Suddenly a horn was slammed- and held. It blew towards his ears on the wind, wavered, vanished, returned. Wind lashed off the mighty Saint-Laurent, cold enough to anaesthetize bare skin in minutes. Instinctively James braced himself for the crash of an accident, but when the crash didn’t come he looked back over his shoulder and saw a giant snowplough, the first he had seen in his life save for an episode of The Simpsons, straddling the curb near the corner of Haldimand and Mont Carmal. Huge tires scudding haplessly along the icy footpath. Snow everywhere. People screaming.

 The truck was making no attempt to right its course. Perhaps fifty meters away there stood the old man who had been shoveling snow from a shop entrance some time earlier, when James had passed. They had waved to each other, even said bonjour. Now the shovel was limp at the old man’s side and it seemed impossible that he would not be hit. Cupping his hands over his mouth in terror, James spluttered as he gulped in too much frigid air, caustic on his lungs. He couldn’t look away. He watched as, by some miracle, the snowplough’s enormous yellow bulk came to a halt at the last possible moment. He watched the old man grab snow from the ground with gloveless hands and pelt it at the passenger side window. Gesticulate madly. And finally he watched as the old man took off his Canada Goose jacket, laughed, climbed aboard. Meanwhile she had kept on walking and was now some distance up the hill, almost undetectable in the whiteness.

So they were friends. This dead of winter which made people indoors claustrophobic and dry-lipped and people outdoors, under their huge coats and balaclavas, anguished with cold; as he quickened his steps to catch her James thought how comforting it was to see a little spirit on display, no matter how reckless. After all, weren’t the Quebecois renowned for their sense of humour? Through shock and exertion his blood seemed sprung to life, he could move his toes again. Hear the thud of a rising heartbeat and the silence of car tires on fresh powder. Falling more heavily now the snow veiled buildings, made snot gush from his nose and freeze solid on his moustache, salty icicles goading the tongue, lick them off lick them off, when to do so would only make more.

It felt as if they had been climbing forever. To James’ left was proof of that ascendance; the old port, the bus terminal next door, the maple markets (he had bought some apple butter for his mother there), the Old City walls, all slowly coming into view. Sparse, sweeping outskirts dotted with low-income apartments and shopping malls. But above all there was the Saint-Laurent. Half-frozen, run into by scores of tributaries, the nation’s most powerful river in all its staggering immenseness. Next to it the Murray was a murky leak, the great sheets of ice floating downstream as wide as the Yarra itself. Not far from where he stood it would begin to form an estuary amongst the largest in the world. Stopping to let a woman pass on the narrow sidewalk, James bore the brunt of the wind and gazed riverward and she said merci and he, having to think a second, said c’est rien back. She was talking on the phone. Moins vingt-sept was all he understood. Then the huge gables of Chateau Frontenac appeared. Behind them the sun’s orb, sheathed in white cloud, looked paler than normal, as if the sky were a tremendous egg laid by a starving hen. As the rest of the building took shape in front of him James was forced to take shelter in the gift shop of the old funicular, his fingers feeling incurably frostbitten under his gloves. So much for the $100 price tag. An urge to piss roused him and, as the river left his mind, she entered it. He pressed back out into the open, strained his eyes in both directions. There was no sign of her anywhere. Something to show you: that enigmatic sentence was the entire justification for this walk, this suicide mission. And now she was gone.

The green trellises are split into jigsaw pieces. They are split into pieces by fern trees, crooked, which bear the furry yellow balls I have piled on my lap so as to eat the nuts inside. Behind the trellis is a sort of junkyard patrolled by desert dogs with thin bodies and long tongues. There is an iron crucifix on a padlocked wire gate leading to another junkyard. In this hostel garden, four cats doze wherever the sunlight splits the green canopy into pieces and my notebook dances with ferny silhouettes. When the sun leaves, so do the cats. The heat of the open air and menace of those dogs keep them from lying on old car bonnets or tin roofing next door.

