Tuesday September 3, 2019 

Lima to Cusco, Peru

Deuteronomy 1:6-8  

The Lord our God said to us at Horeb, “You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Break camp and advance into the hill country of the Amorites….  See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land….”  It was a quick visit with Chris, but “you have stayed long enough at this mountain,” the Lord said to us.  “Break camp and advance into the hill country of the Amorites”—or, for us, the Peruvians.  So here we are in Lima in this two-bit hotel, under a sky that is overcast all the way down to the ground, and I am wondering how I’m going to manage now that I’ve figured out why I kept having to go to the bathroom yesterday when I had very little to eat or drink at all:  Two of my new medications are diuretics!  No wonder I’m uncomfortable.  My itching has subsided and there are no new spots; maybe I’ll stop the meds I don’t like.  But all this is really just pebbles under my shoes.  “Go in and take possession of the land,” says the Lord.  “I’ve given it to you for blessing and enjoyment in this season.  You’ll be fine.”  Are they really his words to us?  Does he care this much about our personal dreams in this world?  Thank you, Lord, for the medical care.  Thank you for this journey that has already been wonderful.  Please strengthen our weak bodies and walk with us every day.

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The bathroom was Camino-perfect with no place to put things, then I failed to put the shower curtain in the tub and flooded the floor—the kind of error I am prone to and that sets Maurice off, though he helped clean it up.  Breakfast was about the worst hotel breakfast ever:  undercooked scrambled eggs, sort-of roasted potatoes, cups of peculiar tan lumpy yogurt, an adequate fruitbowl from which I could pick the pieces that had been properly peeled, two uncertain kinds of juice, and tasteless plain white rolls with bad butter.  Bad butter! —not rancid, just fat and tasteless.  (How do you ruin butter?)  And there was no jelly. After I drank two small glasses of juice for rehydration (since yesterday’s water supply was gone and there’s no drinkable water in the room) and was pouring another glass of juice into my water bottle, Maurice said, “You know, they probably make that juice with water and concentrate.”  No, I didn’t know, thank you very much, it never occurred to me, and why are you mentioning it now?  I talked myself into keeping my half bottle of juice and went upstairs to brush my teeth in the poison sink water.  Maurice then mentioned he had been using bottled water on his teeth.  I didn’t think we had to because we weren’t in the Andes yet, but Maurice mentioned he had just met a young Australian in the elevator who said definitely don’t use the water.  Well.  Maurice decided to go get some Peruvian money and buy a bottle of water.  Surprise.  He got the money but couldn’t get change for the big bills, so no water.  But he stopped in the hotel restaurant and asked about the juice.  They do reconstitute it but they use filtered water; a guy that Maurice said sounded like he had an English degree pointed out the system to him.  Whew.  When Maurice returned with the report, I had just been imagining that I had tummy rumbles, but suddenly I was all better.

The taxi to the airport arrived, but it didn’t look like a taxi, just a non-English-speaking guy in a car.  There were no accessible seatbelt receptacles though I got grime under my fingernails looking for one.  Ugh.  “No seatbelts?” we said to Silent Sam.  He just smiled and shrugged in a non-comprehending way but he did drive much more carefully than the previous night’s driver.  “He’s not going to have change,” Maurice said.  “This is not a taxi.”  “It’s got to be a taxi, we reserved a taxi,” I said.  “He drives people around, he has to have change.”  But Maurice was right.  Peruvian Pedro had no change.  It was my intention to tell him he had to go find some change, but he had stopped in a lane where a sign that even I could understand said, “One-minute drop-off only,” and he couldn’t comprehend anything I said.  I was fuming as I fished out an American twenty, an acceptable alternative to the sixty soles price (at a rate beneficial to a Peruvian).  As I turned to go, there was Maurice, shaking the hand of Clever Carlos and thanking him for the safe ride.

Inside the airport I needed the baño due to the diuretics and my desperate need to get the grime out from under my fingernails.  After we checked in Maurice bought a bottle of water—finally a customer-friendly business that could change a hundred-soles note (about $32).  Looking around at the crowds I realized we were definitely the foreigners here.  We waded into the melee to get lunch—nice American Papa John’s pizza, and two overpriced chocolate Dunkin Donuts to go.  It’s not fast fast food here, but it was comforting.  The plane was already boarding when we got through security, but I had to find another baño.  One stall was occupied, one had a door that didn’t stay shut and one was locked from the inside.  “We have assigned seats,” said Maurice, and he waited patiently.

The flight was only about an hour, and from the mob of taxi drivers who all wanted us to get into their taxis we found our official REI pick-up guy.  We drove on wide roads through Cusco’s sprawl of colorfully painted but unfinished or abandoned buildings to the old part of town where no cars except taxis are allowed, then we had to get out and do an immediate hike up a mountain of stairs to get to our tiny street.  Did I mention Cusco’s altitude is 11,250 feet?  We could tell by our gasping that we weren’t in Maryland anymore.  The hotel was shabby-quaint, with religious art and urns of mint and coca tea in the lobby. 

We rested, had a light supper at Pacha Papa, filtered some water with the filter we had brought with us (now how hard was that?), moved slowly, and we were still breathing adequately when we fell asleep in the cool Cusco night.

Below: scenes from our street