My Top Fives

Canal de Pangalanes, Madagascar (MK)

Rie tells me that when I get back to the USA in a few days, people will ask me which place--out of all the places we went this year--I liked the best. I can’t begin to answer that. I loved many places for many reasons, and I often felt that the most amazing thing was that we were getting to make this trip at all. 

But thinking about that question brought a flood of great experiences to mind. I know that when I get home, it’s going to be hard for me not to rattle on and on and on about the trip to anyone who will listen—and equally hard to zero in on the key moments. So here’s a first stab at that:

Five Great Days

With Annie in Mendoza. (MK)

• The day Miguel took me to his hometown, the tiny village of Inguilpata, Peru. I felt privileged to be invited briefly into a way of life so different from my own.
• Any day on our five-day wilderness hike in southern Chile. My fit, athletic big sister does stuff like this—I don’t. On this trek I discovered that actually I could too.
• Our bicycle tour around the vineyards of Mendoza, Argentina with my daughter and Rie’s younger son. I can’t believe I never wrote about this outing—it was pure fun in excellent company.
• Our pirogue tour along the Canal de Pangalanes in Madagascar. Though we got off on the wrong foot with our guide, we ended up having a blissful day with zero travel stress.
• Day One of a three-day trip to some remote villages in northern Mozambique. Volunteering at Manda Wilderness gave me the rare chance to do meaningful work in stunning surroundings—and sitting on the sand watching the sun go down, I was very grateful for that.

Five Memorable Meals

Honorable Mention--the indoor asado at our hostel in El Bolsón, Argentina, where Claudio (the chef) laid the food on the table and said, "Attack!" (KK)

• Potato soup, guinea pig haunches, and sweet, strong coffee at the Aristas’ home in Inguilpata, Peru. Everything we ate was grown or raised right on their hillside patch of land—and boy, was it good!
• Minced beef and olive empanadas at Bar Britanico, a decades-old wood-and-brass neighborhood café in San Telmo, Buenos Aires, Argentina. While I ate, I watched lovers woo and old men drink coffee and argue about politics.
• The lovely brunch in Somerset West, South Africa with Mariette DuPlessis, who had loaned us her family’s home in Hermanus for a week. For dessert, she gave us melktert (custard pie) and koeksisters (twisted, syrup-covered doughnuts), foods that till then I’d only read about in novels.
• Any one of many dinners that ended with Nkwichi pudding—a simple tangy-lemon dessert with a crushed cookie crust—at a torch lit table on the beach in Mozambique, with the sky over Lake Malawi black and full of stars.
• My budget-friendly comfort food routine in Chiang Mai, Thailand: stir-fried big noodles with chicken and veggies from one night-time street stall and a banana pancake from the next stall over. I’d hand each vendor one of the empty steel dishes from my tiffin carrier, then sit between the stalls on a plastic stool, people-watching until the dishes came back full.

Five Crummy Moments

It was called the Hotel Great Value--really! (MK)

• Heading across the bridge from Ecuador to Peru, having already been stamped out of Ecuador, and discovering that we couldn’t legally enter Peru.
• Standing at an ATM in Dehradun, India, low on cash, having just put my card into the machine, when the power suddenly failed, the screen went blank and the card was gone.
• Sitting in a Dehradun hotel room after changing rooms once already because the door of the first room didn’t lock, and hearing a crash. It turned out the bathroom ceiling had collapsed and the tub was now full of drywall pieces and gypsum dust.
• Riding exhausted in the front seat of a mini-bus in Mozambique, hearing a thwap! and knowing, just knowing, that my computer bag had flown out onto the highway through the faulty back door. It had.
• Later that same day—having retrieved the bag from the highway and declined to let the chapa conductor put it back under a big dead catfish in the back of the van—walking into one of the trip’s nicer hotels gritty with dust, stinking of sweat, with fish scales clinging to what once was a respectable looking piece of luggage.

Five Things I Wish I’d Done Differently

But people speak English all over the world, don't they? (Andasibe, Madagascar, KK)

• Planned ahead more. We read a lot about South America ahead of time and we figured we’d read about subsequent places while we traveled. What we didn’t realize was that when you’re in a new place, you want to BE in that place—and that it takes a lot of mental energy to find your way around, learn bits of a new language, see and do and eat new things. We didn’t have the headspace to read much about Africa and Asia before we went there, and that was a shame.
• Brought a better camera. I had a cheap point-and-shoot and when I ruined it in the rain on Lake Titicaca, I bought another cheap point-and-shoot. Yes, it’s a pain to lug around heavy camera equipment, and yes, you have to protect it from dust, rain and theft. But so many times on this trip I saw things I just couldn’t photograph with the camera I had on hand.
• Joined a few carefully selected tours. We chose to make all our own transportation and accommodation arrangements, which probably saved us money and definitely resulted in many wonderful encounters, insights and experiences. Traveling like the local people do gives you a glimpse of their lives that you just can't get from an air-conditioned tourist van. But we also had days when we arrived at our destination too exhausted to be interested in what was around us. Letting somebody else do the planning now and then would have saved some wear and tear. 
• Built in more down time. When you travel for an extended period, you just can't keep up the pace you might during a two- or three-week vacation. We learned this eventually, though it never felt quite right to "waste" a day when there was so much around us to do.
• Learned more language before the trip. I found it impossible to even think about studying Portuguese in a Spanish-speaking country. It was hard enough to study Spanish in a Spanish-speaking country! I wish that before I left home I had mastered at least the basic phrases in each language we were going to encounter. Even stammering out “hello,” “goodbye,” “please” and “thank you” makes a world of difference. Very often, knowing just a little more would have let me have real conversations.

Five Realizations

Getting a parcel wrapped for mailing in India means going to a street vendor who sews it up in white linen and seals it with red wax. (KK)

• Slow is good. The places I remember most clearly are the ones where we stayed a while and did ordinary things—bought groceries, browsed bookstores, paid for phone service—rather than just saw the sights.  
• The world is really big. We went so many places—and we saw just a tiny fraction of all there is to see.
• You might as well be optimistic. When you travel, so many things are beyond your control that you can either be paralyzed or take the positive view. Staying hopeful is less tiring—and it’s almost always warranted.  
• It's tricky to balance trust and caution. In some places you have to develop a thousand-yard stare to ward off all those who will clamor for your attention, your business, your coins, pens, sweets or whatever. Almost everywhere, you have to be alert to avoid theft and scams. But sometimes the guide you hire because his persistence wore you down turns out to be excellent. Sometimes the kid who is Bonjour-madame!-ing you to death just wants to say hi. If you’re too distant and too careful, you miss out on the little exchanges that make travel so much fun.  
• Wherever you’re thinking of going, go now! Your knees will only get creakier. And that thing people say about how it can be cheaper to go than to stay at home? I never used to believe it either, but it's true! It's true!

