Joe Stevens Mocks a Llama

by David D Hammons

  Chapter 2

  The plane landed in Lima at midnight. What may not be readily apparent is that Lima, Peru and Atlanta, USA are on identical time zones. So any amount of tiredness would be credited not to jetlag but to the free wine we had on the plane. It was a long flight, sure, but that’s partly why Freddy and I had so much free wine.

  “The first thing we need to do is get some cash,” I said as we walked to baggage claim. The smell of hot dust, humid and dry at the same time in a way that made me not sure if I was sweating or chafing, lingered throughout the terminal. The smell was like the smoke from burning wet grass, but even that analogy didn’t make sense to me as I sniffed the definitively foreign smells of the Lima airport.

  “Oh man, oh man, oh man,” Freddy chanted as he approached the baggage carousel designated for our plane. We were apparently the last flight of the day, as only one of the fifteen or so carousels was actively turning.

  “You see an ATM?” I asked.

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “I’m sure we’ll find an ATM somewhere else if we just…”

  “No, look! My bag!” Freddy ignored my search for an ATM and dashed over to the carousel, grabbing his enormous hiking pack as if it were about to teleport to another dimension if he didn’t grab it immediately. “I can’t believe it made it to the plane.”

  “That’s miracle number one of the evening. Now we just need another one that gets us to a hostel where we don’t get stabbed,” I said, finding a tourist information booth containing multiple fliers for an assortment of hostels and destinations.

  There were three hostels to choose from. “Hostel Lima” – innocent sounding. Probably too innocent. “Miraflores Hostel” – a very pretty name, true, but that doesn’t mean it’s trustworthy. And of course there was the “Lima Hostel” – again, not very helpful in name. Sadly, none of them were called the “You Won’t Be Stabbed Here” hostel or the “You Will Be Stabbed Here” hostel, a distinction that would have been helpful at this juncture.

  “What do you think, Freddy? How do these compare to the places we were going to stay in Cairo?” I asked as Freddy returned with his pack.

  “What amenities do they have?” Freddy asked, grabbing a flier.

  “This one has air conditioning. None of the others do. I think that’s a good sign.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “Miraflores Hostel. I’m shocked it’s in English.”

  “That alone makes me a little more relieved. Hostel with air conditioning, and a flier in English,” Freddy said.

  “But do they use proper grammar? A cheap translation is a sure-fire sign it’s a scam hotel,” I said, “Ah! They use the word proximity in the flier. Says ‘close proximity to the ocean.’ That and the nice little doorway in the picture just screams ‘you won’t get stabbed here.’”

  “Miraflores Hostel then.”

  The currency in Peru is known as Nuevo Sol. Later I learned that it’s called Nuevo Sol because the old Sol was completely inflated beyond value. So the Peruvians decided to just forget this whole having a valuable currency thing, put the word “new” in front of their coins and told everyone it was better now. I suppose it worked.

  Using the colorful Nuevo Sol, called soles by the locals, Freddy and I waved through the sea of people waiting at the airport cab line. The little Miraflores Hostel flier said that we should only use the Green Cab company, that they had an agreement with the hostel to give a good rate. This either meant they had an agreed-upon location set in the middle of the desert for which to more efficiently rob us, or we would be able to trust the Green Cab Company. Given that the alternative was to trust the other cabs, who were all shouting for Freddy and I to trust them and get in their car, we chose the Green Cab.

  “Miraflores Hostel?” I asked the driver reading a newspaper behind one of many Green Cab company cars.

  The driver shrugged and tossed down his paper, grunting as he waved us inside his cab. Now, I’ve actually encountered scam cabs in foreign countries. One thing the drivers are not is upset when you get in their car. If the cabbies are eager and smiling, that means you should avoid them. If they look generally pissed off to see you, it means they’re trustworthy and you should tip them well. Especially if they throw your bags out of the cab when you arrive at your destination. Them hurling your bags in front of the hostel door is just their friendly way of saying ‘See, I didn’t steal your bags. They’re right here. On the ground. In a puddle. Tip please!”

