Isla Taquile, where we spend the next day, has the same terraced look as Amantani. The families here are the ultimate collective. They build one another’s houses, sew one another’s clothes, till the various plots of land in rotation. The clothes here represent the various statuses of the inhabitants. For instance, the male political leaders wear black hats, while married men wear red ones and single men wear white. Single girls wear brightly colored clothing, while married women are required to choose darker, more somber colors.
Before they can marry, young couples must live together for one year. If this trial arrangement reveals they’re incompatible, they are free to call off the ceremony. When two people do marry, it’s customary for the woman to cut her hair. From it, the man weaves a belt that encircles his waist from then on, the island equivalent of a wedding ring. I try to imagine what goes through the mind of a young Quechan woman sitting with her scissors. The guide does not tell us what the hair means to the young woman or the emotional impact of cutting it off. Is she proud of her impending status as a wife? Is she distraught over the sacrifice? Does she wonder how her new cut will change the shape of her face or if, when she looks in the mirror afterward, she will see herself as a different person? Maybe it is meant to prepare her for the significant changes marriage inevitably brings, unlike in America, where we turn ourselves into princesses for the day, then wonder at our disappointments when our lives do not resemble the fantasies we have created.
We spend twenty soles each on bus tickets from Puno to Cusco and learn again that the cheapest way is always the longest in South America. Our rattling two-story bus can barely keep a steady pace on flat roads and seems to be almost rolling backward when forced to tackle a hill. It is driven by an impatient man who blasts his horn every ten seconds or so, as though our time is constantly being wasted, though when he attempts to pull ahead of someone, the bus emits an angry, high-pitched wheezing. At a checkpoint, we’re pulled from the bus, and everyone’s bags but ours, the only gringas, are searched.
Our lovely little Cusco hotel is a step up from where we have been staying, but it is a long six blocks from the main plaza so we’re still only paying about what you shell out for a Sunday Times back home. Our room has hot water, and the bathroom is so clean it’s disorienting. We haven’t bathed in three days, but our top priority is food. We’re famished after a light, early breakfast and the long bus journey.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” I say to Carly. “We’ll eat a gigantic meal, take hot showers, then go straight to bed.”
“Amazing,” she moans.
We test the mattresses, run our hands along the soft, clean sheets. The joy and appreciation of these simple pleasures has become crisper since we started backpacking. I feel the needs of my body sharply in ways I never have before.
Cusco’s center is a well-landscaped plaza dominated by an ornate Gothic-style cathedral that took over a hundred years to build. It was completed in the mid-1600s when the Spanish were conquering much of South America. Today Cusco is aggressively tourist-focused. Outside all the restaurants, hostesses shout out the evening’s specials. Club promoters circle the crowds with drink-promotion coupons. And unsettling herds of children beg in the streets. I hand over some coins the first few times, but there are so many small outstretched hands that soon Carly and I begin denying the requests and continue on our way.
“Lo siento,” I apologize.
“No más,” Carly says.
I’m embarrassed by how quickly I find them frustrating and wish we could walk unimpeded. These kids have learned English expletives, and they are ready to hurl them at you the moment you turn your back on them. “Fuck you, lady,” shouts a little girl no older than seven. “Fuck you, go back to your own country. Leave my country alone and go back to your own country, shit lady.”
Almost everywhere we visit in Bolivia and Peru seems conflicted about the Western travelers who descend on the remotest pieces of their land, grudgingly accepting our money, but these Cusco kids force our deepest reckoning with our culpability as travelers. Maybe it’s because they are so young and so furious, or because they scream at us in English, our own inescapable language. Especially unnerving is that they are out until all hours of the morning, shouting at clubgoers drunkenly departing the plaza at two, three, four in the morning if no one purchases their animal finger puppets.
“Just go home,” Carly pleads with a girl one night. “It’s late. You should go home to your family.”
The girl responds by flipping her the bird.
