NOTE: This blog entry was actually written many many years ago.
When I was twenty-four, I got this idea in my head that I would leave the country. I was working in the call center at Apple Vacations at the time and I was very unhappy with my life. I spent thirty-five hours a week sitting in a cubicle like a veal calf, I was making very little money, I had left school the year before, I was in a relationship for which I was not emotionally prepared. Also, I wasn’t doing theater at the time, which prior to that had been a big part of my life and identity. Also, the year 2000 was approaching and there was a weird mood in the air. People were seriously talking about all of the computers crashing due to the Y2K glitch. Our high-tech existence was looking decidedly unglamorous, even dangerous. I was genuinely worried about it. The idea of going somewhere less developed was appealing.
Now, I get a lot of weird impulses but this one was sticking. Between calls at work, I was reading Gary Jennings novel Aztec, a novel steeped in wanderlust. I read Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat in much the same spirit. I read Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, which detailed the young revolutionary’s trip around South America. They made me burn to get away. After all, the most exotic place I had visited was San Diego, where I got my picture taken in a sombrero. My boyfriend at the time was from Peru. He would always tell me about his country: Machu Picchu, The Nazca Lines, Lake Titicaca, The Amazon, and The Andes. All in one country. Peru was exotic, far-away, and affordable. The more I read about it the more I wanted to go.
So one day I decided I would go to Peru. I don’t know exactly how it happened but it was though a switch had been flipped. I would start my South American Grand Tour in Peru. I had these very ambitious plans to go to Brazil and Argentina, and up north. So I sold what little I owned and bought my ticket to Lima. On $500, I was going to see South America.
My ticket came in an exciting flat FedEx envelope. I had never received anything in an envelope like this before. It made me feel important. I opened it and pulled out my ticket. Holding it in my hand was exiting and scary. Understand, I talk about a lot of stuff that I don’t actually do. There was the robot I was going to build; the theater company I was going to start; the novel I was going to write. I’m a very ambitious person who also happens to be very lazy. But now, I had this ticket and I actually had to go through with it. I felt like I was holding the end of a giant rubber band that was going to snap me over the equator.
BE CAREFUL IN LIMA
Because I was going to Lima, my boyfriend's family here in Chicago wanted to use me as a courier to bring some stuff to the family members in Peru, so, they sent with me a huge suitcase full of clothes and other items. My boyfriend's father even dropped me off at the airport. And he felt the need to apologize in advance for all the bad things that would happen to me:
"Lima," he paused thinking of the best was to put it, "Lima is a very poor city. People are very poor there. Just be careful."
At the airport, I wrote my father a long letter that explained that I was leaving the country for an indefinite amount of time because I was fundamentally unhappy with my life. He kept the letter for many years, referring to it as a “suicide note,” the final and incontrovertible proof that I am in fact mentally unstable. I wrote that I would call him when I got settled and for him not to worry too much about me.
I arrived in Lima late at night. I showed the officials my virginal passport and walked out into the night, into Peru. There was an absolutely huge crowd of people behind a series of metal and concrete partitions. There was a riot of noise. It actually reminded me of old footage of the Beatles when they came to America in 64. I was to meet my then-boyfriend’s uncle and cousins. But I couldn’t pick them out of the crowd. All I had to identify them with was an old picture. I waited and waited. I finally saw someone holding a sign that said Gennaro. I walked up to them and tried to communicate in my broken Spanish. We managed to work out that I was in fact Gennaro, although technically I am not Gennaro. The family consisted of a married couple and their two unmarried young adult children, male and female.
We drove to their home in a rickety van. The area surrounding the airport was scary and depressing at night. Was the whole city like this? We arrived at the family’s home and they served me crackers and Gatorade in a hasty late night reception. Why do people in foreign countries like crackers so much?
When I woke up the first morning after my late night arrival I felt what I can only describe as glorious dislocation. It’s the intoxicating feeling of being far from your home and everything you know. It was the opposite of homesickness. I seriously couldn’t believe I had gone through with it.
I spent a lot of time in Lima. About two months, actually. During the first month I stayed with my host family, who took very good care of me. In the second month, I rented a room at a nearby boarding house filled with strange characters. The building was owned by an old couple who lived in the shadowy and baroque first floor filled with mahogany furniture and fine china. In the afternoons they would take tea. I felt like I was trapped in an Isabelle Allende novel.
