Tucuman, Argentina

There´s no sense in beating around the bush. This place pretty much blows. It´s big and dirty and lacks the old-world feel of Salta. Also it´s been drooling gray rain all day and I feel like I´m in Seattle. The power just went out in this hostel but the ceilings are high so I´m giving it the benefit of the doubt. I´m over halfway through the Che Guevara biography I´m reading and have gone from kind of admiring the guy (in his younger days) to having nightmares about him. Shit´s getting pretty brown in Cuba and by page 600 I´m expecting the number of executed "counterrevolutionaries" to reach the thousands.

Cusco smelled like roasted corn and Cafayete (where very little happened except for the fact that I bought my first ice cream cone of the journey) smelled like bologna.

Having consulted my English/Spanish dictionary about 24 hours too late, I´m now 85% certain that I ate a pig´s testicle on my last night in Salta.

The cab driver who picked me up from the Tucuman bus station today put me through the most stressful 20 minutes of my entire trip, screaming in an indiscernable Argentine accent (they drop about 10 rather important letters from the alphabet entirely and mispronounce another four) about where to go and what to eat and who to drink and constantly scribbling down phone numbers for hookers and shoving them at me while steering with his knee and dancing with his left hand and right elbow to the salsa music that was blaring out of his radio. Was quite glad to finally get out of that cab, and actually lied about where I wanted to stay so I could get out earlier.

Then I went to an Internet cafe to avoid the rain and read Simmons´ blog, which is sheer genius.

Cafayate, Argentina

Finally got moving today after three mellow nights in Salta. Veronica, the woman who owned the hostel I was staying in mothered me to a ridiculous degree, not only doing all my laundry for me but also folding and ironing everything -- including my skivvies. Spent the mornings drinking coffee watching cartoons with the little boy who fit into the labyrinthine family structure in some way I couldn´t quite suss out and the afternoons and evenings wandering around and sitting in sidewalk cafes with a book.

Tim and Faye, the British couple we lured into Freddy´s jeep back in Oruro, left a day earlier than me for Mendoza and though their company was wonderful as all getout it was relaxing to have some solo time again. Relaxing, that is, until my plan to be in bed before midnight after yet another enormous meal of beef and red wine was foiled by Fernando, the sole non-family member at the hostel (kind of like Al Jardine) who was also very eager to learn English and party his ass off every night. Walking home, I nearly crossed the street to avoid him but it was hopeless and before I knew it I was in a locals bar with him, one of the brothers, and two of their friends trying to explain the one-liners they kept asking about, things like "You can tune a piano but you can´t tuna fish."

It was all rather hilarious, and it ended at 3am with Fernando and the brother having offered and insisted that I accept a job at the hostel (quite seriously, I think) and then tearing off to a disco downtown, grinning broadly and shaking their heads from the window of a cab and shouting, in a way that was alarmingly reminiscent of my friends back home, "Fucking Chad! You come back to Salta, fucking Chad!"

I missed the 7am bus to Cafayate.

In other news, I´ve noticed that ever since Bolivia these internet cafes have become thinly-veiled dens of videogame iniquities. Every place I´ve been has been home to at least a dozen 13-year-old kids going berzerk over communal games of "Shoot the Shit out of Everything.¨ The one I´m in right now, actually, is hosting a mini-concert starring a 13-year-old kid with a guitar and a half-dozen co-ed admirers. So far the set has included Don´t Cry, Start Me Up, Californication, and the opening riff to Sweet Child o´Mine.

It would all be relatively amusing if the guitar wasn´t criminally out of tune and teenagers weren´t chronically annoying.

Salta, Argentina

I´m waving my Gringo flag wide and high today.

First off, I´m finally getting some laundry done at the hostel, which means all I have left to wear today is a pair of shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt from a radio station. Salta is a pretty modern town, though not without it´s charms (the old central plaza, guys pushing huge fruit carts up and down roads strewn with VWs and even a Porsche or two) and the people, a fetching blend of Spanish, Italian, and Arab, tend to dress rather sharply. Long story short, even though it´s about 80 degrees here today, not even the little school kids are wearing shorts. Add to that a low population of tourists, and I´m basically a sore thumb.

