Odyssey

After ten days in Arequipa, gorging ourselves on chocolate cake and visiting the occasional site, David, Seb and I decided to take a bus as close as possible to the colonial city of Cusco to the north. In Arequipa, no-one had been able to tell us definitively if it was possible to reach Cusco; they would often furrow their brows, grumble about the “paro regional” and advise us that we should just stay in Arequipa for the next few days. We were like Odysseus’s men, lured into Circe’s abode and fated to gorge on food forever as pigs.

Nobody in Arequipa could tell us exactly why the inhabitants of the Cusco region had left their jobs and erected blockades around the city. Some speculated that it was in response to government atrocities in the north of Peru, where indigenous people were fired on by police, their bodies later dumped into the rainforest. Others thought that this merely provided a convenient pretext for some disorder. We later found out that the strike had more to do with the local water supply that the government is attempting to privatise.

Six hours after catching the bus, we found ourselves in the dusty, desolate town of Espinar. Despite the protestations of a local taxi driver, nothing was open and we ended up sheltering from the bitter cold in a hostel where we grabbed two hours of sleep before continuing on to Sicuani. At six in the morning, the bus jolted up to a roadblock, a line of huge stones traversing the road, surrounded by locals huddled round a campfire. Unusually for South America, we found all our bags waiting outside when we got off the bus, and the driver was in such a rush to leave that David got trapped inside.

We still had no idea of the walk that awaited us. A motorbike driver agreed to take us as far as he could, which I took to mean the town from which the bus would leave. We were soon to be disillusioned. Squashed into a truck, I experienced a feeling of adventure and exhilaration that I have never felt reclined in a comfortable seat on a large bus. I had just finished Che, La Vida por un Mundo Mejor by Paddy O´Donnell, and had his Bolivian “heroics” in mind. Without maps or communications with Cuba or La Paz, Che and his men hacked their way through the selva surrounded by soldiers trained by the American military. They had little to eat and Che was paralysed with asma attacks that left him incapacitated, laid out in a hammock carried by his men, smelling his own filth. He was captured with an orange in his pocket, weighing less than sixty kilograms. I am not idealistic enough to think that such a fate holds any charm.

The trailer shook with the vibrations of the motor and after fifteen minutes, several figures on bikes started to come towards us. The driver slowed down and pulled in to the side of the road. We were soon surrounded by gesticulating Peruvians, one of whom pulled out a nail from his pocket and punctured the wheels of the motorbike. They shouted at the driver for taking tourists and breaking the “paro”. We paid him what we could under the watchful gaze of the strikers, and left.

The road was perfectly straight and stretched off down the valley past fields of maize and lowing cows. We shouldered our bags that must have weighed thirty kilos and trudged off into a mirage of melting tarmac. Others walked in the same direction, many of them locals who were simply trying to get home. Three Cusquenas (inhabitants of Cusco) had been caught out by the strike while another woman was carrying a muti-coloured sack. A baby cooed inside. There were far more roadblocks than I had anticipated, many of them simply low lines of rock, perhaps topped off by a gnarled tree root. The bigger blockades consisted of trucks parked across the road. Locals congregated in wide circles and discussed the strike, ordinary people able to take the floor and express their views. We stopped once to listen and heard a small man speak in monotonous tone and ending each sentence with a resounding “Companeros”, comrades. I wonder if this strike has a socialist, anti-Western tinge. Later on in the day, we sat down at the side of the road and were mocked by the passing cyclists who laughed, called us gringos and told David that he was slow. In the last town before we caught the bus, the locals glared at me and an old woman had the temerity to hit me over the bottom with a wooden switch, much to the pleasure of the surrounding villagers who guffawed, revealing their discoloured, rotten teeth.

We knew that we would never make it to Cusco walking alone, so we paid the extortionate prices demanded by motorcyclists, tuc-tuc drivers and small children with trailers to take us the few kilometres between the roadblocks. On one occasion, we hopped into a trailer pulled by a small child on a bike and crawled along the rock-strewn road. Shortly after getting off to help the child push the trailer up a hill, we saw some bicycles racing towards us. Baja, baja (get off, get off) the child cried. In an ecstasy of fumbling, we ripped our bags from the trailer and pressed some coins into the child´s hand as he turned round and fled from the oncoming strikers. He got away, but a tuc-tuc driver wasn’t so lucky. A cyclist hung on to the window, grabbed a huge rock and threw it at the driver through the opening. I assume he missed because the tuc-tuc sped off into the distance.

Five hours after beginning our walk, the sun was at its zenith and was beginning to take its toll, despite the wide-brimmed leather hat that shaded my face from the sun. At one village, Tinta, the locals told us there was no lunch on offer because of the strike, and it was a similar story at the next village where an old man disappointed us with relish. Luckily, one comedor had stayed open and we forced down a revolting pasta dish that wouldn´t have been out of place in the Twits. Thereon in, we didn´t manage to catch any more transport and so had to brave the sun and the burning tarmac for some fifteen or twenty kilometres. Groups of locals on bikes patrolled the road, sometimes sending scouts further to ensure that no locals agreed to carry tourists (the irony is that locals themselves were let through). The most zealous of the strikers were young men of 18 or 19 years who took malicious pleasure in halting a motorbike and puncturing the wheels. They smiled at us mockingly as we passed. Huge blisters appeared on Seb´s feet and walking became toil. David himself began to suffer and lagged behind, rising over the brow of the hill with a vacant expression, his jumper wrapped around his head.

We passed over a hundred lorries held up before a bridge, passed locals playing football in the fields and had begun to despair of reaching Cusco that day when we reached the village of Checacube. Some motorcyclists refused to take us because they said their tyres would be punctured (pinchados). Luckily, a huge red truck pulled up on the square and the driver agreed to let us board, for a price of course. As we approached the barricades, we pulled our mochilas above our heads to deflect any flying rocks. But, the rocks never came. Instead, some of the strikers who were tired of their work decided to board the truck and go home. Che wouldn´t have been impressed. This is what saved us, because from then on, we passed through the blocks without any trouble and reached the bus shivering because of the icy wind. An odyssey indeed!

I sympathise with the strikers, but erecting roadblocks and paralysing a huge city is no way to protest or effect change. Surfing on the internet, I have found that this is no isolated event. The same thing happened at the end of 2008. Such actions can only harm the people of Peru in the long run by reducing GNP and discouraging foreign investment in the country. The government is perhaps reluctant about breaking up the strike because of what happened in the north of the country, but actions like this should not go unchallenged. We need peaceful protest, not disorder and violence.