Good morning class and welcome to Third World Math…it’s a hell of a lot different, and more visceral than the First World variety you’re used to.
For example:
After almost a month of soccer (I know, I know, everyone who really knows what’s up…it’s called football) overdose, watching the World Cup in Lima, I took a taxi through the endless, seething streets of the city to the Transporte Molina bus company, bought a ticket and headed out for the town of Huanta, where my cart and my walk waited for me.
As luck would have it, however, a large farmer’s syndicate decided that day to hold a national series of road blocks to protest the signing of some free trade agreement with the States and other American countries…for some reason, free trade agreements kind of get local, already poor and oppressed farmers a bit agitated, what with the knowing that already absurdly low agricultural revenues will drop even further.
I’d caught wind of it before leaving, and made a point of asking the folks at the bus company office if it would be affecting my route to Huanta….”no señor…todo bien” (nah, everything’s peachy) they said to me with crocodile smiles…and so I hopped on board.
The ride started out like all other South American busrides: lot’s of pushing, shoving; little women in multi-colored clothes lugging WAY too many bags of beans, rice, potatoes, small children, and various farm animal body parts into the aisles with them, followed by WAY too many people squeezing on board, sitting in the bag-filled aisles, followed by another surge of WAY, WAY too many people oozing into every available nook and cranny, forcing the remaining breathable air out of the bus, leaving us all in a sweaty, smelly stifling human sauna. Of course, no bus ride in these parts would be complete without a slightly malfunctioning TV showing some movie (this time an at-least-tolerable Matrix) with the accompanying broken speakers blasting the resulting distorted Spanish dubbing at somewhere near 112 decibels.
I began the fruitless struggle actually sleep, and, miraculously, finally found it just before we stopped (not at all uncommon, seeing as though all buses around here seem to stop at random intervals for completely unknown reasons) and, ominously, the driver shut off the engine…something they only do if we’ve already launched off a 1000 foot cliff, or some other verifiably dreaded thing has happened. I managed a glance at my seatmate’s watch. 4:30 in the a.m. Why do all unpleasant bus experiences happen at some godawful hour of the morning?
As people woke up, whisperings began to circulate, which led to murmuring, discussion, and eventually yelling and shouting at the not-to-be found driver and his assistant to get “the fucking bus on it’s goddamned way”…encouragement that, in this case, had no effect.
It just so happened that the roadblocks were indeed affecting my route, and that we were confronted at this very moment by the first of what turned out to be 6 similar, but different obstacles over the next 30 someodd hours. It was cold outside. I could feel it seeping into the cabin of the bus. I snuggled as far into my seat as I could, resolved to sleep until I could actually see what the hell was happening, sure that we’d be on our way in just a bit.
I woke up a 11:00, light having long since joined the cold inside the bus. We were at altitude, the gnarled teeth of mountain tops near at hand. In front of us large stones and small boulders were strewn across both lanes of the road.
I climbed down to the pavement, groaning as I involuntarily stretched my cramped muscles to that point where you wonder if your joints are going to snap.
Guarding the impromptu rock garden were about 25 campesinos in their rustic ponchos, their legs puffy with 2 or 3 pairs of pants, protection against the biting cold. Each of them was carrying a sling…yep, the david/goliath style sling popular with warriors, hunters, and shepherds since time out of mind.
(I just now looked up slings online. Seems that they’ve been in use for many thousands of years all over the world…through diffusion or independent invention, who knows)
Ahead of us were three buses and a truck or two. I looked behind us and was shocked to see over 60 other vehicles, mostly buses and trucks, snaking into the distance. There must have been over a 1000 people in the buses alone.
People mingled about on the road, slept on the shoulders. Some people got together and hoofed it an hour and a half to a little village that was making a killing off our predicament in this foodless land, selling cooked potatoes and rice for breakfast and lunch.
I read for a while until a large group materialized out of nowhere and started shouting at the rock-garden guards to let us through. Well, the rock garden guys (the protesters, in case you’re lost) didn’t like was being said and began to rain slinged rocks upon us…which sent us all scurrying back into our buses.
Holy shit…there’s a reason slings were and are so popular…these dudes were hurling large stones at least three times as far as a pro baseball player could do…and with unnerving accuracy and force.
Some idiot (thankfully he did it right before I thought to do it) in another bus took out his camera and snapped a few photos of the protesters…which really pissed them off (seeing as what they were doing was illegal) and they bombarded the guy’s window and the whole bus in general, knocking out all the windows, denting the vehicle until it looked like it had inside-out acne, and generally scaring the shit out of all of us.
Ah, but men will be men, so it was only a matter of an hour or so until guys started trickling off the buses again, whispering half-baked plans to each other of out-flanking the protesters (who had a decided, and pre-calculated geographical advantage, being stationed on a steep slope above us) and driving them away… luckily their plans died in the making…at least until later in the day…and cooler heads prevailed. A small group of people negotiated with the protesters and around 4:00 in the afternoon they came to an agreement and we were allowed to clear the road of rocks and head on down the road.
