the traveling inbusches

My family´s visit was an adventure in every sense of the word. It started with them arriving in Piura at 5AM on a flight from Lima, after four airports and three flights in 12 hours. We rested up that morning, watched the US somehow not beat Slovenia, and then checked out some spots around Piura. It happened to be the town fiesta in the artisan capital of the north, Catacaos, which was an unexpected surprise. The erotic pottery there was a bit of a shock – even for me, fried fish turned out to be much-preferred over its uncooked relative ceviche, and I think they were a little taken back by the near-constant ogling by everyone who wasn´t tall and white and wearing sunglasses, but for the most part things went smoothly. We turned in early that night, after a few pisco sours and some really damn good local dishes, like seco de chavelo and lomo saltado.

Day two was a little more interesting. We had arranged to rent a car to drive up to Chalaco and then all the way back down the coast to Trujillo, rather than take buses. The thinking was this would allow us to do things on our own time and not be restricted by bus schedules and whatnot. And I guess we´re just a family that likes to drive. Which is all well and good, but I managed to throw in a nice little curveball by reserving a Rav4 rather than a “real” SUV. You may wonder why I would want to squeeze five very tall people into a weenie little car like this and then drive up an unpaved mountain. And you could be forgiven for wondering. But in my defense, the new Rav4´s are actually huge on the inside, and we did all fit quite comfortably. Check. Plus I had seen at least a few station wagons in Chalaco lately, so I figured if they could make it, a Rav would make it no prob. Double check. PLUS renting the Rav was about half the price of a Land Cruiser. Three points for Mateo. But know what Rav4´s don´t have? A high clearance. And I quickly realized that while the bus trip can be nerve-racking, when you´re a whole foot closer to the ground you feel everything twice as hard. Once the pavement ended outside Morropón, things got bumpy. Actually, bumpy doesn´t even begin to describe it; we banged the living shit out of this car. It took just as long as the bus trip, and I was sure we must have left a few important pieces buried in the mud along the way (oh yeah, it had also rained in the two days since I´d come down to Piura, which only added insult to injury). But the important thing is that we made it, with what appeared to be only some minor cosmetic damage, like the piece of the protective guard underneath that was now hanging like a loose tooth from the engine block, and the fact that one of the doors wouldn´t open due to the side-runner having been bent up about 45 degrees when it slammed into a rock. Nothing some wire and creative use of a tire iron couldn´t fix.

Upon arrival in Chalaco, we made the rounds through town, stumbling our way through several English-Portuguese-Spanish conversations (a product of the years we spent in Brazil), and then had lunch and headed down to the soccer field to watch the yearly “clasico” of Chalaco, between the two longtime rival clubs in town. (We had planned it so that our visit would correspond with two of the biggest days of the town party, which in reality lasts for two straight weeks. This meant that there was a lot of soccer, music, boozing, and general noise and debauchery the whole time.) At some point we ran into a group of people I didn´t recognize, led by a middle-aged white guy wearing a Celtics hat.

“Americans?” he asked.
“Uh, yeah…” I stammered back, shocked practically speechless.

I had never seen any other gringos in Chalaco besides other volunteers when I knew they were coming, and for these two groups to be here on the same day was almost more than I could handle. Turns out this guy had married a Peruvian woman whose father was originally from Chalaco, and they had come back for the fiesta. Even cooler though, was that the father had raised his family in Cabo Blanco, on the north coast, ever since moving there sixty years ago or something. This also happens to be the spot that Ernest Hemingway, Ted Williams, and other mid-century American luminaries and adventure-seekers set up the Cabo Blanco Fishing Club, where they escaped to chase some of the world´s biggest Marlins and, in their downtime, drink massive amounts of booze.

“Hem-eeng-weii! Ted Weel-yums! My friends! I was bar man! Pisco sours! Dey love dem!”

So we met Hemingway´s bartender. Pretty neat.

