At the cinema in Miraflores (Adam Stein, you’re off the hook on my movie-date-threat—I went to see The Matrix Reloaded by myself), the emergency exit is clearly lit by a glowing red sign.

‘ESCAPE’, it says.

Who could resist a door like this?

I experimented with the posh bus to Arequipa, partly to cheer myself up after getting stuck in Lima, partly to see what kind of people rode the posh bus.

You could tell it was the posh bus because we had a pretty steward with a microphone who explained where the emergency exits were, and how to make our seats recline. She also explained, several times, that the toilet was for urination only. Urination ONLY. If we had any other needs, we were to let her know and she would arrange a rest stop for those other needs. Because this toilet was for urination ONLY.

I thought it was going to be like Led Zeppelin tour bus. It turns out that the luxury class is more like a low-rent, geriatric cruise ship. A lone Mexican was the only other tourist, and my seat didn’t recline as much as one might hope on an 18-hour trip. There were no fluffy blankets and pillows.

The steward put on Mickey Mouse cartoons, and we watched him bake a birthday cake for Minnie in Spanish. Then she announced meal service, during which time use of the toilet would be forbidden, and we had to return our seats to the upright position. When we finished our meal, our seats would have to remain in the upright position until she signalled, in case the person behind us was still eating. She brought us each a large tupperware container, which held a chicken drumstick, beef with rice, and mystery cake that had traveled more than I have. I was crushed when the beverage turned out to be Inca-Cola, vile yellow fizzy stuff that tastes exactly like Robitussin. I couldn’t cut the Peruvian beef with my spork. Still, dinner anticipation was almost enough sustenance in itself.

After dinner we played bingo. I couldn’t keep up. Every so often she asked a general knowledge question, and the winner was allowed to name three numbers on his or her card. I felt this was unfair: the questions were usually something like ‘On what day and month was there a heroic peasant uprising in the village of Huancallas in the 18th century?’ But the Mexican won, and she brought him up to sing a song before presenting his prize: a free round-trip bus ticket to anywhere in Peru. He sang a mournful mariachi song, and there were a few cries of ‘Viva Mexico!’ Then the brassy woman behind me stood up to yell that it wasn’t fair that a Mexican got the prize. We should play again until a good Peruvian won, instead of sending stuff out of the country yet again.

So we played again. This time a Peruvian won, and there were no riots. I was very disappointed. I had concentrated extra-hard just to piss her off. I brooded about it all the way through Air Bud.

My Moleskine notebook disappeared in Lima the other night, in a series of events too dismal to tell here. I had given up on it, mourned its loss and the loss of the cards and notes from friends it contained, and added a call to the American Express office to my to-do list (it held my emergency travelers’ checks, too).

Moping around Miraflores, I decided to see who I could complain to on Instant Messenger. And there was a note from PAUL LANDON—the name in all capitals, and already checked as spam before I noticed the subject line was ‘book’. A publisher?

Better.

   ‘You don’t know me, but I’m a schoolteacher in Peru, ‘ he wrote. ‘I have your travel book (just re-read all that and it sounds like a ransom note!)’

Paul had found my email address, and noticed that I’d written about the Cafe Z in Miraflores. He would be there at four o’clock exactly, on his motorbike, to hand-deliver my precious notebook on his way to soccer practice. And he was, and he handed it over before zooming off.

Leaving me dying of embarrassment that in order to find me he had to read through the most appalling, revealing, self-indulgent fretting since Bridget Jones. The stuff that doesn’t make the cut here. This stranger, I realized, knows me better than my best friend. When I wrote to thank him, he sent a gentle quote in answer to all the scribbled literary quotes in my book, this time Polonius’s advice to Hamlet:

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Thanks, Paul.

A state of emergency has been declared in Peru. I’d hoped for a coup, at least—what’s the point of South America without cavalcades of men with mustaches and mirrored shades?—but a month-long suspension of civil liberties will have to do.

It’s very festive. In the town square in Arequipa, there are hundreds of baby-faced soldiers standing around trying not to lean on their tanks. They’re not quite sure what to do, but they pose handsomely for my photos. Most of them look about sixteen, and I want to feed them up with papas rellenas. The riot police are older and world-weary, standing on the street corners with their plexiglass shields and helmets. Kids keep shouting ‘Ciao! Ciao!’, in a mysterious outbreak of Argentinian, when they march by.