Yellowed by pollen, a table tennis table supports the weight of a picnic set spread out in readiness for lunch. But thirty minutes pass and then an hour passes and still nobody comes to eat. And when finally it becomes a fixation spoiling my rest I struggle out of my hammock to see if the plates are dirty. I walk by a tree with bright pink flowers, full of singing birds. One offers a guttural mating call that sounds more like a frog – his tiny chest heaving from the strain. Onions are frying somewhere. In the corner of my eye a mannequin appears. An armless legless female with tongue-like aloe leaves where her head should be, cinched at the waist with barbed wire. A garland of thorns uprooted from an absent head and slid down over those shoulder stumps has settled at the crest of her perfect plastic hips. She is decorative. She is massacred for art.

Her image makes me pause a moment to consider a sentence that has been turning over in my mind, since I haven’t written for perhaps a week.

It seems to me that he is chewing a crown of thorns; the holier his words get, the bloodier his gums.

Nothing else has come to me in connection to that fragment. It is a garden among junkyards. All it will ever be is one of the growing block of sentences referring only to themselves, belonging to no greater whole, which I have added to so prolifically in recent times. So large has the block grown that it is now almost tangible, a dark and forbidding barrier to fluid thoughts, a second set of eyelids. People sometimes call it ‘writers’ block’.

Dam a river though, and the pressure, the energy held in reserve by the wall is akin to a concentration of untold distances, a summation of forces from the entire river before that barrier. Were the wall to burst, the currents immediately afterward must run freer and more powerfully than could ever have been possible without the initial dearth of the blockage. Plates, crockery, knives – everything is spotlessly clean. Soon, however, a group of drunk guests consign it all to the dust and pollen and nut shells of the ground so that they can have a game before their own lunch. And I break the tip off an aloe leaf to rub its riches over my cracked hands. Then I sink back into my hammock. 

It is a happy coincidence that this city's political namesake should have shared his with the French word for sugar. Arid as the climate is, rippled as the air is with heat, in the shade of the palms and acacias of Sucre's Plaza De Mayo it is difficult not to feel that a curtain has been lifted on a sovereign's secret Paradise. The buildings, constructed using the profits of silver mines once the largest on earth, are grander than any I have seen since Lima, their garish white facades cleaned biannually by government edict. World class chocolate stores have fountains in the windows and the fountains in parks are actually filled with water.


Bolivia was signed into existence here. One of the signatories was Bolivar himself. By definition - but not in a practical sense - Sucre remains the nation's capital. And, though President Morales and his parliament sit in the larger, more prosaic La Paz, this place has an undeniable air of stateliness, superiority. Not twenty minutes ago, when our bus was still chugging through slums, interspersed here or there by a half-built mansion or military compound or creek with thousands of plastic bags snagged on its stony bottom, I would never have believed what could be awaiting us in the center. One of the recurring paradoxes of this continent, however, is that wealth begins with an almighty bang, an explosion of grandeur equal to or greater than those in the Western world - what edifice in Melbourne could boast of even half the splendour of the Palace De Gobierno? -  but peters out in concentric circles to relative and then abject poverty with phenomenal speed. For example, central Lima could be mistaken for any European capital; cross the bridge into Rimac, fifteen minutes on foot, and the garbage-filled streets are wrecked and roamed by little children in the night. Colonial hubris built all those plazas hiding the destitution surrounding them, like great trees promising an orchard but instead standing in the middle of loveless pastures dried out or gone to seed. Is it symbolism before the people, then, or for them? What physical sacrifices is one prepared to make for a sense of achievement, pride? Because even those residents of Sucre who are not fortunate enough to live inside that magnificent blast radius can still claim to be part of The White City of The Americas. 


