A day on the town

Was breakfasting today at Otra Casa, having a nice conversation with the Dutch owner about the ins and outs of starting a business in South America and the fine line one has to walk to not be too much more successful than the local businesses. He mentioned this in conjunction with the fact that his friend, another European business owner in Peru, had been shot seven times a week ago. As I ate my bowl of fruits, yogurt, and muesli and watched four children play in the sand a few feet in front of me, I found it hard not to think of the perceptions Peruvians must have about certain kinds of behaviors us gringos bring with us from our home countries when we arrive in South America. The pace of life, the ease of luxuriousness, the lushness of it all makes it difficult for us not to seem indolent, I imagine. Yet the Dutchman I talked with this morning had taken the success of a great idea and the happiness of a peaceful life and used both to begin numerous charity projects throughout the area. These are the people I travel to meet.
Before I knew it the four children from the beach were playing right next to me, and I took out my camera to capture their priceless faces only to be disabused of my own assumption of their idyllic existence. This occurred when the biggest of the four, a girl of about eight, began roughing up the little ones to put them in poses she thought I would like to see. When they resisted, she pushed them onto the ground, despite my protestations. It made me feel like a part of some objectification of these pure little beings, as if by taking pictures of them I was turning them into less than what they were. The eight year old seemed to have caught on to the basic aesthetics of this dehumanization or depersonalization of herself and her siblings, had come to see there childhood as a marketable commodity and was quick to shatter the seeming innocence of their lives to achieve a superficial pose that she thought I would be willing to pay for. I did end up giving them money. I felt responsible for the abuse the little ones suffered after I took my camera out and began the whole process. But I learned my lesson from the experience.
Went to Chan Chan on a collectivo after breakfast. The miles of crumbling adobe left much to the imagination, but it was easy for me to fill the empty spaces with a thriving civilization that imported cultures and people from across South America. An empty alley became a bustling market full of stalls. People in rich costumes of their tribes crisscrossed my path. Everything was for sale. Animals from the Amazon, metals from the mountains, fruits and foods from the entire American world. I only came out of my reverie when a class of twelve year olds stopped us for pictures with them…we ended up taking about twenty before prying them off of us and continuing our journey. Thoughts of the Chimu who inhabited the city stayed with me long after I’d boarded the collectivo heading into Trujillo. A warlike people, their chieftains were buried with their concubines, in a tomb not unlike the Mycenaean tombs of Crete. Their power stretched all along what is now the Northern Peruvian desert and coast, and then they were gone leaving nothing but eroding adobe etched with wild animal designs, some pottery shards, some metallic objects. But in their day, they were feared and honored for centuries. All that is left of them is what we can imagine from the dust.
Halfway through the trip to the Huaca del Sol y Luna, between the two buses I had to take, walking down a street that looked like any other in the city. A policeman in hard blue camouflage crossed the street, motioning to me to stop walking. “Que tal?” I asked. He replied that it was a very dangerous area and that I should not go any further. He then informed me that I was heading into the worst shanty in the city, and that I was not heading in the right direction anyway. It was a startling experience, this example of preventative police work. He even bargained with the cab driver for me.
I arrived at the Huaca del Sol y Luna twenty minutes later. The temples were named so by a European who’d been to Teotihuacan and thought these two in the shadow of the White Mountain were similar. They were built by the Moche culture, who worshipped what is now called the decapitator God, and who sacrificed young men after they lost ritualized combat. Though there is much work still to be done at the site, what has been uncovered is truly exceptional. The decapitator God has alternating body parts of an anthropomorphic nature, with hands going from condor heads to fox heads and back again, on successive layers of the temple. While the Huaca de Luna has at least seven layers, each added on after the previous one was outgrown by simply covering the previous one with mud brick, the Huaca del Sol had ten layers, and was not open to the public when I visited. The truly impressive part of the ruin is the northern face, which gives a clear depiction of how the temple must have looked at the height of its practical use. Bands of repeating designs in high relief, with mineral-produced colors still vibrant after so many centuries, show warriors, the Decapitator God, serpents, condors, and fishermen all going about there archetypal roles. One image in particular, which the guide said had not yet been deciphered, seemed to me to be an entire mythological system in two-dimensional image, with such a variety of creatures and actions in such a small space that it must have been the Moche conception of the world. The temple of the moon seems special to me in that with the different layers of construction comes a painted record of the evolution of Moche mythology. Certain stylistic changes could have resulted from altercations among the ruling class, shifts in belief, natural disasters, or the influx of other cultural ideologies. While this can be debated, the record is there depicting the changes themselves. The structure is the closest thing to a book we have from the Moche. They are one of the few cultures of ancient Peru to have left a linguistic legacy as well, Muchik, which local inhabitants spoke until about twenty years ago. Through the oral histories passed down in these communities we know much about the customs of the people who utilized the Huaca del Sol y Luna that we otherwise would have had to guess at. Their erotic pottery ( http://www.museolarco.org/igal_er.shtml ) tells us something of their society, as does the fact that a woman warrior burial was found dating from 450 A.D. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/world/americas/17mummy.html?ex=1148011200&en=08cced452dd20f1b&ei=5087%0A )

