No Country For Young Men

I was with a friend on a bus from Arequipa to Cusco, Peru, when our dozing coachman ground to a halt in the chill of night between blackened mountains, blithely telling us to either walk the rest on foot, or join him (he smirked) all of eight hours back to Arequipa where we came. Not knowing we would have to soldier through thirty-five miles of fuming protests and blockades, each hauling 20 kilos of baggage upon our sore friction-burned shoulders, we shrugged and grabbed our bags, chuckling at what a wacky little day this promised to be. So Ben and I began our journey at 3:30am, and while the bus rumbled away leaving us bleary and parched on our own, we layered up in alpaca jumpers and got going. When things kept tripping us up we fumbled for torches to uncover the rocks and boulders in the road, but it was all an adventure at first.

We even had time to appreciate the landscape, a vacuum-black expanse silhouetted by the purple vastness of an unmooned sky, whose hushed star-pricked dome was torn by the milky glow of one cosmic dragon’s tail.

Before long chains of bulked lorries lined the road, windscreens preaching “Vivo el Puro!” while dim fires on the grass betrayed wary shadowed faces. It was all stony nods until Sicuani, a bare town of one-story shacks all strewn with hazard tape, where we managed to get a took-took ride to town centre. But when we got there our tires burst amid the shards of glass the locals had scattered. Now they were uniting in scores around their already massive crackling swell of a bonfire, chanting “Vivo el Puro!” and punching the air toward one defiant figure who raised his sheet to the flames in time for us to catch the face of Peru’s president, Alan Garcia, annihilated by white heat. Nervously we hurried ahead.

Thankfully the night was trickling away, and though the sun still dozed behind the land its mounting radiance was palpable at the horizon, spilling peachy light onto the clouds so that our endless straight road was now visible tearing through the wide fog-veiled valley. Ben and I just kept on walking, as did our new gaggle of gringos, farmers and hard-faced Cholitas lugging their babies in cloth bundles on their backs.

What amazed me was how everyone was in on it. At each cluster of crooked-brick homes people were making sure no cars or motorbikes snuck through. In extreme cases barbed wire had been laid on the tarmac in rolls; one man tripped over it quite badly, landing face first while his radio smashed to bits. Audacious youths were offering lifts on the backs of bikes, glad to exploit their monopoly on transport, but were usually met by aggression at subsequent roadblocks. Ben and I were beginning to wonder what political action had inflamed all this. After all, these strikes were happening all over south Peru.

After several hours a peddle cart appeared and we hopped on, only to find our chauffeurs were a five year-old girl in rags and two tiny boys, all scampering along trying to gain momentum. Irked by child exploitation, we did a surly hour on foot and then mounted new peddle-carts, leaving two strong-thighed men to it. For a while we could sit back and let the mountains roll on by, but at the next blockade they stopped to demand twice their original fee.

Fewer and fewer people were offering rides. Motorbikes occasionally zipped by, but if we tried to flag them down the riders would wag their finger. Soon we had no choice but to stop for a rest in Tinta, and it was hours later that we managed to convince one man to let us both on his sputtering motorbike. Bags sagging on either side, he just about kept us from capsizing until we reached a red bridge crossing the river. It was around this time that everything started to hurt. For one thing our stomachs had grown gnarly from neglect, our water all drunk and sweated out, and neither of us had eaten since yesterday. Not to mention the merciless mass of our baggage. Not to mention that we had been going for nearly twelve hours now, without any prospect of an end.

Weary, deflated, we ambled over the bridge trying to kid ourselves the seething horde was merely a mirage. My feeble groan was inaudible behind the cries of outrage and megaphone rhetoric while over two hundred people swarmed and chanted ahead. Then, peering ahead, past all the chaos, we saw, like a dream, a white cab. I didn’t think. I just dropped my bags on the spot and sprinted so fast the sweat streaked into my ears, and as I drew close I screamed ‘HEY!!! WAIT!!!’ towards four backpackers hastily shoving bags in the boot. Before I could catch my breath they’d bundled in; then the cab launched off. The sight of it growing smaller made me fall to my knees with my head in my hands, glass-eyed, unaware of anything, just listening to sound of my panting die down. When I eventually looked up Ben was stooped there, the perfect mirror of my anguish, hunched under the weight of all our luggage combined, silhouetted by the sun’s unforgiving glare.

The next few hours were the most physically grueling of my life. I couldn’t say what happened stage by stage, only that the strain upon our legs was excruciating, and that Ben and I barely spoke throughout. Several times Ben stopped dead still, saying, ‘This is ridiculous, I can’t go on’; and I would say, ‘Come on man, I bet there’s cars just round the corner’. But we both knew this was a lie, and when I gazed down into the valley, beyond all the languid llamas grazing in lush grass, to the glistening river that weaved like a freed ribbon through the mountains, I wished we could just drift on in and let it’s merciful currents carry our poor shrunken bodies to Cusco.

Finally reaching Urcos, we fell at the first log. The sun had retreated over the hills and darkness was already slinking in while the people of Urcos sat about the road, or by the smouldering fire, or up the grassy bank, all peering on with leery twilight grins. Evidently this was where people got spat out on the verge of collapse, only to be told there were still no cars to Cusco. An old man with missing teeth was now sitting next to me, gripping my shoulder and spitting into my face.

‘You can walk six kilometers to Culcay,’ he said. ‘Maybe there you will find a bus. Maybe not, I don’t know. Haha!’

‘No more walking, not possible! We need to go to Cusco from here. Only here . . . Please!’

The man twisted his neck back to crack some quip I couldn’t understand, but was obviously at our expense, since the cluster of kids cackled. Ben was sat next to me on the wall, head in hands, a line of spit dangling from his lips; truly spent. This is it, I thought. We’re sleeping in the dirt.

Two Japanese men were now standing by a large white truck, puzzling over a large map, surrounded by locals all jostling and barking advice. I ran over and asked what the hell was going on; Shin, the driver, had to get to Puno with his colleague and was trying to determine a feasible route. I jutted in trying to explain but the locals all flustered him with loud conflicting directions and I couldn’t be heard. Back down the road three guys were skulking about Ben, sniffing around our bags, ruffling his hair.
I turned back to Shin, clenched his arm and brought my face to his saying: ‘Listen man, you cannot go any further you will be screwed over there are blockades everywhere from here to Sicuani–people will flatten your tires don’t listen to these goons I am telling you Shin you have to go back to Cusco that’s all there is to it go back to Cusco–and for Chrissakes take us with!’

***

I stood spread-eagled, back pressed against our great pile of rucksacks stacked behind the other wasted bodies we had picked up along the way. About seven of us were squashed onto the truck, though there were many others who didn’t make it. Where did they sleep? I’ll never know. But while their forlorn faces grew smaller in the dimming dusk the landscape spooled away in rolling contours and a thousand shades of green. From nowhere Shin passed back a cigarette, and it tasted good. My position was awkward, and the pain in my legs would linger for days, but Ben and I had never felt giddier. So I just laid my head against the bags, blew my smoke into the night, and watched the clouds begin to glimmer with soft amber light that spilled from the heart of Cusco.