The central market is three stories of tropical fruits and technicolour spices, fresh bread and wheels of spongy cheese. Cuy, Lamb, Llama carcasses often still have tufts of pelt attached, or tails. There are pig heads bleeding from the eyes in boxes of offal. Upstairs, an eating hall capable of accommodating two hundred people heaves under the strain of twice as many. They eat a savoury breakfast of Chicharron pastries, drinking porridge and Papa Rellena, the latter of which we sample. For me it is the beginning of a love affair. After buying all the food we need for three days and a bottle of rum, we are $15 poorer.

Later in the day I give a shoeshine boy five Canadian dollars and his marching orders. "Mucho Nuevo," he says, crunching the plastic bill down and snapping it out again. He was crying and grabbing my ankles and his polish containers were empty. Meantime a new mayor is sworn in behind us, replete with brass band playing military songs, youngish crowd roaring. His name is Ivan and his photograph cannot be escaped; as for his opponents, I see nothing at all pertaining to them. One of the onlookers is the manager of our hostel, a Swiss man of 6'4 who seems to be a sort of unofficial town mascot. Everybody knows him and acclaims his presence with loud shouts and embraces. And that deafening mania, of which we can only be drowned-out spectators, arrests my focus to the point of hypnosis.

Thoughts of home, like a sudden ring of the telephone after a period of total silence, storm into my mind. University, job, my family; all are incursions into this holiday peace we all pine for but can never really attain. Day by day those thoughts become more solid, and when at last they are bodies again, when I can smell the paper of library books and hear my mother's voice, I will be forced to bid her goodbye. I am thinking for the first time about the goodbye.

Soon we are accosted by a pack of shoeshine boys, led by the one to whom I gave the Canadian bill. Waiting peacefully for the sunset is impossible. Those dirt-spattered faces, eyes covered in pink swimming goggles, English 'please' repeated over and over in voices quavering on the edge of sobs, more hands around my ankles; we retreat to the hostel, buying some dark chocolate and a few churros on the way.

...

La Mina

Her fleeing spirit catches
on rocks on the empty shore;
on seaweed strung
around ankles coarse
with stubble, fishing lures
rusted and washed up are
reborn - a tent pitched, tides surfed,
ties torn.

And sunning on a rock outcrop
with birds dead and alive
she feels like the last woman,
last mermaid beyond sexual reproach,
without shame or pride or pair
of self-reproving eyes or smell, or taste,
or noise.

She fashions a fence of stones,
sits inside,
untouchably watching
mussel nets rake the surface,
dark black buoys and orange buoys
and duck-diving birds scatter in the vapours;
limp nets pulled in, dripping, piled
at the stern of little wooden boats.
She imagines the noise of them piling.

Desperate to piss,
she clenches her buttocks, ties
and reties her hair to distraction,
walks laps of the twilit beach;
plunges chest-deep
into water grey with silt
but cannot go, cannot abnegate
the perfect finishings of her family,
cannot stop thinking of her dad.

Build a stone wall then,
a box, an outhouse, a hollow
cairn homage to the human anatomy,
build pretty diversions with shattered brown glass-

red-eyed Inca birds place her,
without them she is nowhere;
she wishes they would fly back to Ballestas.

Wooden, half covered with flaking green house paint, the tour boat has a few boards nailed to the roof as makeshift seats. Below is blackish water thickly laden with reeds, yet to be lit up by the rising sun. Cold wind whips off its surface and chills us to the bone.

Far enough out so that Copacabana appears in full on one side, the distant Island of the Sun on the other, I feel my excitement begin inexplicably to melt away, as though I were suddenly reminded of having seen all of this before. I fall silent and she is silent and conversations in Norwegian and Swiss German become all I can tolerate, simply because the words are not words to be, only sounds interspersed with the occasional and jarring familiarity of a´Ja´. My head is empty, save for a vague flicker of images and thoughts, those inextinguishable, pulsing reminders of being alive. And then she she turns her back to rest on my left shoulder. I am startled but soon go back to nothing.

