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.