(KK)

MichaelJacksonMichaelJordanObama

(KK)

It’s been fascinating on this trip to hear what people in various countries have to say about the USA. First, though, we had to figure out how to refer to the place where we live. In South America—which is America too—we were very careful to say “We’re from the United States.” Actually, I learned in Peru to say “Soy norteamericana,” which I liked because it encompassed both my Canadian childhood and my adult home. But when we told people in Africa and Asia that we were from the United States, they’d sometimes look puzzled for a second and then say, “Oh! America!”

Occasionally someone would make a critical comment about American geo-politics, but usually they were too polite. More often they’d mention someone—a cousin, a niece, a son—who was studying in the US. Or maybe they’d say, “I want to go there someday.”  Frequently they asked what we thought of Obama and barely waited for our reply before sharing their own enthusiasm and admiration. 

A young South African man was astonished to hear there’s a lot of interest in organic food in the USA. He didn’t say so, but I gather his impression was that all we eat—and all we want to eat—are genetically modified organisms and the products of vast chemical-spewing agribusinesses.

A man who ran a little restaurant in Antananarivo, Madagascar couldn’t believe he was talking to people from America. “It is so far!” he said in French, the look on his face expressing real shock. Then, after a pause, he added, “Everybody is intelligent there.” We laughed. “Well,” we said, “some are, some aren’t.”

In Peru one day, I got into a discussion with my Spanish teacher—an intelligent, university-educated man—about access to medical care for poor people in each of our countries. “Are there poor people in the United States?” he asked me, clearly surprised.

A well-traveled professor we met on a train in India exclaimed that when he visited the United States he encountered “such respect for life!” He wasn’t talking about a religious viewpoint, it turned out—he was talking about traffic. “I started across a zebra crossing,” he told us, “and suddenly I saw a car was coming towards me. ‘What should I do?’ I asked myself. ‘Should I go back to the sidewalk?’ But the car stopped and the driver did this”—he made a motioning-across gesture. “And I saw that behind her were many more cars. And they all waited for me to go across!” Having experienced Indian city streets—where, the joke goes, you need to hire a rickshaw to cross the street—we understood why the incident seemed so remarkable to him. But I also thought he was lucky he hadn’t been on some US street corners I know.

Obama-wear was everywhere we went in Africa. His face was on ties, t-shirts, backpacks, belts. Some of the clothing may have been donated by US charities, but some—the sarongs printed with his face, for instance—sure looked locally made. It seemed that people there were proud of him and of the fact his father was Kenyan. It seemed they wanted the world to know he was one of their own.
 

The influence of American pop culture was dismayingly widespread. Our guide in the empty wilderness at the southern tip of Chile turned out to be a big fan of “The Dukes of Hazzard.” A waitress in a café in northern Peru played a Garth Brooks song about Baton Rouge over and over and over again so she'd be able to sing it in the karaoke bar. And a sunglass-wearing doorman in Madagascar told us that all Americans were very strong--he knew, he had seen "Top Gun." 

We arrived in Botswana just before the Fourth of July. We’d been gone so long from home—and had encountered so few norteamericanos—that I was thrilled to hear the exuberant white woman hosting the gathering we’d been invited to address another guest as “Sugar Pie.” Americans! And not just Americans—Southerners! We introduced ourselves and were hugged and welcomed and pulled into a volleyball game, all of which bolstered one of the better stereotypes about our citizens abroad. Whatever else we may be, Americans sure are friendly—and at that moment I was very glad of it. 

In Chiang Mai, Thailand, the man in the optical store was reading my passport information out loud so his coworker could write up a receipt for my glasses. He got to “place of birth,” and a note of envy and longing crept into his voice as he read, “New York, USA.” I felt like saying, “I’m not rich! My life is nowhere near as privileged as you think it is!” But it is. I am tremendously privileged and most of the time I don’t even know it.

At Fatehpur Sikri, an ancient capital near Agra, India, a young teenager latched onto us in the crowded market just as we realized we’d missed the road leading up to the entrance to the historic site. He insisted on steering us through twisting narrow alleys up the steep hill, chatting all the while in English. “America? Very good country.” And then in a rush of enthusiasm he said, stringing it all together so it sounded like one word, “MichaelJacksonMichaelJordanObama.” He paused, then went on. “Well, Michael Jackson is dead. But do you know Michael Jordan?” The face of a street-smart teenager planning to steer us to a little shop he knew became suddenly naïve and hopeful. “Do you know Obama?”

(KK)

Seemingly Fearless: A Tribute to My Travel Buddy

Vilcabamba, Ecuador

As I write this, Rie is somewhere over the South China Sea, on her way back to the U.S. to visit her daughter, move in with her boyfriend and interview for a new job. I wish she could have stayed on in Chiang Mai so we could share the final weeks of this amazing year of travel. But I understand her reasons for heading home, and 10 ½ months on the road together is pretty darn good.

In fact, it’s been a fantastic time, and it wouldn’t have been half as much fun without my big sister. So here’s a toast to Rie, who helped keep the cheers level high despite flat tires, collapsing ceilings, would-be purse snatchers, and the big hairy rat in Indira Gandhi International Airport. Together, we traveled on all-night buses, crowded colectivos and shaky taxi-brousses. We shared power outages, water outages, a plague of frogs—and several 30 Rock festivals when the challenges of travel temporarily got the better of us. 

Kuélap, Peru

Cataracta Gocta, Peru

 

Machu Picchu, Peru

Rie turned out to be a great spotter of distinctive potato chip flavors—Tomato Mischief in India, Nori Seaweed and Hot Chilli Squid in Thailand—and of distinctive cross-cultural fashions, like the super-cool dude strutting with his posse through the gare routière in Madagascar, wearing dark glasses and an “I [heart] Ben Affleck” t-shirt.

