But the trip must go on and a week later we board a comfortable Cruz del Sur, first class bus to Puno, at the shores of Lake Titicaca. We recline on padded seats on a bus line that shows art house foreign movies and has a bus attendant dressed the same prim way that flight attendants used to dress. “More mate tea?” she asks. Even Juana likes the bus, which stops for high altitude, big basin, cratered lakes, for vicuna and llama packs and lets us out to take pictures. We stand perched on the side of the road, cameras pointing, and marvel at the clear, thin, cold air. The formidable range of the Andes is the far backdrop to the sweeping, dry, deserted plains. It is like crawling your way on the moon.
The only movie Juana didn’t like was the last one with the sound of baby babble as an inherent and immutable part of the soundtrack. “Why baby?” she asks plaintively. “It is the baby Jesus cult deeply embedded in Latino culture,” I say authoritatively. The eternal curse of mindless life repeating its cycle of poverty and low expectations, the tribal nature, the collectiveness of it, both endearing and repulsive. It leaves us on the outside looking in, which is what I enjoy about traveling, but it poses a problem in explaining ourselves to people like the travel agent in Arequipa who sold us the bus tickets. Who are we to a woman who looks like she is cast from an Aldomovar movie? A woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown who considers this a Spanish upgrade in costuming, so as not to be confused with baby on the back, braids and cloth sack. A woman with heavy mascara, deep cleavage, a bad but vivid dye job, flimsy but high heeled, gold sandals. “No husbands? No children?” she asks whe curiousity just gets the best of her. Juana does not go into the history of the gay liberation movement, feminism, she seems tired instead, unlike the time she told someone we had thrown the husbands into the Bosphorus. She smiles wanly and lets any misunderstanding be attributed to the huge linguistic gap. We travel, in part, to be incognito or at least think we are, looking for the special status that is afforded the observer and foreign outsider.
“Lake Titicaca!” the bus stewardess proclaims and we stare down at a similar but bigger basin of water than the lakes we have passed. The bus winds its way down through the shantytown, whose predominant color is baked mud. We step off the bus in Puno, the town on the shores of the lake and I know immediately that I have gone too far. Puno can not mask its problems, which even seep into the tourist infrastructure. A gold-toothed woman whom we have entrusted to take us to a hotel seems coarse, heavy jowled, a variation of the travel agent in Arequipa but one who has seen harder times. The light has an even brighter, high altitude, close to the sun quality that etches objects into the mind. I tell the woman that I feel like I have come to the end of the world, “el fin del mundo”. She laughs a smoker’s laugh, full of plegm. “Not the end of the world,” she reassures. She has been here always, her family has been here always, back, back before any tourists even thought of coming, this was a navel of the world they knew. Before the highway was put in, when it took days, weeks, to climb down the mountains to dirt roads that led to Arequpia or Cusco, this was the world of her ancestors with their flat hats with red fringes, with their many shawls layered against the mountain cold and many skirts that flared out from the waist. The hotel she takes us to is a sad affair, smelling of bad plumbing and baby poop, cracked concrete. There is an interior windown in our room, covered with a curtain, facing the stairwell. At night, when Juana gets a rare night of deep repose, I listen to a woman crying intermittently, hear her running up and down on the hard stairs, a man following her, protesting, screaming. In the morning, when they try and charge us for something else, my Spanish becomes more fluent with anger. “Somebody crying. Somebody screaming. Don’t talk to me about more money.” The woman’s face takes on the sorrow of the world, downcast, swollen, her crying. The man has dark circles under his eyes, ducks behind the counter, his screaming.
We leave Puno within a day or so, not even bothering to see the islands that the guidebook calls “tourist traps.” We are frustrated with Peru on some level, in that we can’t really seem to get far in broaching the enormous gap between tourist and native. Other countries have provided more access and it is almost as if Peru’s geographic terrain, the vast, inhospitable, arid stretches, the craggy, formidable Andes mountains represent the lengths we would have to go to really experience the culture and the people. Everytime we think of going outside the center of town, the designated tourist center, we are warned with gasps of surprise and with palpable fear for our safety. The one night in Arequipa that we ventured to the periphery of city’s center, where the shutters became dinghy, where the broken pavement wavered, where the houses had chunks of white stone missing, we were approached by well meaning people and told to go back. Go back to the main plaza where lights sculpt the rococo, ornate porous stone of church facades, go back to where you can have an expensive cocktail and look upon the serenity of the plaza, go back to an indigenous market and buy something. Soon, the vast shantytowns surrounding Lima city center, the entrenched hovels carved into the hillsides of Arequpia, Puno, Cusco, grow as oppressive forces in my mind, they come to occupy the peripheries of Peru, the untold miseries, danger, poverty and chaos always there, only slightly out of view, ready to implode, to cave into our vacation plans. By not knowing them, by fearing them, I feel like I don’t even remotely know Peru.
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