I just stared at him. “What?” Jodi asked. “He says it’s 20 cents to use the door.” “What? WHY?” she asked the man. He shrugged, and reminded us that it was 20 cents to use the door. “Do we have another option?” I asked. “No,” she said, and pointed to our bags, now on the other side of the Plexiglass. It appeared we had no choice.
The man didn’t have change, so we had to go to a booth in the terminal that exists for that purpose. On the other side of the door, the world was no different, except that our wallets felt slightly, unfairly, lighter. And that I suddenly had to pee. At the bathroom, I was relieved of another 20 cents, which was only slightly less annoying because I had come to expect it by now. Men usually pay 5 cents, and I have tried to get a discount, perhaps to the male rate, for having my own toilet paper. This doesn’t fly. It’s 20 cents, whether you take toilet paper or not. So the only conclusion I’ve been able to draw is that I’m paying, essentially, for sitting on the seat (if there is one). I’m thinking that maybe next time I’ll ask if it’s still 20 cents if I both bring my own paper and promise to stand.
Later, in the market, we pass a stand selling fruits that look like small red and green Koosh balls. Jodi wants to try them, but they’re $1 a bag. You can’t buy half a bag. The lady gives her 4-year-old child one and tells him to pass it to Jodi, which he does, and after peeling it for 5 minutes we discover it’s sort of like a bland lychee. “Thanks,” Jodi says. “5 cents,” the lady replies. Nothing in life, it turns out, is free.
As we turn away, we nearly trample an ancient woman with no teeth, bright eyes, and bare feet like hooves. She comes up to about our waists and though we can’t understand her, we know from her tone that she’s asking for money. I find it easier not to give anybody anything, but Jodi always has a soft spot in her heart for old people, so I try to piggyback on her good karma. She gives the lady the rest of our change, and the woman’s face lights up, she kisses the coins and blesses the Santissima Virgen.
Usually, at several points throughout the day, we calculate how much money we’ve spent. We’ll think we’re doing pretty well, having counted all the food, buses, and lodging of the day, and then we remember the sitting on the toilet seat, the trying of strange new fruit, the alms to the poor and the 20 cents to use the door, and we realize we have been nickeled and dimed to above our budget. So I’m wondering if next time, the revolving door man will let me pay him in trade—if my urine is worth 20 cents, maybe I’ll just embrace my masculine side and pee right there on the door.
***
After two and a half months of travel, you begin to formulate a very clear conception of heaven. Heaven is a place where you don’t have to unpack, repack, or lift your backpack for a whole week. Heaven is a place where you don’t have to worry about stuff getting stolen, whether you carry it with you, leave it in your hotel, or leave it on the beach while you go swimming. In heaven, you never have to decide where to eat and worry about how much it costs. No one tries to overcharge you for anything, and English is spoken. And then you get off a plane and discover that Belinda was right, and heaven IS a place on earth—the Galapagos Islands.
The whole thing was like a reality show without the challenges or the vindictiveness (what’s left? you ask). 10 strangers, plunked on a small boat in a place foreign to all of them—how will they interact? Will the two single people share a room in harmony? Who looks best in her bikini? Who’s got the coolest accent? Hence, I include the superlatives from Survivor: Galapagos.
Most enviable talent and profession:
Reto, the Swiss photographer with approximately one ton of camera equipment who took photos that looked better than real life. We all wanted a CD of photos at the end, but he has to sell them to magazines. Life is tough.
Most positive attitude:
Lisa, the American girl traveling on her own who kept smiling even when the airline didn’t let her on the plane and she almost missed the tour, and when several of the crew persistently begged her to elope with them.
Best quote:
“It is such a dangerous country, America—so many wet floors.”
--Stefan from Switzerland, relating his most memorable impression of a visit to America.
Biggest mystery:
Where the British couple, Carly and Paul, got their money—when asked how long everyone was traveling for, the usual response was somewhere between 3 weeks and 6 months. They, in contrast, are traveling for 16 months, after which they are getting married in Spain and then traveling Spain for 6 months to decide where they would like to live. No, we’re not jealous at all.
Closest call to near-hospitalization:
Jodi, when she stepped on a sea urchin and suffered multiple impalements to her heel. The captain said if she hadn’t been wearing her fins, she would have had to go to the hospital, as he gleefully sprinkled vinegar onto her foot, joking that he was “making ceviche,” a native dish featuring raw fish, vinegar, onions, and lemon. The spines haven’t come out yet.
