71. The Amazon River

71.

The Amazon River:

By faint starlight and a hint of moon, I make out a fleet of houseboats on what seems to be a lagoon with a broad sheet of water lying beyond.

The Mighty Amazon River?! Oh, my!

I think I might be able to sleep on a wet grassy knoll near the water, but I hear and faintly see some tough looking hombres cruising the area. The only lights I can see are a couple of range-lights on some riverboat in the distance. The town itself is absolutely dark. Maybe electricity hasn’t been invented here yet?

I strike out for the range-lights. They are on a husky-looking Petro Peru Tugboat tied up at a pier with a lot of smaller nondescript boats. The crews are evidently all asleep or ashore. It starts to rain again so I crawl under a big truck parked near the pier and sleep til dawn.

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70. By Bus to Pucalpa

70.

In Huanuco I buy a bus ticket and depart for Pucalpa, Peru, the highest navigable port on the Amazon River.

It has been raining a lot and there isn’t much “road” left for the bus to travel on.

What exists is just a slippery mud pathway through the jungle.

We cross chasms on the most rickety highway bridges I’ve ever seen.

Once the bus driver’s assistant comes back to collect coins from us passengers then the driver stops the bus before venturing out on a perilous bridge. The assistant runs over to a small chapel beside the road--leaves the cash offering and hops back on the bus.

With a grinding of gears we cross the bridge safely!

Did we bribe Fate or has some local bandito decided to collect a little toll from buses to insure their safe crossing? Or maybe both?

The bad road only gets worse. The heat is awful too, but at least the suffering is cheap—I can buy bananas from roadside vendors at a stop for two cents apiece.

At midnight the bus literally slides into the totally darkened town of Pucalpa.

All the passengers exit the bus. I am last to go and reluctant to leave the comparative safety of the bus but the driver insists and I am out with my backpack standing alone in utter darkness.

I haven’t the slightest idea of which direction to go so I stand listening.

The jungle movie noises--you know, chirps, squeaks and squawks--are a bit louder louder in one direction so I head that way and discover the Amazon River by it’s sound!

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69. Saved in Cerro de Pasco

69.

At “Galena” village, the train crosses a pass, which at 15,681 feet (4,781 meters) altitude gives this route the world’s record. An attendant passes through the coach with a portable oxygen bottle selling sniffs and gasps of the life preserving gas.

At La Oroya Train Station, Louise heads south to retrieve her beloved pushbike and I head north by bus.

My bus arrives in Cerro de Pasco late at night. Near the bus station, mobs of shouting people are milling around carrying torches and lanterns. Something heavy is going on but what it is I don’t know and no one is telling.

The friendly bus driver finds a truck that is continuing down the road to Huanuco and puts me aboard.

I find out afterward that the miners of Cerro de Pasco were rioting against foreign ownership (American) and exploitation of the miners.

That friendly bus driver may have saved my life.

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68. I Follow the Wind

68.

New Zealander Louise Sutherland sits beside me on this fairly comfortable train.

Louise is a “push-bike” traveler who has ridden her bike all over the world.

She made her first bicycle trip 25 years ago and has been traveling, on and off, ever since.

She now rides a bike with three gears and a trailer, which she designed herself and had made in an English bicycle shop. She is the author of a book called “I Follow the Wind” which she sells at women’s club meetings in England, when she is asked to speak about her adventures. She left her bike in Lima to make this train trip, which is advertised as the “highest train journey in the world”.

She tells me that she had settled down to a humdrum ordinary existence and almost gave up her adventurous ways but recently woke up to the fact that she had become just another human plodding to the grave without realizing her potential to go and see this amazing world for herself.

Something to think about for sure.

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67. Lima Again

67.

Morning.

Mr. Nerves hopes to reach Lima today and asks me to go faster so I blaze along the vacant desert road like a race driver. I suppose there are no traffic laws or policemen out here. Actually, there are few vehicles of any kind on this dried up roadway.

Here are the shabby outskirts of Lima!

