Traveling in the Third World

Traveling here is not necessarily the easiest thing that I have ever done in my entire life. But I feel like that is to be expected since I am in the Peace Corps and all, but I just feel like it is time to paint a picture of my traveling patterns. The reason I feel it is necessary now is because when my mother came to visit we went to my site and she asked me if I thought we were going to the end of the world. She was pretty sure we were traveling to another country by the time we reached my site. I on the other hand am so used to it that I barely think about the fact that it is 6 hours from my site to my regional capital. That would be like if you lived in Los Angeles and had to drive up to San Francisco every time you wanted to check your mail or go out dancing. Don’t worry there is a grocery store only 4 hours away from me. Easy peezy.

To get from my regional capital to my site I have to leave Ica either real early in the morning (around 7 am) or in the afternoon to catch a bus to a place called San Clemente in Pisco to get a collectivo (car or mini-van filled with people) to make my way up to my provincial capital Huayatara. The collectivos are generally reliable except for the random times where there isn’t a car to be found. Then you get to sit there in a sketchy part of Pisco and hope you don’t get robbed until a car shows up. Once I was lucky enough to wait around for an hour and a half for a car. Once a car came it did a little fake out where the driver said “I’ll take you up,” we loaded the car, then he changed his mind, we got out only to get in the exact same car 30 minutes later.

As we were tranquilly headed up, about half way there, we popped a tire. When you pop a tire in Peru unless you have a spare or are fortunate enough to pop it near a well equip car shop you generally do some bojankedy thing to the tire to make it last just long enough to get somewhere else. This lovely turn of events meant that we had to head an hour in the opposite direction, back to San Clemente to hop in another car to make it up to Huayatara. What should have been a 2 hour trip turned into a 6 hour trip. Always my favorite kind of trip.

Once you successfully make it up to Huayatara depending on the hour you have to wait for one of the two combis (really odd cross between a bus and a mini-van that fit about 15 people comfortably, 25 when there is lots of commotion) up to my site at either 2pm or 4am. Now I know what your thinking, why don’t you just make your plans so you always get up to Huayatara for the 2pm combi and avoid the 4am like the plague. If only it were that simple. The 2pm combi is a very loose 2pm. Really they can leave anywhere between 12 and 4 pm. And somehow every time I try to plan my life to come up on the 2pm I get there around 12:30-1 and those are the days they left exceptionally early. I have effectively given up on trying to get that combi when I return from my regional capital or vacations.

I generally leave Ica at a respectable hour, make my way up to Huayatara, spend the night and wake up around 3:30 to get to my site. Lovely. The best was when I was super brilliant and couldn’t figure out how to open the outside door of the hostel and hopped the fence instead of waking up the owner. Naturally I landed into a trench gutter in the street and almost fell flat on my ass in front of two of my co-workers and one of their moms. They simply couldn’t understand why I didn’t wake up the owner. It was hard to explain that I lost my keys an excessive amount in college and became accustomed to hopping the fence to get into my apartment complex. Old habits die hard. Anyways as you can tell its pretty fucking magical to get up at 3:30 to go up a mountain. Best part of my day.

The one problem with this whole travel adventure is I am generally leaving on a Sunday and hung over. Since there are barely any bathrooms along my trek I prolong my hangovers by not drinking enough water. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this because in the words of my mother I will be unemployable but lets think about this am I really employable in America right now anyways? The tangible skills I have learned from the Peace Corps are how to draw a puzzle of a kid shitting on the street, a grasp on Spanish, 7 words in Quetcha and how to construct a cocina out of mud, concrete and iron. Candidate of the year. Clearly. Anyways, since I am generally making this voyage back up the mountain in a state of less than optimal I want to kill myself 90% of the time. A hangover with a parasite, dehydration and altitude change is actually the worst thing ever. I would not recommend it to any of you. You may end up throwing up on the side of the road like a classy champion.

