Video of the journey
Day 1: The Creeps
I woke up early to be at the bus terminal in Jujuy before
7am. I was groggy, having spent the night on the wiggly top of three bunks in
an overcrowded and poorly-ventilated hostel dorm room with Argentine and German
party animal roommates who kept me up most of the night. I had my 6am revenge,
but it didn't feel as sweet as sleeping would have.
My bus was not at the terminal when I arrived, but I was
early enough to not be concerned. My bus wasn't supposed to leave until 7:50,
but the woman who had sold me the ticket had insisted that it was important for
me to be there by 7am, so 7am was when I was there, although it wasn't clear
why it was necessary to be an hour early for a bus that, no doubt, was going to
show up 2 minutes before departure like every other bus in Argentina ever. When
15 minutes later the bus still wasn't there I got concerned enough to ask at
the ticket window, where they told me that I needed to go to another bus
station a 10 minute walk away. Why the hell hadn't they put that on the bus
ticket?? But I walked over, sweating hard with my giant backpack through a not-particularly-appealing
neighborhood. I had been warned about rampant theft in the area and felt
helpless with all of my stuff. Fifteen minutes of walking later and there was
still no sign of a bus station. I asked the one guy who happened to be out on
the street, who pointed further down the road. Cursing under my breath I kept
walking, and found nothing. Another guy pointed me back in the direction I had
just come from. There had been no buses, no terminals, nothing. But back I
walked until, sure enough, I spotted a building with the name of my bus company
painted on it, but it was boarded up. There was no bus, were no people, no
signs of life…this can’t be right, I thought.
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| Waiting for the bus |
I hailed a taxi back to the main bus terminal and asked
again. The guy swore that the boarded-up building was where I was supposed to
go. I made him promise twice that if I waited there, my bus would come and get
me. He insisted that I was going to miss the bus if I didn't hurry, so I got
another taxi back and sat down to wait, sitting alone on the sidewalk in front
of the abandoned building on the sketchy street that was empty except for a few
men occasionally staggering by reeking of piss and alcohol and making lewd
comments as they passed me.
The 7:50 bus departure came and went. So did 8:00, 8:15,
8:30… I started to think that I should go back and give the guy who had
promised me I needed to wait there hell for making me wait in a weird place and
miss my bus, or make him call the bus and insist that they pick me up at the
main terminal where I felt much safer waiting. The whole situation made me
really uncomfortable.
I was about to leave when a vehicle drove slowly by,
stopped, and started to back up. I wondered if it was maybe a company
representative come to inform me that my bus had exploded and wouldn't be
coming or something…that or life was about to get unpleasant. I discreetly
pulled my Swiss Army knife out of my purse and unfolded a blade. I wasn't sure
just what I planned to do with it, it was handy enough for slicing avocados but
not exactly a knife-fight worthy blade, but figured a knife was better than
nothing on that street. The van pulled up to where I was sitting, and a man
leaned out the window.
“Hoooola,” he drawled.
“Hola.”
“Como estas?”
I wasn’t smiling and was wondering how I’d be able to get
proof that the guy was from the bus company, and decided that I wasn’t going to
get in a vehicle with anyone I didn’t recognize, and I didn’t recognize this
guy.
“Que necesitas?” I asked. What do you want?
“Are you sleeping here?” He asked me in Spanish. Oh great, he thinks I’m a streetwalker.
“No. I’m waiting for my bus. It’s coming soon.”
“No, honey, your bus is late! I will drive you where you are going.” To Lima? I thought. Right.
“No, gracias. I will wait for my bus.”
“Do you want a cigarette?”
“No.”
“Coffee?”
“No.”
“Oh come on pretty girl, come get a coffee with me.”
“No.”
“Just a coffee, come on honey, I’ll take care of you.”
I turned and looked him straight in the eye and said evenly,
“Déjame en paz. Leave me alone.”
He laughed, put his head back in his window, and started to
inch the van forward, then stopped again and stuck his head back out the window
and made kissing noises at me.
