On the ocean side of the highway another jumble of dwellings appears, literally meters from the upscale seaside suburb preceding it. Armed guards man the prison-like entrance gates and the waves of the Pacific thunder to shore in the background. Except at their apexes, the hills look to have been excavated to desolation; ground here is blanched and barren.
Basketball courts appear in the dust. These interminable slums, many buildings of which have crucifix-shaped doorways, are shadowed by a new mountain, bleak and enornmous, with the words Peru Moderno etched onto its side. Like a good Westerner the scale of poverty makes me cry and I avoid looking out the window of our luxury coach for fear that she will see me and ask what is wrong.
Now green-painted garden sheds scatter the immense plains. The bus makes a pitstop in Picusana to refuel. In the sheds live families who fly the Peruvian flag, similar to its Canadian counterpart sans maple leaf, on their warped tin rooves. Still, there is hardly anyone around; likely at work in one of the industrial zones or in Lima. Bulldozers and oil tankers seem more common than cars here. Locals barter at a market near a small olive grove, with the biggest refinery yet consuming the background, probably the foreground too with its fumes. A football stadium, houses, hills, ocean.
We are not forty minutes out of Lima and its must be said that the money has dried up, unbelievably under the noses of those fabulously profitable industries destroying the very landscape these people live in. Unsurpassed poverty flung in faces by ore dust and up noses by oil fumes. But then the money dried up - for most - a pace or two each way from Miraflores, that bubble, that fiction. Money is the true otherworld; we are aliens and I have never been more aware of it.
In parts the view of the sea is spectacular. Cacti grow from the sand and sparkling inlets do not subside until the highway´s edge. Palm trees and crop fields provide scarce oases of green on massive moonscapes. And then there is a resort golf course whose lush fairways are being flooded by a modern sprinkler system. Across the road are perhaps ten thousand people without sewage or running water.
The small city of Ica passes by. Its municipal office, with all-glass facade and daring architecture, is bewilderingly conspicuous in this huge electrified hovel. There are hotels but no reason to stay. The shimmering mirage of that building haunts me long after the highway abounds again in emptiness. For hours now we have stuck to the coact and I pine for higher unpolluted ground.
As the sleeping tablet wears off I look bleary-eyed up the bus and realise what a steep ascent we are making. The sun is rising over the Andes. Light inches down the peaks; everything else still in shadow. Smoke stacks in a valley mingle with the clouds, morning hues of soft pink and yellow, upon which we nearly perch. And it is true that there are smatterings of houses but shadowed houses, asleep and wholly insignificant in this place where nature is everything. Reaching for my Ipod I see my hands tremble.
Now half the mountains are sunlit. Snaking higher and higher, giant embroidery reveals itself below, the first snow-capped peaks supervening over landscapes of immeasurable beauty above. One peak, the largest, is like a spur jutting from nowhere and I ride its white immensity with awe.
Lines of ploughman scythe the earth - I guess for corn, or quinoa, or potatoes - on this stretch of flatland we now cross. The villages here are beautiful. Green pastures, more animals, more space that is not sand dune drilled and dug to oblivion. Some of the paddocks have soccer goals set up on unsown land. I even see a tennis court. And churches are being built and pictures of electoral candidates are posted everywhere and the movie White Chicks, overdubbed in Spanish, plays on the series of screens hanging from the coach roof. In glaring sunlight, the sort I have experienced only in the Rocky Mountains and out the windows of planes when above the clouds, every blade of grass, every roof-tile sprouting weeds in its mortar, every steeple and mountain top speaks to me as if I were in the middle of an echo chamber the size of the world. Much here is to be rejoiced and I rejoice it, glad that she is still asleep beside me. A stream, women walking along its banks in colourful clothing with firewood on their backs, does not follow us around the next bend. Presently Cusco appears.
A city entrenched in mountains, 3400 meters high, guarded by Inca ruins and the huge Cristo Blanco overlooking the Plaza De Armas, arms outstretched, illuminated to a glow at night. Here the sun shines so pitilessly that 20 degrees feels like 40. The Spanish influence can be felt everywhere, from narrow cobblestone alleyways to beautiful cathedrals and, of course, the language. Locals are prosperous in comparison to Lima, and friendlier. Artisano selling ponchos and felt hats vye with adventure tourism outlets and other hagglers of innumerable persuasions, shoe shiners masseuses tattooists money exchangers, for the attention of wealthy Westerners. The police presence is visible and big. Mangy dogs sleep under street carts selling popcorn, pineapple, skewered meat, trinkets. And everywhere, everywhere, like the city motto or a religious mantra, there appears those two words much bigger than themselves: Machu Picchu.
Altitude sickness is common here and we are advised to take things slowly, drink plenty of Coca tea, limit the amount of food we eat for a couple of days. Ignorantly I do not heed the warnings and develop the worst migraine of my life, as though my eyes were about to burst. She, on the other hand, is fine; I struggle to keep pace as we explore the downtown. Of course there is a McDonalds in the Plaza De Armas. I go in to shit and hear disgruntled Americans railing against a lack of sweet and sour sauce.