Those gulls, those black-billed ducks; can they diffrentiate between lake and sea? Out here I guess no-one can, for it is endless azure water on either side of this, Isla Del Sol´s highest peak, overhung by clouds low enough to blow away with a birthday puff, distant currents like silver oil slicks, cows eating withered waterless bushes on precipitous slopes, lambs with red ribbons quietly listening to their elders bleat. Nomadic sheppards padlock huts, perched like lookouts over the water, while sowing crops on flatter land; as I walk along, alone, sometimes silent, sometimes singing, the full force of my imagination rushes back, my thoughts in all their shambolic entropy, and I tug padlocks on those clay idyls and from open, deserted guesthouses steal bafs of coca tea. Stopping only to piss or reapply sunscreen - the day is cloudless and at maximum heat, not to mention my relative proximity to the sun - I have torn away from the other tourists and from her.

This path undulating through the island belongs to me, rouses me from my morning torpor and trips me up on glittering ore-stone and burns me with its charity. Birthplace of the Incas! But what does the word Inca mean to me? Referent to a great civilsation, or the name of a type of soft drink? Part of the puns above butcher´s shops, bus terminals, restaurants, or indexical launching pad into history?

...

The road to Coroico twirls like a pinwheel, paved and then unpaved, rounding mountains or tunnelling through them, opaque in the film of morning cloud still lingering amongst the Yungas. Like its sacred Peruvian counterpart, this subtropical valley abounds in verdant greenery, the air heavy, the scale one of hair-raising enormity. And like enormous colanders, scores of thin waterfalls spurt from these mountains, carving out sharp gullies to render their sides wonderful puzzles of geometry, white miracles running a thousand meters down before drying up not three from the dead riverbed far, far below. Giant banana leaves canopy the road and the skies are policed by gliding birds.

We share a collectivo with twi Boliviano families; the only other vehicles encountered are trucks, tour buses, anti-narcotics four by fours - this area was understandably a haven for cocaine production - and the odd banged up taxi with its bonnet up on the roadside. Chulumani and Chuspipata come and go. Stopping to refuel, I am about to enter the baño when an hombre, wearing black gumboots and gold aviators, signals ominously with his index finger: 1 Boliviano. I hold it in.

Soon both families are gone. The first to leace consists of a mother, father, two young children and grandparents. They are dressed in the latest western fashions and alight at a five star resort. The other family is a mother with one boy and one girl, possibly twins, enigmatically carrying plastic bags full of flowers. They disembark at a windowless roadside shack. And though I didn´t notice, she tells me later than, sitting side-byside. the first family had looked upon the second with utter disdain, as though they were of a lower order entirely. Not in a touristic sense either, which is closer to the way one looks at a different, but by no means inferior, race of people; no, like overlords upon the mastered. It saddened me to hear this- my conception of Bolivia as a bitterly poor country but one poor in solidarity - poverty after all being the world´s great unifier - was irretrievably changed. With what frequency must that first family have cast those subjugating eyes! Knowing nothing of their situations I nevertheless worried for both sets of children but for the wealthier two in particular; everything this country did not need - nor does any country - was already impregnated in their helpless little minds. The archway bidding us Bienvenidos to Coroico also displays the slogan, ´Welcome to Paradaise´. I laugh at the unusual spelling, though I will never know if it is intentional or just a pitiable gaff.

One in the afternoon now; we find ourselves walking uphill again, steeper this time and in extreme humidity, towards a campsite we can seem to find no trace of. Up and up over the tiny town we rise; the terrain is lush and the vistas of the Yungas breathtaking. Banana trees, full of green bunches with their wand-like flowers dangling underneath, mingle with bushes of red hibiscus, ferns beset by some kind of fungal infection, trees with tiny jungle oranges that are the sweetest I´ve ever eaten. It smells of rain, soil. Butterflies of myriad colour and size dart past our cheeks, jumping spiders startle her; hummingbirds; yellowtails; grasshoppers small and bright red; inimitable sound of a certain bird, I do not know which one, who, perhaps streeting towards its prey, will hold its wings close to its body and launch at phenomenal speed down into the valley, trailing behind it a noise that summons, in my mind at least, that menacing whoosh on cartoons when the fuse on a stick of dynamite is lit.