The teachers are on strike. They haven’t taught in three weeks, because they are demanding a salary increase of 200 soles a month (a little under $60). Toledo says they can have 100 soles a month, and that’s it—there’s nothing else in the treasury. So they rioted at the Rio summit in Cuzco, and then a few days ago they blockaded the roads all over the country. I was stuck in unlovely Lima, watching them march and yell in little yellow paper baseball caps. Finally, the army was called in to reopen the roads.

I keep asking if there’s general support for the teachers. It’s clear that they don’t make a living wage: they supplement it with payments from students, or with support from their families. People seem generally sympathetic, but they are worried about their kids being out of school for so long, and annoyed that the unions won’t compromise; they’re not the only ones who can’t survive financially. Blocking the roads was not a popular tactic.

The transport workers went on strike the week before the teachers. Before that, it was the police, who earn so little that they have to demand bribes and fines just to survive. Strikes were forbidden under Fujimori, and now the wave of discontent and repression is finally breaking. One taxi driver explained that the state of emergency was really a victory for democracy. Only now did they have the right to do something extreme enough to get their rights suspended for a month. I liked his thinking better than another taxi driver, who spattered my face as he explained that the Peruvian economy was so dire because the Americans, the British, and the Spanish wanted to keep them and everybody else poor so they could control the world. Um, whatever you say, señor.

Max’s letters always cheer me up, even when I suspect he’s not telling the truth. Today’s sign-off:

Places exist twice for me. There is the scary place I haven’t visited, and the mild, unthreatening spot I build once I’ve been there. The first Lima was terrifying: a giant, Dinkins-era Times Square. Shining Path and shanty towns. The second Lima is much gentler than the version I made out of flicks through the Lonely Planet and sensational travelogues. Peru, like Vietnam before it, is a paper tiger.

The second Lima is really Miraflores, the posh suburb where they stick the tourists these days. I am over-excited to see gringos after a short spell in isolation, and have to leash myself to stop sniffing their backsides. (Enough with the dog metaphors? Okay.) Miraflores reminds me of Coyoacan in Mexico City: in Latin America, money is concentrated and very white. Elegant, brightly-painted houses are barely visible behind high walls and electric fences. White Peruvians drink cocktails while desperate kids sell boiled sweets outside. There are smart tennis clubs and countless casinos, and the shanty towns are far away.

In the Café J, industrial roasters and grinders form working décor, and the seats in front of the arty tables are sacks of Peruvian coffee. A world map covers one wall; I look at it and sigh for all I haven’t seen yet. A jazz trio plays Billie Holliday’s ‘You’ve Changed’. The singer, in a 60s Greenwich Village corduroy hat, gray beard, and ugly jazz shirt, does a surprising, accentless tenor.

At the Parque del Amor, a giant loveseat twists along the cliff, sweet nothings and love poetry spelled out in a mosaic tile for those who run out of ideas. ‘To Love is not a Sin’, it says at the entrance beneath a huge statue of a couple snogging on the ground, and Miraflores couples up obediently. Smart vendors patrol like Redemptorists, selling roses, as the young and the beautiful slurp at each other, each pair in their own little section of the winding loveseat. It could be depressing, but I find these snogfests cheering. So much short-term, Sunday joy.

Down below the breakers crash on the beach nicknamed Waikiki. Little black dots surf. There are hundreds of them, all in wetsuits, apparently not bothered that this sea flushes the toilet for eight million people. Never kiss a Lima surfer. Still, the beach is wonderful, even from the cliff top. Mario Vargas Llosa describes learning to surf (and flirt) here in the 40s and 50s: I picture him now, stately and rabbit-toothed, balancing on a surfboard in his pin-striped suit.

The weather is dismal, something I’d have known if I’d brought a guidebook. Lima is covered in sea-fog nine months of the year (and smog the other three). Though we are still close to the equator it is chilly as San Francisco in the summer. All the better for some dutiful museum slogging tomorrow.

I wasn’t supposed to take night buses in Peru; I’ve been warned against it often enough. But since I’m pro-Peru now, I took a chance on another night bus from Cajamarca yesterday. The ticket seller gave me a senior discount because he liked my eyes, in what I think is my favorite back-handed compliment of the season.

