Tuesday I fly to Florida and escape Peru for a few days, though this interruption to renew my drivers license feels more like an annoyance than a benefit.
Layne’s leg is healing well and every other day she meets the surgeon in the horribly overcrowded public hospital here in Arequipa and he checks progress. She is allowed one short walk a day as the skin cancer site slowly heals. I hope that a few days after my return on Sunday we will be allowed to get on the road again toward Chile. I’m done with Peru.
Our campground at Hostal Las Mercedes is splendid, a fifteen minute amble from the Plaza de Armas in the heart of Arequipa, and most important of all Rusty likes living here, the sole dog on the premises most of the time.
There are two Perus contained within this country and we, the lucky ones, skim the surface and leave. The poor unfortunates who live here and cannot leave have to make the best of a state as recutting on the brink of failure. If you ever chose to visit Peru and there is a lot to see be it mountainous countryside unlike any other, or miles of spectacular undeveloped dramatic desert oceanfront, or ruins so old and so complex and so numerous they make your head spin, you will come in an organized tour or as part of some limited view of the country that need not expose you to the realities of this filthy run down society. I’d recommend visiting Peru that way.
Layne thinks me too sensitive to poverty and the atmosphere of despair that permeates Peruvian society and she’s probably right. The temptation is to take the lack of manners, the surliness and absence of warmth personally but we’ve didn’t weeks watching people here treat each other just as badly. This morning Layne said “Buenas Dias!”brightly to an old man shuffling by on the sidewalk as we waited for our Uber to the hospital. He didn’t break step but glared up at her with a look that was either questioning her sanity or wondering what terrible thing she wanted from him. He shuffled past, paused, turned around to stare one more time and then carried on. “Teach you,” I said to Layne the irrepressible Pollyanna.
I’m still reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s autobiography “A Fish In Water” and the more he expounds on the hopelessness of Peruvian society the more I understand why he lives in Madrid. At first I thought it had to go either him losing the 1990 presidential election but I think his aggravation with more goes much deeper. In an effort to call the Novel winner to back me up let me post an excerpt from two pages of the book:
“The profound pessimism…” That phrase used to describe “Peru’s sickness” gave me permission to write this post. And I know the privilege of travel especially in the era of social media and pursuit of likes one is not permitted to be anything but gloriously in love with every country, every strange custom and every inexplicable way of doing things. I have found the pessimism of Peru, the morose inhabitants, the national depression and lack of hope for a better future to have worn me down. My fellow overlanders speak no dis ish, read no literature and seem to take everything at face value. They never be too. To garbage piled by the side of the road or the utter indifference to good manners and the lack of warmth among Peruvians. They read to me like travel agencies.
The thing that gets me is that we the overlanders are here today and gone tomorrow, we have no stake in the future of Peru. My sadness at their plight leaves me suspended in a web of my own making, an outsider from all sides. Peruvians know they are stuck except the ones who escape. And escape they do.
We have talked to quite a few middle class Peruvians whose children study abroad and settle down abroad and make lives for themselves far from Peru. The latest we met are the owners of the hostel and campground where we are staying.
Their grown up children live in Spain and the Netherlands And they too are going to live in Europe to join them.
A week ago I was out walking the grounds with Rusty shortly after dawn. He wants me to go with him as he checks the perimeter and sniffs the plants and eats a few blades of grass. The staff here have expressed Shazam’s t his quiet he is, nd er barking and never bothering anyone.
He bothers me first thing in the morning demanding my attention.
While I was watching him Gilberto the night watchman came by on his way home and we got to talking. He told me that after ten years of trying the family who own this place have sold it to a hotel conglomerate in Arequipa. The future looks set to change for this slow paced old world hotel and campground, the only one of its kind in Arequipa.
Gilberto has worked her for a decade. He used to be a stonemason and the builders’ yard next door also owned by the family. They owned a huge strip of land along the river he said. They hired him to work at the hotel.
No one knows what will happen next. The new owners who are supposed to sign the papers this week have promised no changes before December and in Latin America deadlines frequently get pushed back. We will be long gone before change arrives at Las Mercedes.
For Gilberto it’s a time of uncertainty. Is he worried for his job? I asked which is always the preoccupation in the US. He shrugged saying he can sheath fine work. No, he said, this place is like home. He pointed out the stonework he has built and repaired over the years including the campground bathhouse and retaining walls paths and steps. He likes working with stone.
He also has scoop at the hotel where he can leave his tools and other possessions. He has a daytime job house painting and having a room at the hostel saves him from having to keep his tools at home because he lives far out in the suburbs and commuting all the time would be expensive.
This place has given him a good life and it’s all going to change it seems like. He says he’ll miss seeing his work and feeling at home on the job but he has a philosophical streak as I suppose you must when you are born a powerless Peruvian. Life is change he shrugs before going to his day job.
Peru is out eleventh country on this journey and one can’t help but compare and contrast as the road unfurls. Talking about Peru Layne and I both agree that Peru is in bottom place with Belize.
The seventy sndcghe excellent food don’t make up for the sense of indifference and sourness of the people. Colombians have come out of a civil war every bit as brutal as Peru’s struggle with the Shining Path guerrillas but Colombians among themselves and in contacts with us exude a joy at being alive that is totally absent here.
Even Nicaraguans who, privately will tell you how aggravating the dictatorship is, greet each other discus strangers with good manners and even good cheer. Ecuador are reserved but are quick to smile back and ask how you’re doing if you make the effort.
I hope Peru finds a happier way forward, further sake not for ours. I’ve checked out already and am bracing for high prices and reserved populations among the Chileans to the south of here.
Unlike Bolivia and Belize, countries you can drive around, there is no escaping Peru for the north-south road traveler. This vast country fills the land from the Pacific Coast to the impenetrable Amazon jungle so even a grump like me has to come to terms with his revulsion.
Florida presents its own problems for a nomad like me. I have discovered many driver license centers only serve county residents, including Monroe county so to renew my license I will have to drive north, I hope not as far as Jacksonville which is near where my official address is but Florida used to be easy for paperwork and is becoming less so. The license itself lasts eight years now so it may well outlive its usefulness as I will be scheduled to be 75 when it expires.
In the age of suspicion and conformity that we live through having a post box for an address is barely acceptable anymore which is ironic as living a nomad life is technically easier than ever with electronics and miniaturization.
I find myself marginalizing myself from the 21st century and I have to admit I d joy the sensation of living at the edges. Forty years ago I emigrated to California because I wanted to see and live the tend setter up close. Then we sailed to the little island on the outskirts of Florida and made a life there.
Nowadays I enjoy not belonging, not settling, not having to make a choice.
In a way that reminds me of my feelings of sadness for Peru I feel the love and let live of my youth that I try to replicate in old age takes more effort than it should.
Simplify! The trend setters urge us.
Better not because of you do simplify your life you won’t have an address, a place, a fixed center to your life. And that annoys people.
And yet there I have all I need which is more than many people have. In Peru it is a fortune, in the US it is theater established order and I dangle between the two.