  Once we’d picked up our luggage from what had been a somewhat stressful cab ride through dangerous neighborhoods, Freddy and I looked around at the two story building that was the Miraflores Hostel.

  A tall burnt orange wall surrounded the structure, leading to an avocado-green first floor and a second floor that was a mixture of some kind of light blue and brown where the plaster and wooden walls blended. The whole thing was lit with a few bright yellow floodlights. The building made me think of what would happen if a four year old trying to build a tree house joined forces with a drunken architect.

  The gate was locked. So I rang the buzzer.

  The little speaker beneath the buzzer button responded almost immediately with a crackled voice that was completely indecipherable.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Rmmmkuuu?” I guess I heard come from the buzzer.

  “Rummikub?”

  “Kerrmmrmm!”

  “What’s Spanish for bed, Freddy?”

  “I told you I don’t know Spanish,” Freddy said just as the door buzzed angrily at us. That meant, I guessed correctly, that it was open. Inside the little hodgepodge building stood an enormous, smiling man who waved us through the door.

  “Hello! Hello, American correct?” the fat man asked in heavily-accented English.

  When I see a fat Peruvian man advancing toward me with the visible intention of giving me a hug, my first instinct is to leap away as quick as possible. Unfortunately, Freddy possesses no such instinct and thus disappeared in the folds of the fat hostel owner’s embrace.

  “I can tell by your accent that you are American,” the hostel owner said after releasing a panting, visibly shocked Freddy, “I am Louis. You looking for a room?”

  “Yes. Do you have anything free?” I asked.

  “Not for free, no, hehe, not for free. I do have a room. Two beds for a very good price. Are you okay, my friend?” Louis patted Freddy hard on the back, knocking out what breath Freddy might have recovered from the hug. “Forty a night for the room.”

  “Can we see the room first?”

  “Very good. Come inside, come inside.”

  Louis led us into the hostel where we found a living room filled to bursting. There were probably a dozen people from just about as many different countries sitting in an assortment of couches that were all twenty years older than any of their respective occupants. Various nautical equipment, oars and fishing poles, with a giant fishing net supporting plastic fish and a few plastic lizards, hung from the ceiling. Hundreds of notes and maps and pictures from all over Peru decorated the walls thickly enough that the walls themselves were completely hidden.

  The living room doubled as an eating area, with tables and chairs set up throughout. Everyone inside greeted us with a hearty cheer and raised cans of cheap Peruvian beer to our entrance.

  “Breakfast starts at six every morning. Lasts till ten,” Louis explained as he walked us to a hallway beside the living room. Passing several closed rooms, Louis led us to a winding iron staircase. It was like one of those staircases from a Victorian library, and looked like it had been stolen from one. I was amazed, climbing behind Louis, both that his weight didn’t collapse the staircase, and that the stairs were completely open to the elements.

  No roof or walls protected the staircase, and I caught my first glimpse of a streetlight-stained Peruvian sky. A light breeze served to keep us cool, or coolish, and I spotted an enormous aloe plant growing in the break between the first and second floor. I
wouldn’t have been surprised to find a monkey hanging from the roof as well.

  “We have filtered water in the kitchen downstairs,” Louis explained as he shakily led the way up the stairs, “Don’t drink the water elsewhere if you value your bowels, hehe.”

  “Did you hear that, Freddy? Filtered water,” I said as Freddy followed behind.

  “Yes. Room has bathroom. Don’t flush the toilet paper; it clogs the pipes. Use the trashcan beside it.”

  “Why can’t you flush toilet paper?” Freddy asked as we reached the second floor.

  “Very small pipes, you see. Will blow up the toilet, hehe. Here is your room.” Louis walked down a corridor carpeted with what looked to be ten yoga mats stitched together and duct taped to the floor, at the very end of which was a green door.