Secondly, I´ve somehow taken to flashing the ¨A-OK¨ sign to people whenever they help me out. This is a pretty ridiculous gesture (thumb and forefinger create circle, three remaining fings flare like a rooster´s tail) which I´ve never *ever* used before. How I managed to spontaneously incorporate it into my arsenal of body language is absolutely inexplicable. This would all be rather neurotic and harmless if not for the fact that the ¨A-OK¨ sign essentially means ¨fuck off¨ in most South American countries, with various subtexts bringing into question various family members and alternative lifestyles depending on which region you happen to be in.

So imagine this: you´re walking down the street in Baltimore and a Spanish-speaking tourist comes up to you smiling with embarrassment and asks in broken but discernable English whether you can tell him where the nearest ATM is. You´re a good person, so you speak in slow, clear sentences and explain how to get to the nearest cash machine. You feel good about yourself, having done a good deed. The Spanish-speaking tourist, overflowing with gratitude, shakes your hand and says ¨Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.¨ Then, he steps back, smiles broadly, waves goodbye, and promply flips you the bird before wandering off.

I´ve done this three times today. I keep telling myself to stop but that damn little hand keeps flipping up and throwing it out. Really need to concentrate on this.

Had a good conversation with one of the sisters in the family who runs the hostel this morning. After three days in Boliva with good Spanish-speakers, it was good to get back to my rambling, stammering ways. At one point, when she said she liked Salta more than Buenos Aires because it was more laid back, I was actually able to communicate the fact that I liked the western U.S., also because it was more laid back. I also complained about how much vacation Europeans get and, for the first time, explained that I had gotten laid off from my job rather than just quit.

It would have been the beginning of a great day if not for the fact that I spent the rest of the afternoon telling everyone I met to fuck off.

Uyuni & the Bolivian Altiplano

Had a little trouble on the bus from La Paz to Uyuni which I´ll elaborate on later. In the end, it was supposed to be a 14-hour trip with no bathroom on board so the fact that the trip was cut short a couple hours after departure was kind of a blessing. After a quick hitch in the back of a dumptruck and a hundred-mile cab ride with a Bolivian couple who were quite kind even though I think the wife was a bit put off by the Peru warmup jacket Graham was wearing, we arrived safely in a frigid town called Oruro just before midnight, in time to catch a few other Gringos at the bus station who you will learn upon further elaboration weren´t exactly in our good graces. Tired, hungry, pissed, resigned to the fact that we would *not* make it to Uyuni for a tour of the Salt Flats the next day, we did what any self-respecting travellers would do at half past midnight in a strange, dead, boring town in the middle of nowhere. We went looking for a bar.

After nearly an hour of padding around and finding all of the recommended establishments closed, we finally asked a cab driver for advice and he pointed to a sign that said karoake/coca-cola. This karaoke thing is becoming something of a recurring thing and I wasn´t very excited but we were up against the wall and had little choice.

Immediately upon entering, we were confronted with two men passed out on either side of a booth with a full bottle of beer between them and three very drunk guys spooning pisco sours out of a plastic bucket with a ladle. All in all, it was quite comfortable, though, and we enjoyed a couple quiet drinks while we decompressed.

In a moment of unadvisable enthusiasm, the decision to have a third got ratified and passed, which would eventually prove to be our death knell. Somehow, in the process of ordering that third drink we got a little chatty with the locals and the next thing we knew were in a full-on bullshit session, covering everything from politics to sports to where all the girls were (¨tomorrow, my friend...the women all come on fridays...¨). We got to feeling pretty cocky, no longer annoying tourists but legitimately interesting world travellers with whom the locals were eager to interact and swap stories.

After a couple hours of this, and due in no small part to the horde of invitations to private homes and parties we received, it became quite clear that this was a gay karaoke bar. The guys were all very nice about it, but after the confusion was sorted out Graham and I snagged a cab and made it to our hotel in time to grab about 3 hours of sleep before waking up to sort out our situation the next day.

