A Voyage to Peru!
I just returned from an exciting journey to Peru, where my dear sister and I defied death! I made art constantly while I was there, so expect a Peru album coming soon!
Here is a tale of our adventures:
A Tale of Whoa!
Or,
How I Literally,
Actually
Almost Died
Going to Machu Picchu
on Valentine’s Day.
By Darshana Bolt
February 2012
I’m not overly fond of adventure stories. I learned the word “cumbersome” when I returned The Swiss Family Robinson to my second grade teacher, Mrs. Storey-Welch. My father gave me fine antique volumes of Jack London when I was a young child, and I did like those, but sinewy stories of death-defying bravery don’t usually do it for me. I have a few of my own harrowing skin-of-my-teeth stories, mostly revolving around doing dumb shit like sneaking out, jumping off the fire escape, and hitchhiking in the middle of the night when I was thirteen in Asheville, North Carolina.
Nothing I have experienced before has even come close to this story.
This isn’t fiction—this isn’t even exaggeration. Do not mistake the drama of what you are about to read for a juiced-up anecdote with generously added details. Everything that follows is absolutely true and happened one week ago in Peru, the place I had decided to move to with my sister Serenity (or Ren, as I call her) on a whim.
We were all set to move from Vermont to Costa Rica. It was hours before my sister’s flight with Spirit Air, the sketchiest discount airline we could find (everyone claps when the planes land). I had one booked for a week or two later. I got a voicemail saying that Ren didn’t want to go—her job teaching ESL at a university sounded questionable due to odious reviews of the school online, and “…I’ve already been to Costa Rica! I want to go somewhere exciting, like Peru!”
The next day, Serenity convinced me to change my ticket, saying that we would have
“… A grand adventure!”
Come February fourteenth, rather than munching on chocolates like many an American lass, I was starving and abandoned, sharing small bites of unripe mango, green banana, and immature passion fruit, or maracuya, that my companions and I (Serenity and the Chileans) found while we were lost in the jungle.
Ren and I had set off for Machu Picchu via the scoundrel tour company down the block from our apartment in Cusco, Peru, the other ancient Incan city that we had made our dwelling-place. The company was supposed to take us most of the way in a van--then we were to walk two hours and stay in a hostel, going to Machu Picchu in the morning and returning by train to Cusco. The tour company, its operator Maruja promised in obsequious terms and in writing, was to provide us with transportation, meals, tickets in to Machu Picchu, and a place to stay.
As we set off in the morning, crammed in elbow-to-rib with a passel of Belgians, French people, Chileans, and Colombians, we were given red nylon cords to tie around our wrists for emergency identification, which very nearly came in handy as we could have become corpses roughly a hundred times in the next twenty hours. I misunderstood and thought the red bracelets for “emergency” were for luck, which caused us great mirth and sarcasm.
The scenery was unbelievably beautiful--jagged mountains bursting through clouds covered in snow like what I remember of the Rockies. There was red clay everywhere; red clay dust rising in the road, red clay bricks forming red clay houses, "...and a red clay halo for my head," as Gillian Welch sang in my head all day.
We drove past the dozens of tough Andean women with mantas (broad woven cloths), bowler hats, petticoats and llamas who had by then become no novelty to us, along with run-down fruit stands and dumpsters full of hungry stray dogs in towns where Spanish colonial churches had been built right over sturdy, ingeniously fitted Incan masonry.
One thing that intrigues me about Peru is that no road sign or politician's pitch is manufactured—every sign is handmade with scrawls or stencils, and the red mud buildings are covered in competing advertisements. Many of them said ELVIS in huge letters--a popular name in Peru, and likely that of a politician. A few days later when I was miraculously still alive, I had the opportunity to say, “Muchos gracias, Elvis!” while shaking a man’s hand. But I digress . . .
Early in the morning on the day we departed for Machu Picchu, we all started off giddy with excitement, joking with each other in the van. Serenity and I tested out our stilted Spanish and reprehensible French with our van-mates.
“Est-ce que tu as un feu, s’il te plait?” I asked one of the French people when we were stopped, and was dismayed when she rattled back a bunch of questions in French that I couldn’t begin to comprehend. I lied and said I’d never studied it in school when asked, despite two years of high-school French long ago (my M.O. in case of embarrassing ignorance.) “Mon autre soeur a habite en Bruxelles, alors j’ai elle visite, mais je n’etudie pas…ma francais est tres mal! Je comprends un peu.”
We stopped for a five-minute break that turned into us waiting for our driver for an hour and joking about what sort of rendezvous he must be having.
“WILLIE!” we all shouted, and Serenity and I felt like we were back at our parents’ house calling for Willie, the family dog we’ve had for twelve years.
“Willie… es… el nombre de nos perro?” I whispered to Serenity. I really have never studied Spanish, and we’d only been in Peru for a week. Not being able to speak Spanish became not only annoying and embarrassing that day, but later life-threatening.
“Don’t say that; they might take it the wrong way and think we’re calling him a dog,” she whispered back. By the end of the day, our entire group was calling him worse than that. Dogs are loyal and steadfast. A few hours after the hour-long five-minute stop, Willie the van driver dumped us by the side of the road and left us.
While we waited for Willie the first time, we made the acquaintance of a spicy, sparkly trio. Before we left for Peru, some friends and acquaintances of Serenity’s had warned us of the nefarious “Chilean hippies” who overran Peru and were supposedly liable to be thieving, woman-seducing con artists. We instantly bonded with Camilla, Angela, and their tall friend Camilo, with his combat boots and warmly un-seductive beard-smile.
They turned out to be the most loyal, generous, and trustworthy strangers I have ever been in a near-death situation with. Of course, Serenity later suggested that James Franco should play Camilo in the movie about our adventure, but he’d have to get more charmingly chubby, hairy, and stoned. All three of them were covered in body paint, glitter, and gleefully clashing patterns. The girls were beautiful. I loved them instantly.