About eighty of us jogged ahead of the crawling vehicles, lugging stones to the shoulders, clearing a path just wide enough for the buses to pass. In Just a few minutes we were in the clear.
We got about 2 miles. And there, before us was a huge rock garden, almost a half mile long, bordered on one side by an imposing cliff and more steep slopes peppered with around 50 protesters.
The bus passengers were not happy at having been stopped again, and they (we) poured off the buses in unison and marched just out of sling distance. And that’s where things got ugly. the protesters were obviously (as evinced by their slurred speech) drunk, and the passengers tired and angry, and about 20 minutes of insults ensued with all kinds of threats (we’re going to burn your buses, we’re going to burn your homes, we’re going to kill you all with stones, we’re going to kill you all with our stones (sans slings), come up here, pussies, no, come down here faggots, etc.).
All the while the only two, yes, count them two, policemen to be found within four light years were hemming and hawing, trying negotiate, being shouted down, booed at, laughed at…then one guy, a lawyer who was travelling with son and wife, the son being a bit under the weather, yelled up “listen, we’re on your side, here…just think of your own families…I have my son here and he’s ill…what if he were to die because we couldn’t get to the city?” to which the drunk protester unwisely replied “well, then, let him die”.
Like a shot, about 30 passengers bolted up the hill toward the sling-armed protesters…also an unwise decision…including this young, zealous Floridian named Steve. I watched as he got within about 100 feet of one of the campesinos, who proceeded to nail poor Steve twice with stones, luckily small ones.
The other protesters set up a pretty organized perimeter and set huge signal fires going on top of the nearby ridges. The area instantly took on the hues and shades of a full-fledged battlefield. The angry-drunk protesters also fired a few slinged (slung? What the hell is the verb for a rock hurled by a sling?) rocks at the crowd, one of which came within 2 feet of hitting a little girl, and another which landed about 10 feet away from me. This set off another, more concerted charge by passengers, (and a prudent retreat by yours truly) who set fire to fields and hay stacks as they went along…I felt like I had time-warped to some ancient Roman conflict…where was Maximus when I needed him?
Anyway, the passengers continued up the hill, trying to get where they could reach the protesters from behind, who, despite being shit-faced drunk, did a pretty decent job of securing their lines and protecting their flanks.
Women with shrill voices were egging on the…let’s call them “busmen” to avoid confusing them with the rock-garden guards, who we’ve also been calling “protesters”…saying things like “get up there you faggots and fight those drunk faggots” (they love to use inflammatory language about gays) and meanwhile those of us who weren’t milling about like lost, slightly frightened sheep went edging along the road ahead to see if we could start cleaning rocks off of the road without getting nailed from above by, well…rocks.
I was there with them…partly out of curiosity, partly to feel the adrenaline that floods you when you know a stone might be denting you noggin at any minute, and partly because almost ANYWHERE is better than being in a bus seat. The occasional rock thudded near me. Zealous Floridian Steve and I got to a point where only two people way up on the ridge were watching. He whispered to me, as though we were in a foxhole, about to charge nearby enemies “I’ll clear the road, you look for incoming stones…and warn me, ok?” I nodded, liking his idea of teamwork. And so I looked for incoming stones, as he cleared away boulders. It was a little dance of terse phrases: “incoming, Steve, move to me” and “incoming, way off”, and “incoming…shit, watch out!”. Others around us started doing the same, and pretty soon we’d cleared a large chunk of the road.
Then I started to hear what was most definitely gunfire. I stopped and tried to pinpoint its source, but with the cliffs and ridges on both sides of the road, it was aural pinball and I hadn’t a clue if someone was homing in on me or was shooting 2 miles away. Finally, though, and with a sigh of relief, I saw where it came from.
Marching down the road to us, from the direction of the caravan of buses and Trucks, was a tightly packed group of “busmen”. At there head, one of the scarce policeman, who, maybe after seeing the girl almost get hit by the rock (which would have most definitely crushed her skull into pulp), or the now very-much-like-a-battlefield-look to the seven or so fires raging on the hills, decided enough was enough and grabbed a friggin’ AK-47 (that’s a Russian-made machine gun, for the uninitiated) and started firing short bursts into the air just above the heads of the protesters. I stared at the gun…dull black, simple lines, infinitely functional there held close to the cop’s chest. It looked heavy, solid, somehow sinister, and totally freaking deadly.
I fell in with the group as they reached us and was just 3 feet away from the dude as he let off a few rounds toward the guys who’d been pelting us with stones. I, of course, jumped about half way out of my skin, and lost all hearing in my left ear forever more…(I would make one shitty soldier…when a gun goes off like that, I involuntarily cringe and my eyes clamp shut with every “POW”…probably not highly desired reactions in the heat of battle…and may I never again be that close to that sort of gun.)