Boliva is currently being rocked by three kinds of protests: students bitching about university funding, different provinces bitching about the reallocation of seats in Parliament, and folks in the South bitching about the government´s broken promise to improve roads and railways near the Argentinian border. As a result, blockades have been set up along many roads connecting major cities, and we awoke to the news that our bus to Uyuni would likely be stranded in Oruro. Graham had a flight to catch in Chile and was on a tight schedule, but as long as I could make it to Uyuni I would have no time constraints messing up my tour to the salt flats. Our bus was at 7pm. It was now about 10am. We were very tired of being on busses every day and having fun every night and longed for some boring days of rest.

It was then that The Dutchman approached me.

He asked if I was going to Uyuni and I told him that I hoped so.

He said he had met a local with a jeep who could get six people there for $250. The local, he said, knew all about the blockades and could get us through.

¨$250 is a lot of money,¨I said.

¨Yes,¨ said The Dutchman. ¨But my driver´s name is Freddy and he has inspired my confidence. $40 per person.¨

That was enough for us, and we set out to find two more people. Travelling during the day, avoiding another Bolivian bus ride, and travelling with this obviously mad Dutchman and his girlfriend all added up to well over $40 in value for us.

A few minutes later, we spied a weary-looking British couple straggling around the bus station. We approached them, trying not to appear sketchy.

¨Do you speak English and are you going to Uyuni?¨ I asked them.

¨Yes,¨ they said.

¨Well, check it out,¨ I said. ¨About 20 minutes ago I met this guy, ¨The Dutchman,¨ and about 20 minutes before that he met this guy named Freddy who said he´ll take six of us to Uyuni for $250 but there´s no way I can vouch for any of these people, although they all claim Freddy can get us around the blockades and haul ass to Uyuni in 6 hours instead of the 10 that the bus takes, but I haven´t even met this Freddy and don´t really know what kind of shape his vehicle is in or if it´s safe.¨

The English girl reached into her pocket and said, ¨Do you want the money now?¨

As it turns out, Freddy kicked ass. We left town around 2pm and 30 minutes later pulled off the highway into a vast expanse of desert scrub and circumvented the blockade (which equalled to about 30 students stonewalling well over 50 vehicles in each direction) about 200 yards off the road. The drive south was beautiful, and after the pavement ended and gaveway to a dusty, windy unmarked dirt road we all gave thanks that we weren´t on that damn bus (which, as it turns out, left without incident at 7 on the dot when the protesters went home for the weekend.) At one point just north of Uyuni, we got out to pee on the Bolivian desert and I´ve never seen so many stars in all my life.

The Dutchman, it turns out, was a painter and furniture maker who waxed poetic on Goethe´s theories about color while the English couple weighed in heavily on the economics and politics of South America. It was a really good ride.

The next morning, Graham took off for Chile to catch his flight and I reunited with the Irish cousins, Paul and Tony, the Aussie girl, Amanda, and Tony´s new muli-lingual, multi-national squeeze, Melissa, who´d flown down from Brazil for the tour. Three days in the Bolivan altiplano touring the largest salt flat in the world and passing several impossibly-colored lagoons turned out to be the highlight of my trip so far. I´ll get pictures up at some point because words just can´t describe. Got dumped off at the Chilean frontier with Iman, a sweet and smart doctor from Queens who was also on our tour and prepared to cross into Chile for what would prove to be a very short stay.

Said goodbye, yet again, to Paul and Tony and Amanda, though the way things have been going I can´t help but think that there will be several more goodbyes with those folks in the future.

(those are flamingos)

La Paz, Boliva

Arrived in La Paz relatively exhausted last night after sucking diesel fumes in the back row of a bathroom-less bus for about six hours. At one point I looked out the window at a little four-door compact driving next to us and marvelled at the fact that we were on a one-way highway, wondering where the west-bound lanes were. After a couple minutes of this, with the bus and the car jockeying for position around several blind turns on a steep mountain road, I realized we absolutely were *not* on a one-way road and that both drivers were absolute psychopaths.

The trip included a "ferry" across Lake Titikaka, which essentially consisted of a bunch of wooden pallets tied together operated by a guy with a long pole and a tiny outboard motor. Thankfully, only the bus rode across on the ferry while the people where herded onto a tiny boat which was marginally less terrifying. I´ll post pictures of this thing when I get a chance because it´s really quite unbelievable. Vern Fonk wouldn´t touch this operation with a twenty-foot cattle prod.

Had more fun than we meant to last night, but for the most part La Paz has been a blurry, tired stop. Very much a city, with people going to jobs and buying vacuum cleaners and the like, very big and crowded and busy and strikingly carved into the basin and walls of an enormous natural crater -- kind of like Pittsburgh except bigger and dirtier.

We also accidently wandered into a karaoke bar with a very shady back room and insanely high drink prices, which has me absolutely convinced it was a brothel. There were no English songs in the karaoke book so we didn´t sing anything.

Copacabana, Bolivia

Found ourselves officially jaded yesterday. After two full days on Lake Titikaka, we booked passage on yet another boat to go see Isla del Sol, believed to be the birthplace of the first Inca. After a pretty amazing experience staying with a family on one island, marvelling at the fact that a few others floated, and snapping too many panoramic photos of beautiful blue water and cozy Andean villages, this last stop was just a little anti-climactic. Two hours on a boat to spend 40 minutes on the wrong side of the island (never saw the Inca ruins) and then a quick stop to see a crumbling stone wall, followed by a two hour return trip. We played cards most of the way, and though the scenery was nice I realized at one point that we´d been so overloaded for the past two weeks that if the Taj Mahal were to rise majestically out of the cold blue waters of Lake Titikaka with dolphins doing back flips and shooting clay pigeons with shotguns while a team of alpacas hoisted up the Bolivian flag while singing the national anthem, it still wouldn´t have made an impression on me. We needed some down time.

Last night was Graham´s (Brit guy) birthday and we did it up right. I´ll leave it at that, except to say that it´s probably a good thing we´re heading out of town this afternoon. This place is small and I think people recognize us.

I´ve come to realize that this trip has reduced me to a handful of very bare, stripped down, essential desires: food, toilet paper, and hot water. The first is easy because it´s so cheap and we consistently eat like kings and queens. The second is a little tougher, as we tend to need it a little more often than usual and the public bathrooms, when you can find them and they´re useable, rarely supply it. The third is the object of much confusion in many of the places I´ve stayed. Everyone claims to have it, but they often neglect to mention that they only have it during the day, or between 9 and 10 am, or on Tuesdays. When you find it...man...it ranks right up there with accidentally getting seated next to a Brazilian supermodel on the night train from Arica to Valparaiso (a pipedream I´m currently in the process of praying for.)

Lake Titikaka

Lake Titikaka sits about 12,000 feet above sea level which dwarfs most of the mountains I´ve ever seen. We booked passage to an island called Amanti where we´d arranged to pay a couple native families to let us sleep and eat with them for two days. We sat in a tiny kitchen with a dirt floor, gossiping in Spanish with the family´s two kids Edgar and Christian (10 and 7 years) for about 3 seconds before they demanded that we go out into the potato fields to play soccer with them. Elevation is no joke and I was winded after about a minute. Kids in Peru apparently have runny noses just like American ones. Edgar was absolutely fascinated by our cameras and when we let him take pictures of us his face lit up like a bonfire.

The island is divided into four sections where three kinds of crops are grown. Every year, the crops rotate clockwise and one section is left empty. I asked someone what the 25% of the island does when their fields are vacant and he misunderstood, re-explaining the rotation system. I asked again, trying to be more clear. I wanted to know what happened when you had nothing to do for a full year on an island where all anyone seemed to do was work in the fields.

¨Oh!¨the man finally said. ¨I understand now. My friend, that is when you take a break.¨

On the boat ride back to Puno this morning I met a man from Belgium who was travelling the world in his yacht with his girlfriend and their 5-year-old daughter. For three years.

Three years.

I asked him if he was going to Africa and he said he was afraid there wouldn´t be enough time, but that he hoped to go there on another trip in the future. I asked him if he would visit the United States and he said it would be nice but on trip like this you had to make difficult decisions because not everything was possible. Vietnam? Perhaps in a few years. India? Not enough time on this trip.

Three years.

I nearly grabbed the guy by the throat and hurled him off the boat.