Huayna Picchu, Peru

Mirador de Patagonia, Punta Arenas, Chile

Isla Navarino, Chile

 

Parc national de L'Isalo, Madagascar

I intended to get trip t-shirts made up for us featuring a phrase from an email one of her friends sent early in the trip. He’d been reading the blog and said something about how “seemingly fearless” we were. ‘If only he knew!’ we thought. By then we were all too familiar with our own and each other’s recurring anxieties, from missing planes to getting robbed to running out of toilet paper. But together we managed to get past all those fears and keep the adventure going.

Gaborone, Botswana

Agra, India

Agra, India

We discovered and got past some differences too. One of us considers yogurt and granola a perfectly acceptable supper, one of us doesn’t. One of us thinks going out to hear Thai people sing country music is a great idea, one of us doesn’t. One of us thinks that if the cab is coming at 7:30, we should be out front at 7:25, and the other one doesn’t want to put down her coffee mug until 7:29. But the spats have been few, far between and minor, and after nearly a year of hard travel, there’s no doubt that we’re still friends. 

Varanasi, India

Thanks for believing we could make this incredible journey, Rie. Thanks for making it happen and for making it so much fun. And thanks for identifying all 56,743 species of yellow flower we encountered along the way. Any time you want to do this again, I’m up for it.

I’ll make sure we have lots of T.P.

Chiang Mai, Thailand

 

(KK)

Metangula Beach Safari!

Metangula, Mozambique, on the shore of Lake Malawi. (KK)

[7 August]

I seem to have created a stir.                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Metangula?” I asked the man standing just inside the door to the big, battered bus.

“Metangula,” he reassured me.

“Metangula!” chorused several nearby passengers, all of them male, all of them grinning. Some made as if to move over and make room for me on their seats, but the bus man gestured that I should go to the very back, where the last free seats were. A young guy, joshing to his friends in Portuguese, left his seat and climbed back to keep me company.

I had just flown into Lichinga, Mozambique on a 737, hopped into a taxi and ridden straight to the dirt lot that serves both as a marketplace and as the boarding spot for chapas, the old buses and flatbed trucks that are northern Mozambique’s transportation system.  Just as I’d been told, in front of a shop called Handling waited a white-painted schoolbus destined for Metangula, the small lakeside town I was headed for. The plan was to spend the night in Metangula, then take another chapa further north along Lago Niassa (aka Lake Malawi) to Cóbuè and from there either take a boat or walk three hours to the Manda Wilderness. I knew the place I’d signed on to volunteer for a month was remote, but I was only beginning to understand how remote. 

The ­chapa guys had hustled me and my bags on board as if the bus would be taking off any second. But though the last seats filled within minutes and all the luggage was already piled behind the driver, we sat for another hour in the mercado. Domingo, the young man who seemed to think fortune had smiled upon him when I got on the bus, tried his best to chat me up.

“Where are you from?”

“The United States.”

“The United States!” He conveyed this information to his buddies further up. “Are you married?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged. He seemed to have run out of English, and in any case he looked maybe 19 years old. So I just smiled at him and looked out the window at the mercado’s small shops, some painted concrete, others just ragged rush-and-stick structures. Litter stood in drifts, and clothes and shoes were laid out on the ground for sale. Women with cloth-wrapped bundles on their heads passed by, but vendors didn’t lay seige to the bus as they had in Madagascar. If you wanted something—some fruit, a roll—you called out the window and asked for it.

Finally the bus started, but only to go two blocks and pull into the long line at the gas station. With the aisle full of bags, the quickest way out was through the windows, and four or five guys jumped through to stretch their legs until it was our turn at the pump.

“How long will it take us to get to Metangula?” I asked Domingo.

“Hour and half,” he said, “mais ou menos.” This turned out to be wildly optimistic, and we had more stops to make even before we left Lichinga. Minutes after we left the gas station, we stopped again, this time at a bakery. Passengers poured out and came back with bags of bread and rolls.

Everyone on the bus seemed to know each other and they joked and laughed and talked in Portuguese and Chinyanja, undisturbed by all the delays. Some called out the window to friends or waved and grinned at people passing by. We stopped at a police checkpoint and an officer with a clipboard walked slowly all around the bus. He looked in the window, noted there was just one person per seat and waved us on our way.

Inspection duly passed, it was time to really load up. We stopped at a cluster of thatched-roof mud houses every twenty minutes or so, and at every stop, passengers climbed in and out through the windows, laughing and greeting their friends, squeezing onto one of the jump seats that folded down over the aisle or finding a place on someone’s lap.

One woman passed a dangling pair of chickens, tied together at the leg, out through the window before she got out herself. The guy in the seat ahead of me, a thin young man in a gray track suit, a stylish haircut and slick shades, reached through the window and gathered in a cloth-wrapped baby, holding and talking to it as its mother grabbed the window frame and clambered up the side of the bus.

The more people crammed in, the more everyone laughed, and the whole enterprise became a traveling party. As the bus stopped for yet another cluster of passengers waiting by the side of the road, the guy in the track suit called out to them, “Metangula! Metangula beach safari!”

A broad-faced young guy with a red shirt perched himself on the back of a seat in the middle of the bus and put his bare feet up on the back of the next seat forward. He took on the role of party director, talking loudly to the crowd and getting grins and chuckles in response. His perch gave him a good view of the people getting on and off, so he would yell to the driver--“Alfonso!”--whenever he considered it time to go.

I had a window seat in the last row, so I had a good vantage point both for the party on the bus and the hilly, dusty landscape passing by. At one stop, a man called out the window to a boy standing in front of a thatched house to bring him a cup of water, which he did, running with a worried expression and a tin cup filled almost to the brim. Party Guy yelled to Alfonso not to leave till the kid made it to the window.

At another stop, a man selling stalks of sugar cane came to the bus windows to take orders, a two-year-old kid on his hip. When he saw me in the window, he laughed outright and pointed me out to the baby. Two little girls standing nearby just stared at me, but when I waved to them they broke into grins and waved back, one of them with her hands in a pair of big red rubber kitchen gloves. At another stop, I saw kids riding scooters made completely of wood—axles, wheels, and all.

For long stretches, there was no sign of human habitation in sight, just brown grasses, a few trees and distant hills. Then we’d pass a cluster of square houses made from mud bricks plastered with more mud, with rush grass roofs held up by wooden poles. Some stood on their own, some were enclosed in compounds with reed walls all around.