Most imitatable habit of speech:
A tie between Jan, the Dutch retired headmaster who, whenever he agreed with you, which was often, would say, “Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh” very quickly, a la the “Yip yip yip” Sesame Street Martians—or Alfonso, our guide, who was constantly pointing out all the possibilities for things: “This iguana is starving because there is too much competition. He is going to die—maybe not today, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week—nobody knows.” Or, “Tomorrow we will go hiking for one hour, then snorkeling for one hour, and then stay at the beach—maybe for half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour—depends of you.”
Rosiest cheeks:
Claudia, the last of the Swiss and Reto’s girlfriend, and the kindest, pleasantest, and, well, Swiss-est of all. Unintentionally does a great Audrey Hepburn impression in her big black sunglasses. Also, coins some great new English words, which I hereby command everyone reading this to help introduce into the vernacular: “Dizzly” for “dizzy,” “fruitable” for “fertile,” and “Milk Street” for “Milky Way.”
Klutziest:
Magdalena, Jan’s wife, who was constantly tripping over her two left feet. We were all a bit scared when they gave her a huge cake knife on the last night to cut the celebratory cake, as the boat pitched back and forth on the waves.
I felt seasick a few times on the longer “navigations,” but sleep and seasickness pills set me right. Stefan, who works in a hospital, kept offering me his pills, saying nonchalantly that since I had bought mine in Ecuador, they were probably just placebos. When we were horseback riding on Volcano Sierra Negra on Isabela Island, Paul’s horse bit my leg as it walked by. But apart from those minor setbacks, the Galapagos were truly heavenly. I’m sure you’ve all seen videos—I had—but I still had never grasped how up close and personal of an animal experience it would be.
The animals regard you with placid, sometimes condescending, stares, and carry on with their business of expelling salt from their nostrils, if they are marine iguanas, or walking on water, if they are red Sally Lightfoot crabs, or dancing and screeching, if they are blue-footed boobies. The sea lions were often playful and curious, and Jodi had a few particularly close encounters with pups. One swam in the shallows with her, using the surf to rush for her face and veer away at the last moment, splashing her with his flippers, and treating her as I imagine it would a sibling. Another crawled on top of her as it got out of the water, sat on her for a bit, kissed her, and was starting to make me a bit jealous before it finally moved on to bigger and better (and realer) sea lions. And snorkeling added an entire new dimension to this new and wondrous world—we floated past reef sharks, and one nearly made Jodi lose her breakfast when they both rounded a corner, from opposite directions, unaware that the other was coming. The fish were amazing, but it was the larger animals that left you trembling in awe. One day we followed a giant sea turtle for about half an hour as it chomped algae from rocks in the shallows. One day we played with a colony of sea lions that swam and tumbled around us, chasing our fins as if we too were water-creatures. And on the last day we got to swim with Galapagos penguins, tiny, waddling, tuxedoed things that are so slow and awkward on land (like toddlers) but in water can swim so fast that you could blink and miss them.
The beaches were amazing, the sunsets brilliant, and every place and each new animal full of history and mystery—this is the one place out of all my travels that I fervently hope each of you gets to see someday.
After our tour, Jodi and I bade fond farewell to our fellow shipmates and headed into Puerto Ayora to spend a few more Galapagos days in the home of my friends Alan and Damalis. Although we were scabby guests who didn’t even think to ask if we could bring them any goodies from the mainland, we got to reap the benefits of their having other, more generous visitors by drinking succulent English tea all morning. It was really nice to be in a home for a couple of days—and what a home it was, too. Be prepared to writhe with jealousy as I describe a house, only reachable by boat and a footpath along the beach, past waterlilies and bowers of low-standing coastal trees (of course full of finches). When you walk in the door you are standing on a boardwalk over a pond, and the boardwalk leads to the living room, guest room, kitchen, and bathroom in different directions. Upstairs is a bedroom with a view of the sea. Skylights abound. In a hole in a post that holds up half of the living room lives a gecko guarding her tiny eggs, and the other half of the room’s post is the trunk of a tree that stood in that spot when the house was built. I could go on.
And although our few days there were nothing like being on the boat, it was really nice to be home for awhile. One night we were taken to a fancy restaurant (courtesy of National Geographic) by a group of Swiss and Dutch botanists, and on our last night we thought we would be nice and make dinner for our gracious hosts. Jodi took on the lasagna (lasaña, as they spell it in Spanish), and I embarked on what would go down in history as one of the biggest dessert disasters the world has ever seen.
Having harvested tons of free passionfruit when we went to visit a lava tunnel in some old man’s backyard that day, I set out to make a passionfruit pie from a recipe on an evaporated milk label. Now, several factors, in retrospect, were hindrances to its success. One, several ingredients were missing or available in the wrong quantities; two, I was a little drunk when I went to substitute other ingredients for them (take note, y’all: evaporated milk and sugar doth not condensed milk make). And three, the recipe was in Spanish, so I may have missed out on some of the nuances and idiomatic expressions. Anyway, what was meant to be a gelatinous pie with scrumptious passionfruity topping and golden-brown crust turned out as a lactose-y soup (albeit a passionfruit-flavored soup) on top of a half-cooked lump of dough, and when I poured on the topping it sunk straight to the bottom. It was a bit of a Holly Golightly moment—but although there are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl’s complexion, everyone kindly acted like it really wasn’t that bad.
That night it rained (true to form, Jodi and I brought the rainy season with us, this time at least to a place that needed it, and it didn’t stop for the next 14 hours. Everything we owned was wet, including the clothes we were wearing to fly back to Guayaquil and then board a Peru-bound bus for approximately 3 days. Somehow, the plane still took off and by nightfall we were on a bus from Guayaquil to Piura, Peru. I will spare you the details of the next three days—they basically involved about 10 buses, 3 nights on buses instead of hotels, and a dazed staggering the morning of the 4th day into the strange new light of Arequipa, Peru. I didn’t write in my diary about those days, because if I had, it would have gone something like this:
Rode bus through desert. Couldn’t fall asleep, so read Crime and Punishment (quite soporific!). Ate passionfruit. Picked scab (very satisfying!). Ate Oreos. Got on different bus. More desert. Watched same Jean Claude Van Damme movie 3x. Then The Princess Diaries dubbed into Spanish. Read some more C & P. Ate passionfruit. Ate Oreos….
So Arequipa was a welcome change from the bus, but in my opinion did not live up to its own catchphrase, “When the moon separated from the earth, it forgot Arequipa.” We definitely felt like we were back in Peru—there were none of the familiar comforts of Ecuador (toilet paper, Magnum ice creams, $1 beers)—and everyone started lying to us again—from our hotel, which lied about their rates and services, to the bank, which lied about the exchange rate. A huge sign in the bank proclaimed 3.35 soles to the dollar (about 15 Peruvian cents higher than everywhere else), so we waited out the lines patiently, discussing what we would get for our crispy Ben Franklin. At the window, we were handed 320 soles and a pre-printed receipt. We pointed at the sign. “That’s not the rate?” we asked, just in case our sign language had been unclear. “No,” said the teller, and equally helpfully pointed at the 3.20 on the receipt. We were too flabbergasted to argue, and took our money, which didn’t feel nearly as special anymore. It’s strange to have to question everything, even if it seems blatantly obvious. But I suppose, if there’s one thing I learned at Governor’s School, it was to question everything, especially if it’s blatantly obvious. That’s my optimistic point of view. The pessimistic point of view unfortunately wins out more of the time, which is that it f***ing sucks to be lied to. Ah well. Yin and yang, I guess (or whatev).
The highlight of Arequipa itself was the Monasterio de Santa Catalina, a convent as large as a city-within-a-city, which only opened to the public when, in the 1950s, they were forced by city ordinance to install electricity and plumbing, couldn’t afford it, so started charging tourists an arm and a leg to explore its nooks and crannies. In colonial times, it was like a party school for second daughters of Spanish aristocracy, each of whom had to contribute a dowry of silver and slave girls to Our Lord, and then live in a beautiful convent waited on by said slave girls, who existed in a ratio of about 3 to 1 “nun.” Later on, they cleaned up their act, “got religion,” and, by virtue of this, got to wear barbed-wire undergarments during ritual scourging. But hey, at least they were doing God’s will.
From Arequipa, the main attraction is trekking through the Colca Canyon in hopes of seeing condors and steeping oneself in the culture of a place where everything that comes in and out has to do so on the back of a mule or on foot, on crumbling, dusty trails that zigzag steeply up the canyon walls. We found a tour that was $33 for 3 days, including food, accommodation, and guide “with basic English.” When we met Rafael, it was clear that this had been an exaggeration. But still we managed, and learned to decipher his constructions, which were patched together from three sources: actual English words, English words pronounced as they would be in Spanish, and Spanish words with the last syllable lopped off. For example, he knew how to say “The local people. The sacrifice,” (actual English) in reference to how they must constantly toil up and down the canyon walls with their produce and supplies, and whenever we passed locals he would usually gesture at them and say this. He knew that “I” was the word for oneself in English, but pronounced it “ee,” as it would be if it were a Spanish word. And for words he didn’t know, he would take the Spanish word and remove the a or o from the end—it works in many instances, when “mula” becomes “mule,” “roca” becomes “rock,” and so forth, but not in others: taking the last syllable off “años” does not make “years” in English. This confused us for awhile—he would say the people settled here hundreds of “an” ago, or that he had been a guide for fifteen “an.” But once we had learned his language, we had a great time.