I took my time exploring the city. Or just talking to people for hours after meals. That’s how I learned Spanish: From talking to people. I was fascinated by things that were both extraordinary and totally mundane. I would spend an enormous amount of time just walking around the grocery store. I was fascinated by all the little ways it was different from a grocery store in the U.S. Or the fact that nowhere in Lima was there a laundromat in the sense that I am used to. They have places where you can drop your clothes off to be washed but nowhere where you can wash your own clothes. It’s the little differences that fascinated me. I call it the Royale with Cheese Effect.
It wasn’t all so mundane. Around the city are ancient step pyramids, or huacas, just sitting there in the middle of high-rise hotels and residential towers. The modern and the ancient side-by-side. In the city are archeological sites that are often little more than extensive fields of rubble, reminding me of the opening sequence of The Exorcist and it’s blasted Mesopotamian landscape.
Lima is also known for the glory of its colonial architecture as it was once the capital of all of the Spanish colonies in the Americas. There are many building in the Arab-inspired mudejar style. And also some lovely gothic touches like the system of creepy catacombs under the cathedral of San Francisco filled with rows of skulls and bones. Apparently there is a whole system of colonial era tunnels running beneath El Centro.
I got pretty good at navigating the city by way of buses and combis. For those of you who may not be familiar with Latin American city life a combi is a very old bus, possibly a decommissioned school bus that races around the city at breakneck speeds usually with a guy hanging off the side barking out the stops. Although the combis and microbuses have their routes, it is not an official service. Again, theres no bus system in the sense that we are used to. And a taxi is any car with a sign in the window that says Taxi. Crossing the street was like an extreme adventure sport.
Foods and services are cheap. Haircuts, meals, lodging, taxis, are all available for ridiculously cheap prices. Electronics and high end products are actually more expensive than their counterparts in the U.S. Internet access was readily available and very cheap. While there is much poverty in Lima parts of the city are chic and well off, city blocks seemingly airlifted from Miami. And, of course, well-tended suburbs which are about the same all over the world.
One day I took a bus too far. I was trying to reach the ruins of Pachacamac outside of the city (It struck me later that this is Lima’s analogue to Mexico City’s Teotihuacan ruins.) I was supposed to transfer but I ended up taking the Arequipa bus to the end of the line, or in this case, the end of civilization. We left the city behind and were soon winding through the hilly dunes that surround Lima, at times coming dangerously close to going over the edge. The surprising thing was that there were people living here. Not just people but a whole community. I say community because this was no shantytown. This was the embryo of a village. People were living in this dusty, dry, inhospitable place. A place where water had to be imported in huge trucks. They might as well have been living on Mars. This place, and I don’t even know the name of it, has stayed with me for years. The dust, the skanky dogs, the homemade intruder deterrents by way of shards of broken bottles and glass cemented on top of walls. I have never seen people have to struggle so much just for the basic necessities of survival. I am forever regretful that I did not have a camera with me. But then again I don’t know how photography would have gone over there. I think my very alien presence was pushing it enough.
VENTURING OUT
By this time I had already been in Lima for about two months and was getting comfortable in a way that made me feel embarrassed as a backpacker so I decided I had better get busy seeing some more of the country so I left, by myself for Cusco via bus. This was incredibly stupid for several reasons. Primarily, in order to get to Cusco from Lima by way of land you have to go halfway down the Pacific coast and go back inland through the Andes and back up north. This was a long trip and I was probably the loneliest I have ever been in my life.
I took a bus to Pisco where I thought I would hook up with some fellow travelers. I didn’t meet anybody there. It was mostly locals with a hawkish attitude towards tourists.
“Hey, buddy, Senor Americano You want a tour? We take you to Paracas reserve. C’mon?”
“Wanna buy some Pisco?”
“You looking for a room, joven?”
“You looking for a girl, meester?”
Mass tourism is prostitution of the land and culture. This dusty little town was nothing more than a place for people setting off from Lima down the coast. It was a place to arrange tours to the nearby nature reserve or to the famous Nasca Lines. It was a desperate low rent tourist town. I immediately missed Lima which has a bad enough reputation to scare away all the tourists and consequently you can spend time there and have a real cultural experience. You can talk to people who are not trying to hustle you at every turn. You can make friends in Lima.
I went and got the cheapest room I could find in Pisco. Actually to call it a room gives it too much credit. It was more of a cell with a mattress. Because it was in Latin America it was painted in a bold primary color yet it put its own depressing spin on it as it was a dark dingy red, the color of an old scab. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I had to walk through the continuously leaky washrooms to get to this room.
I moved on by bus through a series of coastal towns. Going south on the Pan American highway, through Ica and Nasca and the vast coastal desert that runs the length of Peru and actually the whole continent. During the day, it resembles the coast of California. By night, the landscape is eerie and lunar.