An hour out of Cajamarca, driving towards the sunset on what looked from above like a Scalectrix track, we stopped in one of the prettier valleys to pick up a little family trailing plastic bags for luggage. The bus was full, and the conductor made the man next to me give up his seat. The mother plopped down with her baby, toddler standing at her arm.
    ‘Does he want to sit on my lap?’ I asked. It was a long journey. She swung him over to my side with her free arm. He looked up, bright-eyed, a tiny Benjamin Bratt. Then he fell asleep.

His mother breastfed the baby. She was 16 or 17, and it occurred to me that in these parts I could have been the grandmother. Most of the indigenous women I’ve talked to start having babies at 14 or 15, popping them out matter-of-factly. Unlike Americans, they don’t have a list of things to achieve before babies are planned. They don’t have to lay down career success, or financial stability. Those things aren’t coming anyway, so why wait? For us, those things are a hedge against the lack of extended family or village community, something that’s less necessary in a culture where a toddler will crawl onto whatever lap is available as a matter of course.

Norberto slept through the whole journey, though I rearranged him like a rag-doll several times. He was blessedly clean, unlike most of the grubby angels who roam the Andes—scrubbed for his big trip to the city, I imagine. I had forgotten the slightly doggy smell of a toddler’s sweaty hair, and inhaled it as often as I could without his mother snatching him back. It is amazing, the visceral love a stranger’s child can evoke when they are helpless and trusting in sleep.

We all woke at 7 am to another bus infomercial. Norberto told me he was three, and was going to Lima to see his papi. His speech wasn’t very good, but then he probably thought the same about me. His baby sister suckled, giggled, and bounced.

There was no work in the village, the mother told me. Her husband worked in a factory in Lima and sent money back. Now her mother was dying in Cajamarca, an hour away from their home, and she hated to leave. But her husband called to say he was lonely, bring the children, it didn’t matter that it was two days wages, and so she packed them up. It had been four months since they’d seen him, the baby had changed a lot.

The father was waiting for his country mice at the bus station. He was young too, and very thin. Norberto saw him first and pounded the window with a great shout: ‘Papi! Papi!’

Watching the four of them squat in the dirt of the bus station, it was clear that, yes, two days’ wages spent on the bus fare didn’t matter at all. Norberto gave me a snotty kiss goodbye then turned back to adore his adoring papi.

In northern Peru, women wear wide, pleated, knee-length skirts, often several at a time. I counted five woolen skirts on a woman selling oranges at the Cajamarca market, though it was t-shirt weather. They are usually brightly-colored, often red or blue, and worn with a white blouse and several cardigans. A rectangle of woven fabric is always worn over it, usually to sling a baby at the back, but sometimes for cargo. I stopped to make googly eyes at a tightly-wrapped baby a few days ago, which turned out to be a case of mineral water on its way to market.

Feet are often bare and battered, with blackened or missing toe-nails and callouses from miles of country paths. Others wear sandals made from truck tires, which look oddly flimsy with their thick, bright woolen kneesocks.

Sometimes an alpaca poncho is worn over the layers. The real topper, though, is the hat. In Cajamarca, it’s a statement: a cross between a Texan ten-gallon and Lincoln’s stove pipe, woven tightly from pale straw. It throws shade down to the shoulders and is sensible if somewhat bizarre. In Ecuador, I saw bowlers, trilbies, fedoras, flat straw boaters, and pork pies, always worn by the women, sometimes by men and children too.

These hats (and by extension the costumes), more than skin color, mark out who is looked down on as an ignorant, dirt-poor ‘indio’, and who gets to be a ‘mestizo’ with better prospects. I’ve listened to men with burnished faces and features that could be carved on a temple wall start sentences with ‘The problem with the indigenous is…’

Here, where resources are so scarce that it counts for a lot, your racial identity can be doffed with a hat.

Atahualpa surrendered in Cajamarca, but I won’t: Peru and I are now the best of friends.

It turns out that when I staggered off the bus the other night down the street to the nearest hotel, it was equivalent to bunking near the Port Authority in New York. Traveling without a guide book is inefficient but it toughens the improvisation muscles.

I came here based on a vague memory that someone had once told me Cajamarca was a good spot, somewhat off the main gringo trail. I couldn’t remember if it was a city or a village, and I didn’t know where the backpacker hang-outs were. My first morning, I stopped a man on a bicycle for help, just because he looked more Irish than I do. Guy was English, it turned out, but his Irish grandparents ruled his face if not his accent. He was a missionary who had once run an evangelical church on Booterstown Avenue, right where I lived during college, and his kids, who were born in Dublin, were called Róisín and Siobhán. (Row-sheen and Shevaun). It occurred to me that I was probably the only person in Cajamarca who had ever pronounced their names correctly, and I felt he should invite me home to tea. Just as well that instead he simply directed me kindly to the colonial center. I would certainly have got into a spat over the effects of missionary activity in Latin America.

