Filth and Trickery and Sand and Schizophrenics

Reading music festival and Peru are dissimilar. Within seconds of entering both, however, one is offered drugs. In Peru, one is also offered sex.

Stunned, I attempted levity, and pleaded tiredness. But the chap wasn't going for that. And my "maybe later" gags were also being met with more seriousness than I had intended. In the end, we half-walked, half-ran away with a taxi driver who was also babbling at us. No safety though. He and his fluffy-moustachioed compadre seemed anxious to push women on us as well, calling out to senoras as we trundled past on the tuktuk (called a mototaxi in Peru). "No, no, God, no," I whimpered, trying to disappear into my seat.

But we got to a hostel without any further problems, went out and had pizza in a little restaurant where the owner was very jolly and laughed lots and lots, looked at all the bats that lived in the trees on the plaza and went "Ooooh", tried to find somewhere to get a Magnum ice cream, failed, and went to bed. This is what we did.

The next day we headed out toward the bus station but were stopped by a huge parade in the Plaza de Armas. Army troops were lined up along the square, a group of suits were looming by an important looking doorway, and, as we passed, hunched under our backpacks, a sextet of policeman began a langurous frogmarch out to the centre. We sat down on the Cathedral steps to watch.

It was all terribly exciting: a series of flag-hoistings and bellowed songs before a guy stuffed into his green military attire whistled at us to be upstanding; it was the national anthem. The only words I remember are the shouted "Viva Peru!" at the close. And then everyone paraded round - first the army, then the big-band school kids (one of them, bless her, couldn't do the spinny baton thing and was clearly very conscious of it), then banner-holding kids. ("We have the right to an education", "We have the right not to be abused," read a couple. Andy and I agreed wholeheartedly.) After the kids came matching-T-shirted adults, who didn't so much march as stroll as far as the waiting ice-cream vendors and then disseminate in chaos.

The army continued to march stolidly through the tangled mass. We followed them out of the square. And then we started to make mistakes.

Our first mistake was to decide we felt too lazy to walk to the bus station and get in a taxi; our second was not to think it weird that the taxi driver had a friend with him, sat in the back. Our third mistake was to get worried when these friendly, friendly chaps started telling us there was a protest on the road today and there were no buses and recently tourists had been all stabbed and whatnot and it was all terribly dangerous and most people flew straight from Quito to Lima (I knew that wasn't true. Lots of mistakes were made, I tell you.)

Our fourth mistake was to allow our worry to create trust in the taxi driver and his friend, who would kindly take us down to the beach resort of Mancora for a good price.

Our fifth mistake was not to argue harder when they kept insisting gas was 100 soles.

Sixth mistake: paying for the gas. Seventh: not getting out at a checkpoint when we had seen that buses were - lo and behold! - heading down the Panamericana. (In fairness, we were unlucky: for the first twenty minutes of the trip, when we were trying to decide what to do, not a single bus passed. If one had, we would have got out and saved our pennies.)

But enough mistakes. We knew we were getting screwed and there was very little we could do about it. In truth, the journey itself was not unpleasant. The road, for starters, was beautiful - huge seabirds and vultures wheeling and eddying about an ethereal yellow and brown landscape; and the beautiful blue sea - at last the sea - on our right. The conversation, also, was very interesting. Bad people, perhaps, lead more intriguing lives. Probably the most notable thing that came up was that the guy in the back was going to go and fight for FARC in a couple of years. He and the taxi driver both reckoned that Chavez would pay him around a million soles for two years work. I was dubious, but they were both steadfast. Scandalous, eh.

The point when I really gave up on the twenty quid they wanted from me was when I began trying to talk round the taxi driver. His riposte went something like this: "You go off to Mancora and Machu Picchu and Bolivia and wherever, and we stay here the whole time. And we need the money." And i just thought, Well, yeah, you're right.

Most of the fight went out of me then; a token effort upon arrival in Mancora to talk the price down was abandoned when an intimidated mototaxi boy we called over told us that we were being charged the right price. We all knew we weren't and I wanted, more than anything else, the two guys to just admit they were screwing us. But they wouldn't and we gave them the damn money and they left.

That is the worst thing that has happened to us on the whole trip. So we're doing pretty well, really. In Peru the guys who are being nicest and giving you the most advice on how to avoid thieves are often the ones whose hands are creeping towards your bag. Trouble is, most people, especially Peruvian women, are just genuinely helpful and lovely - and the necessity of being on your guard all the time means you might not be as friendly as you'd like. The amount of times I've probably been quite cold to a chap who just wanted to know if I liked Peru and shake my hand makes me quite sad when I think about it.