These two elements combined seem to indicate a relatively open society in which gender roles weren’t completely set and sexuality was celebrated. The portrait vessels, which depict individuals with a range of emotions and idiosyncratic markings, imply an emphasis on individuality that leads the imagination even further. Alternatively, there are vessels that depict vilence so extreme that one begins to wonder whether every part of life was celebrated, from sex to death, murder to birth. The idea is strangely appealing for someone with a distant yet distinct puritanical cultural heritage. As Archaeology magazine put it:
“Vessels in the form of stirrup-spouted bottles with molded figures and intricate fine-line painting show warrior-priests bedecked in imposing ornate garb orchestrating ritual warfare; slitting captives' throats, drinking their blood, and hanging their defleshed bones from ropes; and participating in acts of sodomy and fellatio, all in a context of structured ceremony. In the absence of archaeological evidence, most scholars found many of the scenes too horrific to take literally, often suggesting they were simply artistic hyperbole, imagery the priestly class used to underscore its coercive power.”
It’s interesting the way the above caption clearly delineates the limitations of scholarly interpretation. The projection of cultural norms onto ancient artifacts in the form of perceived hyperbole fascinates me.
So I’ll have to be looking further into the Moche, the Chimu, the Chavin, and the Chachapoya. They all seem to have shared certain features of culture, one dominant one in my mind being the divinity of the feline, brought into humanity through the San Pedro cactus. After leaving the temple and taking two combi’s back to Huanchaco, I ate a delicious meal of fresh bread with tsatsiki, guacamole, and a mustard sauce, finished with a burrito of bean, garlic, and onion. Washed it down with carrot, strawberry, and watermelon juice. Had another good talk with the owner of Otra Casa, who was feeding some street dogs when I arrived. Then walked along the beach to the hostel, stopping to rinse my feet where a class of girls were hunkered down in the warm water coming from a pipe in the road, trying to stay warm in the swiftly dropping temperature. The sun set over the Pacific as a big blood orange, I returned to my room, and took my first anti-malarial in preparation for the jungle in about a week. The warning list of possible side effects made me laugh. Who needs hair when you’re dead?

Huanchaco and Notes

Took a bus from Huaraz to Huanchaco on the Northern coast, just outside of Trujillo. Went with the Movil bus company, which differed from Cruz Del Sul in a number of ways. No meal, no drink, no movie, a single floor instead of a double decker, and according to many I spoke with more prone to robbery. Another notable difference in this ride was the snoring man directly across the aisle from me, who sounded as if he were gargling snot the entire night. Huanchaco is a strip of residences, restaurants, tiendas and surf shops stretched between the slender beach and a wall of eroding shale. Having decided to send a package of unnecessary clothes home, I spent the first few hours of the day on an exploration of my own assumptions. Walked to the post office with a plastic bag full of clothes expecting to buy a box there and send them off. The tiny office, a four by seven slit in an alley with an ethnic Chinese woman cheerfully talking in a constant flow to her customers, did not sell boxes. I was told to buy some at the Mercado so I strolled around searching for it, eventually asking a friendly man who called himself ‘Wayne.’ He and his Rotweiler accompanied me to the fruit and vegetable market, where I acquired a box from a dark skinned woman with worn hands for .50 soles. Wayne then offered to give me tape, paper, and pen to package and address the box, which I gladly accepted. He invited me to his restaurant, La Mococho, where we talked as I prepared the box. It turned out he was a marine biologist awaiting the opening of a study center in Huanchaco in January. The restaurant-as-pastime was never explained, though I assumed he was well off. He told me of his fiance in Florida, a consultant, administrative assistant for immigration, and teacher of math and science. When I told him I was also a teacher last year and explained my plans for the jungle he became enthused. We parted with him wishing me luck and I thanking him for the help he had given.
Back at the post office with the package ready, the Chinese woman informed me that I would now need a copy of my passport, which was then taped to the box. Finally, as the price was shown to be around 40 dollars, I decided to keep the things in my backpack after all. It was, however, a great opportunity to learn.
Walking down the beach with my unnecessary box, I watched classes of children kicking a soccer ball on the beach. Women with small carts selling the usual wares were stationed at regular intervals along the sidewalk. Near the hostel I found a place named Otra Casa, a restaurant/book exchange that served filafel and a daily vegan dish, as well as tasty burritos and offered networking services throughout Peru. It had been founded by a Dutch couple in 1997, and seemed like a center for travelers in Huanchaco. I ordered a burrito with beans, cucumber, tsatsiki, fried egg, and tomato, and sat down with a book called “Chachapoyas: The Lost Kingdom.” While flipping through the pages and becoming enamored with this little known civilization of the Northern Peruvian cloud forest, I began to realize how important it was for me to note the future sources I will need to conclude this adventure of mine. Over the next hours I noted the following things for future investigation:
Two beautiful types of Orchid, the Maxillaria and Epidenndrum
The lost chronicle of Blas Valera
Four intrepid explorers: Adolf Bandelier
Ernst Middendorf
Charles Wiener
Antonio Raimondi
Five Chroniclers:
Garcilaso de la Vega
Pedro de Cieza de Leon
Antonio de la Calancha
Felipe Waman Poma de Ayala
Cristobal de Albornoz
I also learned that Chachapoyans were organized into family groups, (Quechhua = Ayllus), which shared land and regarded origin places (Pacariscas) as the sacred abodes of their ancestors. These were lakes, rivers, mountains, caves, rocks, trees.
The chroniclers had all noted the white skin and beauty of the women of the Chachapoya.
The meaning of Chachapoya is unclear. Garcilaso said it meant ‘Place of strong men.’ Others argue that it is derived from the name of a local ethnic group, the Chachas, and the Quechua word Puyu, cloud. Still others claim it is a combination of two Quechua words, Sacha, tree, and Puyu, cloud, translating into cloud forest.
Wakas were objects or places revered by certain Ayllus, worshipped as ancestor god homes. The Inca used to steal Wakas from conquered tribes and hold them as revered hostages in Cusco, thereby gaining spirritual power over the peoples they assimilated into their empire.
Chachapoyan shamans transformed themselves into felines, as the Chavin of the Cordillera Blanca did.
The Chachapoya desiccated animals and then used them as carrying cases, attached to a stick and with a bone pin through the mouth.
Another point of interest unrelated to the Chachapoya: The organization known as Fairmail, which sells postcards made up of images captured by Peruvian teenager photographers. www.fairmail.info

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.