Nerves takes the wheel and copes so well with the crazy city traffic that we soon arrive at his mother’s grand residence in a swanky suburb.

The home is old and aristocratic and so is Mom and now I see the game: Nerves is the pampered scion of an aristocratic family. The kid is his and so is Mrs. Jones, of course, but since Jones is an Indian, nobody admits their relationship—especially not old Mom, who merely offers Jones a room in the servant’s quarters and ignores her grandson.

Well, it is their reality and it got me a ride with amusing company the length of Peru so everybody is satisfied.

I bid Nerves, Jones and Mom farewell in my best Spanish and backpack across Lima to El Cheapo Hotel. The next day I catch a train to La Oroya high up in the Andes. Some backpackers in Cuzco told me how to catch a boat down the Amazon River so that’s where I’m headed.

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66. Me Chauffeur

66.

Me: Chauffeur

Nerves pretends to rent separate rooms for himself and Mrs. Jones, but it is obvious they are shaking up. I go along with the comic routine.

In the morning we visit the Ariquipa Thieves Market. It is the Real Thing: dealing with honest-to-God thieves for really stolen merchandise. For me it is so real its unreal. Nerves buys some cheap stolen underwear.

All day long I drive like hell, leaving the mountains and entering the vast desert lying between the Andes and the Pacific.

Once or twice Nerves swallows a handful of pills and wants to drive. He does a macho Grand Prix thing for a half hour or so, but he can’t keep up the concentration and turns the bug back over to me. While he has the wheel, though, we are pretty close to death but I take it philosophically. It’s a nice day—probably as good as any to leave my fragile, temporary human shell—so I keep on smilin’ through.

We reach the sea after dark and go through the same “separate rooms” farce at a weird hotel in a nameless village which could be the spooky model for a Ray Bradbury “October Country” story. A cold wind is blowing the inhabitants through the empty streets like autumn leaves. An old scarecrow stops me to say how great the USA is but he snorts with disgust when he discovers the sad fact that this American doesn’t smoke and has no cigarettes to share.

I have tried to eat like my employers, but they do swallow the huge quantities of chicken and rice and stuffed cabbage and soda pop, so I am feeling rather ill and stagger off to bed early.

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65. American Chauffeur

65.

I look into a mirror for the first time in several weeks and an interesting strange visage with sunburned nose and ragged beard stares back at me. I have become a traveler.

In the room next to mine some hip American tourists are arguing about where to go to eat dinner. So much time is wasted in futile talk! Solitary travel is lonely sometimes but I never have to discuss meal plans in Cuzco.

I’m waiting on a sidewalk for the bus back to Lima when a new, blue VW bug pulls up to the curb. The man driving offers me a free trip to Lima in his car if I will drive part of the way. Why not? I climb in.

The Peruvian, who teaches at the University of Cuzco, is going to Lima for his health. The extreme altitude of Cuzco is making him ill.

We drive a bit around town. His first stop is to pick up a lady with a year-old boy.

Ahhhh! She is young, stacked and I can tell that she and the Prof have “got a thing going on” as the popular song puts it—so, like the lady in the song, I call her “Mrs. Jones”.

The professor is dropping pills by the handful so I have to call him “Mr. Nerves”. He only speaks English to me and doesn’t know I now speak some Spanish. When they are discussing their Great Romance, Nerves and Jones keep their faces vacant so I (their American chauffeur) won’t catch on. Well, it’s quite a charade, and I, of course, play my role as well as I can. Mr. Nerves wants me to drive fast so I move the bug along the mountain road in a blast of gravel—across a 4,500 meter pass, by pastures where alpacas graze, through adobe villages, past an overturned bus surrounded by glum passengers—to Ariquipa.

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64. Tour of Cuzco

64.

Back in Cuzco: I meet a skinny Japanese person who calls himself “The Bank of Tokyo”. He draws, teaches karate and yoga and is willing to exchange American dollars for Peruvian Soles at a black-market rate. He has a pretty Peruvian girlfriend and no desire to return to Japan.

