not the motorcycle diaries

I’m marking time this hot afternoon in a Piura internet booth, recalling the drive here from Loja, Ecuador and hoping for some of the same en route to Lima tonight.  Some - not all -  of the same; onto the elimination pile goes the speed at which the drivers take the narrow streets at high, high altitude.  In the first few hours out of Loja I was having trouble prising my hand out of the Jesus grip on the armrest.  I thought the nice old man next to me might have been having similar concerns due to the number of times he had crossed himself since we had left town, so I smiled weakly at him and said “ah …. pretty fast hey!”.  He replied “Yes … very.” Heartened that at least there did not appear to be a difference in cultural definition here, I added breathily, “ah … isn’t it a bit dangerous?”, to which the man laughed and said “no, only the best choffers drive fast!” and gestured to our very own choffer’s hawklike vigilance over the wheel.  Of course, said vigilance took place while exchanging obscenities with the other driver, listening to rapid beat salsa at top volume - all night - and occasionally glancing up at a plastic statue of La Virgen del Cisne (above) who sat above the dashboard and seemed to light up according to certain speeds (take note, s.c.a.m-mers - the catholic merch here is beyond our wildest dreams).  I eventually realised that the instances of the man crossing himself corresponded to our encountering of Virgen shrines (bigger plastic statues of said Virgen encased in elevated plastic boxes filled with flowers and ornate crucifixes) along the road.  Before he got off the bus he turned to me and said “very fast!!!” to me about every twenty minutes and looked at my white knuckles with an avuncular chuckle.  Something tells me that scaredy-cat-anglo-restraint gringos are the butt of more than a few jokes in these parts.

What I would repeat is the beautiful, mountainous Andean landscape - dwarfing hills, verdant valleys, orange and brown scrub with startingly green-trunked trees in flower, small plantations of maize and sugarcane, ambling donkeys, pigs, and chickens.  I swear, if country towns and I didn’t suspect each other of so much, I’d live in one tomorrow.