Ponderable

The travelers I’ve encountered in Huaraz are quite different from those I found in Lima. The backpacker’s family house in Lima was peopled by individuals such as Charlie, a dry Englishman whose name was eponymous with a slang term for his favorite substance, who slept all day and watched football games from home online all night with legs shaking; Kevin, a graphic designer from San Francisco who seemed content to explore the sooty metropolis and go paragliding in the gray skies of the city’s pacific coast (he talked a lot about the last Lexus commercial he had helped design, and how he wanted to make a music video); an English couple whose names I’ve forgotten who cutely cowered around the city with shoulders slumped, dreaming of McVities digestives and remembering with fondness the Panama Canal; an Aussie named Sarah who had been traveling so long all she ever talked about was how much she wanted to go home, and who seemed immune to compromise; and a couple of Australian couples on a round the world trip who now seem more akin to the travelers found in Huaraz than those of Lima.
The majority of the aforementioned seemed to force themselves to take in the city, and did so in small doses often softened by regular calls at familiar standards of their experience, such as the ridiculous shopping mall perched on the cliff over the coast, replete with everything from a Burger King to a Hello Kitty store. The number of hours these nice people spent within the comfortable walls of the hostel attest to the dichotomy between their ostensive plans and the power of their subconscious to keep them on the wheel of their habitual perspectives.
To be fair I must say that Lima is an incredibly uninviting city, and with the risk of sounding like another one of those people who go somewhere and then tell everyone at home how bad it is, I did not enjoy picking black boogers out of my nose, listening to constant horn blasts, or dodging starving children. The number and intensity of methods for keeping people out of private yards was also quite disconcerting. So I understand that had I met the ‘Lima group’ in Huaraz I would have been meeting a different set of people. That said, being around them made me question the purpose of travel as many experience it, out of the moment, determined by a list of destinations and marked by a photograph and the occasional flash of real feeling and instantaneousness.
The normal course of conversation with these individuals was cheerful but banal, what Theroux would have called ’Thornberry,’ involving little more than the troubles of their trips thus far, heavy with warnings of places to avoid if at all possible and quick to associate any new experience with what they knew from home. I’ve always loved the tendency of travelers to mutate original experience into something not so groundbreakingly new by classifying it into a pre-existing category into which it barely fits.
It reminds me of Socrates’ maxim that he who understands metaphor has the greatest kind of genius, to which I would add that those who force metaphor fail to experience the original reality, much less connect the dots in this great web we walk, gaining greater understanding.
It amazes me that so many who travel focus on those pieces of their journey that did not go according to plan and assign negative feelings to these experiences, which hold the most possibility for personal growth if taken as lessons rather than impediments. I am certain the primary purpose of traveling is to take what you have inside and test it against the variety of new experience a new country and culture afford. This is always difficult if it is to be beneficial, and focusing on it is essential to growth, but a positive perspective on the issue is necessary. Turning a learning opportunity into a negative experience seems to me to guarantee only that similar opportunities for growth are avoided. These people, in the main, seemed to be running from something at home and had come to South America because it is cheap and one can lose oneself here, cover one’s tracks, and disappear. As the Wendell Berry poem goes:
"Go with your love to the fields.Lie down in the shade. Rest your headin her lap. Swear allegianceto what is nighest your thoughts.As soon as the generals and the politicoscan predict the motions of your mind,lose it. Leave it as a signto mark the false trail, the wayyou didn't go.Be like the foxwho makes more tracks than necessary,some in the wrong direction.Practice resurrection."-Wendell Berry Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Except I doubt that the people I’m speaking of were conscious enough to really grasp why they were running, what from, and how they would make themselves happy by doing so. Running from their home lives, they forgot not to run from their lives in South America. They seemed too intent on the obstacles of their day-to-day to be searching for the meaning of their flight and attempting to disseminate that meaning to themselves so that it became part of them; much less to search for the meaning of the moment they were in. I’m not sure how many really tasted the mango and avocado we shared. Examples abound. Any time a taxi driver charged more than one thought was fair, or the proximity of poor street people became too much for them, or the expectations attached to one of the usual tourist spots were failed by reality, I observed this tendency to attach to the negative, shut down without an attempt at translation. I watched old filters fitted for different flows struggling to compensate for the difference, and I watched this process exhaust the Lima group.
I walked the streets of Lima for a few days with these people and laughed at their jokes, but the push within them seemed to lack fuel. The mixture of the city, housing a third of Peru’s population in a hundred kilometers of crumbling crust with a modern stuffing, mocking the hard lives of the orange sellers, the women who slept in their sidewalk carts full of the spectrum of sellable things, has to be taken in full if it is to be encountered at all. Otherwise it is too easy to duck below as the reality of it passes and take the first bus out of town…which, admittedly, I came close to doing.
In contrast to the Lima group are what I will call the Huaraz crew. This included four guys biking from California to the end of their trip, wherever it was, having taken a leisurely year to make it halfway. A guy from South Dakota, a Nepalese dude who went by the name Jaffy and had great stories to tell about close calls in Nicaragua and the kindness of Columbians; an elderly couple who bravely attempted treks people my age balked at; rock and ice climbers, robust Germans, trekkers, a guy who taught scuba diving on Galapagos for three years, and others on round the world trips. Many Israeli’s followed what the hostel owners disparagingly referred to as ‘the hummus trail,‘ leaving Hebrew graffiti on the already covered walls of the Andean town. With some exceptions, these were more my kind of people, and like the Quechua whose soul’s have been made more beautiful by this landscape we all became friends and shared our lives for a few days.
Outside children play in the dirt alleys with feral dogs of benevolent temperament, old ladies in brightly colored cloth collect plastic bottles, and men work in the river shifting piles of gravel for unascertainable reasons. Rain falls in the sunlight and the clouds rub their bellies on distant Huascaran. With enough time the ancient marks of thousands of years of human habitation can be seen like faded tattoos in the valleys. The bustle of the city, where so many indigenous people come to sell what they grow and so many travelers come to find isolation in the vast emptiness, is frenzied but somehow tempered by the reality of the place, unlike Lima, which seems more an aborted attempt to combine cultures, leaving a mess of a place that sprawls through polarity. Huaraz is itself, and visitors seem happy to accept it into themselves.
The Café Andino is a groovy café/book exchange for travelers where people congregate for smoothies and lavazza espresso, and to check out the magazines and impressive library. An archaeological exhibit at the local museum chronicles the development of Peruvian culture through stone carvings, ranging from monoliths to lintels and stele. The squat forms impressed me with the way they embodied human energy in static forms, for thousands of years sending a message of distinct personality. A new cathedral is being constructed in the Plaza de Armas, a souring concrete structure more fitted to the setting than the alpine cottage church that served the religious before. I sit in the hostel and hear about different weight requirements for bicycle tours, a pretentious Frenchman who traveled with a guitar but didn’t know how to play it, the best literature to read when viewing Andean scenery. “Moby Dick’ was the most interesting choice I encountered, though others thought ‘Battlefield Earth’ was as antithetical. The profundity and serenity of the place allows the projections of our inner selves to take form, leading to understandings of pieces of ourselves that we had passed by in the rush of experience months and years before. In the same way we make the place personal because of the clarity of its essence, anything can be coupled with it and gain meaning.