Diarios de Peru - 1

I do not consider myself a skilled  narrator of travel tales.  I lack a suitably non-kinky and  laidback sense of humor and an air of sophisticated lyricism that I think are the major prerequisites of  good travel writing.  It is extremely unlikely that reading a piece written by me about some place would get anyone excited enough to visit it. In fact quite the contrary.  To people who think I greatly enjoy travel ( they simply go by the amount of travel I put myself through), I often have this to say, "I am a born pessimist and it gives me great pleasure to travel to other countries and cultures to reaffirm how miserable people are  everywhere".  Despite all this, since I am dead bored right now, too lazy to work, and have suddenly found a two year old  travel diary while moving house (where I had kept assiduous notes of my Peru experiences), I  have decided to transcribe some of that to my blog here.

"This is the seaport, not the airport....."

Driving all by yourself on the Interstate for  a quarter of a day can be boring.  Annoying, if you have to pee as frequently as I seem to need to on long road trips. Unless you are one of those people who reach a transcendentally tranquil state (like Rahul Dravid batting to save a test match) while driving.  It was a moderately bad idea to begin with, to drive from my campus town somewhere in the north-central part of Florida to Miami to catch the flight to Lima.  That I had a broken GPS halfway through, made it very bad.

It was ok while I was on the highway for it's just one straight road with lots of toll booths. But I totally lost my way in the notorious Miami traffic. Miami feels like being already one foot into Latin America, and the unruly traffic does little to dispel that feeling. A couple of wrong turns and I was off the main road, it was getting quite late and I was moving in circles around some sketchy looking streets.  After a while I took a decision. I drove straight towards the few highrises I could see figuring that it would be the downtown area and I could find people to ask directions there.  Suddenly I burst onto a thoroughfare which was blazing with lights and a lot of traffic even around midnight, and saw some signs for the airport which I enthusiastically drove towards.  After a while I almost rammed into a police vehicle which was blocking the way in a very presumptuous manner. As I saw the policewoman step out of her car with a half-angry and half-wtf  look I realized I was on a dead end road, and traffic was supposed to go no further.  This is where years of being an Indian schoolboy comes in handy.  Before she could give me a mouthful, I made a rather helpless expression and squealed an apology, "Sorry ma'am, I am looking for the airport."  It worked.  Her facial muscles relaxed into a grin,  "You've reached the seaport, sir!  Please back up and follow the road to the right....blahblah".

I finally found my way to the airport and then traveled around a bit more in circles looking for the place where rental cars are supposed to be returned.  Just as I was turning in the keys to the lady at the desk, I realized I had forgotten to fill up the gas tank (they fine you heavily for this in the US).  I put on the truant schoolboy act again, and soft-hearted lady  excused me the fine. As I sat down to wait at the airport terminal, I congratulated myself on my ability to charm wide-girthed middle-aged women in positions of authority.  Just then a sexy-looking college age young woman struck up a conversation with me.  She was visiting her "boyfriend, well sort of" in Brazil (oooh la la!).  She was bored to death and wanted to help the janitors clean the airport instead of just sitting there.  She wondered if  Peru was near the Bahamas, and if we spoke Indonesian in India. I wanted to ask her if having dirty sex in lonely early morning airport bathrooms would help relieve her boredom (somehow women who talk silly tend to make me very lustful) but of course didn't have the courage to. Instead I smiled sweetly and gave her some apples because she complained she was hungry.  The Brazilian stud boy can have all the fun. I now wonder why I didn't facebook her.

The flight was smooth. We changed planes in San Jose, Costa Rica.  Things looked very green and pretty, mountains and tropical jungle and all.  Costa Rica is a vassal state of the US, and as a result the only place in central America that has known some peace and prosperity in the last hundred years.  White people like to pay cash and play around here, like they do everywhere else I suppose.  After another uneventful flight (thumbs up to TACA, Costa Rica's national carrier) , I was in Lima. It's a large ugly city without much character where a third of the whole country lives.  Public safety has improved since the unruly Shining Path and Tupac Amaru days but petty crime still remains a concern.  I took a taxi straight to the bus station, not willing to waste one bit of my precious holiday time on this metropole.  And I booked a place in the fifteen-hour bus ride to Arequipa, much to the south.