By Bart Barry-
Editor’s note: For part 13, please click here.
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CUSCO, Peru – The morning air is crisp here in the Andes, 11,000-foot-altitude crisp, and the sun is bright, 11,000-foot-altitude bright in a way whose rays the locals call “burning, not tanning” and the two cause a unique latemorning event in the small room of this bed and breakfast: The glass of the window is too hot to touch but opening it makes the room uncomfortably cold. That may be the only phenomenon the locals don’t cure with coca-leaf tea. And about that coca plant . . .
Shaking, no, shuddering: Not the way your hand moves after a third cup of coffee but how your body moves on a sudden chill, except not confined to a second or a minute or an afternoon – an involuntary shudder vibrating the body its length till the day divides itself as Nature did before we imposed clocks on Her, just meaningless darkness or meaningless light, no conscious associations. An unscheduled way to spend one’s last day in Peru, but the day after Montaña Machu Picchu’s ascent was scheduled for recuperation, though who knew so much freight might be loaded that word’s stanchions?
Ah coca, the magic miracle plant of Inca lore, potent more as an appetite suppressant and diuretic than anything registerable as a stimulant; it might get you up the mountain embracing absurdity but you don’t attribute it till a fifteenhour passes and a 2,000-foot ascent and (more harrowing) descent gives you nary a hungerspike nor even hunger enough to force down luxury rail fare and while you do wonder at it you figure fatigue reasonably overwhelms hunger till the next day. Sometime that afternoon you realize unwittingly imposing the coldest of turkeys on what now loudly declares itself a chemical dependency was unwise; it might be sunstroke from the descent – an afternoon Andean glare that dashes through SPF 30 like wet tissuepaper – or it might be foodpoisoning (did that alpaca steak taste gamey? compared to what?) but it almost has to be the “tea” you mixed to muddy with green hoja-de-coca dust from the convenience store and an enormous bottle of water with a tiny mouth into which you futilely windfunneled your green dust the night before the climb, a concoction so vile your limeña boothmate spent her ninetyminute beside you on the train from Ollantaytambo to Machu Picchu disbelieving and rhetorically asking if you’d complete your illadvised journey to bottlebottom.
Which you proudly stupidly did before resuming assault on your stunned belly with coca-toffee snacks perfect for suckling all the way up the mountain. Twenty-four hours to the quarterhour later the shuddering begins and does not subside for a thirtyhour till it expertly passes misery’s baton to dysentery’s fay cousin, who makes a host of you for a week.
Nothing recreational or edifying about the climb, either, friends. Thirty degrees unrelenting upwards on narrow ancient stones, every CrossFitter for the last hour telling you in Spanish or English or Dutch or German you are but a tenminute from a top you cannot see until you do and wish you didn’t – so high and steeply above you and covered in colorful North Face attire it resembles an Afghan fighter kite at full pench – then a sideways descent on cramped legs that shows you a sheerness of drop you missed going up, a vista that sets you to spidermanning boulders along the silent drumbeat of a mantra that goes: Legs soft like Bode’s!
A perfect time, evidently, to wonder at how much of language is but courtesy. All of grammar, as it happens. Look at that last fragment of a sentence. “Grammar” is the only word my mind needed to communicate the idea to itself; “all” was assumed since less than all would be more sensation than qualifier; prepositions like “as” and “of” serve purely diplomatic roles, softening and qualifying for another’s benefit; “it” is redundant; “happens” is stylistic fluff not even a frivolous mind would say to itself. In that light most editing reveals itself arbitrary as any other pursuit: You’re telling me you got the gist of things without the decorative prepositional phrase “as it happens” but I know I got my thought’s gist simply with “grammar” and so now we haggle to a compromise we assume acceptable to readers like us.
Lima is neither pretty nor pleasant – a Latin American capital in the harshest sense of the term. A desert with a coastline, dusty and trafficful, unfriendly to locals and visitors alike, still deeply scarred 25 years later. Taxistas and innkeepers, what talkative folks comprise the majority of any solo traveler’s conversations his first day in any city, get blankfaced and silent at first utterance of these unmistakable seven syllables: Sendero Luminoso. The ostensibly Maoist domestic terror organization that put Lima in a shoot-on-sight sundown curfew until its leader, Abimael Guzman, was captured and set in a cage for public viewing – its mention still snatches all animation from limeños’ faces.
When compared to other Latin American places there is an almost militaristic efficiency to Peruvians’ concept of time and its elasticity: Peru uses every hour of the day and night, planes land on the Jorge Chavez tarmac at 0200, trains depart their stations at 0400. But Peru also strikes a visitor as among Latin America’s most enduringly indigenous countries – from Peruvians’ appearances and dress to the successful preservation of Inca culture. Perhaps the Spaniards brought to the Americas more than what pestilence and durable brutality trumpeted their arrival; perhaps, contrary to centuries of Eurocentric scholarship, Spaniards also brought a cultural flimsiness Peru found resistible better than its neighbors did.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry