Peru is not Ecuador, and I can’t forgive it.

I ended up here in a masochistic bus binge straight from Cuenca, to make up for growing soft and lazy in that fine city. Cuenca to Loja: six hours. Loja to Piura, northern Peru: eight hours, including a bleary border crossing at 3 am. Piura to Chiclayo: three hours. Escaping from Chiclayo to Cajamarca: seven hours. I drooled most of the way on a water bottle wrapped in a sweater, which was marginally more comfortable than my current hotel pillow.

My ribs are bruised by Peruvian elbows. They are world-class queue-bargers, and at the border I couldn’t convince them it didn’t matter, the bus was going to have to wait for all of us anyway. At 6 am in Piura I had to wake up fast enough to wrestle my backpack off the taxi touts, who could teach the Vietnamese a thing or two. There are no central bus stations in any of the towns so far, incredibly, and so you have to work out which bus companies serve your destination and somehow get to their office. There are three companies that go to Cajamarca, all at different ends of the town. At random I picked the one with the latest departure and got stuck in the outskirts of Chiclayo for four hours. When I ranted to the taxi driver that this made no sense, he said simply ´But the drivers need the work.’

As one of the many market failures of Ecuador, I couldn’t find an up-to-date guideboook for Peru (or Ecuador—I ended up traveling with an eight-year-old Lonely Planet that quoted prices in long-gone sucres.) So I took Chris’s Lonely Planet to the photocopy shop, and flicked through the chapters I thought I might want. ‘Don’t bother to do Northern Coast chapter, from page 300 on,’ I instructed the guy, wondering why anyone would ever go to the Peruvian coast. Unfortunately, it turns out that this chapter included everything for about 700 kilometers below the Ecuadorian border, and I am now forced to wander, guideless, with a mutilated backpack, trying to find the right bus company.

In Chiclayo my glasses were stolen. This is no longer remotely amusing. My first day in Vietnam, they stole my glasses on the bus. The day I crossed the border from Cambodia to Thailand, I left my glasses on the bus. My first day out in Quito, my glasses were pinched from my bag. It was with weary dread that I checked below my seat on the bus this time, knowing that they hadn’t fallen out, knowing that yet again someone figured the case was a wallet. My new-country routine is getting tedious: cross the border, cash the traveler’s check, find the optician. I am going to sue my fancy Park Avenue LASIK surgeon, assuming they can subpoena him on the golf course.

Gone are the gentle ´Buenos dias, señorita,’ I got used to in Ecuador. Here, I’m followed by a steady commentary that makes me queasy, especially here in Cajamarca where there are few gringas to soak up the lavish attention. Every broken-toothed, sad-sack runt delivers his appraisal. They’ve remarked on my breasts, my legs, my backside, my hair color, eye color, skin color, my age, nationality, marital status, and of course—a given—my guaranteed promiscuity. The tongue-tied just whistle.

I want to scrub myself clean. Normally, I am serene about this stuff. Like a good little Buddhist, I try to work up perfunctory compassion for their hard lives, their ignorance. I send interstellar messages of loving-kindness to their unfortunate wives via Radio Free Dervala.

Not today. Today I’m simmering in a soup of PMS and they’re fucking with the wrong gringa. I’ve learned how to make them jump with a well-timed bark.
   ´Póg mo thóin, a lúderamán.’

This is Irish for ´Kiss my arse, half-wit,’ and tomorrow it will be replaced by something more choice in Spanish if my hormones don’t abate before the Peruvians do. Or perhaps I’ll just collect email addresses and forward every ´Is a Small Penis Ruining Your Life?’ spam I’ve received in 2003. That’ll keep ‘em busy.

Every country has something that throws you just a little off balance when you arrive.

In Burma, it was thanaka paste and longyis. The men wear western dress shirts, and longyis (sarongs) knotted at the waist. Their sarongs are jewel-colored, often with a small check pattern. The women’s longyis are neatly tucked at the side, hobbling them to a lady-like mince. I wanted to buy a man’s longyi—the colors were better—but they wouldn’t let me. It would be a scandal, like Marlene Dietrich’s tuxedo. Then I wanted to knot mine in the middle for comfort, but old ladies used to scurry to fix me up in the street. Tucked at the waist, my longyi always fell off. In Burma, I made sure my knickers were clean.