Bandeze, Mozambique from the chapa. (KK)

As we got closer to the lake, the landscape got greener and the bus crept down the hills. Maybe four hours after we left Lichinga, the general stir on the bus made it clear we were approaching Metangula. More mud houses appeared along the road, and as the stops became more frequent, I realized I didn’t know exactly where to get off. It was late in the day by now and I asked Domingo whether he knew the two guesthouses whose names I’d gotten from Lonely Planet. He didn’t and to my dismay he yelled forward to Party Guy.

Just what I don’t want, I thought, the whole bus knowing I don’t know where I’m going. Party Guy did his best to help, but out of the stream of Portuguese he unleashed, the only word I recognized was “praia” (beach).

“Sim,” I said. I wasn’t sure exactly where these places were, but I thought they were on the beach.

The bus had stopped now at a crossroads beyond which the pavement turned to sand. Mud houses lined the streets and a long mud wall was brightly painted with ads for cell phone companies. More than half the people were off the bus, and though it looked distinctly unpromising, Party seemed to think I should get off here.

He climbed out the window and indicated I should do the same.  But my backpack was in the pile up near the driver, and the bus seemed empty enough now that I thought I could clamber forward over the sacks of corn and the jump seats and get it. And though it probably violated all chapa-riding etiquette, that’s what I did, saying, “Desculpe, desculpe” all the way.

Then there I was in a tiny, mud-house town with the light fading and no idea where I’d spend the night. I missed Rie. I wished I’d learned more Portuguese.

But Party wasn’t about to leave me stranded. He offered by gesture to take my shoulder bag and show me to a place I could stay. And however rowdy he’d been on the bus, his face now showed nothing but polite concern. So I gave him the bag and went with him around the corner and down the dirt street toward the broad blue lake, above which the red ball of the sun hung half in cloud. Humped cattle and a black goat crossed in front of us, followed by a young boy driving them home, and on the shoreline I could make out a line of people washing pots and pans and themselves in the lake.

Party took me to the only accommodation in sight, the Casa de Hospedes Bela Vista, a row of small, stark, hot concrete rooms with a smelly bathroom at one end. But it was cheap and there didn’t seem to be any choice. 

I took this picture the next morning, not that I'll ever quite forget this place! (KK)

I told the hotel guy I’d take it and then asked if there was a public phone in town—I wanted to call the people at Manda Wilderness and let them know I’d made it this far. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and offered it to me, but it was a long distance call and I didn’t want to wipe out his minutes. “Existe Internet aqui?” I asked.

He didn’t understand. I pulled out my little Portuguese dictionary, but the word was the same—internet. I pointed to it, but he looked just as befuddled as before. Party and another guy huddled around the dictionary. Party too looked confused but the other guy knew what it meant. But no, he said, no internet in Metangula.

Food was more easily found. Party indicated I could clean up if I wanted and he’d walk me to a place I could eat and then later I could come back here and sleep. I braved the smelly toilet—where it turned out there was no running water, just a big pan of water with a dipper in it—and went with him back around the corner and up the dirt street to a big screened place with red plaid tablecloths and green plastic chairs and a half-dozen people who looked at me very curiously.

I offered to buy Party a beer to say thank you, but he looked very uncomfortable at the idea. Finally he nodded at the order window and asked, “A Fanta?”

“Sim,” I said. “Please get yourself a Fanta.” He came back with a Coke and sat at the table next to mine, downed the soda in record time, shook my hand and left.

I ate a good meal of fish and rice and asked the woman who ran the restaurant when the chapa heading north would leave the next morning. When I tried to leave a tip, she gave the money back to me with a smile. “No,” she said kindly. “Keep it for the chapa.”

I slept better than I expected in my prison-cell room and woke at daylight to find the village already in motion—cattle and goats in the street, women heading back from the lake with big plastic pails of water on their heads, a small cluster of people on the corner waiting for the chapa.

Metangula (KK)

Soon I’d join them. In fact, I would spend six hours on that street corner before the flat-bed truck was ready to carry us north, and then another four hours—including radiator breakdown and repair—getting to Cóbuè and the boat. 

Loading up for Cóbuè. (KK)

The battered windshield, the battered road. (KK)

Coming into Cóbuè.

But a night in Metangula had reminded me that my fellow humans can be tremendously kind. And even in the remotest corners of the world, you can suddenly feel you’re among friends.  

“Excuse me!” I heard as I headed for the chapa corner. “Excuse me!”

It was Party, heading for the lake with a buddy by his side. He shook my hand with great enthusiasm and apparent pride that this stray white person he’d taken under his care was still alive and kicking the next day.

(KK)

Getting Ready to be Unfaithful Again

It’s an ego boost for a girl from the United States to buy bras in metric sizes--85D? really?--but that wasn’t the most satisfying aspect of this morning’s errands. I realized as I walked home that I had managed to drop off the laundry, get cash, buy thread, pick up roquefort empanadas, print out bus tickets and get new intimate apparel all in Spanish—halting, stumbling, checking-the-dictionary Spanish, to be sure, but without resorting to a word of English. But even that wasn’t the most satisfying part.  

The best thing was that I didn’t have to stop and think once about where to go to do my mundane Saturday morning tasks. After a month in El Bolsón, we’ve found the cheap laundry service, located the sewing goods store, learned which stand at the three-times-a-week market has the best empanadas and tortas verduras--and which stand is second-best in case the first one is out. We’ve got our favorite bakery (Marcos, where even the plain grain crackers are hard to stop eating), our favorite waiter (the young guy at Zucchini with the fabulous smile, who started giving us a discount once it was clear we’d be regulars), and a whole pastry case at La Nona that we’ve barely begun to sample.

The surprisingly good beet mayonnaise, which comes with pre-dinner bread around here.

 

Naturally, it’s time to move on. We’ll get on the bus again Monday and head north to Mendoza. I’m definitely excited about it—my daughter and Rie’s son will meet us there, and between the vineyards and the live music and the high mountains and the salsa contests, we should have a blast.

But I’m realizing that this long-term travel thing is kind of like serial dating. You come into a new town all excited and a bit at sea, and getting to know it is both fun and a lot of work. You’re charmed by some aspects, dismayed by others, and maybe you feel a little bit disloyal to the last town because you can’t help but notice that this one has more dramatic scenery.

