OK, so the e-mailed versions of the chapters aren't numbered sequentially , and the next installments of the diary are going to present things out of chronological order. And I suppose you want a refund? Well, life is messy, and travel can be confusing, so just sit back and enjoy the story, most of which is true, although some may be a little exaggerated. When I'm trying to stay current while shifting from one unpronounceable village name to another without a road map, the computer at the hostel is glacially slow, the Internet is unresponsive, I'm getting ready to fly between continents , and my colleagues are scattering to the winds, sometimes hoping for news on time and spelled right is just beyond realistic expectation. So anyway, I'm home and I'll try to fill in the gaps as best I can. The Diaries Continue!
At this point, it's probably appropriate to break into song, and what better tune than Dusty Springfield's Windmills of your mind from The Thomas Crown Affair? What I would suggest, however, is that for "mind" you substitute "gut", because at the time I was leaving, the windmills of my tummy were churning "Like a carouselle that's turning, running rings around the Moon.” But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Here are the lyrics, if you’re interested. Use your imagination when applying this to my upper and lower G.I. tract:
Round, like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel.
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning wheel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnaval balloon
Like a carousell that's turning
Running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
etc…
Like a wheel within a wheel.
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning wheel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnaval balloon
Like a carousell that's turning
Running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
etc…
As
Cool, clear…
I would lay odds that most Americans haven't got the faintest idea of the incredible wealth we enjoy by simply turning on a tap and bathing our throats in sweet water chilled to 55 degrees by flowing through pristine pipes situated in the cool earth. It is a miracle we partake of every day. And just as the "power to tax is the power to destroy," the simple reality of even slightly impeding access to cool, clean water takes its toll, day by day. Just a few sips too few of tepid water on a regular basis, and your mouth can begin feeling like the bottom of a slightly dried out paste pot. Which is how my mouth felt the final Friday night in Peru after a food orgy that I should have avoided. We had experienced two weeks of safe food and drink, prepared each day by two lovely ladies at Pro Peru, Luz and Villma, shown below.
On our final day these two ladies prepared a meal of noodles and cheese and stuffed peppers that couldn’t be beat. We should have stopped there, but someone suggested we go to an avant garde restaurant just off the Plaza de Armas in Urubamba. It was a literal hole-in-the-wall without a ceiling. We piled in under the stars, it was chilly, and the chef began delivering exotic and greasy tapas in great profusion. Through the remainder of That night I awoke periodically to sip water . the following morning I had a déjà vu experience of what I had felt one day 43 years earlier on the ocean swells just outside Westport, Washington when it occurred to me to wonder whether that hot stuffy-room feeling was an indicator that I was going to be sick.
Well, yes. Dr. Chuck observed that all that greasy food might have had an impact. On a few occasions that Friday I became reacquainted with some of that food, most of which didn’t make it to the lower G.I. Tract. Oh, yeah, there was a little diarrhea, but nothing to write home about (Like you’d want me to.) All I’ll say is that although there were occasionally a few hints of a possible volcanic lahar, usually the great events were limited to mighty wind storms.
Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it's own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream.
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
To a tunnel of it's own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream.
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
Well, having got off to a great start, I rode in a silent (except for the slow, careful, soulful belches) daze from Urubamba to Cuzco where some members of our party were kind enough to let me nap on their hotel bed between opportunities to re-examine Friday night’s meal.
Being all out of Peruvian soles, I had the good fortune of having my taxi fare to the airport covered by Jasvir ….. our group pharmacist about whom there will be more to tell in upcoming chapters. Nice lady. She led me stupefied by the hand through the Cuzco airport, commiserated about the glacially slow check-in process, brought me a cool bottle of water and sympathized while I slowly ambled over to a plastic tote, knelt before it reverently and tried o conjure up one more specimen while succeeding only in freeing up another zephyr of stale air from someplace above my duodenum. The lady at the boarding gate didn’t even turn her head. Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guards the gate to hades, had clearly succeeded in blocking all passage of sustenance to the labyrinthine maze known as my small intestine, and in its merciless jaws was choking from my prior night’s meal its final dying breaths.. Jasvir, the pharmacy wizard, conjured two magic pink tablets which tamed the great vapors while I silently acquired a new respect for the power of prayer—to the Pepto Bismol deity.
While I’ve tried to make light of my distress, Jasvir deserves some special respect here. She was handling her own duress. Earlier this day she had come to an unsettling discovery—Someone had plucked from her wallet several $100 bills in U.S. currency and substituted counterfeits similar to the one shown here – complete with a Spanish phrase that roughly translated as “Ticket Luck Alasitas”—whatever that means. At this writing, we’re still trying to figure out how the switcheroo could have taken place, and why someone would create currency that was so obviously fraudulent. To her credit, Jasvir graciously resigned herself to the situation: “It’s only money,” she said, softly.
From Cuzco to Lima we shared a flight that could have been uneventful, but had its own excitement. As I was leaving the plane, I noticed a surprising numbness in my arm. My fingers would’t close around the zippers on the pockets of the vest I wore to carry my travel paraphernalia. As I rotated my arm, my hand flopped back and forth. I couldn’t raise it or make a fist. It was at least a half hour before I began to recover movement. I could pinch my fingers and feel the slight pain, but I couldn’t move them. Rather inconvenient. Over time I decided that my head-down in-flight sleep position, my airline pillow, and the weight of the collar of my utility vest must have pinched a nerve in my neck, putting the arm to sleep. Either that or something as innocuous as a stroke.
Caught in the Act!
The final thrill of the return home was finding out I was a smuggler. Waiting to board my Lima-Miami flight, I was approached by a young woman who told me there was something in my luggage that was not allowed. Drugs? Explosives? WHAT?!?!?!?! After leading me on a labyrinthine stroll into the bowels of the Lima airport and a reviewing my passport, she explained that I was illegally removing from Peru a rock, of all things. More specifically, a fossil of an ammonite, a prehistoric mollusk that the Andes lifted 11,000 feet off the ocean floor several million years ago, discarding it on a table in a tourist trap at an Inca salt mine our group visited on our second afternoon in Urubamba. An ammonite is basically a flattened snail shell. I had always wanted to have one of those, and here was my chance to buy one for only 70 soles —$25 American. Seemed like a good price at the time, and when we got off the train to the jumping-off point to Machu Picchu, we were shuttled through a veritable casbah of trinket sellers with tables covered with fossil ammonites. I’m left wondering how many of these the government confiscates on each out-going flight, and whether they discount them afterward back to the souvenir shops as a sort of business stimulus. I think this is Peru’s twist on Keynsian economic theory, that every dollar spent in an economy gets respent three times. I always wondered how that worked.
But that’s not the worst thing that happened on my return. The real problem will be sorting through and editing 1,426 photos and more than an hour of videos. Ugh.
I hope you are all well. Love,
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