A Bus Journey to Trujillo

There was a bit of a scrap on our night bus to Trujillo. A guy was adamant he had paid and lost his ticket, was refusing to pay again. Watching the scene unfold through the window, shouts muted by a shroud of half-sleep, it was all very entertaining. Then a guy in a red T-shirt went for the ticketless chap with a stick. That seemed a bit unnecessary. A policeman was leaning against his car and just watching it all. This appears to be the move policemen in South America are most fond of.

Earlier, we had been treated to The Girl Next Door in dubbed Spanish - lapsing sporadically into English when the colours on screen liquified. This sounds bad, but was a nice change from the usual South American bus-movie-diet of Steven Seagal flicks; I must have seen Under Siege four times by now - and around five of Seagal's other 'films'.

(So you don't have to watch any of them, what happens is Seagal goes to a place where there are people of different ethnicity to himself, learns their fighting techniques, and defeats the baddies USING THEIR OWN MOVES BETTER THAN THEY CAN! Also, he sports a pony-tail that makes you want to cry and call his mother.)

Another film came on at around half five in the morning, slicing my slumber time down to around four hours, and containing - oh, yes, internet - a pretty graphic attempted rape scene. Sure.

It was called, I think, The Condemned, and was a WWE production starring Stone Cold Steve Austin and many other wrestlers. And Vinnie Jones. Yes, Vinnie was there, dubbed into Spanish, swishing a knife about. Naturally, The Condemned was watched with horrified fascination by the numerous children on board. I spent the next twenty minutes watching some young Peruvian minds disintegrate.

Ah, but outside the window, away from Steve and Vinnie and the traumatised faces of wide-eyed kids, we were travelling through a desert. Green scrubs pocked the barren brown and - with appropriately filmic feel - a lone, ravaged dog trotted past, heading from nowhere to nowhere.

A cop slumped down next to me. You could have bottled his odour and called it Swarthy Musk. Stevedores and builders would wear it and it would have a small cult following of women. The cop became the third person of the very young day to stamp on my bare feet. I let him off because he had a gun and could doubtlessly take me. Instead of protesting, I returned to the window; the desert was beginning to misbehave.

Great black crags ruptured up from the arid floor. On top of one, the dirty white shell of a building sat, ill-advised, rightly-abandoned, justly-alone. This was good. This was as a desert should be.

But then, suddenly, sprouting out from the dusty wastes, were endless fields of long, swaying, green corn. Now, this was just not on. Deserts were not supposed to behave like this. This was my first desert and it should act like one. But it would not. The landscape: lush green corn, dead desert, lush green corn, dead desert, lush green corn, dead desert. On the desert sections, the buildings by the side of the road looked like burnt-out husks from an apocalyptic Western's finale. But, frankly, it wasn't good enough.

I decided, then, that this would not count as my first desert.

A week or so later, Huacachina would behave properly.