The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (33 page)

Dinner is friendly and awkward. An older man who we assume is Benita's husband comes to the table, as do a teenage boy and another, younger boy. We offer our stilted Spanish but soon realize we aren't being understood after the patriarch simply answers
“Sí”
to all our questions. The islanders speak the indigenous language and seem to know even less Spanish than we do; eventually, we all give up and sit in silence, sipping our soup, huddled together for warmth. The main course is eggs with rice
and tomatoes. Meat is an expensive commodity, so most meals are vegetarian, which suits Carly and me fine, since we eat only chicken and fish anyway.

After dinner, Benita appears in our room with traditional island outfits. We have eaten two enormous, carb-laden meals today, one at four
P.M
. and another at seven
P
.
M
., so it is an effort for her to tie three layers of skirts around our distended bellies. Next comes one of those intricately patterned white blouses. The whole ensemble is secured with a thick corset-tight belt.

“I think I might puke,” Carly says.

“Just pretend you're dressing for a Victorian ball,” I whisper through clenched teeth.

Benita drops heavy black shawls on our heads to keep us warm. It's so cold that we pull on pants to protect our last remaining bits of exposed flesh. The completed look is, well, bulky. Benita steps back to survey her work. She nods once, satisfied, then ushers us out the door and up the hill to the dance being held in our honor, along with the other ten or so guests on the island that night.

At the top of a stone staircase, there is no respite, as we are expected to dance excitedly for the next three hours. The male guests have fared better in terms of outfits. They wear loose-fitting ponchos and the local-style hats with pom-poms swinging from them. But the other women are suffering as much as Carly and I as we are whirled around and around the spinning room, emitting high-pitched hysterical laughs at ourselves. The body-constricting clothes, coupled with the lung-constricting altitude, make me wonder if this is what a heart attack feels like.

Carly and I have been adamant about “roughing it” the entire trip. Backpacking has noble ideals: to see how the locals live, to interact with them, to be respectful and blend in as much as possible. Backpackers want to learn, we want to understand the worlds we have entered, not simply consume them. And I savor
those values. We want to be travelers, not tourists, but on Amantani, when we are literally in the garb of another culture, it hits me that some of this is just “dressing up.” Tomorrow Benita will go back to her routine, and we will move on at our leisure, and to pretend otherwise is to deny our advantages and our impact.

Isla Taquile, where we spend the next day, has the same terraced look as Amantani. The families here are the ultimate collective. They build one another's houses, sew one another's clothes, till the various plots of land in rotation. The clothes here represent the various statuses of the inhabitants. For instance, the male political leaders wear black hats, while married men wear red ones and single men wear white. Single girls wear brightly colored clothing, while married women are required to choose darker, more somber colors.

Before they can marry, young couples must live together for one year. If this trial arrangement reveals they're incompatible, they are free to call off the ceremony. When two people do marry, it's customary for the woman to cut her hair. From it, the man weaves a belt that encircles his waist from then on, the island equivalent of a wedding ring. I try to imagine what goes through the mind of a young Quechan woman sitting with her scissors. The guide does not tell us what the hair means to the young woman or the emotional impact of cutting it off. Is she proud of her impending status as a wife? Is she distraught over the sacrifice? Does she wonder how her new cut will change the shape of her face or if, when she looks in the mirror afterward, she will see herself as a different person? Maybe it is meant to prepare her for the significant changes marriage inevitably brings, unlike in America, where we turn ourselves into princesses for the day, then wonder at our disappointments when our lives do not resemble the fantasies we have created.

We spend twenty soles each on bus tickets from Puno to Cusco and learn again that the cheapest way is always the longest in South America. Our rattling two-story bus can barely keep a steady pace on flat roads and seems to be almost rolling backward when forced to tackle a hill. It is driven by an impatient man who blasts his horn every ten seconds or so, as though our time is constantly being wasted, though when he attempts to pull ahead of someone, the bus emits an angry, high-pitched wheezing. At a checkpoint, we're pulled from the bus, and everyone's bags but ours, the only gringas, are searched.

Our lovely little Cusco hotel is a step up from where we have been staying, but it is a long six blocks from the main plaza so we're still only paying about what you shell out for a Sunday
Times
back home. Our room has hot water, and the bathroom is so clean it's disorienting. We haven't bathed in three days, but our top priority is food. We're famished after a light, early breakfast and the long bus journey.

“Here's what we'll do,” I say to Carly. “We'll eat a gigantic meal, take hot showers, then go straight to bed.”

“Amazing,” she moans.

We test the mattresses, run our hands along the soft, clean sheets. The joy and appreciation of these simple pleasures has become crisper since we started backpacking. I feel the needs of my body sharply in ways I never have before.

Cusco's center is a well-landscaped plaza dominated by an ornate Gothic-style cathedral that took over a hundred years to build. It was completed in the mid-1600s when the Spanish were conquering much of South America. Today Cusco is aggressively tourist-focused. Outside all the restaurants, hostesses shout out the evening's specials. Club promoters circle the crowds with drink-promotion coupons. And unsettling herds of children beg
in the streets. I hand over some coins the first few times, but there are so many small outstretched hands that soon Carly and I begin denying the requests and continue on our way.

“Lo siento,”
I apologize.

“No más,”
Carly says.

I'm embarrassed by how quickly I find them frustrating and wish we could walk unimpeded. These kids have learned English expletives, and they are ready to hurl them at you the moment you turn your back on them. “Fuck you, lady,” shouts a little girl no older than seven. “Fuck you, go back to your own country. Leave my country alone and go back to your own country, shit lady.”