There are dozens and dozens of tour companies ready to take you to Machu Picchu, the main reason we’re all here in Cusco. The trip will be our most expensive tourist activity, mainly due to the fact that the British own the one railroad that leads to the attraction; the charge is more equivalent to pounds than to soles. We booked our tour back in Puno with Miguel, a lovely, unusually tall Peruvian decked out in a flashy cowboy hat and a big brass belt buckle who was a relief to deal with because his English was impeccable and he emanated honesty. Miguel booked us our perfect little hotel in Cusco and arranged for a woman holding a sign with our names on it to pick us up at the bus station, as if we were celebrities. It’s Miguel who told us about the different tour companies and how certain ones give locals like Benita a fair share of the profits for hosting, while other companies part with virtually none of their earnings. And now we are happy not to have to wade through the sea of entrepreneurs that line the cobblestone streets and instead concentrate our energies on finding dinner.
Some days in South America we are worn out, and this is one of them. We’re sick of haggling. We’re totally over being harassed by men who think that lasciviously licking their lips and commenting on our bodies is their inherent right. We’re very tired of bread. And empanadas. And broken buses. And waiting around. And getting ripped off because we are foreigners. Most days travel is thrilling: it’s new and exciting and challenging, and you want to take it all on. But some days, as in any place you happen to be, you’re tired and blue. Cusco is different from the parts of Bolivia and Peru we’ve encountered so far. It’s filled with tourists and European- and Australian-run businesses. Cafés here serve pancakes for breakfast, of all miracles. We’ve gone pretty far off the well-trodden path these past few weeks, sometimes encountering few other backpackers, so Cusco feels like a relief we didn’t know we needed. We’re craving familiar food, something that will remind us of home or, in this case, apparently, Ireland.
The pub we alight upon is as befuddling as our sparkling hotel bathroom. Everyone inside is white and speaks English. They have Guinness on tap, and three big screens glow with a variety of soccer games. We haven’t watched TV in months, so the sight of the bright, blaring screens only adds to the overall strangeness.
“Where are we?” Carly asks.
“Galway,” I say.
We find an empty table and unload the four gin and tonics we’ve just ordered, compliments of the two-for-one special. Behind us, a waitress floats by with an enormous tray of heaping nachos. My hungry eyes follow the food to its destination, three scruffy guys—though it’s a more cultivated roughness than the half-starved, barely showering, no-clean-clothes scruffiness Carly and I are currently practicing. One of them has a bushy blond beard and squinty blue eyes, as if we’re not in a poorly lit pub but rather some sun-beaten desert. Around his neck is a small white bone carving curled in an intricate, indecipherable pattern. I am struck by the contrast of his burly-man appearance with the delicate way he wields his knife and fork when the nachos arrive, carefully carving up the messy meal. My attraction to him hits me with freight-train impact, but then I hear the accent.
“They’re Australians,” I tell Carly with a disappointed sigh.
Although after my time there, my affection for Australia and Australians runs deep, the few romantic encounters I had with their men did not go well at all. I found them either brash and macho, like overzealous frat boys, or intense and clingy, like the strange c
afé customer I once went out with who tried to hold my hand all through dinner and started discussing a trip he wanted us to take together before the tiramisu even arrived. Did I mention he wore a T-shirt with a giant panda on it? So I’ve resigned myself to some intrinsic incompatibility between myself and Australian men, even though the ones I knew there but wasn’t attracted to were superb companions.
“No, mate,” Carly responds. “They’re Kiwis.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Everything,” she says, raising her eyebrows sagely.
That’s when bearded blue eyes walks up to our table.
“G’day,” he says, “I’m Martyn. You girls want to join us?”
“Sounds great,” I say. “We’ve just come out of the jungle.” I don’t know why I blurt out this unasked-for detail, whether because I’m nervous or subtly trying to explain our unwashed appearance.
“Well, then. You two are quite the adventurers, yeah?” He grins at me, and my heart flutters wildly inside my chest.
