56. Onward by Dodge Truck

56.

Early next morning I am up and bargaining for a cheap ride to Cuzco.

I get a good price for a place in the back of a Dodge truck, but little brown people wearing felt hats already occupy every bit of “sitting space”. I climb aboard last. They tie my backpack to the tailgate and we’re off. I stand in a surfer’s crouch, bending my knees to keep my balance. As we whip around mountain curves it takes all my strength to keep from being pitched overboard. Under me, between my legs actually, an old woman shepherds two loose, live chickens.

Up the mountainside and into the swirling fog: on the top of the mountain is a wide plateau with thousands of tiny pools reflecting bright blue sky and white clouds. We pass the straw-stack huts of the human inhabitants of this place and small herds of goats and llamas. These are the first out-of-zoo llamas I have ever seen.

It gets colder and starts to snow. Good grief, if the scenery wasn’t so spectacular I would be miserable indeed.

Over a 10,000-foot pass in a blizzard, then down into a valley where oranges and figs grow, and then back up into the mountains and we roll into Cuzco.

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55. Abancay, Peru

55.

Abancay, Peru:

Here in a deep tropical valley surrounded by towering mountains is the most beautiful town site I have ever seen. The lower slopes of the mountains are covered by a patchwork of fields in every shade of green so the farmers up there must work extra hard.

The town people are mellow and men and women wear floppy felt hats that make them all look like gnomes.

There is one good touristic hotel in town (too expensive for me) and three el cheapo pensions-- but plumbing seems a problem so the whole town stinks. What a pity.

I’m hiking on a footpath out of town when some little boys overtake me. One opens his school lunchbox. There is nothing in it but coca leaves from which cocaine is extracted. I recognize them because I have seen piles of them for sale in every market in these hills. “Do you know how to eat these?” he asks, giving me a handful. The boys walk with me while I chew a few. The path begins to glow.

The boys urge me to hurry past one adobe hut where they say a “bad man” lives. I trust these little kids and hurry past the house. I am really getting to appreciate the straightforward honesty of children.

The boys leave me by the bank of a clear mountain stream. Icy water is rushing over a bed of colorful pebbles. There are lots of wildflowers: purple rabbity faces and blue and white daisies, yellow butterflies and slow bumblebees cruising two by two… It is a wonderful afternoon.

...

54.. Got to Be Some Changes Made

54.

For my own self-protection, I decide I must change some old habits.

I’ve got to stop coming on like “Mr. Nice Guy”. I’ve got to come on like a tough or hard person.

Outside America, and maybe even in America, “niceness” seems to be a sign of weakness and an invitation for trouble. People may take less advantage of me and perhaps give me a little more respect if they fear me a little.

I really hate being hassled by children and that’s exactly what these human animals often are in terms of education and experience. That is certainly an unkind and undemocratic thing for me to say, but it seems true to me today.

These “children” can certainly be useful to leaders who understand their condition—look at the amazing stonework terraces and irrigation projects they have built all over these mountains. The Incas were certainly leaders of great power and vision, but without their direction, these people are lost.

This traveler’s impression, and it may be unfair, but it IS what I see—is that very few people actually WORK here. They are poor, ragged, and if they are the heirs of a great civilization, they have lost the creative spark!

...

53. CIA Spy

53.

I am walking down the street when a man in a brown suit stops me. His Spanish is pretty rapid but I catch the drift of his harangue.

He says that everyone in town knows that I am a CIA spy—but he assures me that I should not worry. He says that he will gather a group of men who are eager to hear whatever I have to say. He slips me his address on a scrap of paper and says he will wait for me with his friends in the morning.

But the next morning I am on the first bus out of town. I am about as far as you can get from being a CIA spy and I have nothing at all to say to his gang of nincompoops.

That’s how I cope with my own fear right now. That is, I run from possible conflict!

Polly, who, like me, prefers to travel alone, told me she had conquered her own fear by realizing that basically only three things could happen to her: she could be robbed, raped and/or murdered. Once she faced this fact, she became serene. She is a very special kind of person.

...

52. The Local News

52.

The News

You are probably curious about how coffee is served here in this part of the world where most of the world’s supply of the beverage is grown.

In the best café in town they serve it like this: a cup of hot water, a spoon and an opened can of Nescafe Instant Coffee. No kidding!

I see by the morning paper that a bus operated by the company that just gave me the most interesting recent experience (Hidalgo) slipped off a cliff near here killing twenty-two people.

It has been such a common occurrence that the company has been suspended from operation, but I wonder how passengers are going to get from there to here without a bus since Hidalgo was the only company willing to travel the dangerous route?

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51. Time and Perspective in Art

51.

Time and Perspective in Art

Now, sitting in this mellow candlelit room, I am thinking about time and perspective.

It occurs to me that what we see as “perspective” is actually “time made visible”. I have absolutely no business speculating in a field I know practically nothing about, but it seems to me tonight that “plane geometry” operating as it does with no regard to perspective is merely a fairly useful fiction. Geometry, in experience, is always a function of time.

Well, there it is, and I don’t expect this personal revelation to change the world much, but, true or not, it is interesting for me to ponder.

In my latest drawings I use a “moving point of view” which does not capture a scene from one place at one time, but which is as flexible as my own changing point of view. I don’t think these “works of art” will be popular, but they are fun for me to make!

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50. Andahualas, Peru

50.

