Communists Make Me Hungry

APPETIZER

The gang and I spent some five days in Lima, and the equivalent of two-and-a-half days wondering what we should do in Lima (and surfing the internet). It is interesting how each person has such a different conception of what travel means . . . is it relaxation? Contemplation? The tourist route? Trekking and physical activities? Put four intelligent, independent, college-educated young men together and you`ll see right away that there is no real answer. (Not that there would be for four unintelligent, dependent, elementary-school-educated people either.) So between Lima and Lunahuana (a little tourist town just outside the capital) we patched a bit of everything together -- cardgames at a restaurant overlooking Limeñan Chinatown; watching the Vice Presidential debates in a hostal sideroom with a slightly-psychotic expat improvisational dancer; dodging tamales filled with pigskin (hairs still on the skin) before getting stuck on a bunch of rocks in a river while attempting to raft; fratboy-style jokes a dime a dozen, disgustingly freed by the language barrier; philosophical conversation with one of my best friends as we look out over a massive McDonald`s across the street; and a Tashlich ceremony I will never forget: tossing breadcrumbs that represent my shortcomings over the past year into the Pacific Ocean, watching the waves claim each one with a dull roar, as Lima`s nearly-perpetual fogginess distorted the line between sea and sky.

THINKING THAT THE WAITER IS BRINGING YOUR MAIN COURSE TO YOU, BUT THEN SEEING THAT IT`S ACTUALLY FOR THE PERSON SITTING AT THE TABLE NEXT TO YOURS, WHO GOT THERE AFTER YOU DID AND SEEMS TO REALLY REALLY ENJOY THAT FIRST BITE

I went to Machu Picchu yesterday. I`m not going to write about it just yet.

MAIN COURSE

We took a bus that was supposed to take sixteen hours from a city just outside Lima to Cuzco, which is the traditional jumping-off point for Machu Picchu and a host of other archaeological curiosities. We found one that cost seventy soles (about $25), by far the best deal in the land. So we hopped the Wari -- I had a feeling that this company`s name automatically evoked the anger of some ancient god, and as a matter of fact it is the name of a pre-Incan empire that lived here in Peru -- and proceeded to sleep very, very little. Most of it was because each bump in the road felt like a jackhammer, but there was also one point in the night where a loud noise and a dramatic swerve woke me with a start. Well, the next morning we discovered that the right headlight had been replaced with a . . . hole. Via basic translating skills (the word ``burro`` being said by the locals over and over again) we deduced that we ran into a late-night donkey. A donkey in the headlights. A slow donkey in the headlights, because I imagine he must have saw us coming.

And the show had just begun at that point. The four of us were discussing some conjugation of some irregular Spanish verb when the bus came to a stop. This is not unusual (in my experience) on Latin American bus trips -- just as my not knowing the reason for stopping is not unusual -- so we paid little heed. For the first half and hour. Then we heard a collective yell from a little further down the road, and Joe craned his neck out the window to see what the matter was. He reported that there were trees in the road, so we all automatically assumed that some had fallen over the course of the night and that some teamwork was being employed to lift them out of the way. Furthermore, Joe is 6 foot 8 (quite a bit taller than the average Peruvian) and we imagined him lifting the tree off the road with his bare hands, saving the day for the long line of buses and creating a legend of the Tall Man that would be perpetuated in this lush Andean valley for centuries to come.

Well, it was actually a Communist Revolution that was stopping us. And no, they would not let us through just because none of us had eaten breakfast (someone asked). We were to wait for two hours and listen to a long line of stump speeches, with varied levels of anger and intellectual sophistication, while a highly-apparent subgroup of the rural farmers wielded machetes or poles with sharp wooden fragments coming out of them. I obviously understood very little, but I did catch that they are very low on water and that the government needs to change because it is not working for the People. Which, from what I learned in my Latin American Politics lecture from Junior Year, sounds juuuuust about right. You could tell who was a part of it by who applauded after each speech (they scattered around the group for the sake of coverage) and who looked confused and a little bored. I found myself vacilating between two feelings: a strange sense of disappointment that these people were not inflamed by the Cause (``No history, no Castro is being created here, bud``) and an occasional freak-out because the kid standing behind me was a little restless and rustled his feet around in the brush every so often. After looking at some people further down the road sitting on some jagged boulders (also part of the Communist Traffic Block) the feeling that this Revolution was making me hungry began to build. So I returned to the bus and waited. If it wasn`t for the women selling maize and little cheeses about a half-hour before we started up again, the Revolution would have surely put me to sleep. But then I felt better, and we saw the Communists on the left as we passed them and Nate exchange a little wave good-bye with a few of them. Thank You For Participating! We were back on the road.

And then the Second Communist Revolution came, which was pretty much just obnoxious. This one involved a few logs burning in the middle of the road, right next to a little local foodmart that experienced a sudden surge in business. (Interesting how the Revolution increased revenues, huh?) The group of us got a bottle of Coca-Cola (soda is drank like air is breathed in Peru) just at the point when the Second Revolution let us all through again. So we chugged and ran down the line to find our bus, which was when we realized that there very well might be more than one Wari bus and we had no idea which one was ours. Which led to me bolting down the road, chasing a bus that had three people hanging out of it motioning to me that I had the wrong one. But who could we trust? What was their Cause? And one of them was attractive, wasn`t she? Anyway the right bus was just behind and we boarded without issue. And at around 7 PM -- some 24 hours after the first boarding -- we arrived safely in Cuzco, freshly constrained by
political turmoil yet freshly rejuvenated by our mutual first cups of coca-leaf tea.

DESSERT

``Drew`` is hard to say in Spanish/Castillian, and when I introduce myself I find it easier to say that my full name is Andrew, which is like Andrès in English. The man whose couch I am surfing here has simply taken up Andrès as a name for me, which is about the third or fourth time this has happened. Which means you all might have to update your contact entry for me, real soon. Because this Andrès is something of a maverick, and he is on a team of mavericks, so you can expect him to you know disagree and also be appealing if you like that kind of thing.