We saw condors at the beginning of the hike, before we had even entered the canyon. There were four of them, with their enormous wingspans apparent as they glided around us and overhead (some can reach 6 feet). We were at the rim of the canyon, and the birds flew close to it, so that they were over thousands of feet of empty space but near enough to the walls to see if there was anything worth preying upon. And even though I’ve always wished I could fly, nothing has ever made me wish it more than this. There seemed like there could be no place as peaceful, thrilling, and free in the world. No place where you could be at once so entirely isolated and utterly in communion with everything around you. It was immediately no wonder to me that the ancient cultures of this region worshiped condors as the earth’s connection to more heavenly realms.
Our tour group consisted of Jodi, myself, and a 22-year-old guy named Dustin who looked like Jesus. He was from California, had come to South America to gain independence and have spiritual experiences, was probably 6’3” and 130 pounds, with long blond hair and beard, and he loved to smoke pot and play golf. Play golf? I asked him. Everything else made sense. This did not. This guy was the most anti-golf looking guy you ever saw. But he could talk for hours about the joy of perfecting the precision required to get that ball in a hole. At night he would write in his journal and read us poems he had just written based on our conversations that day. We spent two nights in the canyon, once at a quiet pension run by a family with a little girl and a baby horse, who were hopelessly devoted to each other, and Jodi took the best photo of the entire trip of girl and horse playing in an orchard full of ripe apples. The second night we spent at The Oasis, a green place in the middle of the dusty canyon with grass and fruit trees and swimming pools, but the bliss was ended prematurely by the fact that we had to wake up at 2:40 AM to ascend the canyon wall, in order to get to the top to get to a town where a bus left at 7 AM for the return to civilization.
It was pretty miserable. 3 hours of nothing but uphill, mostly in the dark, on terrain where with each step up you seemed to slide two steps back. I was optimistic and doing fine for the first two hours, and then I made the mistake of commenting on this to Jodi. As soon as I said I was fine, I slipped into a decline and the last 45 minutes were some of the most excruciating of my existence. But even though I had had hardly any sleep and everything hurt, it was quite a beautiful sunrise, over that deep and misty canyon full of local people and sacrifice, mules and appletrees and “ans.”
And so we spent another day on a bus—7 hours back to Arequipa, and then another 6 to Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Puno was a little dismal, but had great pizza and vegetarian options, although thanks to a little souvenir we picked up in the canyon, they were less enjoyable to us than they might have been had we encountered them with functioning bowels. Rafael had told us not to drink the water at the Oasis, because there was sulfur in it. The other option was to buy bottles of water for 4x what you would spend in town. We asked if we could use our water-purification tablets, and he said yes. But somehow I don’t think iodine does much to sulfur. My stomach and entire digestive system were offline for about 2 weeks after that, and a haze of fumes worse than rotten eggs surrounded me wherever I went. Anyway, we soon decided that there was nothing much in Puno we wanted to see except the Floating Islands of the Uros people.
In order to avoid the culture wars between other tribes and the Incas, the Uros took to the lake hundreds of years ago. They built islands out of reed mats, layering them until they’re about 3 feet thick, and they constantly weave new mats to put on the top, while the old ones rot away from below. They build reed houses on top of the reed islands, and reed boats to navigate between islands. They eat reeds for dinner. We took a rushed and kitschy tour, but it was still lovely—grimy kids tumble all over the place and mothers absentmindedly pull them away if they get too close to the edge. Only a few of the islands are open to tourists anyway, so I’m sure what we were seeing was specially prepared for us, but even so it was like stepping back in time to when humans had to survive on their own ingenuity. And in some ways, we didn’t even have to step back in time—some of the reed huts had antennae and solar panels affixed to the roofs, and as you walked past their cavelike doorways you could see the flickering blue of the television. People, I’ve noticed, would rather anything than give up their land. Even if (especially if?) it’s land they wove themselves.
Coming next: all-too-short escapades in Bolivia and a KMT original, “If You’re Going to Mess Up Your Coccix for the Rest of Your Life, Might As Well Do It On the Inca Trail.”
1 comment:
Hey! I stepped on a sea urchin in on Hon Tre Island, Nha Trang, South Vietnam in 1968 and the spine is still in my foot!
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