A quick update…

Awhile back, I got to the city of Ayacucho, in the heart of the Central Andes of Perú…the former home base for the Maoist terrorist movement with the cool name, Sendero Luminoso (or Shining Path) taken from the name of one of the ancient Inca.  Tourism is still trying to get up to speed in these parts ever since the group was disbanded in the early 90′s when its leader and some top henchmen were tossed in jail.

I took a day off in the city, wandering around, enjoying the oh-so-latin-american appeal of central plazas, all that life strolling, striding, lolling, and hanging out in one place.  I went to bed that night with plans to head out the next morning for the 7 day 260km walk to Huancayo to the North.

But I woke up the next morning with a raging fever and a hacking cough trying to empty lungs full of phlegm…I’ve never before felt such a quick and unexpected change from wellness to crappiness.  I languished in bed for another 2 days, watching nearly every movie available on cable, even resorting to checking out the Gourmet cooking channel. 

I was ancy, wanting to walk, so even though I still felt like crap, I saddled up the cart (so to speak) and hit the road, walking the entire 45km to Huanta in one go.  Once there, light-headed, and shaky, I found a hostel set up in an old colonial hacienda, and immediately holed up in my room for another 2 days, hitting a high enough fever in that time to start to hallucinate a bit, and in the process scare the shit out of myself that I was going to die there, in some one-llama town, from some strange sub-tropical disease.  That thought, and the general stir-craziness that comes from lying around sick in bed for 48 hours straight got me outside once again.  I think I scared the poor hostel owners with my visage: green-skinned, wan, sunken eyes, cold sweat, achy-boned shuffle. 

The next morning was no better, and I’d had enough of lingering in Huanta, so I decided to head by bus down to Lima to renew my tourist visa, buy some stuff for the cart (tire protectors, a new front wheel, etc.) and recuperate in a place where a viable hospital could be readily reached…just in case.

And so, Lima it was.  A huge, sprawling, gaseous, gray, noise-riddled metropolis…it’s winter skies an unchanging sheet of rippled-tin clouds, of morning fog, of trapped smog…not very inviting or attractive, really, but home to a hostel called Loki, a home away from home that had a long list of dvd movies, a bar, free breakfast, a big screen showing all the World Cup games, and tons of travelers from all over the world…a perfect place for a sick walker to get well.

Dahi and Dror, two of the owners of the place, were kind enough to offer me a volunteer job working at the reception desk in exchange for free lodging and 40% off food and drinks…

And so the weeks passed, clocked out in football games (9:00, 11:00, and 2:00 every day), music (a couple guys had guitars and we unleashed a few great jam sessions…well…great to us, at least) and beer (nothing more dangerous than a running tab at a bar where you get drinks at a 40% discount)…

Somewhere in there, my fevers lessened and then disappeared, and my cough, though obstinate, finally decided to go away…and yet I stayed.  I was hooked on the World Cup, and comfortable in world of dvd’s, poker games, music, and interesting people.

There was Seb, the affable Englishman, the bringer-together of any and all, the organizer of parties and poker sessions, Mark, the young Irish ladie’s man, one minute with a loud, obnoxious latin version of Janice Joplin, the next with Lula, the 19 year old girl fresh in from England, Igal, the awesome, soft-spoken Isreali guy who just made you feel good about life by being around him, and Angelo, Chicky, and Mauricio, three guys from Lima who spend their entire weekends hanging out, drinking and playing music at the hostel before going back to jobs as lawyers and embassy employees.  Then there was Erik, the Swedish poker whiz, and Fabiola, the pretty, funny receptionist, and Freddie…oh, Freddie, the English cokehead, all-drugs-in-general junkie, with his sallow skin, infected feet and stinky clothes, staying up for days at a time, lurking like a vampire in the TV room, lines of coke laid out on the coffee table in front of him, a tortured guy, but at the same time so innocent and sweet, and Dave and Jimmy, with their jokes and guitar playing, and Garrett, champion Irish drinker, great guitarist, doing lines off his debit card (I’d never seen anyone do coke before getting to lima…), and Emma and her pretty face and sad eyes, and Deborah, her rum and coke sitting next to her bowling socks, and her so-unecessary insecurities, Julio and his coke-bottle glasses, and Shaved-headed Neil with his take-all-stairs-four-at-a-time stride, and the Canadian girls and their “party at all costs” approach to every evening, and Tanya and her reluctant bartending and Tania and her ability to stay up all night and all the next day, sitting in the same spot, with the same expression, and her beautiful accapella dirges, and Sinead with her absolutely unintelligable Irish accent, and Roy and his French girlfriend, and crazy Engish Dave…