After he finally emerged from his long breakfast or visit to his mistress or difficult bathroom visit or whatever the hell he was doing while we waited for him in a rainy driveway for an hour, our van driver, Willie, took us up to experience some hairpin turns high in the misty Andes with no guardrails in the middle of a cloud.
He drove as fast as he could next to cliffs with thousand-foot drops and the huge, raging Urubamba River waiting for us below. His shitty stereo system blasted, in order, "Greased Lightnin' ", something about going down in a blaze of glory, and then death metal. I had heard that drivers in third-world countries are typically reckless, and was still excited about our gorgeous ride, thinking that everything was normal and no harm would come to us.
Eventually, as his driving grew more erratic, the potential falls longer, and the death metal more foreboding, Serenity and I clutched each other’s emergency-bracelet-wearing hands in terror.
“In case anything happens, I want you to know that I love you very, very much…” I said to my sister. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time while she was living in Korea for a year-and-a-half, but the past month we had spent together had made us pretty much attached at the hip. We hadn’t spent more than five minutes apart, and had been delighting in each other’s company.
“That’s not funny! THIS IS HOW PEOPLE DIE!” she responded as we went screaming past another curve about two inches from a thousand-foot drop.
“I wasn’t kidding.”
Willie the loco driver kept going on a totally destroyed road even though five other drivers stopped and told him to turn around. He was racing with other cars, careening past them to pass every single vehicle we came across, no matter how frightening the curves in the switchback road up the mountains.
The terrifying ride finally came to a halt as we got to the first major impasse--an active landslide that we had to run across mere minutes after we saw rocks falling into the road, which overlooked an unending cliff over the massive Urubamba River.
I clutched the beautiful necklace my silversmith friend Pilar had made, which she had given me for protection before my trip to Peru. After running across the landslide, the unfortunate turistas walked down the narrow, dilapidated road in the blazing sun for an hour--it was noon--and then the rocks were finally cleared enough for Willie to scoop us back up in his Death Van.
Next, we got to a river in the road that we had to cross by climbing across a bulldozer, along with other tourists who were on the same washed out road/thousand-foot waterfall. Did I mention that one of the doors in the van didn't work from the inside? Two other van drivers drove across the water and picked up their loads of terrified tourists. We thought that Willie was going to do the same, and he told us to keep walking--but apparently he turned around and went home, because we never saw him again.
Maruja the tour lady had warned us that there might be problems due to landslides, and that we may have to take a different bus and pay ten more dollars. We never dreamed that the problem might be being forced to climb through massive, vertical landslides on a closed road for nine hours with no food or water and then walk all night in the dark through the rain on active railroad tracks over an enormously swollen river with no footbridge. All told, we hiked for twelve hours straight (minus a half-hour break when we finally came to a town), risking death by:
1. Falling off the massive Andean cliffs into the Urubamba River (several thousand feet of straight drops the entire way). We could have fallen on foot or due to Willie’s terrifying driving.
2. Willie-induced car crashes looked very likely at times.
3. We could have fallen off the bulldozer and down the massive waterfall.
4. Being crushed in the three huge landslides we had to clamber across (the active one I already wrote about, before Willie abandoned us, was just a baby landslide), with the rocks our feet knocked down falling so far we couldn’t see them land and nothing holding back the rocks above us.
5. Dehydration.
It was very hot and we had almost no water the entire time. (I usually have to drink 1 1/2 gallons a day or I feel ill. I don’t have diabetes and I still don’t know what’s wrong with me to make me so thirsty all the time—I think it’s a gluten intolerance—but I just accepted that we had no water and kept going. I always thought I wouldn’t be good in an emergency for this reason, but I forged ahead.
I’m also deathly afraid of heights and falling, but just told myself I couldn’t be. If I’d lost my footing due to shaking limbs I would have been more likely to fall to my death.)
6. If I’d re-sprained the ankle that just healed a month ago, I might also have died. There was simply no way and no one to rescue us.
7. A woman we saw by the side of the road told us to cut across her property, taking a vertical path far up through the jungle. Another old woman had a shack in the middle of the jungle path surrounded by little chickens (pollitos) and a filthy little pig. She told us to get off her property and keep going up the tiny, steep mountain path to get to the road. Neither jungle witch offered us water, though we were all staggering, covered with muddy sweat, and hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since very early in the morning (we were hungrily eyeing her chickens.)
The road these women sent my four brave companions and I to was closed due to its extremely dangerous nature (we later found out this was common knowledge to local Peruvians.)
Were these impoverished indigenous women jumping at the opportunity to kill five tourists? Did they hate Chileans AND Americans?
8. After crossing several massive, terrifying landslides, we came upon a group of surly men with pickaxes, shovels, and motorcycles on the deserted road we didn’t know was closed. We later found out everyone else in the group of stranded tourists walked along a road at the bottom of the mountain, whereas we were most of the way up on a road that no one used. The men offered to take us to the next town for money, but left us in front of the next formidable landslide five minutes later.
Rather than just taking our money, they could have kidnapped us—it is not unheard of for foreigners to be robbed, raped, ransomed, or even killed in South America. Taxi kidnappings are especially common in Peru. They drove us in between giant rocks on the closed-off road, inches away from the edge of the cliff with the river raging below. Later we wondered what they were even doing up there on the closed road where nobody goes.
9. Imagine a motorcycle accident on a cliff, in a landslide, with a pickaxe and two people. Ouch.
10. At night, after we finally staggered into the town of Santa Teresa about eight hours after we were supposed to stop for lunch there, we were told that there were no hostels and nowhere to sleep in the town. We all guzzled down a two-liter bottle of water, devoured typical Peruvians meals of rice, thin sauce, potatoes, and mystery meat, and hopped into another van, driven by the man who had offered us a ride into town for a fee when he saw us finally staggering off the closed road, covered in mud. My sister pointed us that despite our lack of traditional patriotism, we are from a place where most people wouldn’t charge you money for a ride in a life-threatening emergency. (Okay, I guess that one wasn’t a possible coroner’s report, but it’s about to be.)
