Marrrrrrrrriiica!

The man seated beside me smalls like a full platter of Anntony's Caribbean Chicken, loaded heavy with calypso rice and collard greens and a half chicken in Anntony's signature sauce.  And while I appreciate him transporting me home for a few moments, I really hope he doesn't read English.  I'm really glad I haven't indulged in any cactus-derived hallucinogens, or this might've gotten really awkward.  I really hope we stop for food soon...

I'm a few hours deep into another 22 hour bus marathon, this time the return trip from Cuzco to Lima, again assured a night sans sueño, playing pendulum in my seat as we whip around mountain passes.  There's really no reason to be in Peru any longer, doing laps on the dispersed friend circuit.  But, boy, do I have great Peruvian friends.  Not to mention a tackless $4 basketball worn gripless on gnarly Peruvian pavement, slowly deflating in a friend's Lima closet, and one can endure only so many And1 highlight reels on the iPod Touch before antsiness has him ghost-dribbling pedestrians down crowded city calles.  Have you ever heard of a bus running a 20+ hour route without a bathroom? Neither had I.

Fuck.

Among other repeat ruins, I explored Machu Picchu for the second time, accompanying mi querida Caleña Kely and newly-forged parce Francisco from Trujillo to Cuzco, now back to Lima, happily playing tour-guide to Cali-come-to-me. Man, I'm gonna miss mis parceros.  All that Cali slang.  That sing-song speech. "Ay, parrrrrcee, qué chimba!"

Ringed binders really bother me.  So I'm left-handed and writing from the back forward, flipping my notebook at each page turn.

Monday's 4am ascent to Machu Picchu in steady rain revealed that my rain-jacket isn't impermeable.  In fact, it's much closer to 100% permeable. Temporarily resistant like a single-ply napkin to a juicy tongue's thrust. (A confusing analogy pulled from the high-school lunch table.)  By the time we arrived at the cloud-enshrouded Hauyna Picchu, I quivered to the rhythm of hypothermal-onset.  There were three hours sheltered in the entranceway of the plush Machu Picchu Sanctuary resort, crouched and shivering over a spread-poncho picnic of white bread, canned tuna, and bruised fruit, three disheveled figures being reprimanded by the hotel staff for playing homeless on the steps as we tried to take advantage of the heat emanating from the hotel doors opened by the nonbackpacking crowd.

Figuring I'd already done Machu Picchu, and on a perfect November day with my brother and Franco-Peruvian friend Blanca, I procured a large, impermeable garbage bag a good six hours late -- from a worker whose perverted fashion sense prompted him to ask me which color I preferred -- and started hiking back down toward Aguas Calientes and una ducha recaliente. But a few hundred meters later I reversed path, unable to pass up the opportunity to stuff my memory card with hundreds more identical photos.  And this time obscured by clouds and mist!  But the sun graced us with it's presence at last, and now I have more great photos with more great friends, and at least 50 photos and 6 minutes of video of heavy llama fornication.

I probably should be dead of some cold-and-wet provoked complication.  Instead, I just have to pee while I set legs jammed into Francisco's back, lamenting the extinction of my trail mix.

Upping my creeper status

Seven weeks of fantasy life stateside revived my travel bug, which is not a reference to the hosts of travel bugs thriving in my gut.  My gracious ex-boss rehired me as a part-time contractor, my relaxed office hours enabling me to booze with friends most nights of the week, then bumble into my cubicle at an hour by which the head-fog had subsided.  My paychecks enabled me to pay all my bar-tabs, procure a few new toys (like the mochilero-essential 64gb iPod Touch), and left me enough leftover change I was uncharacteristically unconcered I might've tipped fifty-Bell's-Two-Hearted-Ale-bucks on a $20 tab.  To an in-no-way deserving waitress.  Which is to say not only was she far from exemplary at her job, she wasn't even cute.

I feasted frequently, my checklist of foods to eat back home mostly satisfied, fifteen newly added pounds of hip-swelling flavor pocket reserves accompanying me back to the lands of ever-crowing city roosters and taxi-kidnappings. (Keep in mind, the chunkification of Patrick merely transforms him from gaunt to lean.)

I find myself unable to purge or even suppress thoughts of and longings for that which I've just fled again -- my back-friendly pallet on my parents' hardwood floor; throat massaging microbrews with the "pint pounders" and rounds of shots with my friends from the trenches and vicinity; bleeding beets and the procession of vegetables that color mom's home-cooked comforts; the company of family from chilly Kakalak to snow-consumed Michigan; a beautiful young woman -- as if memories and desires can no more easily be flushed than my starch-stuffed bowels.

Lima is growing on me again, the intimidating metropolis, behemoth no less, that actually offers more than the dense, guidebook-imbued foreboding.  It also doesn't hurt one's perception to depart sub-zero, sun-deficient days and disembark in full summer swing.  The women are as brown -- if not browner -- and as beautiful as ever, and intoxicated with Vitamin D I almost violated the camper-counselor code of conduct -- which is what happens when girls become women and you're in a land where age differences are more readily and legally disregarded.

Hey, look at this cute, light-skinned girl. Waving at me, no less. Wait, why is she asking me about Davidson Soccer Camp in perfect English.  You used to call me PB&J, eh? And you're from Chapel Hill?  Oh, shit.

"Wait, you're Austyn, aren't you?"

And so I've reencountered one of my favorite ex-campers, from one of my best groups ever, a continent away, after never having encountered anew in North Carolina.  Now we need to have a beer, just so I can up my creeper status a bit by saying I've had a beer with a camper.

Blah blah blah

It's become progressively more difficult to summon both the motivation and coherent and clever sentences to fill this journal. I imagine my boredom has sucked any previously existing entertainment value from my words as surely and thoroughly as my daily cake-train absorbs all the liquid in my guts.

This blog has devolved into a showcase of dessert-exploits. Yesterday I managed to squeeze in dessert after every meal. Each of the three, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. How fucking exciting. How cultural I've become, my view of Latin America two to three layers of bread and icing.

Trujillo boasts an impressive parks-per-square-kilometer ratio, plus it's inexpensive with good ceviche. Lima is one of the world's mega-metropolises that crawls out and over everything, from valley bottom to mountain top, like the God's of City Construction haphazardly flung fistfuls of city-sprouting gel from the heavens and let it splatter and sprout. Um, intelligent design? The tour of la Iglesia de San Francisco was the most fun I've ever had in church, the art and architecture and ancient library all spellbinding, but the thousands upon thousands of human bones held in the dreary catacombs beneath made the lasting impression: Circles of skulls stacked upon spiraling arrangements of femurs. You know you're on a good tour when you see a human skeleton and the guide says nonchalantely, over the group's oohing and ahhhing, "No es nada impresionanate. Vamos a ver muchos más huesos."

Arequipa is nice, and I've had the good fortune to make some American friends who love beer, burgers, and Appalachian accents. The homestay I was so anticipating proved underwhelming, and the "problem" with the cable -- HBO and Cinemax disppearing into fuzz both evenings of my stay despite crystal clear reception during the day -- suggested I might've settled with a family a godloaf too wholesome. When I presented to the family father my plan to leave the house for city center, he was alarmed by my choice of lodging, protesting my prospective residence on a street overrun by "prostitutas, delincuentes, y, Dios mío, ¡homosexuales!"

Thereby unwittingly solidifying my selection.

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.