Then slowly you get comfortable. You learn your way around. You know what to expect and enjoy, what not to bother even looking for. There are secrets yet to be revealed, for sure, but just at the point you start feeling at home, you’re off again, abandoning the now-familiar relationship and starting fresh in the next town.

I know just how lucky we are to be taking this trip. But I’m realizing that at heart I’m a monogamous sort of person, even when it comes to travel. And though I’ll probably always be eager to see more of the world’s wonderful places, I can never move on without a pang.

(KK)

Welcome, Gringa Lady!

Rie and I do stick out a little here. Chachapoyas has a slowly growing tourist trade, but it’s still a small town with relatively few visitors and there’s no escaping the fact that our white faces are a bit of a novelty. Sometimes little kids will stand in front of us and stare open-mouthed. Sometimes older kids or wry-faced teenagers will see us and suddenly start spouting some English: “Good morning!” “How are-ra you?” Once a well-dressed local man leaving what looked like a business meeting in the café glanced over at my table and said in perfect English, “Good to see you. Have a nice day.”

Being easy to recognize around town can have its advantages. Sarita, the smiling young waitress at Café Fusiones, always greets us warmly and asks where we’ve been if we miss a day. People we’ve met only in passing say hello on the street. And when we went out for pizza one night, the young and hugely talented charango player we met early on came over to our table, kissed our cheeks and talked to us for a bit. He was there with his band mates, most of them in jeans and black shirts, and they had no doubt seen us in the small audience at their last show.

“Check us out,” Rie said later, laughing. “We are in with the band.”

But nothing tops the reception we got yesterday when we went with a guide to see Karajía, a group of  ancient clay sarcophagi built into a high cliff ledge near a small town an hour or two away. The tall, solemn-faced figures are pretty iconic around here—photographs of the grouping are displayed in restaurants and wooden reproductions are on sale just about anywhere you go. We were picking our way down the steep trail when we came upon a family group, a grandmother in an embroidered shirt and white cowboy hat, two younger women, and a bunch of kids.

The grandmother waited for us to catch up and then took each of our hands in turn, holding them in both of hers, smiling and pouring forth a torrent of words. When it was my turn, all I could make out was “bienvenida,” “gringa” and “señorita,” but her enthusiasm was unmistakable.

The other foreign teachers had already clued us in that gringa and gringo aren’t pejorative terms around here—they’re just descriptive and you hear them a lot. “Gracias,” I said over and over as she held my hand. “Gracias!”

It did cross my mind that she intended to accompany us to the sarcophagi and maybe expect something in return, but that wasn’t it at all. She and her family were visiting Karajía for the first time themselves and were terribly excited about it, exclaiming and laughing at every turn. The figures arouse plenty of local pride—they’ve just appeared on a new Peruvian coin, for instance—and here we were, these obviously foreign visitors, climbing down this remote hillside to go see them. I think she took our presence as further confirmation that the site is unique and special and worthy of international attention.

And after we made our way along the narrow trail, after we all admired the tall, dignified figures and shivered over the human bones that were lying around, she went around a small wooden fence and picked me a bunch of conical purple flowers, handing them to me with an explanation that I mostly didn’t get. I think it was more or less that these were flowers you didn’t see everywhere but that grew here.

I asked if I could take her picture and much of the family crowded in, then all laughed uproariously when I showed them the picture on the camera’s little screen. Then all the kids and one of the younger women were picking us flowers, tall red gladiolas, little yellow blossoms, delicate orchids they pulled out of the ground roots and all. I thanked them and thanked them and stuck a bouquet into my backpack, and still they picked  more.

The sarcophagi at Karajía were striking, even if their impact was a little diminished by the fact I’d seen so many pictures of them before I saw the things themselves. Meeting that family, though, made my day. (KK)

Local Clamor

A few lines just jumped out at me from the novel I’m reading, Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje: “What surprised Anil [who is from Sri Lanka] . . . was the quietness of the English classroom. In Colombo there was always a racket. Birds, lorries, fighting dogs, a kindergarten’s lessons of rote, street salesmen—all their sounds entered through the open windows. There was no chance of an ivory tower existing in the tropics.” 

It was so accurate a description of the conditions at the school where we’ve been teaching that it made me laugh—though Ondaatje left out the construction noises, the constant banging of mallet on chisel, the unidentifiable random crashes of demolition that seem to accompany us everywhere in Chachapoyas, at home and school alike.

I used to think it was an immutable biological fact that constant loud noise wears on the nerves and exhausts the person exposed to it. I thought that quiet was an obvious prerequisite for reading and writing and learning. But being here has challenged that belief.

A week or so ago, I had my Spanish lesson in an empty classroom at the school and struggled to concentrate as Miguel outlined three ways of expressing future action. The children in Priscilla’s English class were shouting enthusiastically in unison in a classroom nearby: “Good morning!” “How are you!” “Thank you!” Next door, a construction project was underway—either that or someone was passing the time by hitting an iron pipe with a hammer at thuddingly regular intervals.

“Could we have our lesson at the café tomorrow?” I asked Miguel.

“Yes,” he said. “I can see you are not comfortable.” Then he paused and said gently, “But perhaps we can try one more time to tolerate this?”

I could tell that all the noise wasn’t really bothering him at all, and I wondered if my desire for calm and quiet to study in seemed a bit demanding and fussy. More than likely, I realized, his schooldays had taken place in conditions very much like these and he had simply learned to block out all the racket.

It’s an enviable skill. Despite the frequent claim that life in Chachapoyas is muy tranquilo, it’s actually pretty noisy around here most of the time. The church bells start ringing at 6:30 on Sunday mornings—6:30! Early each weekday morning, a garbage truck works its way through the streets, clanging its own distinctly non-melodious bell to alert people to bring out their trash. But no-one is sleeping anyway because by then the roosters have been going at it for hours, the dogs have loudly reasserted control over their little dominions, and the concrete streets ring with footfalls, the occasional clop of horses’ hooves or the roar of a motorcycle starting up.

Few residents of this town own cars and so there are always people in the streets, walking and talking below the windows of whatever building you’re in. The houses have interior courtyards but no lawns and so their front windows hover directly over the sidewalk. And through the ironwork grills of the open windows comes a constant stream of conversation, the beeping of colectivos as they approach intersections that don’t have stop signs, and of course—since no activity here is complete without a festive soundtrack—the thump and blare of amplified music.