That afternoon we took it easy, and my brother and sister came along while I practiced some songs on guitar with two friends – we had talked about playing that night at the serenata (something like a yearly talent show), but I hadn´t realized it was actually going to happen. After an hour or two we had three songs ready to go, with my brother Will accompanying us on the cajón (the classic Peruvian drum, just a wooden box with a hole in it) for one of them. The Jim Beam my family had brought (three bottles, in fact) turned out to be pretty popular with them, as well as with most of my other friends in town. After the jam sesh, we headed down to my buddy Edwin´s place where he had promised to make us tortillas con queso (fried dough patties with fresh cheese), which was very popular across the board – especially the cheese, which seemed more like goat cheese than the cow-derived variety to my family. Next we headed up to the big covered volleyball/soccer court behind the police station, which also doubles as a kind-of assembly center, and passed around alternating bottles of Beam and the local calentado (sugarcane moonshine mixed with hot, sweet lemon juice) until the musical numbers started. We played our songs, which went pretty well. I took advantage of the mic for a cheesy shout-out to the family, which people loved. We watched several other songs and dances, realized it was all pretty much the same, and then called it a night.

Day three brought both of my families together, and we had a breakfast of sango con queso (boiled wheat with cheese) and coffee at my host family´s house. I think the fact that this is hands-down my favorite breakfast was a little shocking to the other members of the family. Despite the language barrier, everyone seemed to immediately hit it off, and we hung out for a while afterwards, watching the world cup and exchanging some gifts my family had brought from the States. Then we walked a few minutes down to a little soccer field in Huacapampa, where I have a lot of friends and I thought I was going to be playing. That turned out not to be the case, as it is about 50 percent of the time I get invited to do anything, but it was a nice walk, and my mom got to hear her first-ever donkey “bleating” (is that what it´s called?). There was, however, still a chance that I might play in the inter-district tournament that day, so we hiked back up past home and down to the stadium in Chalaco to see about that.

This turned out be more successful – my buddy Pacho had mentioned to me the night before at Edwin´s house that he needed some players for the following day, since his dad (Pacho Sr.) was the head of the local Asociación de Pequeños Ganaderos or “small cattle farmers association,” and they had wanted to enter a team. The fact that I am not a small cattle farmer turned out to be irrelevant, and both my brother and I ended up playing with a group of guys from Chalaco, many of whom I didn´t know because they were now studying in Piura and Lima and had come back just for the party. We ended up playing all afternoon, winning three games in an unlikely Cinderella story. Will played goalie, as I´m pretty sure no one has ever played goalie in Chalaco, ever. He went down hard once when he laid out to just get a fingertip on a corner kick – I was already processing the many difficulties of him separating a shoulder or breaking an arm in Chalaco when he motioned that he had only knocked the wind out of himself. Bullet dodged. The second game was almost completely invisible from the stands, due to the smoke-thick fog that had swept in late in the afternoon. I was playing defense, and actually couldn´t see it when we scored, only knowing by the shouts from the other end of the field. That game ended up going into penalty kicks after a 3-3 tie in regulation; Will was a beast and stopped about three shots, and I scored our final goal to win it for all the small cattle farmers out there. Then we had to wait through two more games before taking on the “real” Chalaco team, comprised of all the best players from the two teams in town, as well as the secondary school.

By this point we were pretty tired and, as Will put, “Dude, it´s 5PM and all I´ve eaten today is grain and cheese.” But we won 2-1 in a very competitive game, and hoisted the trophy as darkness fell on the stadium (which turned out to be the biggest trophy I had ever held, hands down). It was like out of a Disney movie or something. Two cajas (crates of beer) appeared out of nowhere, which we were happy to help take care of. I realized that my parents probably hadn´t expected to spend the whole day doing what they spend a lot of whole days doing – watching soccer, my sister usually – but they seemed to have enjoyed the whole scene, despite the fog, surprisingly cold weather, and drunks hitting on my sister. That night we bought my host family all dinner at the local favorite restaurant, and there was a party in the plaza which we hung out at for a bit. Little did my family know that the party would go on literally all night, and that their rooms conveniently located just off the plaza would give them such a good venue from which to appreciate it. All night long.

