Old travel writing

Just something I stumbled across on my hard drive from a while ago.


Bus ride in Peru

After living in Peru for a couple of months you get used to the busses. Ancient wrecked vehicles sent down from North America where they failed their safety checks. The hardy South Americans, it seems, do not require such extravagant luxuries as windows and brakes. When you step up to sit (or most often stand) amongst chickens, children and Quechuans you hand your life over to the man at the wheel and hope that this isn’t his first day.

We had spent the weekend over in Cuzco, the historical centre of Andean Peru. We had not gone, I must admit, for the history. The tours amongst winding streets and excursions to massive Inca ruins had been completed months before. This weekend was about the clubs and bars and the free rum and coke given by the door staff as a thank you for choosing their establishment over the others. Inside was a sweaty Latin dance fest that rarely got started before 1am. By 4am we were dancing on the bar.

So it was with a self inflicted delicate temperament that I gave my life to the driver who would take us back, this Sunday evening, to our sleepy little village Urubamba; our base for teaching English in the surrounding rural schools. The journey takes about an hour and a half and the road climbs high into the Andes before snaking down a mountainside to bring us home. Even with a fuzzy head I could see that this was not going to be a good trip. It was dark and raining heavily on the tin roof. The bus had no windscreen wipers and headlights that, as Jeremy Clarkson might exclaim, looked like candles in jam jars. There was no kind of atmospheric control so every five seconds a man would jump in front of the driver and wipe the mist from the windscreen so he could see through into the pitch black beyond.

Half an hour in the animals on bored had become restless and the chatter had died down into a low mumble, barely audible above the noise of the rain. Suddenly from outside came a huge bang. I pressed my forehead against the window but couldn’t see a thing except for the vague outline of the road before it dropped away to the cliff beyond. In the distance the lights from Urubamba gleamed. The tyre had burst on the side of the mountain. All the men on board ran outside to find stones to stick under the wheels to stop the bus with no brakes rolling back down the hill and off the cliff. They began to work together to change the tyre, using the light from old Nokia mobile phones.

You know you're in trouble when the locals begin to cross themselves. The woman next to me juggled her box of live chickens around leaving one hand free to comfort her daughter and the other to pray. Out of our depth, my friends and I just looked at each other and bit our lips. Eventually the men clambered back in with worried faces. The driver started the engine and we began to coast down the mountain. Every second was an hour and at every bend I closed my eyes. It seemed nobody breathed.

As the bus drew into Urubamba the locals and travellers alike clamoured to be let off. It is the only time in my life I considered kissing the ground. My Britishness of course took over and I restrained myself, managing an exhausted smile. I walked home, secure in the knowledge that one bus had at last seen its last journey through the Andes. It was not to be. The next day on my morning commute to school I gave my life, not only to the driver, but to the patched up tyre I could see poking out from underneath the tin frame.