  Louis mumbled in Spanish as he reached into a pocket and withdrew keys. Each key was secured by a different placeholder. One a bottle opener, one a plastic lizard, one a plastic lime, and one a rock carved in the shape of two naked guys mooning each other while beating their respective cheeks with sticks. I was just trying to figure out what the butt-smacking figurine meant, and why someone would make it, when Louis used its attached key to open the door.

  Inside were two beds, an open window, and bare walls made of faded and multicolored plaster. “Well?” Louis asked.

  “The flier said there was air conditioning,” Freddy noted, “Where’s the air conditioner?”

  “Right here.” Louis pointed to a small fan set against the wall. He cursed in Spanish and struck the little fan, which slowly picked up speed and began to swivel and marginally distribute air throughout the room. “Air conditioning.”

  Much to my surprise, Freddy walked into the room, didn’t say a word to me or Louis, and fell face first onto a bed. He mumbled something into the mattress that I assumed was a commentary on the odor coming from the sheets.

  “What was that?” Louis asked.

  “He said we’ll take it,” I replied.

  Chapter 3

  Now, I won’t force you to read the details of our first night and our negotiations with the shower to get it to dribble lukewarm water over my soap-stained eyes, nor will I bore you with how awful the free coffee and breakfast was. Lots of stuff happened on this trip and I want to make sure you get to read only the best parts. Also, I’m not allowed to talk about what happened with the olives. Don’t ask about the olives.

  So with sunglasses properly mounted, sunscreen properly applied, and inhibitions toward the sanity of what we were actually doing properly mixed with complete ignorance of our surroundings, Freddy and I ventured into the sun-baked streets of Lima, Peru.

  “Just think of it like a younger, Spanish-speaking Egypt,” I told Freddy as we left the hostel.

  “Certainly is hot enough to be Egypt. What is it ninety already?” Freddy asked.

  “Yeah. And it’s twenty back home. Hooray for the southern hemisphere!”

  “Where are we going anyway?”

  “No clue. That’s what brought us to Peru in the first place. I suggest we continue this unbreakable trend of traveling directions and go bloody-all wherever.”

  “You spent four months living in London, Joe, that doesn’t give you an excuse to talk with a British accent.”

  “Cheerio, chap, it’s that-away we go!” I said, heading to the right, simply because Freddy was to the left of me.

  This direction ended up leading us down a bustling main street that cut the city district clean in half. Cars honked and streaked past us in a constant flow over a dirt-layered street. The houses and businesses were all the color of a child’s set of plastic dollhouses dropped in a dust pile and left outside for a week.

  Sure there were modern buildings, and the American-originated fast food restaurants peppering our walk made Freddy launch into another of his economic imperialism musings, but everything had that indefinable foreign quality that was fundamentally interesting to look upon.

  It turned out that this colorfully dirty street led straight into the ocean. And by that I mean it first fell off a very steep, very picturesque cliff. Rocky cliffs that looked about ready to fall apart like fragile sand castles loomed over a smooth-stoned beach where surfers and sunbathers enjoyed the summer sun. Freddy and I gaped in amazement at the wavy-walled pathway traversing the edge of the cliffs, a rainbow pattern of colored discs set in the stones.

  The beach, once we’d climbed down the steps to reach the bottom of the seaside cliffs, was like a prehistoric beach. The only sand was far from the water’s edge, thick enough to make annoying dunes inside my shoes as I walked across it. At the cusp of the Pacific Ocean itself were millions of smooth stones. The whole beach was made up of what my Midwest USA eyes thought to be river stones.

  With each splashing and outgoing wave, the stones cracked together like a thousand knuckles being popped all along the shore. Microscopic scrapings done with a few thousand waves over a few thousand years would eventually turn these stones into the sand that existed further toward the cliffs. I know nothing of geology, so the smartest thing I could say about the stones and beach was: “It sounds like Rice Krispies.”

  “The cereal?” Freddy asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmm. Guess it does.”

  Leaving the beach, we made our way back up the cliffs toward a pitch black lighthouse. I, of course, tried to break through the barred doors to get inside the small lighthouse. But Freddy insisted it was locked for a reason and said it had probably not been in working condition for decades anyway. A similar situation occurred when we found a very old missionary church.

