Traveling alone, Rail Journey triple alliance part 1 June 29, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Flight Schedule, Hostels, Hotels, Motel, Pacific, Peru , trackbackI do not recall how much my memories of that night-time journey were the creation of fitful dreams or the stuff of actuality. The blackness of the night and my own fears were real enough as the lights of the bus probed the landscape, revealing steep escarpments and the outlines of vertical cliffs. Sometimes, peering over the side of the bus, I caught sight of the ghostly white caps of Pacific rollers coming to spit their fury at a continent. The bus swept down the hills and then ground its way up another hilltop through a succession of sandy switchbacks. I kept thinking of the drunken Cary Grant in North by Northwest, as he strove to bring his car under control. Was our driver chewing coca leaves, as so many long distance drivers did in Peru, to ease the burdens of an eight-hour journey? I looked around the bus at the crumpled figures managing some sleep. Two rows in front of me a Japanese man slumped against a girl with a shock of auburn curls. A strange couple, I thought.
The first tendrils of light spawned a mist, which hung over the desert. In my half-sleep I thought the sand was snow for it had the thick texture of water-colour paper. It felt very cold.
The sun was already bright as silver on our arrival in Arequipa, a large city but untouched by ugly tall buildings. A colonial city with a sunny disposition. I found my bag and smiled at the Japanese and the girl with auburn curls. I produced my guidebook as an invitation to treat.
“Which hotel?” I asked. We introduced ourselves. The girl was German: a student dressed in ten different colours but unsmiling. Kazuo, a tall peering Japanese, was smiling, but smiling with the fixity of the nervous. There was an instant unspoken bargain struck. Travelling alone in Peru was a nerve-racking business. We would find a hotel together. One minute later, as we strode through the streets of Arequipa to the racing pace set by Regina, we found that our plans for the next week were almost identical.
“It would be nice to travel together,” I ventured.
Over breakfast in our modest traveller’s pension, with its sunlit courtyard full of cardinal red geraniums, we traded our identities in English, which was the only language we understood in common. The petty deceits that circumscribe our contact with other people become redundant in the fleeting moments one has with other travellers. Family bereavement had bred in Regina a sense of independence and toughness, akin to isolation. At eighteen she had felt the call to move away from home, a state of affairs accepted with stoicism by her mother. She had been travelling for three months in the Americas, but a recent illness, she confessed, had made her very vulnerable. Regina had a very clear idea what she wanted to see and to experience, and a buoyant belief that nothing bad could befall her.
Kazuo always expected the worst. He was travelling around the world and was sceptical of everybody and everything. His itinerary was frenetic, as notions of travel seemed to be based on seeing and recording a certain number of spectacular sights. His schedule gave him security, I smugly conceded, but given his language difficulties and the Japanese ambivalence towards travel, he was brave enough as it was. When he returned home, he hoped to secure employment where he could take three weeks of holiday every third year.
“We Japanese are an undeveloped people,” he lamented. “I have brought discomfort to my parents,” he added even more wistfully.
We spent three days in Arequipa. I learnt to adapt to Regina’s pace and to Kazuo’s sharp cries of pleasure at seeing any Japanese goods. As nearly every car in Peru was Japanese, these cries would punctuate any long silences. Conversation, under these circumstances, is a bit of an effort, as bonhomie can be taken only so far before familiarity makes it both superfluous and a little ridiculous. We did, however, share one common characteristic — we were all introverts, but that was about as far as it went. For a start, we must have looked an unlikely assortment: a German hippy with flowers decorating her trousers; a tall Japanese continually grimacing and emitting cries; and myself, wrapped against the sun and locked into my duty to promote conversation.
The train to Puno is regarded as one of the most spectacular rail journeys in the world. It is also one of the most dangerous. The guidebooks all suggest that there is an eighty per cent chance of having something stolen. The station at Arequipa has a particularly unpleasant reputation for bag-slashing, petty theft and daylight robbery. I remember sleeping fitfully, working out how I would deal with my attackers and protect my companions, but these plans were unnecessary. We took a taxi into the station, where it rapidly became apparent that the spectre of the bad guys hanging around in gangs like West Side Story extras was the stuff of dreams. Instead, traditionally-dressed women waddled along the platform carrying mountainous baskets.
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