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.