Contrary to popular belief, maybe desire, ceviche hasn't killed me...yet.

Presumably talent and motivation -- or, concerning the latter, at least being able to fake it and pound out paragraphs regularly -- are prerequisites for any writing career. How unfortunate for me.

So I can look back on this trip when my memory is as withered as my wheelchair-bound body, so I can try to distract my gathered grandchildren from the overwhelming scent of old sunk into all the furniture, emanating from my decaying corpse on wheels, it's prudent I document, let's say outline, the last few weeks of my life.

Laughing with Ryan. A lot. Stopping her a few times on every city block in every outing of city exploration to investigate this and that pastelería and panadería. Spotting and snapping grainy photos of the ever-elusive Indigenous Leprechaun. Drinking watery half-liter-and-larger latin lagers. Fantasizing about American microbrews. Eating ceviche. Appreciating las delanteras poderosas flaunted by latinas and, particularly, latina manequins.

The trip from Baños to Cuenca, Peru was memorable in the I-can't-believe-we-made-it sort of way. Indigenous Ecuatorianos decided they wanted to "strike," selecting some inequality from the litany. So they had, what appeared to everyone trying to travel that day -- and 90% of transport companies that traverse the middle and main artery of the country simply ceased to run that day, a worker's holiday too -- a huge indigenous street-blocking party. Spilling boulders out of the mountains across the roads. Piling truckloads of rocky debris, entire trees, and other assorted obstacles across highways up and down the corridor. Cold nights at elevation gave way to town-attended bonfires, giddy families dragging dead trees and shrubs past our detained bus, little kids rolling tires twice their size, feeding everything into frenzied fires that devoured those trees like twigs, just kindling. After a four hour delay we were able to pass, though the motivated men of the bus had to disembark at least once every 800m for the next ten miles to clear accumulations of debris strewn over the road. My lack of motivation has already been documented. But really I was more overcome by intellectuality than idleness, busy dissecting the evening's film, the Mexican "classic" Perros de Dios, which included lots of maniacal supplication toward the heavens and two scenes of badass if inexplicable throat disassembly by hand. Even still, I can't recommend it.

Cuenca was pretty boring, Loja was better, mostly because there was a lady who sold delicious choclo which, upon being ordered, she would arbitrarily assign a price between $0.70 and $1. A questionable business practice summarily forgotten as globs of mayonaise-bonded-cheese were painted up and down the sides of the cob. Pretty university girls also populate the city, and the running was good.

After a few quick weeks in Ecuador we crossed into Peru, pausing a night in Piura, which merits mention only for a heavily-iced, three-layer chocolate cake hacked into and served in ogre satiating-sized wedges. Ryan and I managed to secure cheap, clean lodgings in Máncora, a dusty beachfront outpost somewhere across the desert. We even managed to procure the owner's DVD player, from which point I ventured into the sun only to run and eat, the daily routine of fruit followed by ceviche followed by the delicious beef-and-french-fry stirfry lomo saltado, topped off by American-stereotype-confirming cake raids at the nextdoor pastry spot. Ryan left and I laughed a lot less, tried to remember how to speak Spanish, then distracted myself with another DVD marathon and half-cake's worth of individual slices.

Back to Piura for a night. Continuing to Chiclayo would've been more sensible, but I needed more layer cake. The next morning, lugging two hunks in my stomach and another in a box, I moved to Chiclayo. More dust, desert and dessert. I checked out the Bruning Museum in nearby Lambeyeque, and ate lomo saltado on some street corner; I caught Steph Curry impressing on cable, and ate an apple pie for dessert. There is no word missing in the previous sentence.

Here I sit in Trujillo, the greenest city in the Peruvian dust, notable for its abundance of well-maintained public parks and bored and cheery cerdos -- whoops, police -- quick to taxi a wandering tourist about the city. My juicy stomach is no match for the impulse to gorge, giant cakes and skewers of anticuchos (corazón de res)...fuck it, it's lemon merengue time.