermenting. It was clear that, on a longer trip, the jungle would smother and lay eggs in me.

Wading in water as high as our rubber boots, I took one ox-like step and plunged past my waist. I scrambled out and tried to save my camera, swabbing at it with the least-damp corner of my shirt. Turned on, it gibbered in electronic death throes. Rough week for the old equipment.

We slogged around in the woods. Weird trains of blossoms drooped off trees glittering with ants. Now and then Raul would drop into a crouch and shoot a finger at the canopy, whispering, "Hsst! Monkey!" I'd weave my head around, trying to line up with his extended arm until shaking leaves bared a critter loping up a branch, throwing us quirky looks as it got out of sight.

Fruits lay all over the leafy carpet: huge, tiny, stinky, sweet, acidic. We tried a bunch; Ian begged off many. Raul chipped a rubber tree so it leaked "milk." You roll the milk in your fingers and it's rubber. The guides pointed out medicinal plants-- musky crushed leaves, wet peels of bark thwacked off by machete. Good for insect bites? Pregnancy? I said sí a lot on this trip, and repeated a lot of Spanish names for plants and animals while simultaneously forgetting them. There was too much going on.

After dusk we paddled through flotillas of glowworms, heat lightning flickering in the distance. We were looking for caimans, whose eyes shine red in flashlights. We saw a little one. Reeds hissed against the boat; frogs chorused all around us. Drifting back to camp we heard a huge, wet hmmph!-- a river dolphin, said the guides.

In the morning we ate fish and plantains in the canoe. Between my feet gulped the day's lunch: four ugly catfish and a piranha sloshing in bilgewater, all from the nets Raul had set. Piranhas, when you're holding them looking at their fierce little underbites, make soft honking noises: unk, unk, unk.

On our way downriver we heard the slapping ripples of dolphins (said the guides), and we hushed over the opaque water. A pinkish back curved up near the canoe and submerged. Another rolled by. They seemed unreal-- big dolphins in the jungle. One plowed the water with its long nose, eyeing us before slipping back under.

The shower in Iquitos was rebirth. I ate an excessive dinner with my daily malaria pill, and I slept. I visited a creepy museum of casts of Amazon Indians, motorboated to languid villages with a Quebecois woman, ate rice-and-chicken meals from banana leaves. The city stewed under a wet sun.

Leaving took some head-scratching. From Iquitos you can't fly to Chiclayo anymore, nor to Trujillo, nor to Tarapoto-- where, I heard, flights were canceled because vultures were getting sucked into the engines. You can fly to Lima. On the evening of my flight, I randomly flagged down Fernando's motocarro. He drove me to the airport and undercharged me, and my departure by air was crisp and bilingual. The Amazon Basin went away in the dark.

Central Lima is a curt place that's best dealt with at top speed, dodging around pedestrians and taxis and holes while stealing glances at the colonial architecture and sidewalk merchandise (were those nunchucks?). I replaced my camera, ate shawarma, had my foot chewed at by a turtle on a roof, and left.

Huanchaco, just up the coast from Trujillo, is a beach town with soft sand, gorgeous sunsets, and fishermen paddling banana-shaped rafts over the breakers. I lollygagged with other backpackers. The Moche and Chimú sites outside Trujillo (Huacas de la Luna y Sol, Chan Chan) made for good day outings, but momentum fritters pleasantly away at the beach. I swam a lot, swapped a paperback.

Before my trip I'd arranged some digwork in the area, at a Moche site called El Brujo, but that's since fallen through. This may be typical Peru. It's just as well-- I'd already been weighing those six sedentary (sweltering, laboring) weeks against the idea of extra travel. Now freed up, I headed into the more traditional mountains. Cajamarca is supposed to do a lively Carnaval.

3/10/06
CUZCO, PERU

Cajamarca is an airy, tile-roofed city that throws water on you during Carnaval. The plazas are full of people slathered in paint and jumping up and down in circles around drums, everyone yelling the same song ("Cajamarca Cajamarca"), over and over, or perhaps nonstop. Sidewalk rowdies bring you into the circuit of a liter of pilsner and a communal glass. When done with the glass you dash the foam onto the street, and then a bashful young woman is being pushed your way for a dance, and the parade is going by whamming on drums and blowing brass and whirling around in gaudy costumes. On the fringes of town you'll find campesinos bouncing in eye-masks and giant straw hats to galloping flutes and drums.