But anyway. Mancora. The touristy, uber-popular, hippytastic, surfer's paradise beach-resort of North Peru; a jumble of bars and restaurants splayed along the Panamericana with a fisher-price red-and-white-striped lighthouse overlooking them on the cliff behind. On the dusty path down to the beach, cheap cafes served a one pound set lunch menu with ceviche - raw fished doused in lime juice - as a starter. We quickly fell in love with Peru's most famous dish.

Our hostel room had cockroaches and an expired mouse in the bin. "There's a dead insect in my bed," said Andy stoically, while doing a cursory inspection. We loved it. It was right on the beach, had an air-raid-siren as a doorbell, and cost three pounds a night. Every evening, coming in from one of the bars, we would wake the owner at evil hour with a tonally-ascending whine that you could imagine heralding the end of the world. Then we would giggle and apologise our way to bed.
Everywhere were round black insects which would fling themselves at you from the air pointlessly and skitter - tictictic - along the floor when kicked. Apparently, a few weeks before we arrived it had been their mating season and they had been all over the streets in a swarming plague. That would have been worth seeing. It would have ruined the beach, of course, but plague-like scenarios are rare and one must, I feel, snatch at them when they arise.

Our four days in Mancora were a slothful drift of late mornings and late nights; days supine on the beach and evenings playing extreme Jenga and getting beaten at table football by lethal local barmen. (Honestly, this one guy could score from defence almost every time. He was a machine. In the end I hit upon the non-tactic of just juddering my arms at breakneck pace; this bought him down to a goal every four shots or so; it also annihilated my forearms.)


One highlight of these lazy days was a dog that dragged itself along the road with its two front paws, the back two bobbling in the dirt. "That's horrible," said Andy. "Yeah. I can't even look at that," I replied, grimacing. When we had passed the dog got up onto its four healthy limbs and trotted off. It was faking two broken legs and begging for food. This was one smart dog. If i had had anything to give it, the trick would have worked; I've no doubt that it works on many tourists every day. As I recall, it was pretty fat.

A more disturbing moment came in a family fast-food joint on our first night. The camarera was chuckling away at our ordering of yet more cheap and tasty burgers from the barbecue when a little girl emerged holding a toy gun. She proceeded to shoot the pretend hell right out of a little baby in a pram, now bringing the gun right up to its mouth - POW! - now hiding behind a pillar and loosing off a few rounds - BLAMBLAMBLAM! - all under the placid gaze of a policeman, sitting at a table with a very real gun dangling at his side. The baby burbled away happily, delighted at each and every extremely loud mock-assasination.

And then there was Nelson. Nelson was a schizophrenic who would dance the nights away on the Panamericana, gyrating outside the bars and occasionally heading in to encourage patrons to join him for a boogie on the road. "Every week," a local told us, "he has a different dance move." Now, Nelson was crazy but, crucially, he was happy-crazy. Everyone treated him really well, and judging from the way he was always looking off into the middle-distance and waving, he was forever playing to a large and adoring crowd; one that only he could see. We will never forget Nelson for as long as we live.

But the sunsets, internet! They were gorgeous, don't you know. From white to yellow to orange to red with the sun warping in shape as well as colour before plunging down into the horizon and then bleeding - bleeding so, so quickly - across the vast ocean.

The days in Mancora. They were idyllic days. But I cannot finish without mentioning a half-Columbian, half-English guy, who attempted to hit on our friends Jess and Steph, who we have bumped into around seven times now (it's a small world - and it's a smaller gringo trail). The pick of his many sumptuous lines was, "Touch my crystal. I want to feel your energy."

Go buy a crystal necklace and get out there folks. What's the worst that could happen?

Leaving Ecuador

In Ecuador, we learned how to avoid being overcharged on buses. (Confronted with linguistically compromised gringos and the chance of a few easy centavos, many conductors would submit to temptation.)

The technique went thusly:

1. Consult the Footprint guide to get estimate of price.

2. Ask locals what the cost of the journey is: "Disculpe Senor(a). ¿Cuanto cuesta a INSERT DESTINATION HERE?" If too timid to talk to locals, watch how much they give to the conductor carefully.

3. Having learnt the precio, get the correct money ready and when the conductor comes up slap it into his hand and say "Para dos," oozing confidence.

