..on a bus that didn't come.
A heap has happened since last we spoke. An my little brain is having trouble trying to fit it all in then spit it back out on the intertubes.
So I'll just start with the day we had to get from Puno to Cusco. We had to be in Cusco by 7 that evening to pay the final part of the money for the Inca Trail trek.
No worries. We had a bus ticket for 8, 7 hour trip, there in plenty of time.
Of course, we had not reckoned on the sometimes exciting political system in Peru. Turns out someone in the Puno department (sort of a state) promised something and didn't deliver, so everyone thought it would be a top idea to go on strike. And strike here doesn't mean 'Great, I can do the washing, some gardening and watch some telly', it means, 'Hey, leats go down and block all the roads out of the state, all the airports, until someone listens.'
Inspiring, I guess, but inconvenient. So the bus station started to fill up with gringos all in the same predicament. Eventually, this dodgy tour company tout that we'd actually bought the ticket through wandered over.
'$50 US each, and we can get you to Cusco', he said. I was a touch reluctant, but K said righto.
So us, a Swiss family of four, and two Spaniards crammed into a van, backpacks on our laps and knees around our ears, and we went.
The van driver had to go around the strikes, so we took some back roads, or back tracks, if you like. It was actually pretty scenic, and as the van driver nodded off once or twice, then snapped awake just as a tour bus came the other way (also trying to get passengers around the strike), it got exciting. The road was only just one car width wide, and the bus was bigger, so our driver slammed on the brakes as we rounded a hairpin. And what happens when you brake suddenly on a dirt road?
So as we went straight ahead towards a two hundred metre drop, I wondered if the couple of hundred bucks we would have lost by waiting for the bus was worth it. Strangely, the rest of the people in the car went quiet, k was asleep.
I reckon he stopped about half a metre from the edge, and he looked quite calm. Then there was a process of parallel parking so he could get closer to the edge to let the bus past.
After that, we quietly asked the Spanish couple to talk to the driver to keep him up.
It was actually a good trip, though.
Memorable was the toilet break and peeing into a gorge deeper than I've ever seen as a local bus drove past and everyone waved at me.
11 hours later, we made it Cusco, and after unfolding my legs we wandered off into the city to find the trekking place and a hotel.
Next time:
the trek.
Salud.
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3 comments:
Please don't die. The fish would be inconsolable.
It takes me back to a bus trip across Malaysia but in a bigger bus and with only a relatively short drop. A sense of fatalism is handy but no substitute for singing as loudly as necessary to keep drivers awake.
You clearly made it on to the trek? I guess they have that rubber time there as well.
i never got to strike and i was a teacher for 7 years. man. oh, and i've never peed over a gorge, but i squat and probably would lose my balance and die with gravel burns on my bits.
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