I stood up, knife in hand, and yelled,
“Fuck you, get the hell out of here. Go!”
He left.
Angry and shaken I was gathering my stuff to hail a taxi
after an hour of waiting on the street, when suddenly I saw my bus come down
the road. It didn't look like it was going to stop, so I walked out into the
road and blocked it from passing. Sure enough, after the driver yelled at me
and I yelled back and showed him my ticket, it was my bus, and the driver
pulled over, threw my bags in the hold, and let me on. I was in a sour, sour
mood but I’d be spending the next two days on this bus with this driver, so I
figured I should at least try to be nice.
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| My bus ticket |
The bus was full, which was disappointing. After all that
time being the only one waiting for it I had hoped it would be a quiet ride,
but apparently everyone had gotten on somewhere earlier down the road. There
was a guy who had sprawled out across my seat, and I politely asked him to
vacate my spot. He was my seatmate and I would spend the next two days smelling
his BO, but he ended up being a sleeper, and I was grateful at least for that.
Be it plane rides or bus rides or car rides or any rides, I like seatmates best
who don’t talk. Ideally ones who don’t smell either, but I’ll take smelly over
chatty. I settled into my seat for the two-day journey, then got up to make
myself some oatmeal that I had cleverly thought to pack myself, since I hadn’t
had breakfast yet. I got back to my seat and realized that, although I had paid
for a good seat, my seat was broken and didn’t recline. At all. This was going
to be a long 2-day ride.
The drive was scenic, but I had been on the first three
hours of it already, so I pulled out a book and read, a book on the history of
the Inca Empire.
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| It looked pretty much like this for 49 hours, except when it was dark. |
Usually on these long bus rides I alternate between my
Kindle and my laptop and snapping photos with my camera, but after that morning
and all the warnings I had heard about thieves in the region, I didn’t trust
anyone, and didn’t want to advertise that I had valuable stuff with me. I did
shoot some videos with my GoPro, but I kept it strapped to my wrist at all
times, and figured if anyone touched it, I’d punch them and scream bloody
murder. A tougher target than someone knifing open one of my bags to pull out
my camera or laptop. I chided myself for being so paranoid, for behaving
differently than I would have in the south. In the south, passengers on the
buses were usually European or Israeli tourists. It’s not that tourists don’t
steal stuff, but there I was always one target among many. On this bus, I was
the only non-Spanish speaker, the only person who didn’t look like they could
be Peruvian, and I stood out. On other buses, people smiled at each other and
shared snacks. On this bus, I got on as the last person on a full bus, a white
girl with fair hair in a sea of dark faces who looked at me not with the warmth
and friendliness of the south, but with frowning and suspicious, “what is she
doing here?” looks. I’d smile at people, and they’d glare back at me. When I’d
turn around to look behind me, there’d always be half a dozen eyes on me, the
whole trip, night and day. It was creepy.
Late afternoon rolled around and we had not been fed. I
wondered when they were going to bring something to eat or stop for us to get
food, since I hadn't brought anything to eat other than my one packet of
breakfast oatmeal. The multiple border crossings make having a food bag on the
bus impossible as any food would be confiscated. Besides, my ticket read “con
servicios” which means “we will feed you on the bus”, and I figured that would
be good enough. At around 3pm we stopped at the Chilean border. In the three
hours that we were stuck waiting to get our papers processed I could easily
have walked to the nearby gas station and bought something to eat, but we were
sternly told to not leave the line, and I assumed bus food would eventually
come, as it always had in the past.
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No bus food came. After being loaded back onto the bus, a
woman selling egg and cheese sandwiches—i.e. everything I’m allergic to—was
mobbed by the passengers and I asked the driver if we’d be eating soon. “This
is your last chance until tomorrow,” he replied. WHAT?? I asked him again to be
sure, explained that I was allergic to the only thing she was selling, and she
had just sold out of sandwiches anyhow, that I had no food with me, that my
ticket said “con servicios”, that I had nothing to eat. He was unsympathetic. I
asked if I could walk to the gas station to buy something. He said no. Low Blood
Sugar Carie muttered something obscene as tears welled up, and I skulked back
onto the bus, slumped down into my chair, and resigned myself to a night of
trying hard not to slice the arm off of my seatmate to grill for dinner.