4. Say "Gracias" and turn to face the window, or bury nose in book.

On our penultimate bus in Ecuador, down from the rain-sodden streets of Andean Cuenca to the sweltering heat of coastal Machala, we employed the technique - now well honed - and settled in for the long trip. Before long, a clutch of locals were nestled wobblingly between our legs; the bus was the busiest we have been on before or since - there was not an inch of space. I could not see the cloudforest out of the window, but could feel the crackly rise in humidity that announced it. A couple of seats away, one of the cutest kids we have yet encountered, hair forced by beaming father into a sticky side parting, shouted the sweaty hours away.

Machala bus station. A kid walked round with a three-litre bottle of water, flimsy cups stashed in his black plastic bag; a few glugs for a few centavos. He had a couple of takers. Meanwhile, beside us in the waiting room, a baseball-capped chap slumbered jerkingly.

Then we were on the bus and waiting - "Vamos! Vamos! Vamoooos!" shouted a couple of passengers, banging on the window. (This is standard practice in South America. I cannot imagine shouting, "Let's go! Come on! Let's go!" at a bus driver in England; but I confess to joining in with the locals a couple of times over here.)

And so ended our time in Ecuador. Our border crossing was trouble free: the bustly female conductor rushed us through Ecuadorian immigration, flirting with the two police officers cacklingly, and a wily kid helped us out filling in forms on the Peruvian side; we both gave him a well-deserved dollar.

We were in Ecuador for 50 days - the longest I have ever spent in another country. We tracked bears, climbed volcanoes, abseiled down waterfalls, damned ourselves to hell (by drinking alcohol on a holy day), got confused by a jam that promised to make you strong, were amused by some incredibly ineffectual guard dogs, failed to balance an egg on a nail at the centre of the world, fell slightly in love with our bear-tracking cook's daughter. And wielded flaming machetes.

Peru has been wonderful and Bolivia, where we have just arrived, promises to be similarly great. But I still often think about the little country where campesinos go on five day and five night puro benders; where the cars meander about the road in a snaky motorcade, ignoring lanes, vehicles, cliff-edges, sanity; where Saved By The Bell gets dubbed into Spanish - including the outtakes at the credits - for the pleasure of bus-journeyers; and where omnipresent pink-and-blue shellsuited Yogotas men sell ice creams from the huge plastic drums hanging at their stomachs.

And the guards lolling against walls outside department stores have guns bigger than your leg; and on every wall, inside and outside, is a huge beneficent Jesus, staring languidly down; and in every hamlet and every village and every town and every city is a volleyball court, or five, or fifty; and in every bus station the conductors roam the floor yelling, over and over, "Quito. Quito, Quito. Quito, QuitoQuitoQuitoQuito, QUITOQUITOQUITO!".

Here is a picture of a pig and a cat.

Cuenca

To get to Cuenca we had to catch many buses.

First to Ambato; from Ambato to Riobamba (where, on comic-stuffed shelves, sat a superb selection of Jesus-themed colouring-in books); from Riobamba, six hours all the way down tho Cuenca: a terrifying journey of impossibly tight turns, slaloming down landslide-ridden roads. Out the right window, nothing but a solid grey fug; out the left, dusty diggers scooping ashy earth from one crumbly rockface down towards another. At one point, I awoke to the shout of a vendedor, certain in my stupor that the noise was a landslide coming down on us. For half a second, I automatically tensed into an action pose; a ready-for-the-cliff-to-fall-on-me pose. Luckily, I don't think anyone saw.

Eventually the bilious switchbacks finished and we passed through a village where entire sliced and slashed pigs dangled from outside tiny wooden tiendas. A little further down the track, two unslashed and unsliced chaps snuggled together by the roadside, wearing porky grins; I hoped they wouldn't wander a little further uphill and behold their nasty dangling future.

At El Cafecito, our hostel in Cuenca, we met Lindsay, la gringa loca, whose "favourite new friends" we were soon to become. That first night she went out salsa dancing and we went to bed, pleading fatigue and reluctance to inflict the white-man's-shuffle upon such a nice girl and such a nice country. We did not see her again until the following evening; in the morning, we went out to explore Cuenca.

And what a lovely city it was; more charming, attractive and compact than Quito. Ramshackle churches on every corner and beautiful dilapidated buildings hulking over the streets. Everything seemed to be slowly falling apart - but very, very prettily.