The women wore thanaka paste, a yellow paste ground from a special bark. It was used as sun-protection, moisturiser, and make-up. They daubed circles on their cheeks and noses, or sometimes stripes. At first it looked bizarre to me, as if everyone had forgotten to remove a face pack. I wondered how to construct a delicate enquiry about this skin disease epidemic. But later I wished I had brought some thanaka back with me, because the Burmese were the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, far more than the overrated Thais.

Here in Ecuador, I am startled by the small, pink guinea-pigs on plastic trays in the supermarket meat counters. They lie on their sides, shaven and buck-toothed, and they look very cold. I still haven’t tasted cuy (kwee! kwee! kwee!), though they’re strangely tempting when they’re brown and crispy and I’ve had a bellyful of canelazo.

In Laos, I was taken by the baby monks flip-flopping everywhere in their orange robes, shaven and tender as Ecuadorian guinea pigs. Some were tiny, no more than eight or nine years old. At dawn they walked the streets in long lines with their alms bowls, in age order, stopping wordlessly whenever a lay person came to drop a ball of rice and a spoonful of curry into each bowl. In evening, they would lean over the walls of their monasteries, motherlessly, hoping for someone to practice ingrik with. I wanted to cuddle them. But women can’t touch monks.

In Vietnam, it was 747 cafés. They love their coffee, the Vietnamese—you always eat and drink better in the former French colonies than in the British. But the classic seating plan of a Saigon café is not exactly La Coupole. They favor orange and brown plastic seats, facing front, and close together in rows of two, three, and two. You expect a Sixties trolley dolly to bend down next to you and murmur ´Chicken or beef?´ The leg-room isn’t wonderful. But the coffee is good.

I thought Catholic Mexico would be a homecoming after Southeast Asia. But in Zincantán and San Juan Chamula, Chiapas, the church floors were strewn with palm fronds. Here and there neat rows of candles were stuck to the floor with wax, and from above they looked like a city grid seen from an airplane at night. Whole families sat on the floor, praying and sometimes sipping from a precious bottle of Coca-Cola to promote the burps of sacred wind, or passing an egg over the body to get rid of evil spirits. A score of men in extraordinary costumes—white shorts, elaborately-embroidered tunics, ponchos, and high-backed sandals—arrived to garland the saints, an honorific position for men of good standing. My familiars, St. John the Baptist, Jesus, Mary, St. Michael, all had aliases in this Mexico.

In Cambodia, it was skulls that struck. Skull production was the major industry of the Khmer Rouge. At the Killing Fields outside Phnom Penh, there’s a high pagoda stacked with skulls as a memorial. Thousands of them sit ear-to-ear on labeled shelves. Adult Males, 30-40. Children. Adult Females, 50-70. Most have high, flat, Khmer cheekbones, missing teeth, and cracks where they were beaten to death to save bullets. There is a small section, chillingly labeled ‘Caucasian Males’, for the four or five young Australian and French sailors whose boats veered off course in the Gulf of Thailand and who were brought into a closed Kampuchea to be tortured to death. I had seen their photos at Tuol Sleng, the prison where victims were tortured before they were brought to the Killing Fields. They are baffled twenty-somethings with sailors´ tans and Seventies haircuts. Also shown, as far as I remember, are copies of the crazy confessions that some of them wrote, extracted by the instruments now displayed in the museum. I still dream about them.

More skulls roll around in boxes on the floor of Tuol Sleng, below black-and-white photos the Khmer Rouge took of their victims’s faces. 28 years later, nobody knows who these skulls were. They are not carefully-documented, individual murder victims like the men of Srebrenica, they are bleached and nameless bones, a storage problem. In such volume, they become no more frightening—or human—than than the piles of candy skulls for Mexico’s Day of the Dead.

On the road, I pick cafés based on the size of their rack. Der Spiegel and crumbly old Newsweeks won’t win a Nescafe order from me, but I can manage French Vogue at a pinch. It doesn’t matter how old they are: glossy time-travel is fun. And a 1999 Esquire is more of a curiosity than a 1992 Time that drones about war and the economy.

Flipping through a 1999 Vanity Fair, I found an ad for Banana Republic. It was as powerful as a scent memory, this slick, bland spread pushing a pre-fab lifestyle. There were six pages of Dot-Com-Exec Chic, and I could almost feel the slightly scratchy texture of those gray stretch wool pants. I remembered the frazzled excitement when Jason wore that exact dark red shirt to investor pitches, and how the collar faded when it was dry-cleaned. The square-toed shiny black shoes. The little fringe-flip all the boys wore then. I had the skirt and the turtleneck, and maybe even those shoes.