Cajamarca is where the Incas first met the Spanish. In the middle of town is the room where the emperor Atahualpa was held for ransom. It was closed for Carnaval; you had to extract yourself from the city to get touristy. Out in the countryside are ancient burial niches and canals carved into volcanic rock. From gap-walled houses you can hear the peeps of guinea pigs, which sound like questions: "?...??...?" A hotel keeper asked me what I thought of guinea pig (as food), and I admitted that they don't have much meat. He shook his head, smiling, "All the gringos say that."

The road back to Trujillo sways along with a tumultuous river through mountain pastures and rice paddies (rice paddies: disorienting). The queasy nun sitting next to me asked to switch seats and promptly flung her head out the window. From busy hot Trujillo I went to Chimbote, a city that reeks from its fish processing plants. Its claim to scenery is a gray salty hump in the ocean called White Island, surrounded by a thousand rickety fishing boats. South of there is broiling Casma, where you can take a cheap motocarro to the site of Sechín. Sechín dates back 3,500 years and is carved with rapturously gruesome war scenes. In the museum were mummified hands tattooed like jaguar skin.

In Lima I slept off the delirium of an overnight bus. After three visits, I can call Lima a budging, standoffish, incompetent city that brings out the worst of my culture shock. But now I could leave Lima without ever going back, was headed for Cuzco via the mountains. Ayacucho was my first stop, a churchy city formerly held by Shining Path guerrillas. Then there was Andahuaylas, a friendly little town with a huge Sunday market. The riverside street becomes a blue-tarped bazaar with whole pigs laid out on tables, stalls of costume jewelry, cockfight DVDs, men fixing transistor radios, heaps of watermelons, women frying chickens, and anything else that a local could buy or sell. Near town, the terraced stronghold of the Chankas overlooks a quiet lake.

The mountain road to Cuzco is spectacular. It winds through massive green folds over flowering ravines and oceans of clouds. Ridges glow in yellow sunshine while dark snowpeaks jag the horizon. Quechuan farmers stand up from their hoes to watch you go by. Near Cuzco, the bus's violence subsides as the road becomes paved and two-laned. Curves no longer slope outwards as if to tumble you off. Your water bottle is bulging from the altitude, and the scenery is, impossibly, getting even better.

Cuzco is beautiful. Orange from a distance (Peruvian towns look the color of the local clay), it drapes over a bowl-shaped valley surrounded by mountains. Baroque churches light up its center, some built on the Herculean stonework of Inca palaces and temples. It's touristy but comfortably so-- maybe I'm just at the right point in my trip for eating pizza with gringos and waving money around. It's an easy place to lose a week or three, and I'll have to write about it later. Leaving tomorrow morning for four days on the Inca Trail, going to see Machu Picchu.

3/21/06
JULI, PERU

The Inca Trail is Peru's most popular and most regulated trek, requiring a licensed guide, a ticket, a passport, and porters. In Cuzco I checked out a few agencies with three German women I'd been bumping into since Andahuaylas, and after just a couple hours we had the trip booked. At the orientation a couple evenings later, we met the four other hikers, plus our guide, Saul.

We bused out to Ollantaytambo early Saturday morning, most of us punchy from overexcited sleep. At the trailhead were local matrons selling bamboo walking sticks and plastic ponchos. We had to say no, thank you to every one of them as we snugged up our packs and eyeballed the sky.

There were several porters and a cook, speaking Quechuan amongst themselves with throaty clicks and apparently a lot of jokes. They shouldered enormous lashed-up bundles and went chugging ahead to set up lunch. Meals were in a mess tent with liberal amounts of tea and jam. We'd have dishes like lomo saltado (stir-fry over french fries), roasted chicken, and banana wontons.

Colonial treatment aside, you need the calories. Day One is steady hiking, but Day Two gets steep. The trail's highest pass is at nearly 14,000 feet, and hikers straggle out according to their knees and lungs. Coca leaves help with the altitude or possibly just numb your lip. After hauling up the last of the uneven stairs, you reel over a view of buff-colored ridges and the white tops of clouds. Downward is a plod through llama-bitten grass, through fragrant tunnels of cloud forest, over bouncy log bridges, alongside cliffs.