A long walk, ambling along the river, past the University, down and down and down an endless street, took us to our favoured lunch spot: an all-you-can-eat buffet for just over two quid, reccomended by the magic book, which knows all (Footprint South American Handbook 2008). There was rice and beans and chicken and beef and fruit and vegetables and ice-cream and salad and potatoes and eggs and many other delicious things. As ninety percent of males will in an all-you-can-eat, we ate much more than was necessary; much more than we wanted; much more, in fact, than was really safe. In the end, I choked to a bloated finish with a plate of green jelly and grapes. I couldn't even manage any ice-cream. And there's always room for ice-cream.

That night we went out to a bar with Lindsay and her friends. We got on well because Lindsay would talk lots and lots and we therefore didn't have to stretch - as we so often, alas, are forced to do when meeting new people - beyond our natural laconic borders. ("Do you guys get off on silence, or something," she asked us at one point.) Also, incredibly, Lindsay could use the words "cats" and "honeys" without sounding like an idiot. As in, "I could teach you cats some Spanish words to bag some honeys if you like". Superb. Just superb.

TOP 2 PHRASES LEARNED FROM FOREIGNERS ON TRAVELS TO BE INCORPORATED INTO LEXICON AT FIRST OPPORTUNITY

2. "Let's blow this popstand!" American. Meaning: Let us leave this below average establishment. (For example: "You wanna go? OK, let's blow this popstand!")
1. "Man up!" Australian. Meaning: I think you should act in a way in which more testosterone, more machismo, more, as it were, balls, are manifest. (For example: "Why don't you just man up and take me on, chuffy?")

The next day: a museum. Incas. Pots. Paintings. Poems. Fascinating things. In the gardens outside, I stalked birds with my camera, temporarily certain that I was an excellent wildlife photographer after at long last capturing a hummingbird on film. In the evening, we ate dinner at a pizzeria in which lived perhaps the most awful artwork I have ever seen. In garish colours, hung about the room, were portraits of Barry Gibb, Rod Stewart, Bono - and many other unidentifiable nightmarish visages, staring out with rictal grins. The worst, though, was a picture of a rubicund, completely naked blonde on a beach, striding along, pinkly leering at the diners. "Why?" we all murmured to each other in disbelief. "Why?"

Luckily, Jethro Tull's Locomotive Breath was on the stereo. This caused me to forgive everything.

At a bar after dinner in which every spirit could be mixed with chocolate in some fancy concoction, I decided to try the chocolate beer. I don't know what I expected. It tasted like chocolate and beer. It tasted terrible. I glared at it - thick brown sludge - until we left.

The next day, we set out for the border, heading over to the Terminal Terrieste with the greatest taxi driver ever to grace planet earth. This man was incredible. This man was unbelievable. This man, truly, deserved all of his dreams and desires to come true. He deserved a huge ceremony in which little children would scream and shout and horns would blare and trumpets would squeal and beautiful women would fashion idols of him in gold and silver and platinum and dance round them with red robes flashing through the air singing, "Hero, hero, heroooooo". This man, I tell you, he deserved the world.

His taxi was a rusting old banger; scarred inside and out. He wore a tight green baseball cap and his face was thickly stubbled around his permanently clenched jaw. He was, we quickly learned, almost deaf. He bawled at us as he got out of the car.

Hero Taxi Driver: (Right beside us, shouting) "De donde eres?"
Me: (Mishearing, frightened, thinking he was asking where we were heading, not where we were from) "Mancora, Peru"
Hero Taxi Driver: "Ah, Polca!" (Polish)
Me: "Er..."
Hero Taxi Driver: (To Andy) "De donde eres?"
Andy: (Regaining composure) "Inglaterra"
Hero taxi driver: "Ah, Ingles!"

The cab had no left indicator. When we had to turn left the driver would fling his arm out of the window and yell at the street. He would also do this when he wanted to overtake someone - which seemed to be all of the time - indicating with his fingers where the car should place itself (behind him). At junctions, on the rare occasions when he could not overtake without going on the pavement - yes, he overtook at junctions; he did this frequently - he would beep his horn repeatedly and shout at the windscreen and the cars in front. He got the finger from a guy in a van. He seemed surprised. I was not. The hero cab driver would also yell, seemingly randomly, at pedestrians, static cars by the roadside, and animals. Everyone seemed very shocked, but there was also a glint of recognition in their eyes. I suspect everyone in the city must have known him.

As a finale, just as we were pulling into the bus station, he screeched at a young child by the roadside to shut his car door. The car was by the side of the road, about ten yards from where we passed, in no way an impediment. To anyone. The kid looked terrified; Andy and I were in hysterics. As we slung on our mochilas, I gave him a long, long two-handed handshake.

He yelled that he hoped we would have a pleasant journey. And then he scurried back into his cab.