Summer 2011: Amos Part 3

After two months gorging myself on Lima’s dense dinners and plump pastries, it was time to nibble on the rest of the country. My college friend Sarah arrived and we hit the tourist road for my last two weeks in Peru.

If the Peruvian Transportation Association had selected the Best Bus Riders of 2011, we would have won hands down. We arrived in Cusco at 6 pm after crossing the Andes for 22 hours. In order to avoid the overpriced tourist train to Macchu Picchu, we immediately boarded a cramped, six-hour night bus to Santa Maria. We arrived at 4am, discovering S.M. to be a rainy jungle town with no signs of life other than the drivers hustling tourists for the trip to Santa Teresa. So we hopped in for the two-hour dirt-road slog to S.T. We slept in a hotel for a few hours and then finished off our not-short-but-cheap-cut to Macchu Picchu with a quick van ride and a 2-hour hike along the railroad tracks.

The Incas nestled Macchu Picchu high in jungle-covered mountains and built a legendary underground irrigation system, but the ruins themselves don't really compare with the intricate carvings and massive facades of Cambodia's Angkor Wat.

Some Incan stonemasons were better than others. On the right is a regular wall made of random rocks and mortar. On the left is the Temple of the Condor, with stones cut so perfectly they look like tiles. Instead of using mortar, the builders made their temple earthquake-safe by cutting interlocking notches into the hidden inside faces of the temple stones.
Archaeologists blame the rare cracks and gaps in Macchu Picchu's walls on sinking soil. I blame this little rascal.

Cheap accommodation is hard to come by in Aguascalientes, the tourist town nestled at the base of Macchu Picchu. Try camping on their helicopter pad.

Sarah and I strung night-bus upon night-bus on our whirlwind Peru tour. There are three important things to know before you ride these buses:

1. Some bus companies are notorious for accidents because the drivers are sleep-deprived or maybe just drunk. You can usually identify these companies by their prices ($2 less) and the giant line of Peruvians waiting to buy tickets from them.
2. “Bus-bed” service means that your seat leans back to 140 or maybe even 160 degrees, not an actual bunkbed like in China. The Peruvian seats also lack the exotic sunflower-seed-and-occasional-cockroach garnish on Chinese bus-beds.
3. None of the developing countries I’ve visited has really embraced the genius of multi-lane roads. Still, Peruvian roads had fewer vehicles, so I didn’t spend every ride clutching white-knuckled at my armrests as we played chicken with oncoming traffic to pass a farmer cycling a 50-pound load of hay to market. I’m not sure if car accidents are highly correlated with left-lane passing adventures, but that’s what the knot in my stomach thinks.

Let me stop this bus blog for a moment. On every trip, my companions raise the same question— Amos, why are you so cheap? You rack up over 100 bus hours in two weeks when you could have seen twice as many places if you’d flown. You spend an hour scouring the city for a foolishly cheap hostel or wool sweater or local bus when you would have only spent $5 more if you’d accepted the first offer. At best, you’re stingy. At worst, you’re wasting your own travel time, preying on local entrepreneurs desperate for customers, and making Americans look like self-absorbed penny-pinchers.

Every time I travel, I worry about this. But then I stop worrying and do the same thing all over again. Why?

I love saving money. I think for many people a random $15 meal tastes better than a $10 meal simply because the price means it’s supposed to be better. To me, the $10 meal tastes better because my mouth knows what a good value it is. I spend real money on education and sometimes on sports, but that’s about it. Touring a developing country where I can bargain for everything is like wandering through a big seductive casino, except I actually make money off the house. That’s one reason I'm a bit ashamed to admit.

An bigger reason is that I enjoy the slow, local, and mundane. Sure, Macchu Picchu’s ruins and Lima’s churches and Arequipa’s museums are cool, but they make my eyes glaze over in about five minutes (notable exceptions to eye-glazing: Cambodia’s Angkor Wat and Thailand’s Sala Kaeow Ku Cement Sculpture Garden). What year was the temple built? I’ll forget that before lunch. To whom is this statue dedicated? That won't stick either. I'm more interested in talking to the local woman carving her own statuettes. I want to find out what exists in the space nobody visits outside Macchu Picchu. How do those people live?

I’m not saying that organized "real-life" tourism doesn’t exist. Many foreigners choose to fly or take express tourist-buses to tourist cities like Cusco and then visit the rural poor on village tours. Others enroll in private lessons to learn the basics of indigenous languages like Quechua or Aymara. It might be exploitative, but I prefer to take the slow bus and ensnare the villager next to me in a 12-hour conversation. When we weren’t sleeping, our 100-plus bus hours doubled as free Quechua courses and exotic indigenous costume exhibitions. The same goes for hospedaje. Want to know what a rural indigenous family cooks for dinner? Some tourists book real-life tours through their $15/night “luxury” hotels. I stay at the $5 indigenous-looking guesthouse and ask to help them make dinner.

After she taught me how to correctly beat egg whites, hostel owner Victoria showed us the different traditional costumes of the Arequipa area.

It's rude to take pictures of strangers, so this is the only bus-costume picture I have. This woman is wearing the costume on the left in the picture above.

Now, there’s a problem with this rationalization. Real cooking lessons in Lima would be far more delicious and detailed. The real Quechua teachers know how to explain the language much better than the garbage collector sitting next to me on the bus. Then again, they teach rich-people cuisine and standard language curriculum. I’m far more curious about how poor people make delicious food from the fields around them (and that just about fits my budget when I get back to Boston). And I’m not really here to learn Quechua, I’m here to make old toothless women open wide with crowd-pleasers like “Ngokha suti Amos, ngokha kani walpasuya makhta” (My name is Amos, I’m a young chicken-thief).

Sarah and I had a wonderful stay with this Quechua family on Tequile Island in the middle of Lake Titicaca. The only difficulty was that they had no shower facilities. Nothing at all. They offered to heat water and let us dump buckets over our heads in their bedroom.

The next day we figured out how they showered. Cold water only, but with a nice view of the Bolivian mountains.

Tequile Island wins our prize for coolest Peruvian festival. Unsurprisingly, these costumes and dance steps are totally distinct from all other Peruvian festivals.

I don't know how they get 60-year-olds wearing cumbersome rainbow clothing to dance all day under a fierce sun at over 13,000 feet, but I was dying just watching them.

Another problem is that I’m not paying my teachers. But when I’ve paid for organized experiential tourism, it always feels fake. I don’t want to be a customer, I want to be an observer and part-time clown. Your cooking maestro won’t laugh at you when you ask where the spinach comes from or when you beat the eggs the wrong way. Your Quechua teacher won’t get into a furious Quechua argument with the funny-hatted woman in seat 7C about how to say “Nice to Meet You.” Teachers smile at you and appreciate your interest, but they’re making money not friends. This might feel like a cheap excuse for sneaking free lessons, and sometimes I feel that way too, just not often enough
to make me stop.

So what do you think? Should I pay tips to these random and ephemeral friends? I love the bonds we share over this horribly uncomfortable armrest or that bawling baby here in the cheap seats but I don’t want them to realize that I rode the cheap seats just to meet them. I don’t want them harassing other gringos in the hopes of more tips (or dolling their kids up in traditional clothes and posing them for pictures, like in Yunnan’s rice terraces). I want them to enjoy my interest in their culture, not see it as a money-making opportunity. If I can find a nice way to help them beyond sharing my wafer cookies, the garbage collectors and part-time chefs could certainly use the extra cash. Ideas? Anthropologists have probably written hundreds of edited volumes on this topic, so just send me an annotated bibliography.