At Vindigo, we used to tease the founders, Jason and Dave, about their matchy-matchy style, neat as Audrey Hepburn. David bought everything from the blue and beige Banana Republic palette, Jason (or more usually his proxy, me) scooped up the black and red stuff into their pale-blue carrier bags. Very occasionally, they showed up in the same v-necked sweater.

It was expected then, though they’re both more adventurous now. Investors would have been spooked by the nervousness betrayed by a suit and tie. And, in New York at least, they would have questioned the judgment of a saggy t-shirt. Banana shirts, preferably deep blue and not home-pressed, whispered a soothing compromise, and so collectively the dot-com biz-dev babies looked duller than than any IBM suit. In 1999, year of Regis Philbin, colors were as solid as the Dow, and pants were only made in khaki. (I can never remember: is it in American or British English that ‘pants’ really means underpants? Which of you says ‘trousers’? Please advise.)

I was a mis-cast yuppie at the time, and owned a Banana Republic platinum card. Christ. They sent it to me after I’d burned through six months on the regular black card, a star customer who nipped down two blocks to the Fifth Avenue store every fortnight to relieve the stress and loneliness of a start-up in a rack of comfortingly predictable clothing. They kept sending thank-you vouchers in the mail, the amounts carefully calculated by some marketing analyst to stimulate another little spree. I even bought Banana Republic candles, for God’s sake.

I don’t know where all those clothes are now. I used to shrink them by accidentally sending them to the laundromat, and I was usually covered in food-stains by lunchtime anyway, no matter how blandly elegant I started the day. The sleeves were always too short. I was flattered by their shameless dress-size deflation, which by 2000 had me buying size 2 trousers and wondering what the hell Calista Flockheart was left with.

These days, I frequent a different kind of banana republic. I’m the only person I know who gains weight on a year-long diet of third-world streetfood and tap water, but it hardly matters in my worn-out sweatpants. I’ve worn Timberland boots or stinky trainers every day for months, and occasionally flip-flops with a skirt if I’m desperate for novelty and willing to display scratched and blackfly-scarred legs.

But in Cuenca, where every unmarried adult lives at home to save money for clothes, I broke down and bought a two-dollar lipstick and pair of proper shoes. They’re shiny and high-heeled, with a neat ankle-strap like a flamenco dancer, and they’re not terribly practical for the Inca Trail. I wear them with the same old black trousers, of course, and one of my two shirts, both now covered in indelible dog hair. But still, I feel like RuPaul, a strutting glamazon again. It is amazing what twenty two bucks and a cocktail will do for a girl.

As clueless beginners, we naturally pressed Matt for the scariest whitewater disaster stories he knew before we hit the first rapid. He obliged, and we were silent as we weighed the invested $250 course cost against the prospect of Really Bad Things.
   ´But don’t worry too much,’ he said, ‘you know, statistically, you’re much more likely to die in the truck on the way to the river.’

We survived the first day, and the second, which posed much more danger because it took place at an Ecuadorian water park. In the pool we shivered through endless unsuccessful tries at rolling while Matt shouted ‘Hula hips! Hula hips!’ As a reward, we were allowed to go down the water slide, although he warned us to try the chute on the right only, to keep the helmet, life-jacket, and nose-clips on, and to edge to the left on the final bend no matter what. This seemed a tad extreme until I got the following note today from my friend Adam Stein, who did the same kayak course (and almost the same whole trip as me, in reverse):

The third day, we took our new roll skills back to the river and finally ran a proper Big Boy’s Class II/III rapid. It probably seemed as threatening as a pool of baby drool to real kayakers, but we felt like heroes of the Amazon, and were still grinning a kilometer or two downriver, where the water was wide and shallow.

Then I heard a honk on my left. Coming towards us, in the river, was a very large yellow dump truck. We were in its path and it wasn’t stopping, though the wheels were nearly submerged. The driver leaned out the window and shouted at us to get out of the way, and we paddled like blenders against the current until we were clear.

Statistically speaking, it would have been an interesting death.

The Cotopaxi volcano, in the middle of Ecuador, looks like a sinful dessert. The crater is a smooth, dark cone with thick, creamy glaciers dripping down from the top. It’s as perfect as Mount Fuji and twice as broad. And it’s active.

Cotopaxi is the most-climbed mountain in Ecuador. For a few hundred dollars, a guide will take you up there. You start at one in the morning and reach the summit around dawn—it’s 5,897 meters high. You must get back to the base camp before the sun gets high enough to melt the surface snow.

I didn’t want to climb the mountain, but I wanted to spend time with it. So I camped for few nights in Cotopaxi National Park, hiking slowly across from one end to the other on the 4,000-meter-high páramo. The páramo looks bleak from a distance, a plain of grays and dull greens. Up close, though, you see a carpet of the same gentians and lupins found in the Arctic, and tiny orchids, and bright candlestick mosses. A silvery lichen, unattached to the ground, is scattered everywhere and looks like sleet.

For first time in Ecuador I saw no other people in days (and no mean dogs—yay!). The only trace of humans beyond the car park was two spent shotgun cartridges and one very rusty tin can. I found Andean fox droppings, full of feathers and mouse claws, and was glad not to run into the wild bulls I’d been warned about. I watched cara-cara eagles and cooked up my haul of ink-cap mushrooms over a sputtering campfire in a creek bed.

Occasional birdsong sounded like part of the silence, which the Inca believed was the sound of the gods talking. It wasn’t hard to see why they also believed that the spirits of these mountains were gods to be appeased. I camped early—enjoying the luxury of not having to hide my gear and myself until dark—in a broad plain where my little blue tent was ringed by volcanoes. There was Cotopaxi itself directly in front, Rumiñahui behind, Sincholahua and Pasochoa northeast, and the twins of Iliniza to the southwest.

The high plains seem to be always cloudy in this season, and mostly the volcanoes are hidden. But with nothing to do but drink tea and stare—I had run out of books—I caught glimpses of the flirting mountains as the clouds moved from left to right across the sky. The veil would part to show the rim of a crater, or the west glacier, or a swathe of red lava halfway down. I was a slack-jawed john at a stripshow, and it was a thrill at sunset when the biggest, fluffiest pink clouds obligingly passed behind the Cotopaxi crater, not in front. At sights like that, you can only cry or take a photograph, and either is inadequate.

The real show was at dawn, though. Camping on the equator means darkness from 6.30 at night to 6.30 in the morning, so getting up at half past five to see the first streaks is not so much a hardship as it is a relief from twelve hours tangled in a mummy sleeping bag. (I always wake several times, panicked, to find the hood on my face, and that night altitude sickness had kept me sleepless, too.)

The sun hadn’t yet evaporated the moisture from the páramo and so the sky was almost clear. All four peaks of Rumiñahui were fully visible, like a feeding dinosaur. Cotopaxi gleamed in the dawn light, and the others, farther off, were revealed in tribute to big mama. It was completely quiet.

And I wanted every one of you to be transported there, just for a few minutes. Dragged from your beds in New York or Phoenix or Vancouver, from your desk in Johannesburg or Ipswich, from your classroom in Tokyo, from school in Limerick, from your study in Tehran, and plonked on a cold plain in the Andes to sit in silence with me, watching the sun rise over the volcanoes of Ecuador.

I hope you get to see it some day.

Through the thin walls of my Baños hotel room, I reluctantly followed a courtship from start to finish. She was American, very young, and thought Ecuador was, like, amazing. His deep mumble was harder to place—he talked less, for one thing—but after many hours I was fairly sure he was Australian.

They had met on the gringo bus from Quito, and they started the evening in separate rooms. Doors squeaked and there were coy giggles across the corridor as they planned a night out. Drinking piña coladas without fake ID here was sooooo fucking cool.