We immediately started up some more home burning, bus burning, sexuality-defining remarks with another group of protesters, one of whom began firing a shotgun into the air…I was sure he was going to get dropped by the cop, who thankfully showed admirable restraint. The yelling, stone throwing and gesturing (just imagine two rival tribes of chimps in the jungle thrashing in trees, thumping sticks on the ground, biting the heads of unwary little mammals and pounding on their chests, acting all bad-ass but actually not wanting to really have to fight, and you have the general picture of the scene) increased in volume until suddenly, in a complete non sequiter that actually had me chuckling out loud, one of the stone garden guards yelled down in a friendly voice. “hey, quiet just a second, we’re going to consult” at which time the whole group of protesters huddled up like a gaggle of cheerleaders giving each other a pep talk. Fifteen seconds later, the leader turned to us and yelled down. “OK, you can go, if you want…if you give us 20 soles (7 dollar) for burning our hay stacks”.
And in the blink of an eye, that particular battle of the Great War of Some Free Trade Agreement Thing That Has Us Blocking the Roads and Drinking Too Much was over. We all loaded up onto the buses after cleaning the rest of the road, charging through the “gauntlet” of suddenly-former-rock-garden-guards. As we passed them, a rock (those ingrates…we’d just forked over 7 bucks!) shattered a window toward the back of our bus and another thudded against the roof.
And I thought we were home free, but not an hour later, as night fell, we came upon a small town that had “rocked” the road. A bunch of us got out and began walking to clean up the stones. From behind a nearby wall hidden townspeople started throwing rocks at us. One “busman” spotted a culprit and leapt after him, grabbed him, and dragged him down to our group. For a minute I thought the poor guy was going to get torn to pieces, but in the end, a bunch of people just took half-assed pot shots at him while others held him…they called him “our hostage”…I had to stifle a nervous chuckle…I had a feeling these guys thought they were in their own favorite Jean-Claude Van Damme flick.
Just on the other side of a bridge in the town, up a hill, a group of hazy silhouettes hurled insults and stones at us. One of our busmen got caught flush in the forehead and began bleeding like a stuck pig, another guy, just next to me, got smacked in the arm. Again, this gringo beat a prudent retreat out of sling range.
Things started to escalate again and this time I thought we might actually start blazing people’s homes. But, almost magically, and just as comically as before, the townspeople went from “We’re going to rip out your livers and dine on them” to “Ah, shucks, y’all get on through here…and come on back, now, ya hear?” Our “hostage” was released with pats on the back, we cleared the road of large chunks of mineral, and again hit the road.
We hit a decent stretch at that point, even stopping in a small village to get some food, the first I’d had in 24 hours. But later, as had become par for the course, we came upon a mountain pass that was riddled for a couple kilometers with stones and sometimes huge boulders.
Our bus drivers refused to go forward, as reports of a very large, very drunk, very aggressive group of protesters were trickling down to us from the police and some locals. I went to sleep, bewildered and resigned to the fact that my supposed 9 hour bus ride was turning into a never-ending journey.
At 4:00 in the morning our bus rumbled to life, along with all the vehicles in the caravan, a gentle rumble rolling up the hill with each diesel engine started. For the next two hours groups of “busmen” (I lasted about 20 minutes in the crazy-cold night air, my sandaled feet quickly turning into chunks of ice) cleared rocks away, the now 75+ strong caravan of vehicles idling along behind us. The hours passed. We trundled through remnants of other roadblocks, occasionally passing a hardy (and drunk) soul shouting insults at us.
When we got into the city of Ayacucho, we were told that we had to wait another hour and a half for the bus to Huanta because they wanted to be sure that the roadblocks were over for good… I just nodded dully and went righ to sleep….
And finally, exactly 36 hours after leaving Lima, I finished the “9” hour trip to Huanta.
3rd World Math at its best.
And I wouldn’t have traded it for anything because it was such a fascinating experience, showing off all the wackiness of 3rd world everything: an angry citizenry (and rightly so, in general), an ignorant citizenry (most didn’t have a clue why they were blocking the roads), a violent citizenry (those dudes are aces with those slings, and when drunk, willing to use them), wimpy bus drivers (more concerned with their vehicles than their passengers…although that’s a very U.S. mentality, too, I guess), shoddy communication, (no radios on the buses, no working radios in the friggin’ cop cars, either!), greed (the buses should have never even left Lima…hell, we should have never been sold tickets in the first place), a laughable, almost nonexistent police force, (well, ok, the AK-47 was scary enough), and a general lack of any coherency on anyone’s part as to what the hell was going on, why, and how to resolve it (short of “Let’s burn those faggot’s homes!!”)
So, in summary, class…9=36…and don’t forget to bring your slings next time.
what’d you say?