The man dropped us off past a hydroelectric plant to walk for hours along some railroad tracks to the town of Aguas Calientes. Naturally and erroneously, we assumed the trains were not running when some men at the entrance point gave us the go-ahead despite large warning signs.
We were terrified by the prospect of slipping and falling on the rainy railroad tracks, plunging to our deaths into the deep and chaotic river churning below us so loudly in the darkness. We walked upon tracks we could barely see, making wide steps across the terrifying gaps and helping each other with hands, flashlights, and little sips of water.
Another stranded Chilean tourist had joined us, and I gave him the last of our bottle of water and lent him my headlamp, to the irritation of my sister. “What’d you give it to HIM for?” she asked, forgetting that he was the only person with us who spoke English. She meant that he could have just walked alongside us and seen with our light. I had lent him the light because he was very sick, and kept ending up behind everyone; pale, puking, and in the dark. We could keep up and walk next to people with flashlights. Ren was doubly annoyed when she came across our big empty water bottle, which he had just tossed down in the middle of the woods. She carried it the rest of the way.
11. Like the unfortunate Alejandro, we could have been very sick all day. We had been warned to wash all the fruit we ate in Peru, but we had been so hungry that we were peeling back rinds and putting unripe bananas, mangoes, and passion fruit in our mouths. They were all totally green and came from the trees by the side of the road. I did end up with a stomachache from subsisting on unripe fruit. If we had been sick we may not have made it out across the landslides of steep sliding shale.
12. While we scrambled in the dark across the rails with no footpath, we had no idea that there was a train coming. Thankfully, when we heard shouts from ahead to leap out of the way of the oncoming train, none of us were on the many bridges behind us or in the tunnel we had just gone through. There would have been no escape from the train but the bone-crushingly ferocious river we could only hear below.
Well, I think that wraps up our twelve most likely causes to need red emergency bracelets! What saved us from certain peril? Luck, conviction, stamina, mutual caring, and a silver necklace. Certainly none of the Peruvians who could have helped us in our situation did—except for our wonderful friend Ennio, who helped us seek justice when we got back to Cusco. When we finally emerged from the Closed Road of Untold Dangers, an official-looking woman with a huge truck on the other side of the landslide told us that whoever was responsible for us being in that situation should get in a lot of trouble. Our tour lady was a nasty woman who gave us back forty bucks each after yelling at Ennio, who interpreted for us.
Machu Picchu was magnificent.
“MACHU PICCHU O MUERTE!” we had shouted throughout the day to keep us going.
When we got back to Cusco, we continued to be exhausted by the street hawkers whose unsolicited soliciting hounded us through the streets. Hawkers in Cusco do not leave you alone, no matter what you do, say, or completely ignore. They won’t go away and attack in swarms.
I was going to join their ranks as a street artist but decided it was time to go back to Vermont with my sister when she had to leave unexpectedly after several weeks. Living by myself in a city of hustlers with no money and competing with aggressive Peruvians to sell art for a few dollars would have been interesting, but likely miserable. With the exception of the delightful Ennio, Serenity wisely concluded that no one gives a shit whether you live or die in Peru.
***
I am back in Vermont briefly, but I’m just saving up for a month for my next adventures in Nepal, Thailand, Montana, and then possibly Korea or Japan. I would have had to teach English in Cusco to pay rent, and I would have been paid about $2/hour. I hope to spend this year before I begin a career as an art teacher traveling as much as possible and experiencing different places in the world.
After traveling for two days, I jumped out from behind a stone wall in Vermont and made my parents cry (presumably with happiness.) They had thought I was going to stay and live in Peru for six months, and so did I until the night before the plane left, when I bought the last affordable ticket. My mother has never been so surprised!
In our time of terror, there was no way to go but forward, with shaking knees, clinging to rocks that fell from below our feet down to the muddy brown Urubamba, thousands of feet of cliff face below us. With our new friends, we joined hands to stare down death (a cliché, I know, but it takes on new meaning when you’re watching a rock you tried to step onto fall into a seemingly bottomless chasm!).
I got away with only a few bruises, a stubbed toe from slipping and falling on the rainy railroad tracks in the dark, a few new friends, and a very muddy sister.
I found myself bounding down the narrow path to the Incan Bridge at Machu Picchu, which was another narrow passage next to a long, steep cliff in the mist. My knees weren’t shaking at all. Vertigo is a thing of the past. A few beautiful red flowers with red stems grew out horizontally from the high Incan wall before the bridge.
Last summer, I joined hands with a bunch of naked friends to jump off a stone wall into Lake Champlain, but found myself unable to jump. After a friend fell from a window and died at my school seven years ago, I had developed a sick fear of falling and jumping from high places. I intend to leap at the next available opportunity and make a big splash.
After we finally arrived safely in Aguas Calientes, the gorgeous town, inaccessible by car, which is the only way in to Machu Picchu, we all commended each other for not crying.
“You are very brave,” Camilo told us, his eyes shining above his black beard. Despite our newfound bravery, we found ourselves incapable of eating at the restaurant our terrible tour included, since the proprietor’s index finger rarely left his nostril, and I saw the children who were cooking in the back drop the bread on the dirty floor several times while they were playing catch with it.
Here is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to my friend Pilar the morning we awoke in a hostel in Aguas Calientes:
Ren named our death trip companion Angela “Hermana de los Zapatos Sucio”—sister of the dirty shoes. I think I may have neglected to mention the giant mud pits we got sucked into.
Where we live in Cusco there are dozens of impoverished men and boys who shine shoes for a living. I got an aggressive pitch the other day—“Your shoes are dirty!”
“Hey! My shoes are FINE!” I had responded indignantly. If only he could see our shoes now.
We are Mud Women.
We finally made staggered to a hostel at midnight last night. I was on the verge of throwing up from dehydration.