Andahualas, Peru:

I am writing by yellow candlelight in a clean, cheap room in this lovely mountain village.


But there was some trouble getting here.

First the bus was stranded by a local gasoline shortage. Since there was no gas to buy, we passengers-- mainly Indians who had been visiting Lima-- camped out for a couple of days and nights in the stalled bus.

Next a collapsed bridge stopped us. The bridge had actually fallen into a raging river, but we passengers managed to cross the river, picking our way on unsubmerged portions of the steel bridge.

I helped carry children and luggage across in the moonlight. It was really very exhilarating to have strangers entrust me to carry their infants in one arm, move from girder to girder with the free hand like a monkey and carefully choose my footing across the slippery wreckage.

An empty bus from the same company waited for us on the opposite side to carry us onward.

I met a girl on the stalled bus, which made the long journey more fun for me-- an Indian who spoke Spanish and her native tongue, Quechua.

I had never heard of that language before.

She said it was somewhat like Russian, though I don’t know what she meant by that.

She was fascinated by my paperback copy of “El Retorno de los Brujos” (“The Morning of the Magicians”) by Pauwels and Bergier.


I ended the trip aboard the favorite transport of the Andes: the two and a half ton Dodge stake truck. All these vehicles are painted decoratively and most have a name painted on the front, something like “Jesus is my Salvation” or “Batman Number Two”.

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49. City Thoughts in Ayacucho

49.

I eat breakfast for the third day in a row at the same good café. I notice that my presence has upset the usual “sociogram” of the place. Regular customers had their special tables staked out until I intruded, throwing a monkey wrench into their routine. Can they handle it? They will have to think a little--and before their first cup of morning coffee too. I feel a little bit cruel.

So, to take my mind off their seating problems, I think some more about cities.

Cities seem to sprout, flourish and die like plants. For the best living it may be best to pick a city on the way up––not one that has already arrived—but these conditions change fast. A city with a good reputation can already be a bad place to live by the time you hear about it and move there. It seems to take a long time for a good reputation to die—if you’re a city, that is.

People living in big cities seem to be dedicated to the exploitation of one another. The city is the Big Marketplace, where the young, talented and beautiful come with what they’ve got to trade for what they can get. In a city, costume is important. Youth and inexperience fall for the trappings, but behind the costume is the flesh and bone and behind that meat, the human awareness of the entity.

You come to town dressed up so fine--
But I wonder what’s going on in your mind?

(If anything.)

And, of course, youth does not last. The city dweller plugs along, living sometimes well and sometimes badly until the youthful energy is gone. If lucky, the citizen may retire back to the country to the good life and if unlucky, the citizen remains in the city to be exploited and abused by a new youthful generation until he dies. So it is.

...

48. Ayacucho, Peru

48.

Ayacucho, Peru:

The town museum displays a large collection of trepanned human skulls.

These skulls often have misshapen elongated domes as well as some neatly drilled patterns of holes bored though the bone.

According to the museum information, hundreds of these skulls have been found locally.

They are thought to be the crania of pre-conquest women.

The rest of the women’s skeletons are missing. There is no evidence of healing in the bone cells surrounding the holes so these “operations” were presumably always fatal or they could have been performed post-mortum for some reason.

Perhaps they are the evidence of some bizarre human guinea-pig experiments. No one knows what the existence of these skulls means, but here they are.

A young Indian in a filthy red sweater has no information about the peculiar skulls , but he offers me his predictions about the future as he sets up his cutlery booth on the sidewalk.

He says next year will be particularly bad—even worse than this year.

To me, that seems like a perfectly safe prophecy since everything seems to be getting slowly worse.

He says he gets his information from the Spanish edition of the Jehovah’s Witness “The Watchtower” magazine.

An old Indian trots by us in the mud carrying two huge cardboard cartons on his back tied together with rope. They look heavy but he is chugging right along with a minimum of pollution.

...

47. Huancayo, Peru

47.

Huancayo, Peru

This town is recommended on the tourist maps for its unusual Sunday market.

The hotel owner tries to short-change me—so does the restaurant man and the baker.

In the Famous Market, I catch a pickpocket’s hand in my pocket. He and the tough friends he is with don’t bat an eye when I pull his hand out of the pocket without my wallet. They keep following me looking for another chance—so I guess this is a tourist’s paradise in Peru.

Indian women stand barefoot in the freezing rain with rivers of mud flowing past them in the street. Men and women here wear dirty white, bottle-cap shaped hats of some hard looking material that looks like plaster.

They say this hat wearing custom is a holdover from the old Inca days when the every villager was compelled to wear a special costume specific to his or her town of origin, sort of like the driver’s license ID required today for US citizens.

Locals on street corners shout, “Gringo go home!” at me and one kid throws a rock at me but his aim is bad.

I am the only gringo around to hate so I get all the attention for my countrymen--and I don't even know why we are despised! But I suppose it is because we have money to come here to buy junk in their famous market and they don't have enough money to go to the states and buy junk in our famous market!

...

46. Waiting for Big Brother

46.

Waiting for Big Brother

Waiting in the Lima bus station for transportation south I hear a familiar popular song: in English: “Hey, Big Brother—as soon as you arrive, better get in touch with the people, Big Brother—Keep them on your side…”

Up into the Andes again. It’s snowing. My nose is running and I am generally miserable after my stay in Lima.

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