Out on the streets, kids yell and laugh and chase each other with the water balloons they use to celebrate Carnival time. Over near the market, men with clipboards who work for competing taxi companies solicit passengers for a nearby town by shouting “Pedro! Pedro!” at anyone who walks by. On Chincha Alta the other day, a couple gutted a two-story adobe house with their bare hands, throwing each rounded beam with a thud into the street, where someone else would pick it up, shoulder it, and trundle it off around the corner.

And then there is the sound that I’ll always associate with this room, this house, this street, this town: The Shriek. Rie and I both heard it our first night in the house we’re living in—it shattered the wee hours with an eerie and penetrating quaver.

“What was that?” we asked each other the next morning. We couldn’t even tell for sure if it was a human sound. Maybe it was a feral cat? Or some enormous and deeply unhappy bird?

Whatever it was, it woke us every night between midnight and 2:00. For a while I would jump up when I heard it, open the window and look out, thinking that if I could identify it I would learn not to hear it anymore. But I could never see where the sound was coming from, just hear it reverberate up the empty street. 

I had almost decided it was a pishtaco, a malevolent Andean creature of legend I’d read about, when one night I noticed it was interacting with what was undeniably a human sound.

“Oooh-weet WOO!” somebody was whistling.

“Oooh we-heet wa-WOO!” came the reply, making up in volume for what it lacked in precision.

It was a parrot and somebody was teaching it to wolf whistle, though I’m not sure why the lesson had to take place at that particular hour.

In any case, its late night practicing of this and other sounds no longer jars me awake like it did at first. I guess that after all a body can get used to the clamor around it. When somebody says that Chachapoyas is such a wonderfully quiet town, I just nod and agree.

“Sí, eso es. Muy tranquilo.”

(KK)

Field Trip to Huancas

Everything went wrong on our outing to Huancas, but by the time I got back to my room Saturday night, I couldn’t help but grin. Against all odds, the day had turned out to be one of the best of the trip so far.

Things started off OK. Miguel, my Spanish teacher, had suggested that Rie and I join him for a trip to Huancas, a tiny town near Chachapoyas that’s famous for its clay pots and beautiful views. We met at the school at 4:00 and walked to the taxi stand, a muddy lot where colectivos sat waiting. A driver called “Huancas?” out his window and we piled into the back seat. Shortly a fourth passenger arrived, a short, bent, wrinkled woman who sat up front and began chattering in a way I couldn’t decipher.

With the car full, we were off, jouncing over the most rutted, uneven track we’ve been on so far, and that’s saying something. We climbed up out of town, rattled past the tiny airport, and bounced along for 10 kilometers or so, looking out over the green hills. (I’ve learned they’re considered hills here, not mountains, however high they seem to me.) The chattering woman got out at a small gate among the agaves, and then the driver took us into town and let us out at the plaza.

It was like stepping into another century. There were no cars and few people, just timeless-looking adobe and wood structures lining the square. Mud streets ran around the plaza and outward in several directions, a few tile-roofed structures on each one. Then the roads ran off into the hills where widely-spaced houses sat on small plots of corn and cane. Mist wafted through the hollows and the clouds hung low.

It started to rain, and Miguel took us down a side street to the pot-making center, which turned out to be empty and locked. We looked through the slatted wooden gate, but there wasn’t much to be seen besides some big flowerpots at the far end. So we stood under the overhanging roof, our backs to the wooden gate, and watched the rain.

Up the street a few buildings away, a Seventh Day Adventist service was underway and we could hear singing out the open door. Otherwise, there were few signs of life, just chickens and a turkey pecking their way along the street, the occasional stooped woman going by in a knee-length skirt and sturdy shoes, a blanket-wrapped bundle on her back. From time to time, an older woman came down the street, lifted a crossrail or two out of the fence opposite, climbed through and tended a wood fire over which was an iron pot of boiling water sending up steam into the wet air. Miguel said she was probably cooking moté, fat kernels of corn, and later it turned out he was right.

I could tell he felt bad about the rain and the locked gate, but he kept his good nature and made an effort to salvage some semblance of a Spanish lesson. “What is the woman doing?” he asked me, grinning as he added “Presente continuado,” the tense we’ve been working on.

I gave it a try: “Ella está cucinando.” That’s about where my Spanish stands at this point.

We reviewed my colors and ran through what’s become our routine in my daily lessons with him—when I got up that day, what I’ve done, what I’ve eaten. He described how to make a local dish called arroz con pato—rice and potatoes cooked with onions, culantro and cumin—and then made a pitch for the healthfulness and deliciousness of el cuy. I asked him where the best cuy was to be found.

"In my mother's kitchen," he replied. She prepares it, he said, in a clay pot like those made at Huancas, boiling it with onions and potatoes and other things.

“Meanwhile,” he said, humor in his eyes, “the other guinea pigs run around the kitchen floor. When the stew is finished and you eat it, they maybe come over and you feed them a little bit and they sniff it to see if it’s somebody they recognize.” He laughed and we did too.

We talked about our childhoods, he quizzed us on the capitals of the South American countries, and he asked about our lives back in the States. How much does it cost to rent a room in Chapel Hill? How much does it cost to stay in a hotel?

At one point he indicated a donkey and asked me,“Como se llama?”

“Burro,” I said.

“Burro,” he repeated slowly, as I hadn’t gotten my double-r quite right. And then again, “Como se llama?”

But my brain was getting tired from the hard work of communicating in Spanish. “Mike,” I said.

He laughed.

The rain went on and on. When it finally let up enough so that we could walk up the road a bit, admiring the ancient-looking adobe houses, it suddenly struck me that I had to teach my English class at 7:00. It was 6:15. We had to go, immediately.

We hurried back to the plaza where the colectivo driver had told Miguel we could get a car back to Chachapoyas. The place was utterly deserted—no cars, no people. Shortly the rain started up again and we took shelter in a small adobe structure. Miguel tried to call Fidel to tell him I wasn’t going to make it back on time for my class, but there was no signal. He tried again and again—nothing.

No colectivos showed up. The light began to go out of the day, the streetlights came on around the plaza, and the quiet town grew even more silent and deserted as night fell. Rie and I started to joke that maybe we should just stay there, that we’d probably get a better night’s sleep in Huancas than we did on our noisy street in Chachapoyas, but the prospect became more disconcerting as more time went by. Was there even anywhere there to stay? There was clearly no hotel on the plaza. Would we have to knock on doors and ask for lodging? Miguel was scarcely more familiar with the place than we were—he’d only been there once before.

