Finally, after getting me through grad school and saving up vacation time and money, we went abroad again. The wait of nearly two years (658 days!) was longer than we'd like- and we don't plan on waiting so long again! This next trip was to start off in a very familiar place- the central Sierra of Peru, specifically Huancayo and of course, my old Peace Corps site of Vitis. Afterwards we'd be off to spend a few days in Lima before heading to Costa Rica for a week. This included the 8-hour overnight bus ride from Lima to Huancayo, something I became very familiar with while in Peace Corps. The bus leaves the flat desert megapolis of Lima late at night. In the evening hours there are congestion and traffic to pass through, until finally the quieter suburbs of Chaclacayo and Chosica are visible from your window. Immediately after leaving Chosica behind, the bus starts making it up the Andes on the Central Highway that zigzags and cuts through the Andean foothills, which at the beginning have almost no vegetation and look like giant sand dunes against the light of a full moon. Cold starts to creep in after passing our old home of Matucana and then San Mateo. The bus heaters and blankets provided are normally enough to keep warm, but outside the air has a chill to it; you’re in the Sierra now. At 15,681 feet, icy Ticlio is home to the highest point of the central highway, and from there the road descends to more tolerable Sierran altitudes, and, eventually, to the jungle. Once you leave Lima behind, this trip is undeniably beautiful, at least when you get a window seat and it’s not too dark to look outside. The common unpredictabilities of all land travel in Peru are still present; is the bathroom working? Will this trip take 8 hours or be delayed with no warning to passengers?, WHEN IS REFRIGERIO (SNACK TIME)?!, etc. Often you’ll wonder if the movie being shown is appropriate for family audiences. Violent martial arts movies and the movie Taken starring Liam Neeson were popular bus movies in Peru from 2008-10. Thanks to Peruvian buses, my appreciation for both Bruce Lee and Liam Neeson as actors were developed at the same time. That is a sentence no one has ever written before. You know you’re in the Sierra when you get into an argument over mal viento (“bad air”). This is the phantom wind that makes one sick by the mere act of hitting you when you're warm and the air is cold. My poor mother was once berated by a woman after opening a window when we were still in the suburbs of Lima (with the bus’s heater already on!). It was stuffy and the heat bordering on sultry. “We’ll all get sick since this bus is going to Ticlio!,” the woman explained to my mom, in a tone that was a mix of fear and annoyance over my mom's ignorance on dangerous window air. Another woman chimed in and tried to guilt trip my mother by saying there was a baby in the back, who would surely get sick if the window was open. My mother was unprepared for the argument, since strangers wholeheartedly objecting to the free flow of fresh air isn’t a normal part of travel in the USA. In Peru it comes with the package. In this case most passengers silently nodded as the other women spoke. So my mother obliged and closed the window. Then we promptly sat in our seats, positioned our pillows and electronic devices for the trip, and enjoyed the same comfort that potatoes must have while in a microwave. Of course, with the window closed none of us were hit by the mal viento, so these potatoes got to Huancayo safe. Especially the baby potatoes.
For this trip Huancayo was just used as a stepping-stone to Vitis, so we only stayed there for a day before heading to Vitis early next morning. We were still able to visit my favorite place in Huancayo, the Park of Huanca Identity (Parque de la Identidad Huanca). My favorite chicha lady who I regularly frequented from 2008 to 2010 was still there- as was her famous peanut chicha. I still have not found this drink anywhere else! If you like peanut butter, you would love peanut chicha. If you don’t like peanut butter, well, I don’t believe you. What I’m trying to say is, you would love this chicha. Despite the short time, I think the others got a good feeling of the essence of Huancayo. The best way to describe this city is to imagine a small village in the middle of the Andes, who all of a sudden experienced a migration of 300,000 new neighbors in a week. Huancayo is full of narrow sidewalks that are chock full of uniformed school children, men in jackets and women in bowler hats, with numerous combis whizzing by that shoot soot into the air. You never feel alone in Huancayo; on the contrary, I always find myself double-checking my belongings to make sure I don't get pickpocketed since one is always surrounded by people. All day Huancainos are bustling back and forth from home, work, school, market, or one of the thousands of menus and pollerias, and every sidewalk is just one size too small to fit the number of people without some incidental shoulder-bumping. Although it's a city, it's very true to its roots- the food, artesian works, and people are undeniably Andean and uninfluenced by the changes brought on by huge influxes of tourism in other parts of Peru. Huancayo, the Central Andes, it was good to be back.
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AuthorBrad Goodman Archives
January 2019
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