Ren and I just ordered a coffee milkshake so we could sit next to more cliffs, rivers, and railroad tracks, writing letters at this touristy café. We were delivered a tiny scoop of terrible, almost inedible freezer-dried sherbet sitting next to a little cup of bad black coffee for eighteen soles, or about seven or eight American dollars—an unheard of sum in Peru. When my sister complained about our “milkshake”, the waiter pointed as though we were very stupid—“Café…helado!” (“Coffee…ice cream!” Of course you know that; you’re Spanish…). We are getting accustomed to being ripped off at every available opportunity in this country.
Addendum: this nicely punctuated my White Guilt. In Cusco I sleep on the floor and our apartment is only 50 degrees at night but we can escape these discomforts…even minimum wage in America would go a long way here.)
Our tour guide lady, when we finally got her on the phone, innocently said that she hadn’t promised us water and she probably isn’t going to reimburse us because she “…said there might be problems.” I have vowed to learn Spanish for the express purpose of sititng in her office down the street from our apartment and bitching her out. It’s not about the money; it’s about having put our lives into the hands of people who wish only to exploit us. The Spanish (except for you, of course!) ruthlessly exploited the indigenous peoples of Peru, as indigenous people have been exploited all over the world. I am primarily of European descent and have spent a decent amount of time reading Howard Zinn with tears in my eyes (ugh…reading that, it makes me sound like someone I wouldn’t like, but it’s true). However, it is still shocking to see how centuries of brutality and exploitation can lead to people not caring if you live or die as long as they can get a few bucks out of your wallet first.
I just had to run to the bathroom because eating unripe fruit we found in the jungle did a number on my body, but I feel like once my sore muscles subside, I can now handle anything.
We didn’t even complain that much until afterward—bad milkshakes being worse than death!
The entire day, I periodically clutched the silver necklace you made as it hung around my neck beneath my dirty, sweaty bandanna. I thought of how you said it would protect me, and I put all my faith in the love and kindness of those who care about us, along with my desire to live via a hot piece of metal. My superstition may have contributed to our survival.
We need a day to recover, and then we are finally going up to Machu Picchu tomorrow morning! After almost dying a hundred times yesterday, I want to say that I love you and it’s been one hell of a Valentine’s Day!
Love,
Darshana
Really the most perilous way I almost died was at the end of our journey, and it was from holding in uncontrollable laughter. At the ruins of Machu Picchu, we ran into two wholesome young American lads we had sort of briefly met at a coffee shop back in Cusco, and ended up getting a taxi from the train station with them.
The blond one gave my sister a hand massage in the taxi, and I was already cracking up while pretending to sleep because she hates being touchy-feely with strangers. The guy was rubbing her and humming to himself for twenty minutes. Then he asked her if she had a boyfriend, soon after telling me I have beautiful eyes. I was SO glad she was sitting in the middle. “What’s your favorite color? Mine is see-through…yeah. I like clear,” he mused thoughtfully.
I had to keep my eyes closed so no one would talk to me in my sleepy state, but I’m pretty sure I turned bright red and my shoulders started heaving. I just said I was carsick.
If you ever want to make my sister or me laugh our respective asses off, just ask us what our favorite color is. As an elementary school art teacher, I get this question a lot, but this kid was twenty-four.
Speaking of colors and Machu Picchu, we saw a rainbow in the sky just below us when we were in the ruins. The Incas worshipped rainbows, and we had actually seen a double rainbow bright and clear over the Incan Temple of the Rainbow in the town of Chincherro the week before. In typical fashion, the dirty rotten Spaniards had built a big cathedral right over the stones of the unfinished Inca temple, but the rainbow itself proved irrepressible.
Despite the Peruvian love for the rainbow—indeed, the flag of Cusco is almost identical to the international gay pride rainbow flag, to the chagrin of the macho Cusquenos—my sister told me I absolutely could not wear double rainbows on laundry day (A.K.A. wash-all-your-clothes-in-cold-water-in-the-sink-and-hang-them-up-to-dry-even-though-it’s-the-rainy-season-and-they-never-will day).
It was the day before she was going to go back to the U.S., leaving me on my own in Cusco. It was cold, and my only clean clothes were sparkly purple tights, a rainbow sweater, and a rainbow down vest. At my sister’s insistence, I changed into a black outfit before we went out for coffee because she was so sick of drawing attention to ourselves and constantly getting harassed by strangers.
It is true that I draw more attention to myself than my sister—to her amusement, airport security in Peru basically asked if I was a crackhead, while they didn’t ask her anything about coca.
“Do you have any coca products? Coca food? Coca candy? Coca leaves? Coca TO SMOKE?” they grilled me.
Ren was already all the way through, and they were still searching me. And I thought Peru and Spirit Airlines were both way sketchier than me! While they were still going through all my stuff, another airport security guy watched up and touched my arm, inquiring about my tattoo in rapid Spanish.
“Am I allowed to take it on the plane, or do I need to get rid of it?” I joked. He didn’t get it. Joking with airport security is usually a bad idea. It’s an especially bad idea when you’re leaving South America and you don’t speak Spanish.
It was there in that café back in Cusco, in my dirty t-shirt, that I realized it was time to go back to the U.S., overjoying my mother to the point where she would offer to do my laundry. I’ve now been in a flannel bathrobe for just under a week. The clothes my mom washed for me are draped over the couch, but I see no point in wearing anything besides pajamas. I’ve never been happier to give up adventure for comfort. Besides, I hope to be in Thailand within the month! I’ve told few people I’m back, realizing that if everyone thinks I’m still in Peru when I’m really hiding out at my parents’ log cabin in the snowy woods, I can stay in this flannel bathrobe longer. I explained the meaning of “comfy” to Ennio before we left Peru.
Here is a tale of our adventures:
A Tale of Whoa!
Or,
How I Literally,
Actually
Almost Died
Going to Machu Picchu
on Valentine’s Day.
