A Journey to the Top of the World..Huancayo, Peru

It begins with a train which leaves Lima and reaches an altitude of 15,920 feet. It no longer runs. So it goes. On the way up there were attendants passing along the cars holding a three feet square white bag containing oxygen for the desperate. Marilyn, Alon ( the OAK) and I played Tavla, which is also called back gammon. He claimed he was the champion of Israel, but my Dwarf beat him all but the first game and I had a grand time laughing. When we got to the highest point and the train stopped to take on water, the Dwarf got off to photograph a soccer game!!!! She didn’t have strength enough to get back on though and we had to pull her up onto the train. Altitude is a funny thing. The players continued racing back and forth.

At first the Andes appear to be ragged jutting granite, devoid of all vegetation, gray and spotted black ingots like dark untrusting eyes. The land is dry, treeless and empty. The last word is hardly fitting. Nothing. Nothingness. Nada! Once and a while a man with his donkey or a wife trod the edges of the tracks. And oh yes, the train plods at about the same speed. It takes a hundred heart beats to pass the walkers. I guess they are invigorated by the coca leaf they chew from dawn to dark. Bare footed, the tramp toward . . .who the hell knows?

Then you crest the summit, the train begins to gain a little speed, the clothes on the walkers gets better and there’s a brooklet here and there. Then a few scrub trees, can’t define what they are, except they droop and have long thick very green leaves. And before you know it, 16 hours has past and you’re in Huancayo. Today you go up there by buss. Still no airport, but go. It’s something that stays in your head forever. But don’t go with obsessed shoppers like Alon and Marilyn! I always say that my wife can shop a phone booth for six hours and come out with packages.

We find a nice hotel, bed down and both of them are awake at the crack of day. I have no intentions of joining these hounds! I’m going to stretch out, drink freshly pressed coffee, read and think about writing some more of a novel entitled The Marys. They can go. Oh . . . the town is only 11,000 feet up. The market is approximately six miles of open air vendors hawking everything imaginable in local goods.

One more forgotten point. Eating at five miles on a moving train, even when you’re in the club car and there are tables is also fun! FUN! FUN!@!! The hot coffee is cold in a minute and the grilled sandwich is soggy and cold by the time it reaches your table. And there are loads of folks huffing on that oxygen bag. And a few others heaving their guts out the windows. And it’s cold!
Meanwhile the duo is off. Let me tell you what was there, and why it’s gone. The native weavers came in with burros filled with hand woven garments which ranged from shawls and ponchos to wonderfully enhanced shirts. They make the shirts from Guatemala look sort of crude and unadorned! There were pure llama wool coats, jackets and ponchos for ten dollars! Hats and scarfs piled three feet deep on a lurching table.

And food! There was food. Some of it was more than strange. Yours truly loved Che-Che. The women bite into a kernel of corn, spit it into a jar and in two or three days the corn and spit ferment. It’s the consistency of custard and tastes really good! Also about 120 proof. I liked drinking it and then playing trumpet in a marching band where I was at least a foot taller than all the other members.

Meanwhile Alon and Marilyn are pacing and grazing . . .more like stalking and sweeping . . .like a couple of English Setters. He’s taken his empty back pack. You can fit a normal sized native in it! And they’ve bought and bought! Later Alon’s wife will not approve of his twenty three Alpaca sweaters! She doesn’t want him to wear the poncho. But the Dwarf has enough to hold her until we get to Bolivia and that’s another tale of woe. One last thing. A guy was trying to cut into Marilyn’s hand bag with a knife, but when Alon showed him that his knife was five times as big, the poor guy quit! Alon and I make good body guards.

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