  This time Freddy really wanted to look inside the sun-bleached Catholic church, but a fat priest yelled at us when we tried to get through the door. Guess it wasn’t a tourist attraction.

  “I’ve noted that the more in working order a church is, the less likely they’ll accept guests,” Freddy noted, shrugging off the insults the priest was no doubt yelling after him.

  “They’re too busy?” I asked, looking around at the steadily narrowing streets and wondering where the main street was.

  “No, they’re just, I don’t know. They’re being used.”

  “Maybe they’re not holy enough to be worth seeing. Except for people who are interested in the geopolitical implications of ecclesiastical architecture. See, I can speak in words that aren’t real too, Freddy.”

  “Very impressive,” Freddy said, taking a glance back at the church. It had at one point in time been yellow, the bars at the windows perhaps once lacking rust. The stained glass window was smoke-stained but still impressive with its display of the Virgin Mary clad in blue, a sunburst lighting her blessed head. Three towers at the front, with an overall cross-shape in the back, it was the very image of Catholic control and awe. And there were a dozen more just like it between there and the fast food restaurant where we ate lunch.

  Never eat fast food in Peru. It’s too expensive. The burgers are flat out awful. And the soda tastes like stale bubblegum. Seriously, they have this thing called Inca Cola that’s exponentially more popular than Coca-Cola in Peru. It’s yellow and tastes like stale bubblegum; or rather, it’s urine that tastes like stale bubblegum.

  I had suggested we eat at this Peruvian fast food chain as a cultural experience, and that we drink and eat the local cheap stuff. I did not expect, as a cultural experience, to be expelling said cheap food into the fast food chain’s toilet mere minutes after consuming it. Oh, and that whole thing about the toilet pipes being too thin to flush the toilet paper? Yeah, it applies everywhere in Peru.

  Based on this experience, I have come to a surprisingly enlightened way of explaining the difference between first, second, and third world countries. First world: you have toilets and can flush the toilet paper. Second world: you have toilets. Third world: you don’t have toilets. This is a helpful distinction if your travel plans ever take you to a place that serves Inca Cola, as it will be uncomfortably excreted into the toilet and if your bath
room tolerance doesn’t allow you to handle the little trashcan where the soiled toilet paper goes, well, best stick to the first world countries.

  After our cultural hazing that was eating Peruvian fast food, we found ourselves once more in close proximity to our hostel. Freddy needed to get some more filtered water, so we returned.

  “I want to go to a museum,” Freddy said as we filled our water bottles.

  “I saw a paragliding thing over by the cliffs,” I said.

  “I’m not attaching myself to a parachute over a cliff, Joe.”

  “It’s like a museum. You get to see the entire city from a tall view.”

  “How is that like a museum?”

  “We could have the parachute handler yell interesting tidbits about what you’re looking at. Just point at something and he’ll be like, ‘In fifteen eighty two the Spanish conquistadors stopped here to build a gambling hall. The natives lost half the land you now see over a single game of Black Jack.”

  “That is not what happened.”

  “Freddy! Joe!” a drowsy-eyed Louis said as he saw us filling water bottles at the filtered water faucet. It was past noon but he was still not wearing pants and wore a blanket-sized t-shirt, clothes he’d no doubt been sleeping in. He didn’t seem to notice, or care, about his pants-less state and gave Freddy a very unwanted hug. “How do you like Lima?”

  “It’s nice,” I said with a chuckle that Louis returned.

  “Great, great! Hehe.”

  “So, we were…” Freddy said, shuffling as far away from Louis as gentlemanly possible. What he accomplished instead was to leap into one of the kitchen tables and knock over a plastic platypus that was occupying the table. It fell to a clatter after Freddy attempted to juggle it.

  “You drink too much Inca Cola my friend, hehe?” Louis asked.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “We were wanting to find a museum,” Freddy said, after mumbling, “They don’t even have platypodes on this continent,” and returning the plastic figure to its post.