The next morning we grabbed some breakfast and got an early start back down the mountain. Things went well for about two and a half minutes, when we blew a tire on a sharp rock. At this point we were still in sight of Chalaco, which meant we had a very, very long way to go before a real city with tires for sale. The good news was that the spare was inflated; unfortunately it was so worn you could actually see the threads in some spots. In any case, we changed it and continued on our way – very, very carefully. Another popped tire here and we would be in some serious shit (this would pretty much become the theme of the rest of the trip). Somehow the trip down seemed a little less like riding a wild stallion than the way up (or maybe we were just used to it), but some four hours later we did make it all the way down to Morropón, thankfully. While the family grabbed lunch, I went tire-searching, and found nothing. Another neat feature of the 2008 Rav4 is that it has a very unique tire size, which apparently can only be found in the biggest of Peruvian cities, Morropón not being among them. So I called up the rental guy in Piura (about an hour and a half away) to see what he thought. He called around, and called back only to tell me that that particular tire is, in fact, so rare that it can´t even be found in Piura! I spent a few minutes alternately kicking myself for renting this wannabe SUV in the first place, and wondering why in the hell this guy was renting people a car whose tire couldn´t be located within a hundred miles. But mostly kicking myself. Anyway, Chiclayo was now our best bet, several hours down the coast. The good thing was that we had planned to head that direction anyway, passing through Chiclayo on our way to spend a night and day at the beach in Huanchaco. On the negative side, we now had a decision to make, which essentially amounted to the lesser of two evils: take the safer route back through Piura and head down the Panamerican highway to Chiclayo, a route which wouldn´t bring us a new spare, but at least would have more options in case of a breakdown…OR send it straight from Morropón down to Chiclayo through a town called Olmos, a route that I had never taken, but which was supposedly an hour or two quicker because it cut off the whole Piura leg. I couldn´t tell you why, but I decided that the latter sounded like the better choice, and so we set off into uncharted territory.

When I say uncharted, I mean it. The three or so hours between Morropón and Chiclayo turned out to be some of the most inhospitable, desolate land any of us had ever seen. It was starkly beautiful in many places, driving on the open road with no one else in sight, surrounded by desert with the green mountains we had just come out of rising off to the East. But I just couldn´t stop thinking about the grim consequences of a flat tire out here. Every little shanty town we passed through was another option for a night´s stay, somewhere we might be able to find some water and food. Suffice it to say these were three pretty tense hours for me, and I´m not someone who finds himself feeling tense very often.

To my great relief, we reached Chiclayo late in the afternoon and managed to locate a tire place. The word “Bridgestone” has never looked so beautiful. We got the crappy spare moved back to the back where it belonged, and (for a mere $240!) had a new one put on the front passenger side. For that price I asked the lady to at least throw in a quick car wash, which she did after a little pleading/shameless flirting on my part. This was much-needed, since I had told the rental guy that we would be taking the car “around Bajo Piura nomás,” knowing that if I told him where we were actually going he wouldn´t have rented me a Schwinn ten-speed, much less his shiny new Rav4. The car was completely caked in mud, which would have been a little suspicious, and might have aroused enough alarm to make him check under the car. Which would not have been good.

So things were looking up, and pretty soon we were on our way again, headed south toward Trujillo as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean off to our right. Tempers were flaring a little, but all told, we were still doing pretty OK. A few hours later we saw the white-green lights of the Pacasmayo cement factory approaching to the East, flickering like some weird city of Oz off in the distance, and we decided to call it a night here, since I knew the town and a spot we could stay. We were a couple hours from our goal still, but we were pretty beat and not in the mood to navigate any more in the dark than we had to. By this point, every one of the five of us had a fairly strong opinion about everything going on, and even deciding to stay was a bit complicated. But in the end we stayed, got a good night´s sleep – helped by a couple nerve-calming beers out of the mini fridge – and woke up the next day to a beautiful morning at the beach.

We set off for Trujillo mid-morning, making good time and in much better spirits. At this point I just wanted to get the hell to Huanchaco (the beach town outside of Trujillo) and turn this car in without any further complications. Which we very nearly did. Unfortunately, approaching Trujillo we missed the completely unmarked turn out to Huanchaco (go figure), and wound up right in the heart of one of the biggest and most congested of Peruvian cities. After asking directions, we found ourselves at a stoplight, wanting to turn right and seeing no oncoming traffic. The ensuring conversation, one that I would quickly find myself deeply regretting, went something like this:

Ted: “Hey, you can turn right on red in Peru, right?”
Me (never having actually driven in Peru, but having observed that literally no one obeys traffic laws anyway): “Uh, yeah probably. Sure.”