Just outside of Puno we were talking about names and the Brit finance guy said if he´d been a girl he was going to be named Leah. The Australian girl´s eyes lit up and she announced that she was going to be named Stephanie.

We lost the South African and his British girlfriend tonight, along with our Canadien glassmaking friend, which was very sad. Before she left, she cut her necklace into little pieces and presented everyone with a different hand-made bead of her own design. Things got a bit teary.

Ten minutes later I just about shit myself when I nearly lost it by fiddling with it in my pocket while walking down the sidewalk.

In other news, beer gets very foamy when you try to pour it into a glass at this altitude.

Saturday, October 15 - 2005

Nothing happened today.

Machu Picchu

For my next trick, I´ll attempt to use the word "unutterably" for the third post in a row.

Done.

Too much to cover here so will do some summarizing.

Reasons why the 5-day trek to Machu Picchu via Salcantay Glacier should have been an absolute unmitigated catastrophe:

1) 24 hours of intestinal warfare leading right up to the jagged edge of a 5am wakeup call to leave on a 4-hour busride (with no bathroom) to the trailhead.

2) Rain on muddy roads gets said bus stranded halfway up mountain pass, impervious to the efforts of guides and porters to free it using pickaxes, stones, and dead shrubbery.

3) Alternate bus is an open-air cattle car which is only slightly more mobile -- horizontal railing running down middle of passenger area appears ready to snap at any given moment. Vertical distance between road and valley floor increases exponentially as width of road decreases.

4) First day of hiking cut short due to #s 2 & 3, stomach continues to gargle, eating is difficult.

5) Day 2 ushered in with fog so thick you can´t see to your eyelids. 20 km of ball-busting hiking over 16,000 foot pass (yup...the pass was 16,000 and mountains on either side over 20,000) yields little in the way of reward as Salcantay Mountain and Glacier are completely obscured due to aforementioned fog. Beautiful views are replaced by freezing temperatures, rain, high elevation huffing-and-puffing, and best of all an even denser-than-the-fog snowfall. We are informed that had we arrived hours later the pass would have been snowed in and we´d have been turned back.

6) Trail descending into valley becomes river. Easy to follow, difficult to stay dry. Day 2 is delayed by various elements of nature and final 30 minutes are negotiated in near pitch-blackness.

7) Day 2 ends, mercifully, with camping at a small jungle homestead with beer for sale. Glorious nature of situation is soon undercut when we realize the guy we´ve been buying beer from is actually running an operation which competes with sales of the guy whose benches we´re sitting on. It becomes apparent there are as many bars as people on this homestead (two). Situation reaches Herculean levels of hilarity when the cheated bar owner discloses, in a heated tirade directed at those of us using his benches but not buying his beer, that the owner of the other bar (20 feet away) is his brother.

8) Multiple members of group succumb to intestinal problems of various types and intensities.

9) Day 3 introduces mosquitoes which have appear to have been genetically altered to suck every drop of blood from any object less dense than a piece of granite, possessing supernatural ability to penetrate cloaks of body odor, insect repellant, sunscreen, and other assorted funks so thick as to be visible while aquiring their targets.

10) Can`t stress enough how brutal #9 was.

11) Arrival on night 3 in La Playa is coordinated perfectly with a major blackout in the small town upon whose outskirts we are camped. Fortunately, the bars stay open and we are marched through town by our guide to a small back room which is opened up by a very sleepy townsman who very graciously allows us to drink by candlelight in his tavern with vintage Def Leppard and Guns ´n´ Roses posters on the walls. This would appear to be a positive experience, but after a few rounds our cook finally caught up to announce, somewhat furiously, that we were nearly two hours late for dinner. Fortunately, the usual situation where two or three bad apples misbehave and get reprimanded is augmented due to the fact that *everyone* is late, including our guide, so there is no one to do the chastizing.

12) Day 4 begins with temperatures spiraling into the upper registers of "too brutal to deal with." Short trip in cattle car results in two more episodes getting stuck and one game of chicken with another bus on a very narrow road. After game of chicken (and short scuffle with forces of gravity, inertia, and common sense) is very skillfully and terrifyingly won by our 14-year-old driver we encounter enormous boulder in middle of road. Boulder could not have been skirted by the other bus in game of chicken. It becomes evident that boulder has arrived in middle of road quite recently.