By Darshana Bolt
February 2012
I’m not overly fond of adventure stories. I learned the word “cumbersome” when I returned The Swiss Family Robinson to my second grade teacher, Mrs. Storey-Welch. My father gave me fine antique volumes of Jack London when I was a young child, and I did like those, but sinewy stories of death-defying bravery don’t usually do it for me. I have a few of my own harrowing skin-of-my-teeth stories, mostly revolving around doing dumb shit like sneaking out, jumping off the fire escape, and hitchhiking in the middle of the night when I was thirteen in Asheville, North Carolina.
Nothing I have experienced before has even come close to this story.
This isn’t fiction—this isn’t even exaggeration. Do not mistake the drama of what you are about to read for a juiced-up anecdote with generously added details. Everything that follows is absolutely true and happened one week ago in Peru, the place I had decided to move to with my sister Serenity (or Ren, as I call her) on a whim.
We were all set to move from Vermont to Costa Rica. It was hours before my sister’s flight with Spirit Air, the sketchiest discount airline we could find (everyone claps when the planes land). I had one booked for a week or two later. I got a voicemail saying that Ren didn’t want to go—her job teaching ESL at a university sounded questionable due to odious reviews of the school online, and “…I’ve already been to Costa Rica! I want to go somewhere exciting, like Peru!”
The next day, Serenity convinced me to change my ticket, saying that we would have
“… A grand adventure!”
Come February fourteenth, rather than munching on chocolates like many an American lass, I was starving and abandoned, sharing small bites of unripe mango, green banana, and immature passion fruit, or maracuya, that my companions and I (Serenity and the Chileans) found while we were lost in the jungle.
Ren and I had set off for Machu Picchu via the scoundrel tour company down the block from our apartment in Cusco, Peru, the other ancient Incan city that we had made our dwelling-place. The company was supposed to take us most of the way in a van--then we were to walk two hours and stay in a hostel, going to Machu Picchu in the morning and returning by train to Cusco. The tour company, its operator Maruja promised in obsequious terms and in writing, was to provide us with transportation, meals, tickets in to Machu Picchu, and a place to stay.
As we set off in the morning, crammed in elbow-to-rib with a passel of Belgians, French people, Chileans, and Colombians, we were given red nylon cords to tie around our wrists for emergency identification, which very nearly came in handy as we could have become corpses roughly a hundred times in the next twenty hours. I misunderstood and thought the red bracelets for “emergency” were for luck, which caused us great mirth and sarcasm.
The scenery was unbelievably beautiful--jagged mountains bursting through clouds covered in snow like what I remember of the Rockies. There was red clay everywhere; red clay dust rising in the road, red clay bricks forming red clay houses, "...and a red clay halo for my head," as Gillian Welch sang in my head all day.
We drove past the dozens of tough Andean women with mantas (broad woven cloths), bowler hats, petticoats and llamas who had by then become no novelty to us, along with run-down fruit stands and dumpsters full of hungry stray dogs in towns where Spanish colonial churches had been built right over sturdy, ingeniously fitted Incan masonry.
One thing that intrigues me about Peru is that no road sign or politician's pitch is manufactured—every sign is handmade with scrawls or stencils, and the red mud buildings are covered in competing advertisements. Many of them said ELVIS in huge letters--a popular name in Peru, and likely that of a politician. A few days later when I was miraculously still alive, I had the opportunity to say, “Muchos gracias, Elvis!” while shaking a man’s hand. But I digress . . .
Early in the morning on the day we departed for Machu Picchu, we all started off giddy with excitement, joking with each other in the van. Serenity and I tested out our stilted Spanish and reprehensible French with our van-mates.
“Est-ce que tu as un feu, s’il te plait?” I asked one of the French people when we were stopped, and was dismayed when she rattled back a bunch of questions in French that I couldn’t begin to comprehend. I lied and said I’d never studied it in school when asked, despite two years of high-school French long ago (my M.O. in case of embarrassing ignorance.) “Mon autre soeur a habite en Bruxelles, alors j’ai elle visite, mais je n’etudie pas…ma francais est tres mal! Je comprends un peu.”
We stopped for a five-minute break that turned into us waiting for our driver for an hour and joking about what sort of rendezvous he must be having.
“WILLIE!” we all shouted, and Serenity and I felt like we were back at our parents’ house calling for Willie, the family dog we’ve had for twelve years.
“Willie… es… el nombre de nos perro?” I whispered to Serenity. I really have never studied Spanish, and we’d only been in Peru for a week. Not being able to speak Spanish became not only annoying and embarrassing that day, but later life-threatening.
“Don’t say that; they might take it the wrong way and think we’re calling him a dog,” she whispered back. By the end of the day, our entire group was calling him worse than that. Dogs are loyal and steadfast. A few hours after the hour-long five-minute stop, Willie the van driver dumped us by the side of the road and left us.
While we waited for Willie the first time, we made the acquaintance of a spicy, sparkly trio. Before we left for Peru, some friends and acquaintances of Serenity’s had warned us of the nefarious “Chilean hippies” who overran Peru and were supposedly liable to be thieving, woman-seducing con artists. We instantly bonded with Camilla, Angela, and their tall friend Camilo, with his combat boots and warmly un-seductive beard-smile.
They turned out to be the most loyal, generous, and trustworthy strangers I have ever been in a near-death situation with. Of course, Serenity later suggested that James Franco should play Camilo in the movie about our adventure, but he’d have to get more charmingly chubby, hairy, and stoned. All three of them were covered in body paint, glitter, and gleefully clashing patterns. The girls were beautiful. I loved them instantly.
After he finally emerged from his long breakfast or visit to his mistress or difficult bathroom visit or whatever the hell he was doing while we waited for him in a rainy driveway for an hour, our van driver, Willie, took us up to experience some hairpin turns high in the misty Andes with no guardrails in the middle of a cloud.
