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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