I arrived in the large city of Arequipa early in the morning. Arequipa is called the white city because it is made from the local white colored volcanic rock. The city lies at the foot of Misti, a giant dormant volcano. Here we leave the flat desert behind and get into the dry foothills of the Andes mountain range. I spent my afternoon exploring the city’s most famous attraction, the town-sized monastery of Santa Catalina with its beautiful European styled cobblestone streets and vividly colored walls. Most of the monastery is now open to the public but about of quarter of it is still closed and houses its nuns.
I met some people further down past Arequipa, around Juliaca but made no real connections with them. I merely tagged along, a nervous not entirely accepted herd animal. I wasn’t able to insinuate myself into the teeming backpacker culture the way I had hoped. My traveling companions and I-I no longer remember their names or anything about them-rented a microbus and made our way through the Andes to Cusco. We drove through the storybook landscape of mountains and terraced hills and grazing Llamas and Alpacas. It reminded me of pictures I had seen of the British highlands. Later when I saw the Lord of the Rings movies I immediately thought of Peru.
We arrived in Cusco during the Easter week and the city (which I later learned to love) was overcrowded and filthy. I became ill from the high altitude and the hilly cobblestone streets. Cusco is very hilly and going anywhere involves lost of climbing and descending its winding streets. I was getting sick of traveling but I had come this far and had to see the sights of the Sacred Valley of the Incas, at the end of which was the great prize of Machu Picchu. I broke with my companions and made for Pisac, the first town on the way to Machu Picchu. Alone, I hitched a ride up to the ruins that overlook the town. This was the highlight of my trip. The ruins are vast and spread out through a path that cuts through the mountains and looks down on the small valley town below. I felt like Indiana Jones for about an hour.
I stopped at a down father down the valley where one of my books staid that there were ruins high up in the mountains along a hidden path. Getting there involved constant hiking and consultation of my map and compass. I tried to scale the gravelly mountain side but only succeeded in getting myself lost. I gave up after a couple of hours and made my way back down the mountain and back to the main drag.
I caught a bus to Ollantaytambo, the last town before heading to Machu Picchu. This was the most alien place that I had ever been. The town is one of the few that kept the original pre-Spanish layout and many of the buildings date back to Inca times. A series of Inca viaducts still bring water down from the snowy mountain tops, so there are many little stone channels running mountain water throughout the town. Ollantaytambo was cold and gloomy but attractive in its own strange way. Looming above the town are the ruins of a colossal fort but I was too tired to explore them and my feet were killing me from my ill-fitting hiking boots (they at least looked good.)
The next morning I made my way to the entrance to the Machu Picchu trail and I basically gave up. I couldn’t go on. My feet hurt and most of all I couldn’t face doing the three day hike on my own. I was terribly lonely and homesick. I headed back to Cusco, humbled. I hung out there for a few days to recuperate and bought my ticket to Lima.
This time the grueling overland trip was made worse by an earthquake outside of Arequipa. My bus was stranded for fifteen hours on the side of the road waiting for boulders to be removed so that we could proceed. By the time I arrived back in Lima, I was filthy and smelled worse than I think I ever had in my life.
I called and got my ticket changed so that I could leave early. Again, it arrived in a flat envelope. Again, I would be slung shot out over the equator. This time, back to my home, where I could reset my life. So, that’s the story of my first trip to Peru, during which I spent a lot of time in Lima and did not see Machu Picchu.
I guess I’m thinking about this because of some of the books I have been reading lately. Most recently read a book called Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer that detailed the short and idealistic life of a young man named Chris McCandless who ventured out on an epic trip across the country and ended up starving to death in an old school bus in the Alaskan taiga. I read The Beach about Gen X Western backpackers who go to Thailand and set up a community on a hidden beach. I also read The Mosquito Coast about a man who takes his whole family to the jungles of Belize because of his disgust of what America has become.
They are all, one way or the other about malcontents who seek to escape the developed world and its problems and I see a little of myself in all three protagonists. The fact is that if I didn’t have my theatrical work here to anchor me, I probably wouldn’t be living here in the States. One day I may decide that I would rather spend my time writing and the nice thing about that is that I can do THAT anywhere.
I often imagine what it would be like to be an expatriate. Living in some village or another, being El Yanqui. But I wonder if those people really fit in anywhere. Can you ever really be accepted into another country, especially if you carry all of the baggage that comes with being from the United States? One of the reasons I have so much respect for immigrants is that it takes real courage to leave your country and live somewhere else. I don’t know if I have that kind of strength. So for the time being I stay in the land of Freedom and Cheeseburgers.
