cold feet

(An excerpt from a blog entry written from Cusco on May 15, 2015.)

I’m sitting in an Irish-themed bar. With early 90's alt rock videos, a choice of sports games on two monitors, and walls covered in art tinged with irony and smoke strains left over from an era when tourists didn't complain as much. 

I am escaping. Yes. I have my cheap Peruvian wheat beer and my guacamole-and-deep-fried-wontons to turn to, and I do so with relish. The western familiarity of this place provides a stalling tactic. The escaping is part of an act of waiting, of spinning wheels while other circumstances determine my immediate future.

3 weeks ago, my backpack was stolen with everything in it except my bank cards. Passport, drivers licenses (California and international), vehicle title, Peruvian proof of insurance and motorcycle permit, laptop, iPhone, spare keys, map of South America, $US60 in cash, a crappy, torn, hole-strewn notebook, and my personal copy of the book I made about In Search of the Frightening and Beautiful. It happened while I was parking my bike. I don't remember taking the backpack off. I only remember the weightlessness of its absence and the deep, guttural panic of realizing it was nowhere to be found. 

It's kind of amazing to be liberated of the things you depend on. Most notably the cell phone that I'd stared at endlessly, that I relied on as a connection to my other world. Suddenly I had nothing to distract me from myself. I wandered around in a daze the day after. I looked at all the red and white electronics store signs, smelling the smoke from distant fires mingling with sewage and decaying trash cluttering the nearby Rio Santa. I watched young men peel quail eggs with bare hands as their mothers hovered over them in puffy wool skirts and ridiculously tall felt hats; policemen with tight black uniforms and automatic guns presiding over street corners with tight, unsmiling, shiny faces. I noticed how bright and unforgiving the sun was despite how cold the temperatures were in the shade. And I watched my back at every turn. 

I still had a camera, whose weight I'd resented, which I'd thought about selling before this happened. I dug it out of one of my side cases, appreciating its physicality in a way I never thought I would. Its rectangular viewfinder, which I'd previously thought of as limiting, framed the streets of Huaraz mercilessly, and soon those roads became my victims as I ran around, casting my own shadow on their cracks and outrageous, obnoxious bright colors. I used the camera as a weapon to reclaim myself, and before long I was back on my bike, gunning for the company of a good friend in a faraway town. 

So you could say that Perú has presented me with a mixed blessing. I have hundreds of stories to tell that have manifested themselves both in the outrage acted out in 47 dogs who've attacked me on the highways in this country (yes, I've counted), and in the genuinely sweet smiles of women who have taken care of me here, from the demure hostess of the 10-soles-per-night ($US3) Hostal Milky in the Huascarán mountain town of Yamana, to the lovely ass-kicking women of the tourist assistance organization iPerú, without whom I would not currently have a replaced passport nor a valid copy of the permission I need to ride my motorcycle here freely. As my friend Peter so eloquently stated in a recent email, "sometimes the truth you seek turns around and bites you in the ass." Yeah, that about sums it up, doesn't it?

Hundreds of stories. This is not an exaggeration. They have breathed life into me and have taken it away. I have aged 15 years in 5 and a half months. Sometimes I know I am stronger for it; other times it feels as though someone has taken a lead pipe to my knees. But this is something we can all relate to on one level or other - correct?

Mexico / Belize / Guatemala / El Salvador / Honduras / Nicaragua / Costa Rica / Panama / Colombia / Ecuador / Perú. 

Each of these countries conjures up its own set of wild images in the western mind. From automatic weapons and machetes to pictures of cute brown-skinned old men in broad-brimmed hats picking coffee beans. My mind is a western one. So my imagination goes nuts as I approach every border, filling my brain with vague sketches based on movies, novels, leftist history books, sensational news stories and other people's photographs.  I say I don't know what to expect (which is true), but I always have an idea, which usually ends up being wrong. 

How poor is it? Will the mountains be steep and dramatic, covered in vines and banana trees? Will I see exploded car carcasses? Will there be bright-colored parrots or shit-hurling monkeys? Will I get ripped off? 

12 countries. 10,350 miles. 170 days. After a while you'd think this would become routine, but every border is a threshold bringing brand new things. Every country has a history and attitude all its own, which will mesh with my own outsider baggage in some unique way. The trick is to keep being open to that, to continue to be willing to learn, no matter how tiring, frustrating, lonely or scary it can be.