This hustler and his girl take me on a tour of “underground” Cuzco.

The dens we visit feature candles, incense and stoned hippy freaks from all over the world sitting on dirty carpeted floors tripping on drugs and soft guitar music.

These bearded young men and half-naked girls don’t move, speak or even see. Wasted, they live in their own drug created reality. Well, there are millions of people on this planet and millions of different life styles. I suppose creative people will always find some way to live that suits them.

The “normal” shabby Cuzco bars where the natives go at night are full of ugly old men. If a woman comes in, ostensibly to buy cigarettes, they grin and paw her as she passes. This inexpensive kind of sexual encounter makes these old goats’ evening enjoyable

There are also one or two world-class hotels in Cuzco for those tourists with two weeks and a pocketful of money, but unfortunately, I do not see their interiors!

And what sort of meaningful lifestyle am I experiencing as I make these critical observations? Do I, perhaps, feel a little bit superior to the people I have just described? Hmmm?

Well, I do like my freedom of traveling without a destination and I don’t seem to want or need drugs or even intimate companionship right now. I find all kinds of teachers and learning situations on my present path and I especially like the guidance that seems to come from within.

Dare I call it “insight”?

Anyway, I feel that my chosen “earthprobe” lifestyle is good for me right now.

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63. Macchu Picchu Park

63.

Macchu Picchu Park

The park is securely fenced and gated, of course, and there are the usual fees to pay and tour guides to avoid, but once in the park no one could fail to be impressed by this enchanted mountaintop.

They say that the master builders and inhabitants of Macchu Picchu were gone long before the Spanish arrived—and, except for these stone ruins, every trace of their civilization has vanished. There are garden terraces, gushing fountains of clear water, broad stone stairways, mysterious doorways and the great walls, whose colossal stones were cut to fit each other with such precision and so many angles that they have defied the destructive power of the frequent earthquakes of this region for centuries. In an upper clearing in the ruins, I see the extraordinary “sundial stone” whose peculiar angles have provoked thought and provided interesting puzzles for modern archeoastronomers.

These ruins, so alien and so unexpected in this remote setting of mists, wildflowers, tropical birds and butterflies, with the eternal thunder of the great Urubamba River echoing up from its twisting course a thousand feet below, impresses me more than any scene I have ever witnessed.

A few days later, I catch the early morning “Indian Train” back to Cuzco. The old coaches on this train offer an extreme contrast to the bright tourist train of the few days earlier. This train is chockfull of Indians with bags and bundles of merchandise for the Cuzco market and there are also a few penny-pinching backpackers like me. Naturally, there are no seats available, so I stand most of the way.

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62. Aguas Caliente

62

Aguas Caliente:

There is only one place for travelers to stay in this six-house village--an unsightly one-room concrete-block pension.

I rent one of the several empty cots. This will be my base camp for exploring the famous lost city, but first I want to sample the nearby natural hot spring baths I have been told of by other backpack travelers.

Up a faint footpath into a narrow defile behind the village I find the springs: clean concrete tubs with sandy bottoms filled with clear steaming water. No one is around. Off with the clothes and into the crystal pool! Oh, good! I float like a lemon slice in a bowl of hot punch feeling better and better and then dash over to the nearby tumbling mountain stream for a startling splash in the cool water, then back to the hot tubs! The only company I have during the entire lovely afternoon is a cloud of pretty butterflies.

Back in the village I buy and eat fried river fish, bananas and fresh baked bread. After nightfall a few little children come out to play in the little town square. There is no electricity in this tiny community so candles glow and fireflies wink in the darkness.

At sunrise I hike back up the tracks through the tunnels to the foot of the needlelike peak that is crowned by the "lost" city. Where the footpath up the mountain begins, I discover a bamboo shack which shelters seven or eight international backpackers, some of which have been living here for weeks or even months.

You can buy a meal here too, so I order coffee and a thick pancake from the native woman who runs the establishment, then set out on the strenuous two-hour climb to the ruins.

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