On the road to Cusco

 The bus out of Puno to Cusco was not nearly as nice as the Cruz del Sur line.  For reasons we did not yet know, Cruz del Sur did not take tourists from Puno to Cusco.  We meet an uptight, bespectacled man who is traveling alone.  He is wearing a cap proclaiming “Achievement First” and I ask him if he works in a charter school.  My enmity for him grows as he expounds on “school reform” and how much he has grown to dislike teacher tenure.  Given that I am almost ready to collect a pension based on teacher tenure, I am incensed by young people talking about how poorly I have done my job.  He is young but growing fat in the middle, a small, sad looking guy clearly missing his clipboard, walkie talkie and other accouterments of his charter school, administrative job. He seems an unlikely traveler to Peru, a few vacations out from the beach in Hawaii or a Princess cruise.  Then there are the gaggle of English girls, a high spirited high school group with plans of trekking every Inca trail in and out of Macchu Picchu.  There is a German man with his young son, doing some quality bonding, all decked out in expensive hiking gear, all whistles and bells, interlocking straps and velcro, mountaineering logos on expensive, breathable weft and warp outfits.  The bus is a barebones affair for all the tourists it is carrying.  It creeps up the highway to Cusco, higher and higher untl the landscape is as dry and barren as the moon and the ice covered mountains are closer and closer.  And then the bus stops like it is dangling in mid air on an exhalation of breath.  

“Huelga,” says a very thin, pretty Peruvian woman who is sitting next to the Achievement First! guy.  He has been trying to flirt with her and I at least admire his taste.  She is polite but distant in the way of all South Americans who aspire to be European.  

“Strike,” she says in English.

“Well, cheers!”  the English girls begin eating crisps and digestives, begin playing word games.

“Huelga?” I ask and glance at my water bottle which is just half full.

She is preparing for a long sleep, putting a mask over her eyes, bedding herself down for a long rest.

“Oh yes, many, many strikes in Peru, all the time,” she says with resignation in her voice.

“Indigenous demands?” I ask and she eyes me curiously.

“El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido?” (the village united will never be defeated) I say the chant of Latin America that has become the catchall leftist slogan everywhere.

“Yes,” she says as if indigenous demands were just about the worst thing to ever happen to Peru.  “Gas prices,” she adds. “They are angry about gas prices.  And it could be hours or more.” 

She vaguely waves her hands towards the outside moonscape.  I shudder and imagine the night darkening, the high altitude cold like the prison that American leftist Lori Berenson nearly died in.  The unheated bus, maybe the random light of the moon.  Was there a full moon tonight?

“They take rocks and put them in the roads, no one can get through,” the Peruvian woman says.

“Why don’t we just push on slowly over them in the bus?” an English girl asks.

The Peruvian woman looks askance at them.  Young, privileged girls going trekking on cheap, third world holiday.

“They will throw stones through the windows.  Someone will get hurt,” she says matter of factly.

Indigenous demands.  My sympathies are with them.  From the time of Pizarro, they have been exploited.  Yet, as the hours will creep by and my sense of safety diminishes, I know I will be tested on this committment.  I am sure the universal pariah, Lori Berenson,  despised by almost everyone we spoke with in Peru, would still not waver.  Yet, I already feel my ugly conservative tendencies surfacing.

“Your English is excellent,” I say to the Peruvian woman.

She smiles and tells us she leads tours of Patagonia and have we ever been there?  The implication is that this would never happen in Chile.

“No pueblo unido there?”  I ask.

And she smiles again and with it, the mysterious, vast geography of South America falls into place for me.  There are the countries aligned that are profoundly and perhaps dangerously committed to undoing past colonial designs - Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and there are hierarchial, fascist leaning countries - Chile, for one.   

We will spend many hours at high altitude on that bus.  No police ever arrive. The English girls eat all their junk food and start throwing up, my water bottle registers empties, I start to get a headache, Juana disappears for a long time to go climb some mountain so she can see the strikers better.  At nightfall, the bus, along with all the other backed up traffic, starts to slowly descend.  We don’t reach Cusco until late that night and end up staying in a posada that is so old and off-kilter it looks like Pizzarro stayed there.