He drove as fast as he could next to cliffs with thousand-foot drops and the huge, raging Urubamba River waiting for us below. His shitty stereo system blasted, in order, "Greased Lightnin' ", something about going down in a blaze of glory, and then death metal. I had heard that drivers in third-world countries are typically reckless, and was still excited about our gorgeous ride, thinking that everything was normal and no harm would come to us.
Eventually, as his driving grew more erratic, the potential falls longer, and the death metal more foreboding, Serenity and I clutched each other’s emergency-bracelet-wearing hands in terror.
“In case anything happens, I want you to know that I love you very, very much…” I said to my sister. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time while she was living in Korea for a year-and-a-half, but the past month we had spent together had made us pretty much attached at the hip. We hadn’t spent more than five minutes apart, and had been delighting in each other’s company.
“That’s not funny! THIS IS HOW PEOPLE DIE!” she responded as we went screaming past another curve about two inches from a thousand-foot drop.
“I wasn’t kidding.”
Willie the loco driver kept going on a totally destroyed road even though five other drivers stopped and told him to turn around. He was racing with other cars, careening past them to pass every single vehicle we came across, no matter how frightening the curves in the switchback road up the mountains.
The terrifying ride finally came to a halt as we got to the first major impasse--an active landslide that we had to run across mere minutes after we saw rocks falling into the road, which overlooked an unending cliff over the massive Urubamba River.
I clutched the beautiful necklace my silversmith friend Pilar had made, which she had given me for protection before my trip to Peru. After running across the landslide, the unfortunate turistas walked down the narrow, dilapidated road in the blazing sun for an hour--it was noon--and then the rocks were finally cleared enough for Willie to scoop us back up in his Death Van.
Next, we got to a river in the road that we had to cross by climbing across a bulldozer, along with other tourists who were on the same washed out road/thousand-foot waterfall. Did I mention that one of the doors in the van didn't work from the inside? Two other van drivers drove across the water and picked up their loads of terrified tourists. We thought that Willie was going to do the same, and he told us to keep walking--but apparently he turned around and went home, because we never saw him again.
Maruja the tour lady had warned us that there might be problems due to landslides, and that we may have to take a different bus and pay ten more dollars. We never dreamed that the problem might be being forced to climb through massive, vertical landslides on a closed road for nine hours with no food or water and then walk all night in the dark through the rain on active railroad tracks over an enormously swollen river with no footbridge. All told, we hiked for twelve hours straight (minus a half-hour break when we finally came to a town), risking death by:
1. Falling off the massive Andean cliffs into the Urubamba River (several thousand feet of straight drops the entire way). We could have fallen on foot or due to Willie’s terrifying driving.
2. Willie-induced car crashes looked very likely at times.
3. We could have fallen off the bulldozer and down the massive waterfall.
4. Being crushed in the three huge landslides we had to clamber across (the active one I already wrote about, before Willie abandoned us, was just a baby landslide), with the rocks our feet knocked down falling so far we couldn’t see them land and nothing holding back the rocks above us.
5. Dehydration.
It was very hot and we had almost no water the entire time. (I usually have to drink 1 1/2 gallons a day or I feel ill. I don’t have diabetes and I still don’t know what’s wrong with me to make me so thirsty all the time—I think it’s a gluten intolerance—but I just accepted that we had no water and kept going. I always thought I wouldn’t be good in an emergency for this reason, but I forged ahead.
I’m also deathly afraid of heights and falling, but just told myself I couldn’t be. If I’d lost my footing due to shaking limbs I would have been more likely to fall to my death.)
6. If I’d re-sprained the ankle that just healed a month ago, I might also have died. There was simply no way and no one to rescue us.
7. A woman we saw by the side of the road told us to cut across her property, taking a vertical path far up through the jungle. Another old woman had a shack in the middle of the jungle path surrounded by little chickens (pollitos) and a filthy little pig. She told us to get off her property and keep going up the tiny, steep mountain path to get to the road. Neither jungle witch offered us water, though we were all staggering, covered with muddy sweat, and hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since very early in the morning (we were hungrily eyeing her chickens.)
The road these women sent my four brave companions and I to was closed due to its extremely dangerous nature (we later found out this was common knowledge to local Peruvians.)
Were these impoverished indigenous women jumping at the opportunity to kill five tourists? Did they hate Chileans AND Americans?
8. After crossing several massive, terrifying landslides, we came upon a group of surly men with pickaxes, shovels, and motorcycles on the deserted road we didn’t know was closed. We later found out everyone else in the group of stranded tourists walked along a road at the bottom of the mountain, whereas we were most of the way up on a road that no one used. The men offered to take us to the next town for money, but left us in front of the next formidable landslide five minutes later.
Rather than just taking our money, they could have kidnapped us—it is not unheard of for foreigners to be robbed, raped, ransomed, or even killed in South America. Taxi kidnappings are especially common in Peru. They drove us in between giant rocks on the closed-off road, inches away from the edge of the cliff with the river raging below. Later we wondered what they were even doing up there on the closed road where nobody goes.
9. Imagine a motorcycle accident on a cliff, in a landslide, with a pickaxe and two people. Ouch.
10. At night, after we finally staggered into the town of Santa Teresa about eight hours after we were supposed to stop for lunch there, we were told that there were no hostels and nowhere to sleep in the town. We all guzzled down a two-liter bottle of water, devoured typical Peruvians meals of rice, thin sauce, potatoes, and mystery meat, and hopped into another van, driven by the man who had offered us a ride into town for a fee when he saw us finally staggering off the closed road, covered in mud. My sister pointed us that despite our lack of traditional patriotism, we are from a place where most people wouldn’t charge you money for a ride in a life-threatening emergency. (Okay, I guess that one wasn’t a possible coroner’s report, but it’s about to be.)
The man dropped us off past a hydroelectric plant to walk for hours along some railroad tracks to the town of Aguas Calientes. Naturally and erroneously, we assumed the trains were not running when some men at the entrance point gave us the go-ahead despite large warning signs.