We talked and talked to distract ourselves. At one point, Miguel made a comment about how many bowel sounds there were in English, which of course cracked us up.

“We’re even now,” I told him, grinning, and I explained to Rie that in one of my first lessons I’d mispronounced the word años.  

“She told me she had 42 anuses,” Miguel said and we all laughed. (Actually, I’d told him my real age—I guess he knocked off a few years out of courtesy.)

Finally he reached Fidel on the phone, easing my conscience about my class. Then he disappeared, leaving Rie and me to wonder whether this was all an elaborate initiation process on the part of the school—you take new teachers out to Huancas and abandon them. But when he came back he had a packet of crackers for each of us and a bit of information—there were no colectivos in the plaza after 6 p.m. If you wanted one, you had to call and have one come out from Chachapoyas. So he called Fidel again and then reported that Fidel was sending a car.

To pass the time as we waited, I asked Miguel to teach us a song. He was singing short snippets of a wistful and romantic waltz—something about your red lips and your eyes which I will never forget, something else about three things and no more—when a colectivo suddenly appeared on the other side of the square and went around a corner onto a side street.

Was that our car? Didn’t the driver see us? Where had he gone and was he coming back? We were tired and hungry by then and eager to get home. Miguel walked up to the corner of the street down which the taxi had disappeared, but three or four dogs surrounded him, growling and jumping.

The car finally came back, a couple of passengers in the back seat. But by then Miguel had reached Fidel again and learned this wasn’t our car. Or something. I was getting confused about what was going on. In any case, Miguel told the colectivo driver to go on without us. We stood there some more, all of us beginning to shiver.  

More time went by. Once a light shone down the road and we heard the sound of an approaching engine, but it was just a motorcycle. Then another colectivo drove up—a small and very welcome miracle. “Chacha?” the driver asked out his window. Rie and I were ready to jump in but Miguel was hesitating, trying again to reach Fidel. He couldn’t get a signal, and Rie and I opened one of the car doors, seeing as we did that on the shotgun seat, which was fully reclined, was a year-old baby, sound asleep. Then suddenly Miguel was in the front seat and we were off.

Where was the baby? I looked across the back seat past Rie—nothing. Was Miguel holding her? No. The driver hadn’t put her in the back of the station wagon, had he? We were hurtling down the dark hillside, bouncing over the ruts and rocks, and I prayed the baby was secure.

By then it was full night. Every once in a while, a face would appear in the headlights--people walking along the dark road, a couple of kids on horseback, cows coming at us randomly, the odd motorcycle roaring past. At one point, a colt came toward us diagonally across the road and I gasped as we sideswiped it, or seemed to. I felt no impact and heard no sounds of pain, so perhaps we didn’t, but the close shave scared me. At least I’d finally located the baby. Her little feet were hanging over the stick shift—her father had put her across his lap and she was riding that way, still sound asleep, while he shifted gears and ate something or other and carried on a conversation in Spanish with Miguel.

Meanwhile, Miguel was still trying over and over to reach Fidel, who he said was now on his way to Huancas to get us. We passed a colectivo on the road, but it had two passengers in the back and it didn’t stop when our driver honked, so we figured it wasn’t him. And that was the only car we saw. Everything else we passed was a motorcycle, a person or a beast. Soon we were headed down the last hillside towards the city lights of Chachapoyas.

Miguel turned to us. “Should we go to the school?”

“Let’s go eat,” I said. “Let’s go to the plaza.”

His face was troubled and apologetic. “Fidel says the car he’s in will cost 25 soles and that we have to pay for it.”

“Then I guess we should go to the school.” It was the last place I wanted to be just then, but what could we do?

“La escuela Ingles?” the driver asked Miguel, and then we were there. The school door was open and the lights were on. Fidel’s mother was at the secretary’s desk and another of the local teachers came out the door grinning.

“Where have you been?” he asked, laughing at our bedraggled state.

“Huancas,” we said.

“In this weather?”

“It looked fine when we set out,” Miguel said, looking to us for confirmation. We nodded.

The teacher was still laughing. “Why on earth did you go?”

“It was a field trip,” said Miguel, looking at me. We had compared the Spanish and English phrases earlier. “It was Kathleen’s Spanish lesson.”

“Was it at least a good lesson?” the teacher asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “It was.”

Another colectivo pulled up. Fidel got out and with him, unexpectedly, Priscilla, a young, pretty Peruvian teacher. Fidel radiated irritation as he paid the driver and when he came in spoke sternly to Miguel in Spanish. I apologized to him and Priscilla for their trouble and paid him back immediately for the cab fare, but still he was annoyed and mimed strangling Miguel.

“What could we do?” I put in. “We’d already let one car go. There was a colectivo, Miguel couldn’t reach you, and we just got in.”

I was tired and hungry and just wanted to get out of there, but first I asked Fidel about my class. Had any of my students showed up?

“Two of them,” he said. “They went up. I think they’re still there.”

I thought at first he was teasing me but then realized he was serious.

“I was distracted trying to get a car to go get you,” he said, shrugging.

They were still there? Nobody had told them what happened and sent them home? Shit! I went up the stairs to my classroom, saying goodbye to any credibility I may have gained with my students that week. But there was another class in there, no sign of my kids. I went back down, shaking my head at Rie and Miguel. There was nothing to do but wait till Monday and explain to my students then.

The three of us sidled out of the school, Miguel hanging to one side as if about to say good night and go back to his house. He still looked abashed, though we’d told him several times he had nothing to feel bad about.

“Come eat with us,” I said.

“Really?” he said.

“Yes, really. Please come.”

And he did. We walked down to the plaza and ordered a big meal and a jug of Pisco sours. A few bites, a few sips, and the disastrous day shifted into a shared joke, something we could laugh about together. We talked and talked, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, covering Peruvian and American historical figures—we toasted Martin Luther King, whose birthday it was—and where exactly each of us stood with regard to the Catholic religion we were all raised in.

When Miguel first asked about this, Rie said gently that in the United States people didn’t usually talk about religion, that asking about it was almost taboo.

“I like to talk about it,” he said simply. And so we did.