Another hotel but at last a sign, an arrow; we are headed in the right direction. Excitedly we round a bend, haul our heavy packs over the next rise. There is a small military compound but no campsite. I look back at her; cheeks purplish red, fringe, stringy with sweat, stuck to her forehead. Put your things down, I tell her, while I go ahead and make sure it´s there. She nods and I give her a kiss and water. Thirty seconds after setting off I stop; it is there.

Once the tent is up I pass a quiet hour absorbing what is truly an ample reward. Officially an ecolodge, the grounds command unparallelled view, set on the hillside in segments connected by wooden stairs strwen with tiny purple flower. The relative altitude obscures the rest of the town as if it were not there at all. And opposite us the Yungas plunge down into a gorge and rise again sharply in green mountains, staggeringly high, leaking more miraculous water.

There are two swimming pools, hammocks slung from bamboo, a mediation room - glass panelled - where the view alone is enough to put one in a trance. The stone hot tub, however, is empty and fire wood costs extra. We pay $5 per night to camp. For four days her tent is our home. Cramped, without mat or sleeping bag save for a colourful Boliviano blanket bought in La Paz, the tent, pitched in the shade of a huge banana tree, affords me little rest but I hardly care. Roosters crow at around 4; stirring then, I rise soon after. And in the early hours all is shrouded by thick cloud. Even the sky looks hopelessly overcast. What a transformation to be awake for then; slowly the sun imposes itself on the shadows, slowly there appear things - objects, plants, insects, birds - invisble before. And by midday, after I have sat in the Sala Mayu for an hour, never able to vanquish a last thought from my mindm usually the most untapped and trivial (this morning it was the lyrics to Britney Spears´ ´Sometimes´) swam, showered, eaten breakfast and chosen a good vantage point, at last the valley and sky become clear, cloudless, bright as stars, and all the inhabitants of the jungle are again in full song.

One afternoon, thunder claps from far off down the gorge. We have just washed our clothes in the stone sink at camp and have them all spread out to dry- on seats, logs, the rafters of a small communal hut with thatched roof and walls made from mud and beer bottles. In the middle off the bottle-butts there stands, on the back wall, the figure of a Frangelico monk, which I find an inexpensive and cool display of piety.

Before long half the sky has turned black. Asleep in hammocks, we are finally raised to our feet when one bout of thunder sounds as if the sky is breaking in two. She rails against me for saying the clouds were going the other way until I point out that they are, in fact, going both ways, bad coming toward us and benign floating out to other lands. She rails against me for making that mistake. We rush to put everything in the tent. It rains hard all afternoon and all night. Under the hut´s thatched roof we play cards, drink whisky, eat fried bananas and take in the spectacular deluge. Later, when the tent has cooled down, we make love. And in that sobering after-effect of sex I realise we would stay here for months if we could. This is a dangerous thought; only weeks left and still so much unseen. Next morning she asks me will we stay another night, but scrap our plans for Cochabamba and head directly to Sucre instead. I agree to everything.

We came from the sacred mountain,
squat on rocks and staring at clouds
boundless, and the Old Mountain hosting
a thousand specks with fifty dollar tickets
gushing at roofless temples
and waterless fountains-

We came from Canada
for novelty passport stamps,
for Inca-trail t-shirts-
climbed for the thoughtless
vertigo of fatigue- and maybe,
in those giddy seconds,
for an unpeopled moment when only
green and white and quietude abounded.


...


