We paid the rooming expenses, nightly, and after being robbed we stayed in private, unfashionable rooms that most backpackers would have scoffed at even if they could have afforded them. I only bathed when there was the promise of more than 5 minutes of consistent hot water and we often caught movies on our cable TVs while we stayed in after dinner; David working on drawings and I under the pretense of taking extensive notes. (Incidentally, many of my notes on Religulous turned into a full-out essay grappling with some delivery similarities between Bills O'Reilly and Maher... I have a one-liner about the restaurant we ate in that night: "Pasty pasta." I'm on the yellow brick road to travel essay hell.)
In our defense, we were coming off of almost three months of total exclusivity in the Catskills from the summer, and had gotten in the habit of being each other's sole companions (a habit we are clearly still nurturing seeing as we are currently g-chatting whilst sitting a mere 15 ft away...).
Nonetheless, the characters we did briefly join as traveling companions are all the more poignant given their brevity and rarity. We were inexplicably partial to German pairs, and often, people well over retirement age. There was, in no particular order, also:
- a mid-thirties Frenchman (5 months into a solitary 2 year trip around the world, excluding Africa...) who we met in a deathcab to a vampire bat-infested cave
- a young French guy with his Polish-born, Austrian-raised, Russian/English/French educated girlfriend (who we ran into all over Southern Peru, and whose face was eaten away by a deadly milkweed found in the Colca Canyon on a hike)
- two Swedish guys who taught us how to play a card game called "Diminishing Wist" (that's a lot like Spades/Dungeons and Dragons) while discussing the cruelty of neutering dogs (note: neutering, not spaying).
- Two German students: pre-med with a ponytail and a dentist in a Dave Matthews cover band
- Keith, the previously mentioned boarder and Rottweiler-breeder from Cockney who, as it was discovered over a farewell beer and an overheard cell phone conversation, was fleeing drug charges for the past two years and was simply dealing internationally ("Nah, mail is the safest. And I've me dogs in case.)
- Behrnard and Francesca, both retirement age physical and speech therapists from Germany whose humor and aggression made our entire experience dealing with hotel staff and taxi drivers in Chiclayo very, very uncomfortable (Behrnard, who could barely say "Hola," would simply start babbling incoherently and animatedly in mock-Spanish until someone, usually David, tried to explain to the frazzled driver/tour guide/waiter that he was trying to be funny, not insulting. He was also known to pick up discarded toys or trash on the sidewalk and wave them indiscriminately at innocent passer-by, while his wife indulged in innocent chuckles.)
- Nilton, our Peruvian guide to the Colca Canyon, who opened our very first conversation with the statement that his wife "lives with another man. My life is very sad." On our last trek up the largest mountain in the canyon, he was overcome with fever and refused medication, insisting that "Inca people are very strong." He still outstripped everyone on the trail with astounding ease.
- Two Polish retirees who claimed that Peruvian cheese was delicious, their son made portraits that were spectacular, and Polish family trees allowed the woman to remain free of the title of "grandmother" until the child in question was a boy, which was stupendous.
- Karla, a boisterous dresser and, though possibly battling pneumonia, avid smoker who took us out for drinks in the desert and later in Santiago. Possibly the only "friend" we made on the entire trip.
The experience wasn't about people, a fact that I struggled to understand as the rest of my life's experiences are entirely dependent upon them. I have always described places by the people I have met there, the conversations I had. But there, amidst the Germans and card games and treks, I found vague stimulation from those interactions, and my usual intensity when meeting someone new was replaced by the adolescent response of boredom: I would find myself seeking something more interesting around me (a view, a landmark, a pastry) while David had to pick up the languished conversation hanging awkwardly between us. I didn't need to "connect" with anyone, and was more inclined to marvel at the way my thoughts naturally wandered, and marveling at these ordinary things I was seeing in an unordinary place. All the while these people still talking to me like the pigeons at our feet weren't inordinately fat, or the vendor on the corner wasn't selling gargantuan carrots that seemed almost obscene in their girth. These are my interests now.
Someone once told me that the most important power she believed in was the power of place, and I didn't understand the profundity of the term until last month. South America was about transport, sure, but also something else, something reflection on myself will reveal; something having to do with landscape, family, observation, fear and self-management. I was discovering my upbringing in restaurants (my grandmother's meat empanadas, manjar-coated desserts) and recognizing my father in every South American man (the authoritative voice, the oily skin, the thick fingers that gesture unceasingly in conversation).
And thus travel may be for me, simply, obviously, about place: a thing that puts me so outside myself that in retrospection maybe I can see myself more clearly. Maybe.
