Mostly, my parents were here.

After another unfortunate blog lapse, I have to say I have no idea why I let that happen (I certainly haven’t been hurting for spare time, as you will soon read), except for the guilt that mounts about not doing it, and then the overwhelmingness of trying to recap a growing span of time unaccounted for. So I’ll try to focus.

My parents were here! My parents were here! I met my parents in Lima the last week of March, and together we traveled to Cusco, enjoyed the city for a few days while we acclimated to the altitude, did the 4-day Inca Trail hike to Machu Picchu, returned to Cusco by train, and then enjoyed Lima for a couple days before they flew out. Minus a few snags on the trail, it was an awesome trip.

Southern Peru is really a different world from the North, where I live. Even though I technically live in a part of the Peruvian Andes, it’s just nothing like the stereotypical international image. Here there are no llama or alpaca herders, Quechua speakers, or even potato farmers. Obviously, I’ve come to love it here and was genuinely homesick when I couldn’t get back (more on that later), but it’s hard not to see Piura as something of a cultural dead zone. It’s not just me being a whiny essentializing American; there’s a historical precedent. Piura city is one of the oldest Spanish settlements, one of the first (if not the first? Wikipedia?) places in Peru Pizarro landed, and we all know that cultural preservation was hardly a top priority of your average 1500s Spanish settler. Another factor is that unlike, for example, Cajamarca, there is no big city in the mountains in the northernmost four coastal departments (Tumbes, Piura, Lambayeque and La Libertad). As a result, people have always had to move between their small mountain towns and the coast for their basic needs, which would have an obvious mixing effect on the “mountain” culture.

Again, I don’t mean to essentialize. I don’t mean to imply that a culture isn’t valid or interesting if it isn’t constantly talking about what happened 500 years ago, and I know that there’s definite posturing for tourists when women walk their llamas through the Plaza de Armas in Cusco. I guess what I saw in the South that really struck me as different than what I see in the North is a self-awareness about the importance of culture and the active maintenance of traditions that go back hundreds of years.

I really loved Cusco. I had heard complaints from other gringo travelers that it was just too “agringado,” too touristy, a creepy mix of Quechua and America. It was definitely touristy, obviously, but I suppose if you don’t come on a quest for authenticity, you can kind of take it for what it is and enjoy yourself. Having my parents there was a particular kind of awesome, too. It would have been nice, I suppose, if they’d had the time to come up to Piura and see my site, but it was cool to do something that was equally exciting for all of us.

The Inca Trail was really hard, but rewarding. Health was sort of the ever-present factor. When I was feeling good, I could take the hard climbs and steep descents in stride, but when I was brought down by altitude sickness or yet another IDODO (Intestinal Disturbance of Dubious Origin, such a common presence throughout my 19 months in Peru that I assigned it its own acronym), it was pretty miserable. Nonetheless, we made it. Machu Picchu really deserves its newly-minted Wonder of the World status. The pictures just can’t capture the scale of it all. We’d seen a lot of ruins, both around Cusco and along the trail, but Machu Picchu was all of those combined times ten, both in scale and in breathtakingness. The mountain landscape around Machu Picchu, though that’s not what people go there for, is pretty incredible, too.

And then we were back to Lima, which was cool for me because, even though I haven’t spent a ton of time in the capital, I do have my favorite spots that I could share with my parents. They’re mainly in the borough of Barranco, the “Bohemian” part of Lima. We walked down to the beach a couple times, walked through old neighborhoods and admired the architecture, went to my favorite art gallery, and my parents even got to survive their first Peruvian earthquake. Their last morning here, there was a 5.4 earthquake directly off the coast of Lima. My dad, who was out running, didn’t even feel it, but my mom and I, on the third floor of our hotel, certainly did. I think my mom will remember being huddled in the stairwell in our pajamas for a long, long time.

Gorgeous views aside, what was really great about having my parents here was sharing Peru, even an unknown piece of it, with them. We talked about the tacky decoration of the Catholic churches (one church in Cusco was referred to by parents, separately, as “Disco Jesus” and “Elvis Jesus”), the necessity of bargaining with all cab drivers, and the constant battle of wills for small change. It was hard when they left; after all, we had spent nine days constantly together, sharing tents and hotel rooms. I started a blog entry to distract myself immediately after they left, but it turned out to mostly be about me wanting to go eat my feelings at Burger King, so I did it instead of writing about it.

After leaving Burger King, I went immediately to the embassy host family’s house, where I was staying for the next three days to work on the Peace Corps environmental newsletter. That was absolutely wonderful. There are a few families in Lima, not all of who work directly for the embassy (some are with NGOs or other international organizations), who let Peace Corps Volunteers stay at their houses while in Lima. It’s nice for us, because we save on a hotel room and get the comforts of home inside the Lima city limits, and I guess it’s not that awful for them because we are good company and we give them an excuse to drink wine (by…bringing them wine) and they get to feel that they have done something good for their country. I actually have no idea why embassy families let us mooch off them, but I am sure glad they do. The husband in this family is an infectious disease doctor with the Navy working with the embassy, and the wife takes care of their three adorable kids and bakes like a madwoman. She started a bagel business when they got here three years ago, and makes bagels by order in her kitchen. Peru has had a lot of culinary influence from outside, but there are still things I haven’t eaten the entire time I’ve been here that I miss sorely, and bagels are decidedly at the top of the list (followed closely by black bean burritos, blueberries, and tofu hot dogs from Red Hot Lovers in Ann Arbor, which I guess isn’t really fair of me, but the heart wants what the heart wants. I’m pretty sure this is at least the third time I’ve mentioned these hot dogs since I started this blog). She has filled this niche (surprisingly, not entirely with sales to ex-pats) alarming well and always has fresh delicious bagels for the taking in her kitchen. My friend Kate and I feasted like kings the whole time we were at their house. It wasn’t just the food that made the stay wonderful. The whole family really made us feel welcome, like there couldn’t have been a shadow of a possibility that we were an imposition. It was nice in the wake of my parents’ visit to have an American family experience, to feel like I was instantly catapulted into the kind of house I used to babysit in during high school.

And this is where the story gets less fun. I returned to Piura city roughly a week and a half ago, ready to breathe the mountain air and starting to miss my own mediocre cooking, only to find that there were no buses going up because of the effect this year’s unprecedented La Niña rains have had on the unpaved mountain highway that leads back to Santo Domingo. I was told by my boss in Piura that I would just have to wait until conditions got better to return to site. This was Thursday. So Casey, the Volunteer close to me along the same highway, and I waited. We first heard word that there was a bus going back on Sunday-ish. We excitedly reserved tickets, but then I got waylaid by yet another IDODO, which made the prospect of a 6+ hour bus ride unappealing, at best. I woke up early to accompany Casey to the bus station and to change my ticket for the next day, only to find that the bus wasn’t running anyway. So Casey and I hauled her stuff back to the hostel, and woke up early the next day to see if we could leave then. Casey had (it seemed at the time) luckily reserved her ticket with the bus company that goes directly to her site, while I had been waiting for the bus company that goes directly to my site to start their trips up, and on that day only her bus company was running. I couldn’t imagine why that was the case, but Casey went up without me, as I got jealous and crabby in the Piura heat. It turned out the reason my bus company was hesitant was the same reason it took Casey a day and a half to get back to site – the highway was still horrible. It’s important to note that the trip to her site normally takes between five and six hours, and generally does not involve a night in a crowded hut in the campo alongside a broken-down bus. Casey called me and begged me to stay in Piura at least one more day. This made me crabby. But of course she was right. If you asked me how I spent that time in Piura, I wouldn’t really have a good answer for you. I saw movies (“Atonement” was too closely followed by “Material Girls,” starring the Duff sisters). I tried to post a video I made about waste management on YouTube, to no avail. I took naps. I ran errands. I hung out at the bus station. But I still have no idea how that added up to a week.

