Hey everyone. I’m looking forward to sharing this week with you. It was quite eventful in significant ways. While I did have an adventure traveling to various places in northern Peru and Ecuador, it was also a week of good-byes and reunions.
So the day after we went to the cathedral, some of us went to church. For me it would be my last time going to the ward in Cuzco, so I said good-bye to Antony. I’m glad I held it together, because I was not at all prepared; I just realized as we were leaving that I should say good-bye, so we turned around for a moment and exchanged farewells.
This week I was looking forward to Monday through Thursday to give the song-and-dance thing another shot, but there was a transportation strike throughout Cuzco on Wednesday and Thursday. On Tuesday, Reinaldo said that it would be business as usual, but, as with Day of the Dead, Colibri was shut down because not everybody could reliably use public transportation to get there. On Thursday (the twenty-fourth of November) we (that is, Anna, Kyle, Annie, myself, and a new girl from North Carolina who wasn’t living with us but whom we invited, along with a girl from Germany) celebrated Thanksgiving by cooking different things that would go in a traditional Thanksgiving dinner (I insisted we get the ají pepper because we were in Peru, even though Peruvian food is generally not spicy at all) and then eating with our host family. Astrid, our host mom, had been in the United States a while at one point, so she’s celebrated this before, but it was still fun to celebrate it with each other and with her. This group really is starting to feel like family!
The next day was another bittersweet day, as I graduated Spanish class. The initial sadness was reduced because my Spanish professor and I had arranged to go to lunch the next week, and I planned to be back at Proyecto Peru again.
That afternoon after lunch, I took a taxi to the airport and flew from Cuzco to Lima and then to Piura. I was going up there to see a good friend who was serving a mission for our church in the department of Piura (I was staying in the departmental capital, in a really noisy hostel that was more functional than for sleeping). While I care about getting a good night’s sleep, I will totally forgo it if it means adventure and finding oneself and all that. And that’s what I got!
I got to Piura that night and checked in to my hostel. After a night of little sleep, I got up the next morning and headed down to the Cruz del Sur bus station first thing. They didn’t have a bus to Sullana where my friend was until the next afternoon, and we had arranged to go to church the next morning. They referred me to a terminal called Epo, where I found a 7:00 AM bus the next day. They, in turn, referred me to a terminal called Sifa, where, after some minor difficulty posed by a quicker and slightly different dialect, I managed to book a bus to Ecuador that left at 10:30 that morning and got there at 4:30 that afternoon. I booked a one-way trip on it because it wouldn’t be leaving the border town whose name I won’t bother to spell for now until 12:30 that night. I was set up for what happened next.
The bus ride to the border was a party. There was no way I could recline my seat to rest (that was for luxury, and I was going for the real deal, whatever that was). One of the highlights was the six hours of straight cumbia, interspersed by Abba and Ottawan on two occasions. I learned that we were traveling right by the ocean, and according to my watch, the closest we got to the equator was three degrees.
As we approached the border, a guy started walking around asking, “¿Necesitas sellar tu pasaporte?” (Do you need to stamp your passport? This kind of threw me off. I assumed that everyone on the bus would need to stamp out of Peru and into Ecuador, so I thought, What more could he be asking us about our passports?
I crossed the border into Ecuador with everyone else with no incident, but then that’s when the fun really started. I found somewhere to eat across the street from the terminal. I ate a soup with potatoes, noodles, some meat, and some plantain chips. After that, I asked someone who worked at this restaurant what there was to do.
“You can go to bakeries, beaches, all of it, here,” she said, “but you’ll get robbed if you don’t take a taxi.” Having figured that out, I walked back across the street to secure a way back before midnight before I set out to explore the town; however, I figured out that the only way back at a reasonable time was a colectivo that would be leaving Tumbez, the town on the Peruvian side of the border, soon. I hitched a ride in a basket on the side of this guy’s tricycle–I thought only kids rode those–and when we first left, he asked, “¿Necesitas sellar tu pasaporte?” Not knowing what “to stamp” meant at the time, I said, “No.” So we just rolled on back into Peru, and by the time I had realized my error he had long gone. I kept asking for help to hail a taxi back to the border so I could rectify things, but somebody kept saying, “Sir, you’re a special case, the law will allow you to get in in some special way. Just go to a control post down the road closer to Piura and stamp in. It’s too dangerous at the border at this time of night.” I was sure she was mistaken, but I ended up getting into the colectivo and heading out. At the control post in the town of Carpitas nearer Piura, we learned that they did not in fact stamp people back into the country, only review their passports. This made me furious! I had come here to see my friend, not to screw with immigration and people who didn’t know what they were talking about. I determined that I would not let my mistake interfere with my plans, whatever ended up happening. I really wanted to see this person.
