Peru VIII: The Edge of the World

The Huaquillas – Tumbes border was hardly recognizable. It was almost empty. Last time, the lines were three-deep and snaking all the way round the building. The majority of those waiting were refugees arriving from Venezuela and to add insult to injury the computers were down. But now we marched right in and apart from an American family of seven (missionaries we guessed, judging from their scripture-laden t-shirts) we were the only ones there. We had our choice of four counters, which were really eight: Ecuador Out / Peru In, times four. It was such a simple and practical concept, two countries working together at one border, I wondered why they can’t all do it this way. Our good luck continued with a customs official without a chip on his shoulder, but our SOAT insurance cost four times the price of a car policy. Four times the accidents they said and that was that. The entire process took all of 50 minutes.

We caught our breath for a couple of nights by the ocean in Máncora, which I can’t say had improved much. The backpackers were less prevalent this time of year but still eating quinoa and passion fruit breakfasts while the locals eked out a living one street over. It’s the sort of place where people like us are past our sell-by date by about 40 years so we were glad to climb back on Bolívar and ride off into the sunrise (I use this early-morning term because people like us are also considered to be asleep by sunset).  Since large towns with decent accommodations were few and far between, Fran had decided we’d run hell for leather to Lima, about 1,200k away.  It would be a hard three days but the road was good even if some climbing was involved. A lot of this northern coast was new to us as we’d stayed mainly in the mountains before. Not long out of Máncora the Pan American Highway veers inland, leaving the ocean behind. Climbing towards Sullana I recognized the high desert in all its dreadful isolation: villages that spoke of nothing but a hard life with only sand, trash and cemetery crosses to break the line of the horizon.

Once we came out of the mountains I began to enjoy the remoteness of the desert which stretches all the way to the foothills of the Andes. But I happened to look over Fran’s shoulder and my eyes fixed on the gas gauge. I wasn’t in the habit of doing this and now I wished I hadn’t.  We were in the final quarter even though we’d just fueled that morning. I watched it for a while and the needle continued to go down, very fast, maybe because we’d been battling a fierce headwind. Fran was pretending not to be worried. The lack of anything on the horizon other than sand no longer excited me. The miles went by, we crossed a bridge that hadn’t seen water since Adam spied Eve sitting under the apple tree, and still no towns. And then, a sign, made of cardboard or wood, I can’t remember, but it said “Gas” and a crooked arrow pointed to a small house. We pulled off onto the sand, passing empty plastic bottles, torn papers and a front “garden” planted with old tires. A young woman came out with a water container half full of gas. She was so small she couldn’t quite see how much was going in when she poured. Her little boy watched beside her while a toddler eyed us from the very dark doorway. From where I was standing, I could see no light or furniture inside.

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We hadn’t been tracking the mileage vs fuel consumption which was not smart. As it turned out there was still plenty of gas in there, it just didn’t look like it. We’ve since learned that from full to a half tank, the gauge moves at a snail’s pace, but once it hits the halfway mark the needle begins to play games and speeds up. Before you know it, you’re hitting the last red line in the bottom left corner of the dial and telling yourself that there is a God and he wouldn't do this to you again. Would he? The little family’s half tank did eventually get us to a gas station but it was far enough away to wonder if even with that refill, would we have made it. We stopped for the night in Chiclayo and if I thought the desert trash was bad, the mounds piled up at the entrance to that city and on the roundabouts were shameful.  At Hotel La Posada del Ingles, the Englishman in question welcomed us and said he liked living there well enough; compared to other parts of Peru, he said, Chiclayo was clean. Lord above, I thought, now that’s an optimistic outlook if there ever was one.

Each day brought a ferocious headwind and the hours blended into one another in a dusty blur. But I loved it. There is nothing so desolate and barren as this coast, not even the wilds of Nevada in November can look this bleak, and it’s never boring.  Even when the world around you has turned to grey, beige and brown, the sky brings hope in an unwaveringly blue.  At intervals we’d pass a little shack made out of palm or other woven leaves, with every opening shuttered against the unrelenting gale. Behind each one, long, high screens were erected for shelter, dwarfing the small dwellings huddled in front. Sometimes the building was a shop, with a narrow rectangular slot that bravely served as a counter, but otherwise all hatches were battened down and even their enclosed “yards” were roofed over. I wondered how on earth you could wake up to that desolation day after day, for the rest of your life.

On the afternoon of the third day we entered the first towns on the northern outskirts of Lima. What an urban mess, what chaos, it would take hours to get through it all and Bolí’s seats were killing us. For all the desert’s terrible beauty Peru’s coastal towns are appalling: unfinished, unpainted, with rubbish and abandoned tires, and as bricks and mortar become less affordable, bare concrete blocks and plywood form shanties that creep up hillsides that are little more than giant sand dunes. If we can just reach the airport I thought, we’ll know we’re close, but we never did. Instead, we ended up on a curved freeway on-ramp only to be stopped by a young cop just before merging with the traffic. He waved us back. Back? Back UP the ON-ramp? It’s a miracle we survived, especially without getting a ticket. It was only when we reached the main road again that we saw the sign: “No Motocicletas”. It's amazing what you can endure when you’ve no choice. We arrived in Miraflores nine hours after setting out from Chimbote, sore but intact.  There we recuperated for three days and got together with the family of a good friend. It was a visit that had waited four years and two months to happen, and again I have to say, with great pleasure, never say never.