13) 5:15 am bus to Machu Picchu overheats.

14) Return train from Aguas Calientes to Cuzco nearly canceled due to a rockslide which has destroyed nearly 500 meters of track. We appear to be stranded in Aguas Calientes, but after several hours of waiting, three games of chess, 32 hands of Gin Rummy, a veritable Olympics of ¨throwing playing cards into a hat on the ground,¨ and a fist full of fraudulently photo-copied train tickets, we somehow manage to get on the train (albeit on the floor) and take it to the damage point. A tourbus somehow manages to pick us up (¨bus will meet you at kilometro ochenta y dos, ya...?¨ and we arrive in Cuzco, fithy tired and covered with horseshit, at 1:30 am.

Reasons why the 5-day trek to Machu Picchu via Salcantay Glacier will go down as one of the greatest trips of all time:

Not entirely sure how this worked out. Has something to do with the magic of Machu Picchu, but more with the amazing group of folks we got to go with. Disaster tends to breed bonds and no one was the slightest bit uptight or caused the tiniest riff. That´s not to say people weren´t stress-tested, but everyone handled it with humor and grace.

A brief catalog of the group as related in terms of offensively-reductive stereotypes: Two crazy Irish cousins who manufacture traffic cones, slender Canadien couple on honeymoon, French couple who kept to themselves but were nonetheless sweethearts, wise-cracking British finance guy, Aussie girl relocated to Aspen, somewhat crunchy Northwestern woman who now blows glass beads on an island off British Columbia, East Coast girl relocated to Seattle for oceanography PhD, South American/British couple who were dead ringers for folks I know back home and who gave me a phenominal lesson in S. African history by candlelight at the bar in La Playa, brakeman from Alaskan railway who´s about to move to Vegas and his girlfriend from California who´s now teaching English in Ecuador.

Our guide, Saul, was a whole chapter unto himself. I´ll pass over most of what could be told here and skip straight to our last night in Aguas Calientes, the evening before we were scheduled to visit Machu Picchu at 5:15 am. After several hours of reverie and merriment, the crew found itself stumbling out of a disco around three in the morning, trying to figure out what had happened, who was responsible, and whether there had really been disrobing involved.

Saul grabbed me in a headlock and, looking around to make sure nobody else was in earshot, said, ¨Chad...eef I go to seep now I weel note wake up. Weel be very bad.¨

I agreed with him. ¨Very bad,¨ I said.

¨Chad,¨ he said. ¨We must keep dreenking. I know a place. Weel be fun. Tell the others. Beer.¨

Later, the guy from South Africa related that Saul had also pulled him aside and said, ¨Tomorrow, I cannot talk about Machu Picchu. Es impossible. Andrew, *you* must do it.¨

The night ended with us arriving at the hostel only to find it locked and unattended, trying desperately find our way in while Saul pleaded with us to continue down the street with him. He gathered us together in a kind of football huddle, arms around each other´s backs.

¨My friends,¨ he said. ¨You have two options.¨ We all listened up. He was, after all, our guide, and he´d been fantastic up to this point. We were in a bit of a jam and we needed advice. It was beginning to look like tomorrow might be a problem.

¨One, we can sleep on the porch.¨ We all looked to see a dark figure hunched in the doorway of the hostel, fast asleep.

With this, the South African guy´s British girlfriend briskly left the huddle and made a beeline for the door to find a way to summon the hostel´s proprietor. The South African guy looked to the rest of us for advice and someone told him if he knew what was good for him he would follow her immediately. He did.

¨Or...¨ Saul pressed on, looking everyone in the eyes, studying the ground, checking over his shoulder as he contemplated option number two, working out the details in his head and growing more obviously pleased with himself as he cobbled together an ingenious method for extracting ourselves from this brownish, degenerating, mess of a situation: drunk and tired on the streets of Aguas Calientes just an hour before we needed to be up and packing. Option one hadn´t sounded so good and we were expecting something mystical and mindblowing out of number two.