We stopped at Inca forts and temples, each one lichenous and looming over a steep drop. Inca stonecutting is incredible-- oddly polygonal blocks fit like puzzlework. Buildings mesh with the land and vice versa. Outcropped bedrock is carved into a foundation, or an altar, or it's just shaped with a few planes and protuberances, as if to bring it into the game.

The evening of Day Three, the porters boiled medicinal leaves to apply to some afflicted German knees. Our tents smelled like socks.

On Day Four, wake-up is at four o'clock. You pack and toss back your tea under a mess tent clingy with rainwater, then hurry down the trail after the boots flashing in your headlamp-- the mob of hikers backs up at the checkpoint, which opens at 5:30. From there you charge the Sun Gate, and Machu Picchu appears gray and misty on a far-off saddle. I didn't wait for anyone and reached the city right before the clouds rolled in, when nobody was in the plazas, hours before the buses disgorged the Cuzco tourists in their Jolly Rancher-colored raingear. I could sit on a rock and look at the thing.

In Cuzco, windows are plastered with that poster image of Machu Picchu under the summits. You arrive saturated and expectant. As the morning develops, you'll have moments of clutching at something ephemeral: This is one of the wonders of the world, and I just took a picture containing a woman in bright purple pants.

That said, a moment alone with Machu Picchu and the rain pattering on your hat is achingly good.

We had six or seven hours there. It's a big complex that rewards wandering around and gawping at the fog-shrouded stonework, the layout of its spaces, the cloud forest creeping over the edges. When the gaggles of umbrellas arrive, you can still find quiet parts.

For a late lunch we descended to Aguas Calientes, a tourist ghetto set in the forested cliffs of the Urubamba Valley. The Germans and I stayed a night, soaked out some knots in the hot springs, cringed at pop music over dinner, and the next day took the train back to Ollantaytambo to climb the fort where the Incas once beat back the Spanish-- their only real victory during the conquest. On the bus that evening I was so bone-tired as to feel part of the shaking windows and the scalloped valleys and the mountains crawling by. The tackiness of tourism had fallen apart. Across the aisle sat a Quechuan farmer, his long face circled by a knit chin-tied cap under a felt hat, taking slow bites from a fruit he turned in dark, burled fingers.

After a dead sleep I spent another couple days in Cuzco, walking in the outlying ruins (though it's hard to call them ruins, since during earthquakes they regularly outperform newer buildings), eating crepes, and poking through museums (favorite piece: a huge foldable diorama called The Portable Trunk of the Birth of Christ, featuring Andean costumes, llamas, and flamingos). Cuzco is still laid out as the Incas laid it out, and with a good map you can see where there once were palaces and now are alpaca souvenir shops.

On the cheaper long-distance buses-- like the one I took from Cuzco to Puno-- vendors and buskers hop on for a while, swaying down the aisle proffering wheels of homemade cheese, playing panflute and ukelele, or booming about a miracle cure that they pass around with the cap off (reeks of mint). They collect money and hustle off waving thanks, presumably to catch a bus going the other way. In an economy like Peru's, people have to exploit the nooks and crannies. I heard that there are people who stand in line at the bank just so they can sell their spots. Self-appointed guides hound you at tourist spots, where you also find gaudily quaint people holding baby llamas and asking for a sol a photograph.

There's a lot of this around Cuzco, of course, and somewhat less around Lake Titicaca. The lake spreads out cold and blue in the prairie-like altiplano, high in the mountains. Puno, on the northwestern shore, is Peru's jumping-off point for lake tours, most of which visit the floating islands of the Uros. The Uros have lived for centuries on spongy mats of reeds, regularly laying down new reeds as the bottom layers rot. The fresh reeds squeak underfoot like giant green beans. The islanders sell crafts to tourists, eat fish and guinea pigs, and somehow have a phone hut.

So it was a tour. I was just happy to be on a boat. The sunlight at that altitude flashes blindingly off the water. On the isle of Taquille we visited the shy local community. The men knit the women's clothes and the women knit the men's. The way a man flops his cap indicates his availability; women do this with the colored pompoms hanging from their shawls.

The countryside around Puno is sweeping and friendly. The giant stone burial towers of the Colla people (pre-Inca) stand semi-ruined on a long hill. An hour and a half southeast is Juli, known as "Peru's Little Rome" for its 16th- and 17th-century churches. Cobbled streets crook around a lazy plaza where round women in bowler hats shamble along. It's a sunny, not-much-happens kind of town with a breeze off the lake, and my last stop before the Bolivian border.