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.¨