The next morning Carly and I are meant to be up at five A.M. and on the train at six, headed to Machu Picchu. But we only arrived back at the hotel around three A.M. after relocating with the Kiwis from the Irish pub to a club, where Martyn and I danced for hours under the hypnotic disco lights. When we parted, he kissed me chastely on the left cheek and asked when he could see me again. Carly and I haven’t had a raucous night out since back in Australia, for alcohol and altitude do not a good match make, and we apparently made up for this by drinking our body weight in gin and tonics. We both have pounding headaches, our limbs are wobbly, and Carly’s stomach is emitting a worrying gurgle.
“I don’t think I can do it,” she laments. “Can you take care of things? Reschedule our tickets for tomorrow, mate, please?”
“Of course! Leave it to me.” I spring into action, gathering our passports and tickets, throwing some cold water on my face. I’m disgustingly hungover, too, but this has been our dynamic in South America, where we oscillate between being the one with the worst altitude headache, the worst upset stomach, the closest to her breaking point from not having a hot shower in days on end. Whoever is a little less worse for wear on that day takes over. And today it is my turn.
This was a new concept for Carly, who was used to taking care of herself on her travels and in general. On this trip, I had learned I was stronger than I initially thought, and Carly discovered that it didn’t make her weak to rely on someone else once in a while. She didn’t have to be an island. It wasn’t simply about having one of us watch the packs so the other could wait in line to buy train tickets, or whatever other practicality, though that was an advantage; it was also good to be able to share our travel experience, to be in this together, hangovers included. I’ve also secretly been entertaining the idea of seeing Martyn again, so the idea of putting off Machu Picchu for a day isn’t all that disappointing.
A word of caution: don’t ever postpone your trip to Machu Picchu. It will not go well for you. It turns out we’ll have to wait until Saturday to get new spots on the train and on the two-day hike we booked, nearly an entire week to see the ruins we’ve come so far for. At least there is a warm, clean bed with a day to sleep off our hangovers and the possibility of meeting up with Martyn later on.
In the afternoon, we head into town to book a hostel closer to the plaza. It’s a grimy little abode with uneven floors at the end of “gringo alley”—a long row of restaurants, shops, and buskers selling handmade jewelry spread open on blankets they rush to scoop up whenever anyone gets a whiff of the authorities. Our room has two twin beds that squeak bloody murder every time you move a muscle. The walls have cracks and holes and are decorated with the strangest pair of paintings. Each depicts a naked female body with ample breasts, but the head is a man’s, with sideburns and mustaches, the whiskers of an incoming beard. Our strange room has no private bathroom, though it does have a small barred balcony where we can sit and people-watch. The first day we are lounging on this balcony, two familiar voices float surreally up to us.
“Would you look at this, love?” says the man.
“What’s this, now?” a woman replies.
“It’s a handmade necklace. Let me hold it up to the light. Yes, yes, I thought so. This reminds me of the beads those old Indian women in Calcutta use. Do you remember that, love?”
Travel is a funny thing. Just when you expect never to see someone again, you run into him or her in an entirely new country on a day you weren’t even supposed to be there.
Down below us, the Wild Thornberrys are characteristically captivated by some vendor’s wares. Before Kevin has the opportunity to examine the beads further, no doubt licking one or sticking it up his nose to test its medicinal properties, we race down to them.
“Girls!” Anne cries. “How are you both?”
I half expect Kevin to examine us and conclude, “Ah, yes, love, these two look just like the ones from that jungle in Bolivia, remember?”
It is also from this vantage point that I watch Martyn make his way toward me the next couple of days and nights. Sometimes he’s with his friends and we all go out to eat. Other times he wanders up alone and we spend our time sharing the earphones of his CD player and drinking wine on the balcony. One night he stays over and we cuddle chastely, since the bed squeals every time we move and Carly is not shy about telling us to shut up.
“He really likes you,” Carly says the next morning.