¨Or we can go to dreenk more beer!¨

When people say they ¨fell down laughing,¨ they usually don´t mean they found themselves on the ground, rolling from side to side and clutching their their stomaches as they wept with laughter. That is, however, exactly what happened to us for about ten minutes before scraping ourselves off the cobblestones and staggering off to find a way into the hostel. The fact that we actually made it to Machu Picchu and navigated relatively cheerfully through the next day is proof positive that God does not always hate us. Which is good to know.

raiders of the lost art of not treating poor people like plastic fruit

Took part in the ritual disembowelment of a once-proud people´s spirit by participating in an organized tour of ruins in the Sacred Valley. Hugo set this up for me, and even though it turned out to be a good return on very little invested effort the logistics were so sketchy that I vowed to bail out of the Machu Picchu trip he´d booked me on for the next day. I normally hate organized tours, but there´s no other way I would have gotten to these places 24 hours after arriving.

In between getting bussed to breathtaking hillside Inca ruins with exquisitely-terraced agricultural plots in places that seem utterly unaccessible (even in modern times) for 45-minute tours, we got dropped off for hour-long stints at the public markets in a handful of very small, very poor villages. Old women and young children (is no one middle-aged in these places?) dressed in traditional bright red shawls and porkpie hats set up in typical swap-meet formation selling the exact same souvenirs (alpaca sweaters, fake gold trinkets, wooden flutes, blankets, random used books, cigarettes...) in 50 separate booths. Fat white people with sunburns took turns arranging adorably dirty little children into pleasing arrangements with llamas and pigs for photographs to upload as wallpaper on their computers back at work, all the while missing the point that these people expect to be tipped -- at least nominally -- for swallowing their self-respect and participating in this twisted spectacle. It made me kind of ill and I spent most of my time wandering across the street to photograph crude coca-cola advertisements hand-painted on the sides of crumbling mud brick shacks and bony cows tied up with short rope leashes.

Arrived back in town and orchestrated a retreat from my main man Hugo (who´d rescued me that morning when the tourbus forgot me and hustled me into an entirely different, unrelated tour), and the travel empire he´s constructed which doesn´t quite measure up to his good nature, in the only way that seemed decent. I made up a lie. A whopper. About a woman. Figured that kind of thing would work down here, and it did. At one point when it became very unclear (since all this was happening in Spanish) exactly *why* I had to cancel my tour and leave to find this girl tomorrow Hugo asked me if I was sick, to which I responded, quite poorly, ¨Solomente en su corazon, Hugo. Solomente en su corazon.¨ Go to babelfish if you need a translation.

Then wandered back to the Crossed Keys, which I pretty much confirmed is the bar owned by the British guy who´s now the consulate in Cuzco and who Michael Palin tapped to take him into the Amazon on one episode of ¨Full Circle.¨ (eat your heart out, Webb...) The bartender was really nice and let me practice my pathetic Spanish with her. A few minutes after I walked in alone she asked me what I was doing and I replied, with great difficulty, ¨I try to listen to these men shout loud with anger to each other but the Spanish I have is ridiculous.¨

A beer later I got into a huge, drawn out discussion with two kids from England about politics, Bush, Blair, Brown, Iraq, Iran, Israel, the IRA, and a whole host of other very intense, very involved, very interesting subjects. They´d been on the move through Mexico, Central America, and South America for five months and told me, ¨You´d better be prepared, because everywhere you go people will have questions about what´s going on in America.

¨That´s ok,¨ I said. ¨Because I have all the answers.

They made me stay out too late drinking pisco sours (made from fermented sugarcane) and I paid for it.

The next day I took care of some must-do´s. Drank Inka Cola (tastes like Mountain Dew spiked with bubblegum), ate alpaca (tastes like pork) with quinoa (tastes like cous cous) and toured the Museo Inca, which was once again a bit of a letdown. I was the nerd on the tour of the ruins who kept questioning the tourguide (who, by the way, was flat out wrong about a *lot* of shit) and making offhanded comments about things he was omitting. I´m not proud of this, but had hoped to get over it with an informative day at the museo. No dice, and I still feel like an asshole.