Luckily there were some distractions from my growling
stomach. Movies, as usual. Unusual was that most of the movies were not horror
movies, which I was grateful for. My creepily staring busmates were scary
enough. Ronan, some heist movie that I didn’t watch, Hangover III, Fast and
Furious 7 (Really? There have been 7?), Rocky 7 (Grudge Match), Lone Ranger, a
surprisingly not-completely-terrible movie by Sylvester Stallone about an
undercover narcotics cop hiding out with is daughter in Louisiana, some
terrible-looking movie with Vince Vaughn, and then a disturbing movie based loosely
on the even more disturbing true story of an Austrian girl who had been locked
up as a sex slave in some creep’s basement. In the movie, the guy was a
stranger who had kidnapped her as a child, he waited until she came of age to
start raping her, and kept her locked in the basement—except when he chained
her to his bed—for 10 years before she escaped. In the real life story, the
rapist was the girl’s own father who started raping her when she was 12 and
kept her locked up in the basement with her seven children/half-siblings for 24
years before she escaped. That night I had nightmares about the bus driver
yelling, "Obedéceme!
OBEDECAME!!" (obey me) while I was locked up in the luggage hold.
And I dreamed of food.
Day 2: Welcome to Peru
I woke up dizzy the next morning, having not eaten in a full
day. Breakfast didn't come. Neither did lunch, making 30 hours with no food. I
slept a lot. We crossed the border to Peru, there was no food at that border
crossing. I looked. I did make some friends, though, after one middle-aged woman
approached me while we were waiting in line and asked if I understood what was
going on. Thinking she was trying to help me, I smiled and thanked her and said
I did. She thrust her papers upside down in my hand and asked if I could help
her fill them out. At first I was confused. She spoke Spanish, I didn't, and
the forms were in Spanish, why did she want my help? Then she started pointing
to the lines as if trying to read them, but they were upside-down, and it
dawned on me that she couldn't read. So I sat down with her and went through and
filled out her forms for her, and just when I had finished, there were three
other women waiting. I helped all of them with their forms and waited with them
in the customs lines to make sure everything was okay. From then on I had
people on the bus who smiled at me. Apparently the people on the bus had
decided that the gringa wasn't so bad after all.
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| Welcome to Peru! After 7 months in Argentina and Chile, I finally made it to another country! |
Finally in the mid-afternoon we stopped at a weird mud-gated
building that looked like an abandoned warehouse from the outside but was a
sort of restaurant on the inside. I elbowed my way to a spot in the line (one
thing I had learned after two border crossings with these people was that an
unwillingness to use elbows will get you left behind and unfed) and gratefully
accepted the blocker-elbowings of a few of my new woman friends to keep my
spot, and when I got up to the cashier I asked the women to help me order Lots
of Food because I was really hungry. They were happy to hook me up with the
best of hearty Peruvian Fare, and when the meal came it felt like the best meal
I’d ever had. It helped that, having been starved of spice for the past 7 months,
Peruvian food was legitimately flavorful. It also helped that I was famished.
The women sat and ate with me, and made it clear that I was now in their
protection. I was grateful for it.
Later that evening, we stopped for dinner, and I felt like
my whole world was Food. It was glorious. I was in Peru. And I had food. Life
was good.
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| Finally! A meal! Also, Pincapple and Orang. |
Back on the bus, people smiled now. Maybe they had been
hungry and grumpy, too. It was like being on a bus in Chile, only whereas in
Chile people are warm and kind and welcoming immediately, my Peruvian busmates
had taken significantly longer to warm up to me. Now that they had though they
were all smiles and jokes and curiosity and advice and niceness.
I slept much better that night.
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| Bus rest stop bathrooms |
Day 3: Arrival in Lima
My morning in Lima quickly got quite exciting. Continued in The Long Road North Part VI: Lima
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