One time I was tired and returning from Lima and made what I would call the best decision of my life. Sometimes instead of catching a collectivo up to Huayatara you can take a bus headed for the department (state) next door Ayacucho and hop off in Huayatara. Smarty-pants KCM got to San Clemente around 6pm with two very dead phones and a very tired brain. The buses were before the cars and they accosted me. Since it was hypothetically cheaper and I just wanted to sit down I hopped onto the bus with the intention of getting off at Huayatara. I decided not to sleep for this portion of the viaje because I just had a sneaking suspicion that if I did they would forget about me and I would end up in Ayacucho, a city I don’t know in another department, at 3 am with a site visit from my boss the next day.

I dozed for a second or two but managed to stay awake watching “The Avengers.” I noticed we were approaching Huayatara and not slowing down. Suddenly I realized we were passing it and I hopped up to try to get the attention of the driver. I wanted to get off the fucking bus. Obviously the driver was on the level below us and the ringer to get his attention was broken. So my attempts to get his attention were fruitless. At this point I began to get a little worried, what the fuck was I supposed to do if I ended up in Ayacucho in the middle of the night except probably die. And both of my phones were dead so I couldn’t even tell anyone to attend my funeral.

Sensing my panic a nice man tried to help me out because he realized I had no idea what I was doing. And I began to say I have to get off this bus I can’t go to Ayacucho at 3am. Since the button was getting us nowhere and we were getting progressively further and further away from Huayatara I resorted to banging on the bus floor above the drivers head. I’m pretty sure I woke up the entire bus. I probably should feel bad but I was in a state of panic at this point so really it is what it is.

Finally we got the bus to stop a solid 30 minutes up the road from Huayatara. At this point I got off the bus and screamed in very flustered Spanish to the drivers about the fact they forgot to drop me off and what was I supposed to do now. They had little answers for me and they couldn’t very well just leave me on the side of the road without any streetlights at 9:30 pm. Then I would actually have become bus road kill.

The drivers told me to get into the front with them and they would try to flag down one of the other 2 buses from their line headed back towards Huayatara. Now I don’t know if you have ever tried to catch a bus with another bus on a highway without streetlights but it is not the easiest. The one time we actually did manage to get the other buses attention they were a solid km away from us and there was no way to actually communicate to the stopped bus. The plan was foiled and I was getting closer and closer to Ayacucho, further away from by bed and more convinced I would arrive to my site the same time as my boss with my room in a state of complete disarray.

Finally we got to a place called Rumichaca, a small town that looks like an old ghost town that is the stopping point between the end of the department of Huancavelica and the entrance to the department of Ayacucho. At this point the bus decided to leave me at the police station to wait to see if I could find the other bus from their company headed down towards Huayatara. As I got off the bus and got in the back to get my things (oh yes because I really intelligently left ALL my shit unattended on the top of the bus, should have been completely robbed) a very drunk man got off to go pee. He was naturally quite concerned about my well-being and the fact I was not getting back on the bus. Clearly the police thought he was my boyfriend and kept asking me if I wanted to talk to him. I did not. Ever.

By this time it was around midnight and I was at about 4100 meters with only two light sweaters meant for low 60s. But at least I was no longer headed towards Ayacucho. Instead I was just freezing my ass off. So there I sat in the police station waiting for the other bus to pass for about 2 hours watching Seinfeld on cable, drinking water and contemplating my impending hypothermia. After a while we realized it had probably already passed and we should just get me in another vehicle headed the right direction. Of course the first car to pass was an 18-wheeler. In the states I would never think of getting into an 18-wheeler in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. But this is Peru. Sadly his passenger side door wouldn’t open so I had to wait for the next car to pass, a bus.

As I hopped onto the bus the police man gave me some parting words “don’t fall asleep this time.” I didn’t fucking fall asleep he first time. But that is neither here nor there. Eventually I made it back to Huayatara around 3:30. I stayed awake almost the entire trip back because I was thoroughly convinced he would forget about me and I would end up in Lima, even though I was sitting right next to him.

Anyways to wrap up this epic saga I slept in a combi for a solid hour and then went up the mountain. I was so sound asleep on the way up that I nearly missed my stop and ended up in the next town over. Luckily my governor noticed I should not in fact keep going up the mountain. I took a brief nap and my boss showed up in the afternoon to a seemingly productive volunteer who lived in clean room. Little did she know I spent the next 3 days in bed with something very similar to strep throat. All in all I learned my lesson, when it comes to transportation in Peru, never experiment, you will get burned.