Lunched on a balcony overlooking the main plaza where, in 1780, the local hero Tupac Amaru II was publicly torn limb from limb by the Spaniards after his desperate, last-ditch Indian revolt was quelled. Today there was a parade with solemn men in dark suits doing a strange two-step and women in multi-colored shawls looking bored and distracted.

The plaza is filled with countless little street urchins constantly trying to sell things to tourists. I started talking to one today and was surprised how friendly and forthcoming he was. He sat down and I tried to speak Spanish to him. I asked if he liked school and he said no. He asked me if it was my first time in Cuzco and I said that it was, and that I liked it very much. I asked him if he would go to college and he looked at me like I was insane, shaking his head with the world-weary resignation of a 40-year-old and sighing deeply as he made the ¨too much money¨ sign with his fingers. We talked a little about the Yankees, Micky Mouse, and Jean Claude Van Damme and we talked about the rain. Then he narrowed his eyes and cocked his head and asked me very slowly, ¨What do you think about your presidente?¨

I ended up buying a postcard from him which depicts two men horrifically dragging a live condor through the street by it´s outspread wings. It cost about nine cents.

When I got up to leave I asked him what his name was and he said, ¨My name is Hugo.¨

Cuzco, Peru

Spent about 9 hours on an overnight flight from LA to Lima, during which I was the victim of some kind of sadistic psychological warfare waged by the flight attendants involving an oddly-inflected Spanish and a mysterious specially-ordered vegetarian meal which I just couldn´t manage to get rid of. To make things even worse, I had to listen to some hot-shit high school grad sitting behind me go on and on about how she´s had 15 years of Spanish (she must have only been 17) and was going to install stoves in the homes of native Peruvian Quechua Indians somewhere near Ollyantaytamba for the next three months. Jesus Christ...

Finally won a minor victory by getting a normal breakfast and landed in Lima without consequence, where I got to chatting with a guy from Santa Cruz who´d once been reported as a terrorist by a white woman in a bar there due to his slight brown-ness. Chatted up the hot-shit high-schooler a little who was actually quite pleasant once she became the only English-speaking person within ten miles of me.

Arrived in Cuzco tired, hungry, and a little woozy (elevation) and was astonished to watch my cabbie, Hugo, magically transform from driver to hotelier to tourguide to bosom pal to travel agent right before my eyes. It took all I had to concentrate on making sure I wasn´t getting ripped off while he booked me on a tour of ruins for the next day and Machu Picchu the day after. Inca trail is booked solid through November (¨es imposible´, senor...¨) so I´m on a different route that approaches via the side hatch, rolling over what appear to be some impressive mountain passes in the faded color photographs that hang in every travel agency´s window.

Around 5:00pm, a large commotion and crowd appeared out of nowhere in the central plaza of the town. A few minutes later, a cheap-looking race car came tearing around a corner of what I must stress is a very small, narrow, stone street and fishtailed into the crowd. People dove out of the way in every direction and the two teenaged boys who came nearest to getting flattened giggled stupidly as they landed on their stomachs. A beer company called Pilsen X-treme was having some kind of promotion with girls in skintight jumpsuit and tall bottles of inflatable beer. There were amateur reporters with tape recorders and video cameras mobbing the drivers as they tore into the plaza, about 2 minutes after each other. A drunk bald man tried to flag a race car like it was a taxi and everyone laughed. I asked a pretty distinguished-looking British guy next to me with grey hair and an expensive camera strap what was going on and he said it was a three-day road rally of the type he commonly followed in the U.K.

¨Very exciting,¨ he said. ¨But not exactly what I´d call an intense concern for public safety.¨

I nodded in agreement and then shrank back in terror as a furious string of firecrackers exploded beneath the feet of a rabid reporter, once again sending bodies flying to the ground as smoke and bits of paper rose up into the air and another race care squealed around the corner into the crowd.

new world

Stepped off the plane to find myself surrounded by a loud and unutterably pushy throng of people. No English spoken anywhere. Everyone absolutely beautiful. All the signs in Spanish. Felt completely out of place and intimidated by the endless sprawl of the city as we descended to the airport.

God, I hate LA.