We were terrified by the prospect of slipping and falling on the rainy railroad tracks, plunging to our deaths into the deep and chaotic river churning below us so loudly in the darkness. We walked upon tracks we could barely see, making wide steps across the terrifying gaps and helping each other with hands, flashlights, and little sips of water.
Another stranded Chilean tourist had joined us, and I gave him the last of our bottle of water and lent him my headlamp, to the irritation of my sister. “What’d you give it to HIM for?” she asked, forgetting that he was the only person with us who spoke English. She meant that he could have just walked alongside us and seen with our light. I had lent him the light because he was very sick, and kept ending up behind everyone; pale, puking, and in the dark. We could keep up and walk next to people with flashlights. Ren was doubly annoyed when she came across our big empty water bottle, which he had just tossed down in the middle of the woods. She carried it the rest of the way.
11. Like the unfortunate Alejandro, we could have been very sick all day. We had been warned to wash all the fruit we ate in Peru, but we had been so hungry that we were peeling back rinds and putting unripe bananas, mangoes, and passion fruit in our mouths. They were all totally green and came from the trees by the side of the road. I did end up with a stomachache from subsisting on unripe fruit. If we had been sick we may not have made it out across the landslides of steep sliding shale.
12. While we scrambled in the dark across the rails with no footpath, we had no idea that there was a train coming. Thankfully, when we heard shouts from ahead to leap out of the way of the oncoming train, none of us were on the many bridges behind us or in the tunnel we had just gone through. There would have been no escape from the train but the bone-crushingly ferocious river we could only hear below.
Well, I think that wraps up our twelve most likely causes to need red emergency bracelets! What saved us from certain peril? Luck, conviction, stamina, mutual caring, and a silver necklace. Certainly none of the Peruvians who could have helped us in our situation did—except for our wonderful friend Ennio, who helped us seek justice when we got back to Cusco. When we finally emerged from the Closed Road of Untold Dangers, an official-looking woman with a huge truck on the other side of the landslide told us that whoever was responsible for us being in that situation should get in a lot of trouble. Our tour lady was a nasty woman who gave us back forty bucks each after yelling at Ennio, who interpreted for us.
Machu Picchu was magnificent.
“MACHU PICCHU O MUERTE!” we had shouted throughout the day to keep us going.
When we got back to Cusco, we continued to be exhausted by the street hawkers whose unsolicited soliciting hounded us through the streets. Hawkers in Cusco do not leave you alone, no matter what you do, say, or completely ignore. They won’t go away and attack in swarms.
I was going to join their ranks as a street artist but decided it was time to go back to Vermont with my sister when she had to leave unexpectedly after several weeks. Living by myself in a city of hustlers with no money and competing with aggressive Peruvians to sell art for a few dollars would have been interesting, but likely miserable. With the exception of the delightful Ennio, Serenity wisely concluded that no one gives a shit whether you live or die in Peru.
***
I am back in Vermont briefly, but I’m just saving up for a month for my next adventures in Nepal, Thailand, Montana, and then possibly Korea or Japan. I would have had to teach English in Cusco to pay rent, and I would have been paid about $2/hour. I hope to spend this year before I begin a career as an art teacher traveling as much as possible and experiencing different places in the world.
After traveling for two days, I jumped out from behind a stone wall in Vermont and made my parents cry (presumably with happiness.) They had thought I was going to stay and live in Peru for six months, and so did I until the night before the plane left, when I bought the last affordable ticket. My mother has never been so surprised!
In our time of terror, there was no way to go but forward, with shaking knees, clinging to rocks that fell from below our feet down to the muddy brown Urubamba, thousands of feet of cliff face below us. With our new friends, we joined hands to stare down death (a cliché, I know, but it takes on new meaning when you’re watching a rock you tried to step onto fall into a seemingly bottomless chasm!).
I got away with only a few bruises, a stubbed toe from slipping and falling on the rainy railroad tracks in the dark, a few new friends, and a very muddy sister.
I found myself bounding down the narrow path to the Incan Bridge at Machu Picchu, which was another narrow passage next to a long, steep cliff in the mist. My knees weren’t shaking at all. Vertigo is a thing of the past. A few beautiful red flowers with red stems grew out horizontally from the high Incan wall before the bridge.
Last summer, I joined hands with a bunch of naked friends to jump off a stone wall into Lake Champlain, but found myself unable to jump. After a friend fell from a window and died at my school seven years ago, I had developed a sick fear of falling and jumping from high places. I intend to leap at the next available opportunity and make a big splash.
After we finally arrived safely in Aguas Calientes, the gorgeous town, inaccessible by car, which is the only way in to Machu Picchu, we all commended each other for not crying.
“You are very brave,” Camilo told us, his eyes shining above his black beard. Despite our newfound bravery, we found ourselves incapable of eating at the restaurant our terrible tour included, since the proprietor’s index finger rarely left his nostril, and I saw the children who were cooking in the back drop the bread on the dirty floor several times while they were playing catch with it.
Here is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to my friend Pilar the morning we awoke in a hostel in Aguas Calientes:
Ren named our death trip companion Angela “Hermana de los Zapatos Sucio”—sister of the dirty shoes. I think I may have neglected to mention the giant mud pits we got sucked into.
Where we live in Cusco there are dozens of impoverished men and boys who shine shoes for a living. I got an aggressive pitch the other day—“Your shoes are dirty!”
“Hey! My shoes are FINE!” I had responded indignantly. If only he could see our shoes now.
We are Mud Women.
We finally made staggered to a hostel at midnight last night. I was on the verge of throwing up from dehydration.
Ren and I just ordered a coffee milkshake so we could sit next to more cliffs, rivers, and railroad tracks, writing letters at this touristy café. We were delivered a tiny scoop of terrible, almost inedible freezer-dried sherbet sitting next to a little cup of bad black coffee for eighteen soles, or about seven or eight American dollars—an unheard of sum in Peru. When my sister complained about our “milkshake”, the waiter pointed as though we were very stupid—“Café…helado!” (“Coffee…ice cream!” Of course you know that; you’re Spanish…). We are getting accustomed to being ripped off at every available opportunity in this country.