About thirty seconds later we heard the little weenie siren from a police motorcycle, and my heart just sank. We were so, so close. Anyway, we go through the whole “license and registration” bit (with me translating from the passenger seat), and it turns out that in fact, you can´t do that in Peru, and this particular cop might have been the first one in the history of Peru that actually felt like enforcing it. Wonderful. After sulking for a few minutes, I decide I should try to do something about this situation. I cruise back to the moto and start talking to the guy, really milking the whole “I´m a volunteer working here, my family are tourists here visiting…we´re idiots…really sorry” angle. I mean, really laying it on thick. In his defense, he could have been a much bigger dick about the whole thing. As he showed me in his little reference book (which, granted, he could have had made for about a dollar at any copy place), the fine for our egregious offense came out to 432 soles, or about $150. Which sucked, but what I was much more worried about was the process that we were going to have to go through to get this taken care of, especially since we were planning on leaving that night to Lima and just wanted to hit the beach for a couple hours first. So after twenty minutes or so of pleading, the guy took pity. Well, kind of. It went about like this:

Me: “Listen, what can we do to just get this taken care of as quickly as possible?”
Cop: “Well what I can do is knock it down to the lowest general traffic violation, which would be a fine of 132 soles.”
Me: “Thanks, that helps a lot. But that means we still have to go down to the station or whatever, right? And we´re kinda pressed for time here...”
Cop: “Well…I guess if you don´t have time, you could just give me the cash and I´ll take care of it for you.”

I got the impression this wasn´t the first time he had done this (especially when he requested that I put the cash in the envelope with the registration, rather than just hand it to him in broad daylight.) As for me, I realized that straight-up bribing a cop actually felt a whole lot better than I would have thought, and we were on our way again, the traveling Inbusches. To my great relief, the rental guy had sent his friend to pick up the car, and I think he was so impressed with the new tire that he neglected to do most of the final inspection. I practically threw the keys at him and he had to yell back at me to come back and sign the return agreement. Good riddance. But a good story, too. We got some great seafood, Will and Gena learned to surf, and we set off to Lima on a plush overnight bus, where at least if anything happened it wasn´t our fault anymore.

(My dad would later send me a link to a travel site where the first words of the “Driving in Perú” page read something like “Driving in Perú should be considered an extreme sport and is not recommended under any circumstances,” and went on to mention lots of interesting statistics, like the fact that there are roughly six times as many accidents here as in the rest of Latin America, which is also 30 times the rate in the developed world. Ha.)

From here things went pretty-much according to plan. We hopped a flight to Cuzco, stayed a night at a great spot right off the plaza, ate quinoa prepared as many ways as we could find, bought some alpaca sweaters, and drank several gallons of coca tea (which really does help with the altitude, especially when you go from sea level to 11,000 feet in the course of an hour). The next day we hopped on the bus, then the train, out to Aguas Calientes, the town below Machu Picchu, which isn´t nearly as much of a dump as I had heard. I actually kind of liked it, as much as anyone can really appreciate a town offering literally nothing but hotels, restaurants, and overpriced souvenirs. The following morning my Dad, Gena, and I got up at 4AM to stand in line for the bus up to the sanctuary itself, where we were among the first 200 allowed to hike up Huayna Picchu, the peak jutting up behind the ruins. Incredible views, and some very steep, slippery, handrail-lacking stone paths with just inches separating us from thousands of feet of air. Overall Machu Picchu was absolutely incredible, especially in the early morning before the thousands of tourists arrived (of which, obviously, I am a part…but like most Peace Corps volunteers I tend to use that word with a certain level of disdain). By mid-afternoon it had been a long day, and we grabbed a drink and watched some World Cup action at the ridiculous Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge (only $900 a night!) where I took the liberty of stealing a nice stack of coasters. Then it was back to town, and a long, cramped trip back to Cuzco for our final night in-country. The last day we were just boarding the plane back to Lima as the US went into overtime with Ghana, only finding out how it ended upon arrival.

So despite the US losing, having to buy a new tire, paying off a cop, and numerous other mis-adventures (or maybe because of them), it turned out to be one hell of a trip, and I´d do it again in a heartbeat. Minus the Rav, maybe.