Foiled Again
Sunday, 31 July 2005
Despite having a fantastic plan, involving being on buses for eight million hours over a stretch of two and a half days where we would arrive in Pisco completely triumphant this morning, the forces and fate of Latino America was not having it. These people know how to shut down for a fiesta, and so we are stuck in the North of Peru. Ho hum...
Noone can say we didnīt try though, weve been in 8 bus stations in two towns, and even to an airport, staffed by a cleaner and an old woman who sells sweets, she rang her mate for us who said he might be able to get us flights for Lima by bribing people and charging us more than twice the price of a normal ticket if we hung around for a few hours. It somehow remined me of the last internal flight I tried to do in Peru, where there were going to be people sitting in the isle of the companies one plane and where I ended up having to frog march a bloke who already had a black eye into his office to get my cash back, so we decided to stay here. The mass exodus to Lima for this festival probaby means its a bit full anyhow.
Maladita Sea! We were supposed to be being swift at this point as weīve got half a continent to cover by 22nd of September. I spent most of the journey out of the mountains in Ecuador staring out at sun on the clouds and vast mountains hoping the crumbly narrow roads werenīt going to fall down the side of the mountains and wondering where the groups of mothers with gruby children tied to their backs at the side of the road came from, and where they went to when they got off. I couldnīt see any houses. One of the roadside foods in Ecuador is whole massive spit roast pigs which are just floating there outside houses on the side of the road like lord of the flies revivalists.
When we got out of the mountains and had our passports looked at around nine or ten times by men with various bits of artillery we were allowed into Peru for about nine hours of trundling through deserts full of droughty looking trees, with sun sucking their water out of them and platic bags instead of leaves and rubish swirling around shanty towns.
When we get to Pisco it will be triumphant.
On August 06, 2005, gael said:
World-wide travellers could have collided in Peru! I am in the upper corner where Peru, Brasil & Columbia meet on the banks of the Amazon - heading towards Iquitos for next 2 weeks. You are probably further south working thru the rest of the continent. I hear Bolivia is beautiful .. . . and coolddd. Good for Brits!
PS If you had to skip the South in the USofA, you missed the best white trash . . . next time!