Addendum: this nicely punctuated my White Guilt. In Cusco I sleep on the floor and our apartment is only 50 degrees at night but we can escape these discomforts…even minimum wage in America would go a long way here.)
Our tour guide lady, when we finally got her on the phone, innocently said that she hadn’t promised us water and she probably isn’t going to reimburse us because she “…said there might be problems.” I have vowed to learn Spanish for the express purpose of sititng in her office down the street from our apartment and bitching her out. It’s not about the money; it’s about having put our lives into the hands of people who wish only to exploit us. The Spanish (except for you, of course!) ruthlessly exploited the indigenous peoples of Peru, as indigenous people have been exploited all over the world. I am primarily of European descent and have spent a decent amount of time reading Howard Zinn with tears in my eyes (ugh…reading that, it makes me sound like someone I wouldn’t like, but it’s true). However, it is still shocking to see how centuries of brutality and exploitation can lead to people not caring if you live or die as long as they can get a few bucks out of your wallet first.
I just had to run to the bathroom because eating unripe fruit we found in the jungle did a number on my body, but I feel like once my sore muscles subside, I can now handle anything.
We didn’t even complain that much until afterward—bad milkshakes being worse than death!
The entire day, I periodically clutched the silver necklace you made as it hung around my neck beneath my dirty, sweaty bandanna. I thought of how you said it would protect me, and I put all my faith in the love and kindness of those who care about us, along with my desire to live via a hot piece of metal. My superstition may have contributed to our survival.
We need a day to recover, and then we are finally going up to Machu Picchu tomorrow morning! After almost dying a hundred times yesterday, I want to say that I love you and it’s been one hell of a Valentine’s Day!
Love,
Darshana
Really the most perilous way I almost died was at the end of our journey, and it was from holding in uncontrollable laughter. At the ruins of Machu Picchu, we ran into two wholesome young American lads we had sort of briefly met at a coffee shop back in Cusco, and ended up getting a taxi from the train station with them.
The blond one gave my sister a hand massage in the taxi, and I was already cracking up while pretending to sleep because she hates being touchy-feely with strangers. The guy was rubbing her and humming to himself for twenty minutes. Then he asked her if she had a boyfriend, soon after telling me I have beautiful eyes. I was SO glad she was sitting in the middle. “What’s your favorite color? Mine is see-through…yeah. I like clear,” he mused thoughtfully.
I had to keep my eyes closed so no one would talk to me in my sleepy state, but I’m pretty sure I turned bright red and my shoulders started heaving. I just said I was carsick.
If you ever want to make my sister or me laugh our respective asses off, just ask us what our favorite color is. As an elementary school art teacher, I get this question a lot, but this kid was twenty-four.
Speaking of colors and Machu Picchu, we saw a rainbow in the sky just below us when we were in the ruins. The Incas worshipped rainbows, and we had actually seen a double rainbow bright and clear over the Incan Temple of the Rainbow in the town of Chincherro the week before. In typical fashion, the dirty rotten Spaniards had built a big cathedral right over the stones of the unfinished Inca temple, but the rainbow itself proved irrepressible.
Despite the Peruvian love for the rainbow—indeed, the flag of Cusco is almost identical to the international gay pride rainbow flag, to the chagrin of the macho Cusquenos—my sister told me I absolutely could not wear double rainbows on laundry day (A.K.A. wash-all-your-clothes-in-cold-water-in-the-sink-and-hang-them-up-to-dry-even-though-it’s-the-rainy-season-and-they-never-will day).
It was the day before she was going to go back to the U.S., leaving me on my own in Cusco. It was cold, and my only clean clothes were sparkly purple tights, a rainbow sweater, and a rainbow down vest. At my sister’s insistence, I changed into a black outfit before we went out for coffee because she was so sick of drawing attention to ourselves and constantly getting harassed by strangers.
It is true that I draw more attention to myself than my sister—to her amusement, airport security in Peru basically asked if I was a crackhead, while they didn’t ask her anything about coca.
“Do you have any coca products? Coca food? Coca candy? Coca leaves? Coca TO SMOKE?” they grilled me.
Ren was already all the way through, and they were still searching me. And I thought Peru and Spirit Airlines were both way sketchier than me! While they were still going through all my stuff, another airport security guy watched up and touched my arm, inquiring about my tattoo in rapid Spanish.
“Am I allowed to take it on the plane, or do I need to get rid of it?” I joked. He didn’t get it. Joking with airport security is usually a bad idea. It’s an especially bad idea when you’re leaving South America and you don’t speak Spanish.
It was there in that café back in Cusco, in my dirty t-shirt, that I realized it was time to go back to the U.S., overjoying my mother to the point where she would offer to do my laundry. I’ve now been in a flannel bathrobe for just under a week. The clothes my mom washed for me are draped over the couch, but I see no point in wearing anything besides pajamas. I’ve never been happier to give up adventure for comfort. Besides, I hope to be in Thailand within the month! I’ve told few people I’m back, realizing that if everyone thinks I’m still in Peru when I’m really hiding out at my parents’ log cabin in the snowy woods, I can stay in this flannel bathrobe longer. I explained the meaning of “comfy” to Ennio before we left Peru.
2008: Coalescing The Cosmic Drip:
Recent Works by Darshana Bolt and Dennis Packet
We had ourselves an art show this February at the Green Door Studio in Burlington! The Green Door is my favorite art space. The artists who run it are amazing--you can check out some of their projects at this website: www.greendoorstudio.net/. The Green Door is the home of the Combat Paper Project, which is a compelling endeavor: www.combatpaper.org/. The lads were just interviewed by CNN while our show was up, and I'm hoping my artwork will be in the background! I'll post when the show is being aired as soon as I find out!