Dali

Overall, Peru has been a real trip. I started out hating it – the crooked money changers, the menacing cops who stopped us 85 times a day to point out that we don’t have a front license plate, the desolate high desert, the overall air of poverty and desperation. Then we drove through some of the most surreally beautiful landscape I’ve ever seen, and met an unbelievably warm welcome from the mountain villagers. I started to like it. The mountain cops, too, were better – they wanted to know where we were from and if everything was going OK on our trip, what we had for lunch. We came back down from the mountains into the bleak desert where people live in plastic bag shacks outside of town in the sprawling dump and hail you, hoping you’ll dump your garbage near them so they can have first pick. The shacks shaded into the shanties of Lima, and while we were distracted by the blare of horns and the so-Catholic-they’re-suicidal taxi drivers, we drove into a zone of pure opulence, of Porsche SUVs and picture-perfect beach houses. When you’re nice to street vendors or waitresses here, they blink and then grin at you like you’re the first.

I cant say enough how nice the people are here. The owners of all the parqueos we’ve stayed in have been the nicest people we’ve met on our trip. After parking for lunch in Ica, we paid our pittance to the parqueo owner, and on the way out he ran out with three mangoes for us. Huh? This is classic Peruvian.


We get tossed from one extreme to the other, both in terms of landscape and people, and I can’t regain my equilibrium. I feel ike we’re traveling through a Salvador Dali painting, and nothing is what I expect it to be. Every time we turn a corner the rules are different. Somewhere back near the border, I think the highway folded and we slid into a different dimension. I’m writing this entry from a tiny desert oasis, which contributes to the surreal atmosphere – I didn’t know landscapes like this existed outside of the movies. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in this country, where the majority of people seem to be struggling for food and shelter, and a few live like the upper crust of North America.

And we’re only halfway through Peru…