At four a.m. they came back, bumping the walls and fumbling with the key. The giggles were louder now. Cigarette filters make good earplugs; I wished I smoked. For two hours they rutted, vigorously and inexpertly, inches from my headboard. I lay awake, cross, and wondered if the final Valley Girl shriek would be
´Like, oh God.´

Young flesh triumphs over piña coladas and lack of sleep. By 8.30 am she was chattering again and begging, as far as I was concerned, for a sound slap. Or maybe a pillow over her face.
   ´So, like, I couldn’t believe it when the doctor turns around, toe-dully casual, and goes, ‘Oh yeah, like, by the way, your cervix is twisted.’ And I’m going ‘What? What are you talking about? My cervix is twisted? What does that mean? Am I in-fur-dul?´

The Aussie mumble grew perceptibly less enthusiastic as she chirruped on. He was probably stealthily chewing his arm off at the shoulder, coyote-style. I would have.
   ’I mean, can you believe she just drops that a pretty important piece of my body is twisted out of shape, like it’s no big deal? I was so freaked out. I was looking up ‘cervix’ on the innernet to find out what shape it was supposed to be…’

Some day, when I know more than I know now, I’ll write an update of The Rules™, a how-to-deal-with-men guide for women who are not diamond-hungry, blow-dried freaks. And somewhere in there, very specifically, I’ll instruct girls like my neighbor in Hostal Pedregal.
   ´Sweetheart, if you ever want to see him again, skip the vagina monologues the morning after. And give the poor lad more than two hours sleep. Your neighbors will thank you, too.’

Kayaking left me with an ear infection that felt as if someone had stuck a hot pencil in my ear and from time to time was whacking it with a ping-pong bat. In Cuenca, I gave in and went to the hospital. It was a two-for-one bargain, since I was treated by a kind middle-aged obstetrician and her seventy-five-year-old chest surgeon father. Most of the examination consisted of Papa interviewing me on why there was a war in Ireland and establishing whether we were part of England or not. Explaining the connection between these questions in Spanish while getting prodded in the ear took concentration. Then they prescribed enough antibiotics to run a dairy farm, and solemnly warned me to take plenty of sugar in my tea to combat my low blood pressure.

My hot ear reduced my interest in camping in huge, flood-prone caves inhabited by vampire bats. But I couldn’t reach my Guaranda friend, Carlos Alberto, by telephone in order to cancel the trip we’d planned, and so I took a ten-hour bus ride back to Ba’os to tell him in person. At nine in the morning I was sitting in the posh and gloomy Hotel Sangay, but there was no Carlos Alberto. Unlike me, he was too sensible to spend a day on a bus without a phone confirmation. I was relieved but cranky to be back in Ba’os’in the middle of the country’instead of continuing sedately south to Peru, like a sensible tourist. Some day I will learn to move through a country from top to bottom, instead of zig-zagging around like a pinball.

Speed was an odd choice of movie to show on a ten-hour bus journey through the Andes. While Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock tried to keep their zooming city bus from exploding, I gripped the armrests as we cornered on hairpin bends. Still, Keanu in a tight t-shirt was a welcome break from the endless live informercial we’d suffered during daylight.

Until now, I’d taken little country buses, mostly, where the hawkers sold fruit, mote, and soft drinks. But the Quito to Cuenca route connects most of the major towns down the Panamerican highway, and both the vehicles and the salesmen are slicker. They jumped on the bus whenever we passed through a town. The pitches hardly varied, and could have moved straight to the Home Shopping Channel with little help.

They introduced themselves, sometimes with a sob story, and threw out some quiz questions to engage the audience, complete with trinket prizes. Then they switched smoothly into a fast-talking hard sell, flogging tinny chains with birthstones that would open your chakras and release your creative and healing energies, or leather belts with hidden money pouches to foil the thieves who were everywhere these days, waiting to steal every dollar you had, or purses in the shape of cowboy boots that were ingeniously hand-tooled by master craftsmen. We passengers were amazingly fortunate, since we would pay much, much more in stores for items of such quality. Luckily for us, our vendors—no, our friends now, surely—were hooked up with terrific wholesale (but legitimate!) deals that allowed them to offer these perfect Mother’s Day gifts at such low, low prices, ladeez and gennelmen…

Then they would saunter down the aisle, dropping a sample on everyone’s lap.
   ´Gemini? Charming and versatile. Pisces, ma’am? Sensitive and loving…’
Finally, they collected their money and their samples, still pitching all the while, jumped off the bus, and crossed the highway to catch a bus going back the other way. On the Panamerican you never wait more than five minutes; these people made their living surfing the road.

No pitch lasted less than twenty minutes, and the machine-gun delivery sounded like a cattle auction. I was three seats from the front, stuck in the prime sell spot, and as they lined up to shower me with spittle I briefly considered flinging myself off the bus. But it was a long drop. And I wanted to get to back to Cuenca.