Huaraz

I arrived in Huaraz at five in the morning after a bumpy ride from Lima. Before the bus departed a police officer boarded and photographed everyone on the bus in case it was hijacked, giving me a thumbs up as he pointed the camera at me. The attendant gave me an extra plastic cup of coke with a wink and a smile, which I sipped as the weight of Lima was left behind. The road was like a mini-golf course, with sand traps, hills, valleys, and colorful, inexplicable obstacles. We climbed ten thousand feet into the night.
I got about two hours of sleep that night, and despite the weariness I felt upon arriving I only had to look at the encircling Andes like the teeth of Pachamama and I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest just yet. Met up with some other folks at the hostel and we set out on an uninformed trek to a distant alpine lake, which we never reached. We wandered up a mule track further into the range, finding a distant goal in a sheer faced rock canyon carved out by some long-slid glacier. The mountain slopes surrounding us were patched into uneven fields of brown and green, rimmed with trees and studded with livestock and children wielding worn tools. Whenever we came close they asked us first for caramel, then chocolate, and finally money for one of the two. Their smiles were hard to resist, though I had nothing too give.
We continued towards the canyon along a ridge framed by villages in the valleys below, following a path that mirrored a canal that looked as old as the land. Sometimes clouds parted above and beyond, allowing us to grasp the height of the place we were heading.
After a few hours we reached the mouth of the canyon. We sat with the chill wind to our backs, eating avocado and banana sandwiches in the yard of a lone farmer who seemed delighted to share the majesty of his everyday with us. Before us was an endless span of lowland shadowed by the vaulting rock on either side, with clouds hanging in the snags of the face like the froth of a magic potion, or the entrance to a different world.
It is hard hiking miles up at ten thousand feet. I slept like a happy rock.
I awoke today at six well rested, and joined a pure dude from California and a kiwi for the long trek to laguna 69. After a three hour ride in a combi with twenty people sharing small space, we happily attacked the 6 miles up and in, letting the morning mist chill our sweat, following a meandering stream through a lush valley of wind-stunted trees and complacent cattle. The place was too beautiful, to full, for me to put it into words just yet. Mountains sixteen thousand feet high peaked from behind clouds. Rocks carried to perfect spots by floods since dried stood and watched as we passed.
The trek was truly grueling. By the last leg we were all struggling, and I was setting the pace so I felt an obligation to continue onwards despite the clumsy weights my feet had become. We cut back and forth along the switchbacks up the mountain, following a trail that was also a stream in the constant rain. The landscape continued to take our breath away, what was left after the altitude had its piece. Waterfalls fell hundreds of feet around us, a distant din mixing with the wind. At about forty-three hundred meters the hail began to fall at an angle that was hard to deny. We passed small lakes, unique flowering cactus balls and dilapidated refuges for stranded backpackers, and after one last push up a cattle trail replete with silent, watchful animals we reached the laguna.
The blue was deep and eternal like the eyes of some of the people I love. Two little ducks seemed impossible in the biting cold, shaking their little bodies as if it were the best of times. A glacier a thousand feet above us. Two Germans eating snitzel in the rain with loud words. The feeling of accomplishment was extraordinary, as we had completed the three and a half hour ascent in just over two hours, and thus had leisure time to spend watching the wind whip the surreal waters into millions of tiny crests that batted against the immovable mountains surrounding us.
Slept hard and woke sore and early for the long ordeal of a trip to Chavin de Huantar. Boarded a bus with a smiling guide who talked in blistering Spanish for much of the ride. As we left Huaraz behind the only evidence of human habitation was the road and the lone shepherd’s refuge, amidst great open spaces stretching away in endless green, dotted with moss covered rocks and hung low with clouds. The place is one in which the earth is passionate in its expression. We climbed thousands of feet through gorges and valleys untouched but for single tracks across there sides, coming to a deep lake in a cleft between three mountains. I drank mate with honey bought from a young Quechua girl who’s father sat shivering in a boat on the lake, waiting for the unlikely tourist to brave the foot high waves. Her mother had their family’s llamas kneeling between the road and the lake for picture ops, and she was having luck with some of the people from my bus. I walked down to the lake and let the wind coming off the water sweep me awake.
We climbed further into the mountains, which seem to go on forever, and came to Colina. Here I ordered the Parilla mixta, an inexpressibly large plate of food. Climbing another 1000 feet brought us to the Chavin de Huantar.
The Chavin culture was the first civilization of the Andes and thus the Americas, with its origins at about 3300 years ago. They knew the paths of Orion and the Southern Cross, organized by the number seven and the cardinal directions, created intricate stone carvings and pottery, and took San Pedro cactus before walking into their temple and meeting their god, Lanzon, whom I saw today.
A boomerang shaped stone carved into a fearsome anthropomorphic deity that smiles down a passageway beneath the earth, it was easy to imagine the Chavin experience whenever they were called on to visit their god. Dim light, hallucinations, the sound of the elders chanting from the circular plaza behind, and then the passageway and at its end, initiation into the secrets of the Chavin. The cactus was supposed to aid in the Chavin’s transformation from human to feline, which they represented on their temple by successive stone heads that morph from human to semi-human to feline. I’m definitely going to have to follow up on this culture, as it is one of the most fascinating I’ve encountered in a long time.
The ruin itself is set amidst the type of Andean countryside that is almost impossible to describe. Great changes in elevation, thousands of shades of green, waterfalls plummeting, wind whipping the short grasses. The indigenous Quechua walk slowly along small paths on the sides of enormous mountains, infants swaddled in multicolored blankets tied around their shoulders, baskets of produce held in their arms. The color of the people is such a stark contrast to the landscape that they can be spotted from miles away.
The hours of driving through the countryside to and from the ruin were as good as the ruin itself. The land lets your mind stretch in ways that only these sacred, desolate spaces allow. It was ever so easy to be present.
Just back in the hostel from a long ride through the shadowing Andes. Shepherds and there flocks waver in and out of existence in the dancing light of fires. The clouds descend and cover everything in a white vastness. A statue of a cross bearing native tops a mountain in bright white. Next to me sits an old couple from Trindad. After talking all day, the smiling man with a bright white beard asks “What does a rich man put in his pocket that a poor man throws away?”
“What?” I ask.
“:Snot!” He says and imitates a farmer‘s blow, and he and his wife start laughing hysterically.
When the bus got back to town I walked through the busy, brightly lit streets to the hostel, crossing through alleys with roving dogs yapping at each other and small children selling two-packs of toilet paper. The chifa restaurants were packed with Peruvians laughing and talking. Three wheeled vehicles putted through the night illuminated by blue, green, and red lights. Quechua closed up there street stands and began the long walk home.
I got back to the hostel and everyone was in an uproar. The election of 2008 was being reported, and Obama was winning.