Cajamarca is lovely, and I am basking in the first warm, sunny weather since Mexico. In the old center, by the stately churches, you get a better class of catcall. I found a more central hotel (just as dilapidated), and this morning I laced up the hiking boots once more for a twenty-mile walk through the hills.

I took a colectivo from the very smelly market up to Ventanillas de Otuzco to see the pre-Inca burial catacombs. The translated sign solemnly noted that this site had once contained many mommies. From there, I headed down to the river to cut across to Baños del Inca, 6 km away, to indulge my rustic spa habits. On the way, Julia asked me the time (nobody wears watches here), then asked where I was going.
   ´I’ll come with you,’ she said cheerfully. ´I just moved here from Lima. I don’t know anyone but my in-laws, my husband is still down there, and I have nothing to do. And it’s terrible that you travel alone.’

So we walked along the river, where tuk-tuk drivers washed their sputtery little rigs and workers insisted on posing for a photo, builders’ bellies proudly stretching their shirts. Julia was from Arequipa, way down south on the coast, and met her husband when they were both working in Lima. She had sold cosmetics, baked bread, worked in a factory, sold candy, sorted yellow onions for export. Now there was no work of any kind, so a month ago she had brought the kids to live with her husband’s family here in the boonies. They were good people, but you couldn’t find a job in Cajamarca—or anywhere else—without connections, which she didn’t have. So she was going to leave the children here and head back down to Lima tomorrow to try again. Fujimori, the Japanese, had been great, a wonderful president. He sorted out Shining Path and set the economy up again. But things were sliding now, and everybody hurt. It was getting to be as bad as the old days with Alán Garcia.

We split up at Baños, and I paid $1.25 for the luxury hot springs tub, which looked just the same as the dollar tubs except the only other woman in it had skin as white as mine. Peru, like Ecuador, segregates instinctively.

From Baños I walked on to Llantambo, where gaggles of women in straw ten-gallon hats carded sheep and llama wool and gave me contradictory directions to La Collpa. It was on the other side of the hill, they told me, and I could either go backwards or forwards. Or I could climb the hill. But really I should take a colectivo…did I not have any money?

Eventually I struck off towards the hill, with the nodded blessings of two farmers. There was a river, small but fast, in my path, and I yelled across to the kid laboring on the other side.
   ´I want to go to La Collpa…where’s the bridge?’
They were sorting stones from the river bed, dumping them from a huge forklift into a wire net that sifted them by size. He signalled me to wait, then ran up to the forklift driver. I scanned the river for a bridge, or a path on the other side, then gaped as the forklift drove right down into the river and rumbled across to the spot next to me. The door opened, and a shirtless seventeen-year-old hauled me into the cab. I balanced on his lap and we chatted politely as he backed across the river and set me down on the other side. They both refused to take payment, and directed me to the next lot of workers down the road, who would tell me where to go.
    ’Look after yourself. There are some bad people in this country,’ the fourteen-year-old warned. He was stunted by hard work and bad food.

The other workers took great delight in directing my scramble up the hillside to look for the path.
   ´Left a bit…further up…that’s it, darling, keep going…watch out for the dogs, they’re mean around here…’

They were. Yet another tried to bite me, in exactly the same pattern as before. A silent cur, guarding its owner away from home, loped up behind me and gripped my calf. I raised my stone and the woman shouted, and it slunk away without closing its jaws. I’ve started to plan my trip based around proximity to rabies centers.

I was, as usual, filthy and thirsty by the time I found the path back to Cajamarca, and I bought a fifteen-cent ice-cream from a kind old man pedalling his cart in the middle of nowhere, just to ask him if I was going in the right direction. I couldn’t resist eating it, then fretted about hepatitis for the three hours it took to reach home. (Home. How quickly I label prison-cell hotel bedrooms these days.) But there are no perfect days without ice-cream, right?

Okay, I admit it.

When I find internet access cheaper than fifty cents an hour, I type ´Dervala´ into Google for a bout of narcissurfing. This month’s favorite surprise link is from the Cambodia Daily.

Still collecting Malaria Drive donations, folks. There’s a little button on the left.