After supper, he walked us to a corner near our house, gave Rie the cheek-to-cheek air kiss we’ve become accustomed to, and then turned to me. I did the air kiss and then just hugged him, wanting him to know there were really and truly no hard feelings and that we’d meant it when we’d said earlier that, in a weird kind of way, it had been a good day.

For me anyway it came down to this: When we set out for Huancas, we were teacher and student. By the time we got back, we had become friends. (KK)

The Office of Provisional Normalization

On Monday morning, a jovial, well-rested Peruvian border agent brought his children to work with him, read them our names, showed them our passports, gave us our entry stamps and wished us a good journey. From that point, the day was a blur of towns and transport, too many people crammed into a series of white station wagons, the windows open, the roads dusty, the mountains, rivers, high desert plains and planted fields rushing by.

We went through hilly, twisted-street towns, past adobe huts painted with political slogans, along wide, business-lined boulevards crammed with cars, trucks and moto-rickshaws. In some rural stretches there were so many rickshaws, palm trees and rice fields that I wondered if this was in fact Peru and not Southeast Asia somewhere.

Then we found ourselves stranded in a hot, metal-roofed adobe shed in Bagua Grande, waiting for a colectivo that was promised but nowhere to be found. The young woman on duty in the shed put her feet up against the door frame and watched her telenovela. The five of us—the same five who had waited for the hostel to open in La Balsa—avoided saying out loud that we seemed to be in for a re-run.

But a driver did eventually come. By 9:00 that evening, after a long, slow ride up into the mountains, we arrived at last in Chachapoyas. In two long days, we’d covered 189 miles as the crow flies.

Our first morning here, still exhausted and disoriented, I saw a sign that said something like The Office of Provisional Normalization. “I should probably stop by,” I thought. “Some provisional normalization sounds like just what I need.”

Except for the gleaming white cathedral, the buildings that lined the plaza all looked identical to me at that point—two-story, white colonial buildings with wooden doors, red-tiled roofs and wooden balconies under the second story windows. The streets too seemed impossible to tell apart—there were no street signs, not even placards at the street corners. (Later we learned to look for the address plates over individual doors, which also give the name of the family that lives there.) Everything was dusty, and the sun was hot and so bright I kept reaching for my sunglasses before realizing I already had them on.

Everything we needed to do involved learning new words and navigating new systems, and that morning it all felt overwhelming. We worried that if we plugged in the computer, the 220-volt current would fry it. Finding a laundry service and dropping off our dirty clothes seemed an almost insurmountable task. Every word of Spanish abandoned me, and I felt like we were staggering around, confused, bumbling and blatantly out of place in our gringa-ness.

It didn’t help that when we met the director of the school the night before, he didn’t seem quite sure who we were. He appeared surprised to learn we hoped to arrange home stays, and he kept alluding to some difficulties the school had been experiencing. It would open, he told us, five days later than scheduled.

The delay has turned out to be a good thing, though. Now, five days after our arrival, we are well settled into big, thick-walled, wood-floored rooms that open onto a courtyard full of flowers and small trees. We look out over tile roofs to the mountains to the west and south, and at night the sky is full of stars and the courtyard full of fireflies. Our landlady, Andrea, has a warm smile, honest eyes and a lot of patience. When we were moving in, she indicated she’d like me to come downstairs and sign a piece of paper summarizing our agreement. I understood what she said, but could not get a reply together for the life of me. She just laughed and gave me a big hug, as if to say, “Oh, you poor thing! You’re in way over your head, aren’t you?”

(KK)

We’re getting there though. Staying in one place and catching up on sleep has helped enormously. The streets have started to take on individual identities, and we’re quickly building our web of local landmarks—the school, the market, the vegetarian restaurant, the café with the decent internet connection, the shop with the really good lemon pie.

And our fellow teachers have taken us in hand. One of the first nights, Gregory, the academic director, sent word he wanted to meet us. He was a bit in his cups when we arrived, but kindly and welcoming. He explained the splatters of blood on his shirt with an involved story about a chicken that got caught in a closing door and subsequently needed comforting.

“Where is that chicken?” he asked Fidel, the director of the school and the owner of the pub we were in.

“In the toilet,” said Fidel. I had to hope he meant the bathroom, and in fact, a little later on, Rie discovered there was a live chicken perched on a red bucket in there. Before long, Fidel brought it out to the bar and they all gave it a cuddle.

(KK)

(KK)

(KK)

Then he made us Pisco sours, and Gregory and Tom, another teacher, insisted we carry them to the roof of their lodgings a few doors down. It was a great place, with a view over the rooftops to the cathedral on the square. In the other direction, you could see the lights of the houses climbing up the hill to the west. Gregory pointed out the South African flag he flew from one corner of the roof, the internet router that hung from a telephone pole inside a plastic bucket to protect it from the rain, the few stalks of corn he has sprouted in a pile of clay apparently intended for repairing the house.

A few days later, they took us off on a strenuous but wonderful hike, delivering bits of teacher-to-teacher advice and local knowledge along the way. (“Only eat the cebiche in the market on Wednesdays—that’s when the fresh fish comes in.”) Next up is the trek to Huancas, which Gregory keeps recommending, though in his South African accent it comes out more like “Wankers.”

(KK)

(MK)

We met more of the teachers at a staff meeting last night, including the two kind souls who will teach us Spanish, and this morning we went by the school to pick up our books. The secretary’s desk and the bookcases that normally lined the walls were all pushed into the middle of the room and the computer screen had a cloth draped over it to protect it from the dust. A radio was playing and a painter was rolling blue paint on the walls. In the midst of all this, the secretary was registering two little girls for school, that is, until Fidel sent her out for glue to repair the teacher’s manuals he wanted to give Rie and me. The CD for my audio-based class is missing, but I’ve been assured it will be in hand by Monday.

A little later, in the copy shop/laundry service where I went to pick up our clothes, I found, next to piles of pantyhose and unidentifiable pieces of hardware, something I’ve been looking for for days:  a notebook! With that and a pen in hand, I’m as ready as I can possibly be to start classes on Monday.

Every day has some kind of mistake in it—Rie asked our landlady’s granddaughter where her birthday was, and I apologetically told a woman we met that unfortunately she didn’t speak Spanish very well. And every day there’s some kind of technological breakdown, whether it’s the electric shower head sending out sparks or the power going out entirely. But bit by bit we are becoming provisionally normalized, even coming close to feeling at home.

(KK)