In the Koricancha temple, once the largest in the New World, we follow one of the Dominican Friars still in residence down a fenced off walkway, into a forbidden room. The door he enters next is locked, but another path leads to an exhibition room without exhibits. So we go in and discover a small chamber, roped off, housing pieces of contemporary art; mannequins with necks a meter long, with two heads, Jesus lying on a pyre made of leaves, Jesus headless, Jesus two-headed. I shiver at the thought of what effect it al might have on that old friar. Then we hear footsteps and tiptoe downstairs.
Next day we follow the tourist circuit to Sacsayhuaman ruins. Barely an hour from the Plaza De Armas, the steep stairs and rarefied air make me feel three times my age, heart leaping from my chest and a throb behind my eyes. I am seeing stars and giddy. Perhaps my iron is low, she suggests. Will I take one of her pills? Though it makes sense I give it no credence - she brushes it off but I am furious with myself for being so cold.
Dripping with sweat, we give the park officer our tickets and step into a place of incredible silence, and incredible beauty. We walk down dirt paths canopied by trees with spiky red flowers. I notice her hands shaking. I touch the back of her neck; cold. Are you alright are you alright? Too stubborn to say no, she pushes ahead. Moments later the path ends and a wooden fence, fixed together by strips of alpaca leather, arcs around a sort of viewing platform with a tall crucifix standing in the middle. Resplendant in the sun, Cusco appears before me in full for the first time. I can literally see every building to the mountains on the other side, onto which Viva El Peru has been impressed inside the most gigantic coat of arms in the world. Floral wreaths rest against the base of the cross, and to my left the Cristo Blanco is set upon by hoards of tourists.
Further into the grounds, what marvellous stonework we have been traversing and rubbing with our hands falls way, plunging into a moat-like central valley where llamas graze and another, grander outpost of this ancient fortress rises up again higher, steeper, more picturesque. Before we head down, however, she asks to take a rest. She is shaking and her stomach has cramped and she needs to sit down. So we sit in a perfectly square corner of stone, drinking water, eating a few mouthfuls of a Quinoa bar, feeling the tempo of our insides start to level out. Then silence, until as I expected she concedes that she cannot make it up the next rise. And I hold her and tell her not to worry, to find a peaceful place on the flatland and lie down, that I am not faring much better and will only be a few minutes. And I force her to finish the water.
I start to climb. Quickly the throbbing reasserts itself and my vision is stippled, as if I were looking at millions of tiny blades of grass trembling on a breeze. But it is windless and cloudy and whatever grass I see stands still. From the top I am granted more panoramic views but can hardly appreciate them, so loud and resounding are those thuds! So loud, I understand as I catch my breath, that they are in fact independent of me. Yes, the thuds are definitely external, and booming. Over the next ridge I see at least fifty people dressed in white robes; most of them look Peruvian but at this distance it is hard to tell. They are moving eastward in single file, dancing eastward almost as a bizarre conga-line. The thuds grow louder as the line fans out and ascends a slope, eventually settling as a horizontal barrier facing the lower ground. I move curiously to a better vantage point and discover a circular field of grass below, surrounded by staggered walls of stone, perhaps a ceremonial site in Inca times, where throngs of people, obviously white-skinned, use sticks to beat the biggest drum I have ever seen.
They chant according to the directive of a woman who has red hair and is dressed in outrageous leopard-print robes. Her face is covered in freckles and glitter. A camera has been set up on a tripod but is manned by another white girl in typical hippie clothes who cannot go five minutes without launching into dance, like a grass blade on a breeze. The sound, intensified by that amphitheater, reminds me of drumming I have heard at gatherings back home, as do the clothes the Gringos wear. But in setting and in sheer unexpectedness - I will never know how they gained permission to stage such a ritual here - it is without precedent. Slowly moving closer, falling further and further into the trance that seizes me whenever I hear percussion at such thunderous volume, closer until it is I who have a stick in hand and who beats the drum and clashes sticks with others and closes his eyes in submission to the noise, I can only guess - from beliefs I already hold - that there is a small population of disaffected Westerners here, as in Nepal or other places famed for their cradling of spirituality, who have taken too many drugs to forget the ills of their own world, perhaps of their own sad former lives, and ended up staying on, ironically - some would say pathetically, but not me - becoming more concerned with the metaphysical aspects of the place than any locals, who simply happen to lead their ordinary lives in extraordinary surroundings.
And I beat along with them because I both empathise with and pity them in equal measures. That it should take such an upheaval of self, of identity, just to feel a sense of belonging! But my empathy tells me the creation of a new self or the abstraction of the old is the only way to achieve what we have self-flaggelatingly called contentment, which even then is always a knife edge away from being shown up as absurd, phony, fraudulent.Red headed lady in leopard robes, man with long greying hair dictating the flare-ups and come-downs of the drums, I commend you for trying. No-one could accuse you of being half-hearted, beating a car-sized drum so far away from home.
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