“I’m not sure,” I hedge, because my feelings for him are so much stronger than I’ve ever experienced that I don’t want to jinx it. I know I could very well be just some chick he hangs out with on the road for a few days.
“He went shopping with you instead of motorbiking,” she says, amazed or disgusted, I can’t quite tell.
It’s true. The day after we met, I emailed Martyn to say my Machu Picchu trip was off and I was heading to the markets. He showed up at the hostel within the hour, mumbling something about needing a new pair of pants. His two friends had rented motorbikes for the day but Martyn had begged off, sending Carly scampering out to see if she could join them before they took off.
Martyn and I spent the day browsing and flirting and buying hats that will be ridiculously out of place once we leave South America. When I returned to the hostel, I was flushed and smitten; Carly looked the same way after having spent the afternoon racing around Cusco’s countryside with the Kiwis.
Although I miss him disproportionately to the amount of time we’ve spent together, I’m glad that Martyn leaves for Machu Picchu the day he does because it’s the same day Carly and I get so sick we think we’re dying. We have eaten the local food throughout our trip with nothing more than the occasional irritated stomach. We’ve carefully avoided raw vegetables and any suspect water sources, but these precautions aside, we’ve congratulated ourselves heartily on our willingness to sample the local cuisine and our obviously strong constitutions. So the irony of becoming ill in the most touristy town in South America is thick. We think the culprit was a fresh salad we splurged on at a restaurant down the street. We hadn’t had lettuce in months, and it looked so clean and crisp, but who knows what did it? All I know is no culinary sin in the history of womankind ever deserved this degree of punishment.
We get ill within five minutes of each other. We’ve just left a late showing of the film Psycho that was playing at one of the many movie houses around town. There we overindulged on popcorn, soda, and chocolate bars, then wandered back to our hostel. Two blocks away, a sharp shooting pain rips through my stomach, buckling me.
“What’s wrong?” Carly asks.
I grimace. “Not. Good.”
“Okay, okay.” She puts her hand on my back. “Let’s get you to the hostel.”
No sooner have we passed the lobby and are rounding the corner to mount the stairs than Carly puts a hand on her own stomach and inhales sharply. The uneven floors seem to rush at her, and she trips over herself. We race as quickly as the nausea will
allow to the hostel’s shared bathroom and proceed to emit sounds no other human being should ever have to witness. I stay in the bathroom for what feels like hours, dozing in and out of consciousness. Carly is back in the room when I stumble in. She’s shivering and curled in a fetal position. I collapse groaning on my bed, and there we both stay, trapped in our own private hells, for the next twenty-four hours. We set each other off every hour or so, Carly’s throwing up into the plastic bag beside her sending me scurrying back to the loathsome shared bathroom to do the same. Neither of us has the strength to help the other or even say anything comforting; we just toss and turn in our neighboring beds. When there is nothing left in our systems, we are too weak to move, too weak even to take a drink from the nearby water bottles. We need help, I think, but even the thought is exhausting.
My thoughts wander psychedelically from one subject to the next, though my brain is too tired to sustain anything more than fragments. I consider the hermaphrodites on the walls, who put them there and why. I think of Martyn. I have long cinematic visions of him trekking the Inca Trail, which in my mind is an ethereal Narnia-like tunnel into another world. I have never been so sick away from home. I have never been this sick in my life, sick to the degree that I seriously think we might waste away in this room. When I was ill as a child, my mother always made me chicken-and-stars soup and French toast and wrapped me in the coziest comforter to while away the day on the couch.
“I want my mom,” I whisper into the dank room, tears streaming down my face.
“Me, too,” Carly says.
But we are alone.
I think back to my freshman year at music school. Like clockwork before my lessons, I’d find myself in the bathroom, offering up my insides from the stress. I remember the freezing, endless winter my first semester. I’d lost weight since I started college in the fall, ten or even fifteen pounds off an already smallish frame, and was like a little old lady, perpetually shivering away.
The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure Page 25