So the day I finally made the ascent was Thursday, a full week after I arrived in Piura. The highway was fine, as it hadn’t been raining for a couple days, but the bus driver misjudged once and drove us into the mud off the side of the road (thank God, on the wall side, not the cliff side). This was scary enough for me to think the bus was going to tip and crush me and I casually pick out on my iPod the song I thought I might like to die to (I went with Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So,” gotta keep with the classics). The bus did not tip, but it was stuck in the mud for the next TWO AND A HALF HOURS. The thing is, when I tell these stories in retrospect, it probably doesn’t sound that bad to you, I mean, two and a half hours sitting on a pretty mountain road, that’s not so bad. But it’s the infiniteness of time that makes it bad news. I had no idea when I got out of the bus, or for the next two hours and twenty-nine minutes, when or if the bus was going to get out and how the hell I was going to get all my crap home if it didn’t. A week in Piura doesn’t sound bad, but when you don’t know how long it’s going to be and every night you’re going to bed not sure if you’re leaving in the morning, it’s pretty hellish. I hadn’t gotten my stuff out of the bus when we all had to get out (not that I could have, my side of the bus was only about a person’s width from the side of the mountain anyway), so I didn’t have a book or anything. I did have Jenna, the Volunteer traveling back with me (we’re a clustered bunch on my mountain) and the aforementioned iPod, so that helped. I spent awhile listening to NPR and throwing mudballs at trees. We watched the guys try to work together to get the bus out. The funny thing about this was, if you watched very carefully, and what else was there to do in two and a half hours but watch carefully, they don’t actually work together. Each dude gave the distinct impression that he believed himself to be in charge, and that everyone else was just following his orders. Men doing the most menial tasks, like putting rocks under the tires to create a makeshift road that the bus might drive out of the ditch on, frantically gestured their will at the driver. Everyone was constantly shouting different orders that were obviously impossible to follow. It occurred to my estrogen-addled and therefore invalid mind that it might have helped to take the cargo out of the back of the bus to cut down on the weight, but I kept this insight to myself. It was really a two-and-a-half-hour macho shitshow, sort of like watching 14 lost dudes refuse to pull over to a gas station and get directions at the exact same time. And then, suddenly and without much warning, the bus escaped from its muddy prison, and for no reason that I could see, barreled on far beyond where the mud stopped. This was unfortunate for those of us who had been waiting in front of the bus, who, after two and a half hours of waiting for a bus to move more than a foot, suddenly found ourselves sprinting, trying not to get run over by the same bus.

This wasn’t quite the end of it, as the bus dropped me off at a town in a fork in the road about an hour’s walk from Santo Domingo (I had too much stuff with me to walk), and there were no cars at that late hour. I waited for another hour and a half before a guy came to drop people off, and then I learned a valuable lesson in the economics of desperation. The four men who had been dropped off also needed a ride to SD, but the driver didn’t want to go all that way, since it was already raining. Two of the men had no real urgency to get back. The other two men did. One of these two men informed me of the deal he had struck with the driver: the driver would accept 30 soles (which is already kind of too much) from us. It seemed clear to me we would each pay six, but I was told that one man would pay 15, I would pay 10, the other man would pay 5, and the two who had no real urgency (or really good poker faces?) would pay nothing. I accepted this almost immediately and pondered the economics of it the whole way home. As it turned out, the two other paying customers were father and son, so it was really a 10-10-10-0-0 split, and he had just presented it as 15-10-5-0-0 to make me feel better. I barely cared at that point. I made it home only nine hours after starting the trip, so I couldn’t really complain.

And now I’m back and content and eating broccoli and spending too much time writing in my blog. Can’t complain.