My being tired only added to my short temper. We got back into town, and I hailed a taxi back to my hostel. I gave him the address, and although we started out in the general direction of that address, he started questioning me like I didn’t know anything.
“That’s a dangerous part of town,” he said. “Are you sure? I think I’m going to drop you off at a better hotel.”At that, I let him have it, something I haven’t done in a long time: Much more forcefully than was necessary, I told him that my stuff was back at the hotel. He quickly got that I had had a bad day and went to unnecessary lengths to console me. Because I had misspelled the address, the price went from ten soles to thirty, and because I felt bad for losing my temper, I paid him accordingly, without attempting to negotiate. He asked if I’d like him to pick me up the next morning and take me to the Epo bus terminal. I thought, Why not? and I took him up on it.
The next morning, I was determined to not let what I had to do to legalize my being in Peru mess with what I had really come here to do, and as part of that I was determined to not be messed with. As a result I became a bit more suspicious than might have been warranted when the taxi driver showed up outside my room fifteen minutes earlier than he had said he would be there. Was he trying to rack up the price, pretend to be my friend for his benefit? To be fair, though, it’s not like you can schedule yourself down to the minute as a taxi driver all the time. As it was, when we got in the car and were headed to the bus station, he asked twenty. I tried my best to be cordial, but I wasn’t having any of it. True, he had waited on me until I was ready at exactly the agreed-upon time. My response?
“Sorry, man, but I don’t have twenty to pay you, only ten.”
“No, twenty soles.”
“I don’t have that much to pay you. I got to Epo for much less yesterday.”
“Why won’t you pay me twenty? I waited on you.”
“You didn’t have to wait on me, and I could have called other people.”
So I guess I was being a little too aggressive. I just didn’t want to be screwed with. At Epo, I finally managed to wring ten out of him. I thanked him, and I was soon on the bus to Sullana.
It was so good to see my friend and her companion at church. In between being at church and them being busy as missionaries, we didn’t have a whole lot of time to talk, but the time we did have was precious. We managed to briefly catch up and to share what we thought about living in Peru. At the end of our meeting, I explained the immigration situation, and she got me set up with the bishop. Later on, I met at the bishop’s house, and we (the bishop, his wife, one of his counselors, one of their sons, and myself) arranged to drive to Macará, a border town much closer to Sullana, and get me stamped back into Peru. I was so touched by their kindness that I felt sorry for all the aggression I had shown anyone. It could have also been sheer relief that all the physical and mental preparations I had made for another long night were suddenly unnecessary.
We had a great time driving together and getting to know one another. The result of this and of meeting each other in church is now a WhatsApp group where I help them learn English. Because of how generous they had been toward me, I was more than happy to help there. I also met a woman and her teenage daughter, the latter of whom was losing her vision. She was learning braille, and her mother and others were trying to get her to use a cane, but she was resistant to the cane. We exchanged numbers and have been in contact to this day.
As we drove, they told me that there were some parts of the countryside that were quite cultivated with things such as avocado and mango trees, while other parts were desolate. How did this work, I wondered?
At Macará, we finally stamped me out of Ecuador and back into Peru. In addition to having been relieved of that weight, I now had another extra day in Peru in case something were to go awry on the way back home. For my new friends, this wasn’t the end of it: They would have to come back another day and go through the four-hour process of stamping themselves back into Peru as well. I have never been so touched by such self-sacrifice in a long time.
In addition, not only did they put aside the rest of their Sunday and thereby another of their days to help me out, but they drove me all the way back to my hostel in Piura, which was about an hour drive south of Sullana. We got some snacks to eat along the way–nothing that would qualify as a real dinner, but in this case it was more than enough! At least they let me pay for gas. At my hostel, I slept much easier, a much more grateful, humble, and happier man.
The next day was perhaps the most straightforward part of the whole trip to Piura: I got up, headed to the airport, checked into my flight home, and went home. Before flying to Lima, I went to the best cevichería I have ever been to. In case I haven’t made note of this yet, the corn in Peru is the best: It’s not the sweetest, but it’s juicy and chewy and fresh! This was mixed in with rice and ceviche. The ceviche wasn’t very spicy or juicy, but it was fish, and it was something on my sore throat and empty stomach (I hadn’t eaten properly since the restaurant on the Ecuadorian side of the border the first time there). On the flight home to Cuzco, I sat near a family who was visiting from the States. Too much English, I thought as we flew along. I wondered if I was really ready to go home.
Traveling in Peru 