Tax on our boarding passes paid; all Puno buses preparing to leave. Through the departure door and gate we pass and settle outside amongst other backpackers, leaning our bags against a concrete pillar. Stray dogs are sleeping on the tarmac warmed by recent engines. When the space is filled they move to an absent one, slinking, with the precision and nonchalance of lifetimes on the streets, impervious to the shouts or rocks hurled by locals, nonchalant between man and machine and other tired dogs. The night is cloudless and cool. I wear a cardigan I bought at an inflated price from one of the selfsame Cusco artesanos, holding her from behind because she refuses to haggle out of anxiety and so remains in none but my long-sleeve thermal and an old leather jacket. Nearby a couple from Spain talk to a couple from Russia in English while a Japanese girl listens tacitly from the shadows.

Luxurious coaches come and go in legions. But ours does not come. Perturbed, we look at the boarding passes given us in haste by a woman who at the time of issue was on the phone and trying to Pacify a furious Peruano man of perhaps eighty years. Not only do they indicate a change in bus company, but also that we have both paid 15 soles less for the seats. Moreover, stapled to the back is another boarding pass, for Copacabana, Bolivia, that we did not purchase. And when at last a big, battered bus bearing the name on our tickets, Libertad, pulls into a different gate than we had been advised, with a cardboard Puno on its massive dash, we have no choice but to get on.

The air vents do not work and the windows have been locked shut- normally trifling problems, except for the small puddle of motor oil by my feet. Impossible to complain now though; locals have made their dash to the dilapidated second storey and shoved their huge colourful bags of goods into the cargo hold. I say a quiet curse to the bus company and feel stupid for having been duped. In context, however, things are not so bad. Splendour or squalour we are on our way. My immense fatigue should permit me some sleep, no matter how high I become in the process. And all the Peruanos, so quick to start snoring around us, are comfort enough that this ramshackle coach will go where we need it to go and that we will see our bags on the other side.

...


But some places, as a consequence of our own state of mind upon entering them, unwittingly, innocently acquire what we like to term bad energy, a bad vibe. This trait is almost always terminal; it cannot be reversed and will ultimately effect a judgment of an entire city or even country based on nothing but our caprices. And, excepting those few to whom a genuine misfortune occurs somewhere that forever associates the name of that place with a set of memories they would rather forget, it is usually the case that when somebody says I dont like that neighbourhood, they will point to dubious, ineffable flaws; strange people, weird energy, bad vibe.

Strange people? Obviously an assertion belonging to the sphere of pure subjectivism. Let that same person make a second judgment after receiving one small act of good faith or kindness in the area where such strange people live: watch how his opinion shifts. The opposite is, of course, true as well. But caprice and misunderstanding - combined with our so often being too quick to judge - can virtually turn paradise into hell.

Other factors, most of them subjective as well, also come into play. Do we find the place physically appealing, beautiful to the eye? Do we like the style of its architecture, the layout of its streets? Are there too many or too few green wedges? What does it smell like? What, broadly, is the ethos on display, and does it comport with our own?

Puno is on the receiving end of some bad press and a hostel too far from the bus station and a fight her and I have in the central market and its unscupulous treatment of the Lake Titicaca foreshore. In spite of its upsides - for there are surely some - it is forever cast in our minds as a place with no touristic appeal, a place as daark as the clouds gathering in the hills behind it on our first afternoon, which, although they soon lighten, turn to that wet season blanket of white that swathes the sky and consigns a whole population to the indoors. Empty streets turned to red mud slicks. Lake stripped of all its beauty. And cow skulls in pothole puddles by the roadside. We leave for Bolivia the next morning.

Then the oil silos, a graveyard, a carnival; this carnival of humanity sandwiched between the hills and the turbid sea. As terrifying as they are thought-provoking, almost visual philosophy in terms of their total human realism, the slums continue unchecked, uncared for. We roll on. Pens of withered cattle and more mines, refineries, quarries commingle with the brick hovels. Political graffitti extolling this or that candidate, or liberty, or hope, is scrawled over any available wall space.

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.