And the list could go on, because that’s what it’s like staying for more than just one spin of the revolving door world of hostel time…tons of people coming and going, it’s a world of perpetual transition, almost zero stasis…a place where you could easily meet a hundred people in a week, have a great time with every one  of them and not be able to remember a single name.

The work at the reception desk was unchallenging, nothing more than checking people in, checking them out, putting the resulting data and cash in the necessary places, answering the same questions a million times over…”5 soles in the taxi to get downtown”, “yeah, that bus company goes North”, “No, we don’t take credit cards”, etc.

Finally, like a switch being flipped, I decided it was time to leave, and before I knew it I was on my way back to the mountains with healthy lungs and atrophied limbs, caught in a nightmare 36 hour hell-bus ride back to Huanta (see the 9=36 entry).

When I reached the old hacienda house where I’d stored my stuff in Huanta I was surpised and humbled to find that the owners had decided to give me a huge discount on what I owed them for my previous stay.  Kindness rains down so unexpectedly sometimes.  Later that afternoon, shopping for the next leg of the journey, I ran across Zealous Floridian Steve from the busride.  He invited me to visit his family later that evening.  I accepted, and at 8 that night found myself sitting in a cramped upstairs room with the Johnson family, each of us on metal bunks, surrounded by half-packed boxes…I felt like we were in some behind-enemy-lines safehouse, discussing plans to overthrow George Bush or something…except for the frequent and engaging laughter and the general silliness. 

The Johnon’s it turns out, are independant missionaries come down to this tiny town in the heart of the Peruvian Andes with the goal to stick around and do the positive things that missionaries do.  They came down from Florida mostly over land, in an old, clunky car, in buses, hitchhiking, and finally, after finding themselves stuck in Panama with nearly no cash, flying to Lima Perú with tickets purchased for them by a kind, wealthy, recovering alcoholic gringo they’d met while passing time at a local AA meeting in Panama City…yeah, the Big Dude does seem to work in mysterious ways, eh?

As I said goodbye to the family later that evening, the mom came up to me and handed me a heavy chunk of something in a plastic bag.  “What could it be?” I thought “the Book of Leviticus?  the New Testament?  A chunk of the Cross?”  In the end it was a block of pure brown sugar made from a local Agave plant, actually the same kind that they use in Mexico to make Tequila.  The sugar is amazing and I have to continually stop myself from gnawing my way through the entire 2 pounds of it in one sitting.

I think one of the reasons I got sick awhile back was because as I’ve walked, I’ve done a pretty poor job of maintaining an adequate and balanced diet.  First off, it’s hard to recoup all the calories lost in walking 26 miles day after day, up and down mountains.  Secondly, I’m just not a very imaginative food preparer (otherwise known as “cook”) and my diet therefore suffers.  One of my goals coming back from Lima has been to eat more, and more healthily…and so far it seems to be going well (except for the overwhelming desire to eat 2 pounds of cactus sugar in one bite)

I just finished up a 6 day 130 mile stint on the road, along the beautiful Mantaro river valley.  Cliffs, canyons, rapids, pools, hydroelectric stations, shitty gravel roads, lots of cactii, and little red biting flies, poverty, winter crops, kind people, fruit trees, goats, old ladies, cyclists, melted-mud homes, a friendly praying mantis, a sore hip, much dust, and heavy moons.

My friend, Marieke, a Dutch woman just crazy enough to give this walking thing a shot, has now joined me and we’ll be heading North into the high country for a few days before hanging a sharp left and heading down to the Pacific ocean, and the Panamerican Highway.

I hope all of you who read this are well and happy. 

much love

ian