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Leaving Lima I remembered that Sunday in March 2020 when we drove out of the city and into the desert on the southern side. Now that we were back that memory didn’t hurt anymore. For a while we’d thought about returning to Ica, just for sentimental reasons, and the idea of coming full circle appealed to me. But the owners of our old hotel, while sporadically in touch, didn’t live on the premises and the young managers we’d been locked down with were long gone, now in Mexico trying for a second chance at a better life outside of Venezuela. So, with our hour come round at last, we decided to drive through and not stop, and that didn’t hurt either. It was a memory best preserved, sealed and protected from not only the present, but also from ourselves, leaving us just the way we were.

The cliffs of Paracas were the second of only five items on our “Must See” list when we left California. (We don’t like to put too much pressure on ourselves. After all, we’re retired.) Though we were locked down a mere 75k away, we never got to go there. The town itself was sleepy and beachy with a short malecón where restaurants sold fish and the usual food for outlandish prices. Off the waterfront dogs roamed the streets in packs, noses pressed in an unsavoury manner against the glass of the ubiquitous chicken joints. A little local knowledge however directed us to a hidden patio with a few tables and chairs that served Fran a full octopus for $10.00. It made his day and next morning the National Reserve made mine. The vastness of that desert, which cuts off abruptly at the edge of an equally vast ocean, is impossible to comprehend. There's the sensation that you are poised on the edge of the world, simultaneously at the birth and at the end of time. And you feel very, very small.

After stopping inland in Nazca, the road returned to the coast and ran along deserted beaches and fishing coves. Outside the dreary town of Atico we explored the lunar-like landscape, its tearful roadside memorials and wind-sculpted rocks in the shape of the Virgin Mary.  About 370k shy of the Chilean border we turned left to begin the stony climb to Arequipa. Here the valleys were irrigated and apple-green, stretching as far as the foggy land’s end. The mountains, groaning with trucks down to second gear, went from black rock to soft pink, the air warmed and an oasis spilled like a green river across the valley floor. Along its banks shops sold olive oil, a nice change of merchandise, until we climbed again, then flattened out. The terrain changed and changed again until Misti, Arequipa’s volcano appeared. And there at 2,328m we stopped for five days to acclimatize.

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In preparation for Bolivia, we needed to climb in increments. It’s a process best done slowly but we had the time to do it. Finished with Arequipa, another volcano, this one smoking, became our travel companion as we wound our way up to Chivay at 3,600m, and on to the Colca Canyon. It’s a fertile land of llamas, alpacas and the Andean condor. In Cabanaconde the drive up to our hotel was a long, uneven dirt road with dips and rises and sharp corners. Pferdi would never have made it and I didn’t like it one bit.  But all paradises are reached by a rocky road and if Shangri-La had a hotel, it would have been this one. It hung over the canyon and we didn’t even have to get out of bed to see the first condors of the morning soar. At night the fire in the main room relieved the chill of the mountains and after watching the evening flights from the terrace, we’d retire to dinner with a glass of wine. Two young couples breezed in and out for one night each but apart from that it was our own private tower in the sky. We explored during the day, driving above green terraces, white villages and a meandering river. On the edge of one town an old woman and her alpaca looked about to cross the road.  We stopped and waited but the white, woolly animal broke away and sauntered over. It stared at us for a long moment, cocking its head (a little critically I thought), then circled and came back for another look. The unblinking black eyes were quite intense and it had a curious, though simpering expression. I smiled nervously at the woman but it wasn’t returned. The thing’s scrutiny was getting a bit ridiculous so Fran took off slowly only for it to follow alongside. We speeded up and it speeded up until it was bouncing alongside me like a cotton wool horse in the Grand National. He (she?) was so close I could have hugged its neck and climbed on and I was furiously trying to work out its intentions. But to be honest, I don’t think it knew itself what they were. I yelled at Fran but he could see it in the mirror, head bouncing up and down, making you want to turn away, but you can’t! Arrrghhh!!  Then, rescue, the dirt beneath us returned to tarmac, and without as much as a by-your-leave, ole Fluffy it did a sudden U-turn and disappeared. Since then, I can’t look at the things without seeing a sugary sweet malevolence behind those bland faces.

Back over the mountain, passed the volcano again, to Lake Titicaca. This road was very remote, well-surfaced at first then terribly potholed.  No wonder with the amount of trucks but where there’s trucks there’s fuel, and a sort of mobile civilization. It’s always nice to have company.  Somewhere along the way they turned off and we were alone again, descending into yellow fields dotted with deep blue lakes. Coming into Puno it doesn’t feel like you’re on top of the world, but at over 3,800m you’re pretty close. The town was down below, on the shores of the lake and the nav app wanted us to turn left onto side streets so steep we couldn’t see where they began never mind where they ended. Finally finding a less dramatic descent we made our way to our hotel. The streets were busy with a few visitors but mostly locals, and it seemed like every day was market day. Everything was for sale: bags of dried dung for fuel, countless varieties of potatoes, unidentified balloons of raw meat and heads with teeth included. Most of this took place on the train tracks where wide colorful skirts were spread over dirt and rubble without a care in the world. It made the day before Thanksgiving in Ralphs grocery store look very quiet. I think I felt more foreign there than anywhere else in the whole country. We were the interlopers, staring at people while they went about their daily business, and it just didn’t feel right. It may have been still Peru but already our toes were in Bolivia.  And that for us was the big unknown.

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