Almost everywhere we visit in Bolivia and Peru seems conflicted about the Western travelers who descend on the remotest pieces of their land, grudgingly accepting our money, but these Cusco kids force our deepest reckoning with our culpability as travelers. Maybe it's because they are so young and so furious, or because they scream at us in English, our own inescapable language. Especially unnerving is that they are out until all hours of the morning, shouting at clubgoers drunkenly departing the plaza at two, three, four in the morning if no one purchases their animal finger puppets.

“Just go home,” Carly pleads with a girl one night. “It's late. You should go home to your family.”

The girl responds by flipping her the bird.

There are dozens and dozens of tour companies ready to take you to Machu Picchu, the main reason we're all here in Cusco. The trip will be our most expensive tourist activity, mainly due to the fact that the British own the one railroad that leads to the attraction; the charge is more equivalent to pounds than to soles. We booked our tour back in Puno with Miguel, a lovely, unusually tall Peruvian decked out in a flashy cowboy hat and a big brass belt buckle who was a relief to deal with because his English was impeccable and he emanated honesty. Miguel booked
us our perfect little hotel in Cusco and arranged for a woman holding a sign with our names on it to pick us up at the bus station, as if we were celebrities. It's Miguel who told us about the different tour companies and how certain ones give locals like Benita a fair share of the profits for hosting, while other companies part with virtually none of their earnings. And now we are happy not to have to wade through the sea of entrepreneurs that line the cobblestone streets and instead concentrate our energies on finding dinner.

Some days in South America we are worn out, and this is one of them. We're sick of haggling. We're totally over being harassed by men who think that lasciviously licking their lips and commenting on our bodies is their inherent right. We're very tired of bread. And empanadas. And broken buses. And waiting around. And getting ripped off because we are foreigners. Most days travel is thrilling: it's new and exciting and challenging, and you want to take it all on. But some days, as in any place you happen to be, you're tired and blue. Cusco is different from the parts of Bolivia and Peru we've encountered so far. It's filled with tourists and European- and Australian-run businesses. Cafés here serve pancakes for breakfast, of all miracles. We've gone pretty far off the well-trodden path these past few weeks, sometimes encountering few other backpackers, so Cusco feels like a relief we didn't know we needed. We're craving familiar food, something that will remind us of home or, in this case, apparently, Ireland.

The pub we alight upon is as befuddling as our sparkling hotel bathroom. Everyone inside is white and speaks English. They have Guinness on tap, and three big screens glow with a variety of soccer games. We haven't watched TV in months, so the sight of the bright, blaring screens only adds to the overall strangeness.

“Where are we?” Carly asks.

“Galway,” I say.

We find an empty table and unload the four gin and tonics
we've just ordered, compliments of the two-for-one special. Behind us, a waitress floats by with an enormous tray of heaping nachos. My hungry eyes follow the food to its destination, three scruffy guys—though it's a more cultivated roughness than the half-starved, barely showering, no-clean-clothes scruffiness Carly and I are currently practicing. One of them has a bushy blond beard and squinty blue eyes, as if we're not in a poorly lit pub but rather some sun-beaten desert. Around his neck is a small white bone carving curled in an intricate, indecipherable pattern. I am struck by the contrast of his burly-man appearance with the delicate way he wields his knife and fork when the nachos arrive, carefully carving up the messy meal. My attraction to him hits me with freight-train impact, but then I hear the accent.

“They're Australians,” I tell Carly with a disappointed sigh.

Although after my time there, my affection for Australia and Australians runs deep, the few romantic encounters I had with their men did not go well at all. I found them either brash and macho, like overzealous frat boys, or intense and clingy, like the strange café customer I once went out with who tried to hold my hand all through dinner and started discussing a trip he wanted us to take together before the tiramisu even arrived. Did I mention he wore a T-shirt with a giant panda on it? So I've resigned myself to some intrinsic incompatibility between myself and Australian men, even though the ones I knew there but wasn't attracted to were superb companions.

“No, mate,” Carly responds. “They're Kiwis.”

“What's the difference?”

“Everything,” she says, raising her eyebrows sagely.

That's when bearded blue eyes walks up to our table.

“G'day,” he says, “I'm Martyn. You girls want to join us?”

“Sounds great,” I say. “We've just come out of the jungle.” I don't know why I blurt out this unasked-for detail, whether because I'm nervous or subtly trying to explain our unwashed appearance.

“Well, then. You two are quite the adventurers, yeah?” He grins at me, and my heart flutters wildly inside my chest.

The next morning Carly and I are meant to be up at five
A.M.
and on the train at six, headed to Machu Picchu. But we only arrived back at the hotel around three
A.M.
after relocating with the Kiwis from the Irish pub to a club, where Martyn and I danced for hours under the hypnotic disco lights. When we parted, he kissed me chastely on the left cheek and asked when he could see me again. Carly and I haven't had a raucous night out since back in Australia, for alcohol and altitude do not a good match make, and we apparently made up for this by drinking our body weight in gin and tonics. We both have pounding headaches, our limbs are wobbly, and Carly's stomach is emitting a worrying gurgle.

“I don't think I can do it,” she laments. “Can you take care of things? Reschedule our tickets for tomorrow, mate, please?”

“Of course! Leave it to me.” I spring into action, gathering our passports and tickets, throwing some cold water on my face. I'm disgustingly hungover, too, but this has been our dynamic in South America, where we oscillate between being the one with the worst altitude headache, the worst upset stomach, the closest to her breaking point from not having a hot shower in days on end. Whoever is a little less worse for wear on that day takes over. And today it is my turn.