The manly rangers shot a black bear here last week, before I arrived. It was very close to my cabin: there is bear scat on the trail to the outhouse. For several days he had cased the ranger work center and the tourist campgrounds. He was completely indifferent to human presence, and too smart to get caught in the traps set for him. The staff spent several hours chasing him around the campground, followed by curious tourists. They couldn’t catch him.

My naturalist host recounts:

   ‘I’d just put the juice jug back in the walk-in cooler when I heard Kevin calling, without any great urgency it seemed, ‘Hey, there’s a bear.’ Naturally I wanted to take a look, and as I walked out through the backporch door I asked him where it was. ‘Right there in front of you,’ he says, as I almost walk into it. Maybe three feet off to the right, just below the porch. Ready to have a mosey around the staff kitchen.

We just looked at one another. Nobody moved for quite a while. Finally I started shouting, and he slowly ambles off for a bit. He stopped to face me again from about 20 feet away.

I started yelling like a lunatic, which only made him come back towards me. So I reached for the only handy object to throw at him, which happened to be a damp floormop. Which I threw kind of caber-style, with a double-fisted underhand toss that clean missed him by about five feet. Spooked him enough that he turned tail and ran a little further away. I ran after him, shouting and waving my fists. Menacingly, you know. Which just drove him right up to my cabin. I was worried he would go through the screen to get the jar of peanut butter I had in there to bait mousetraps, so I started lobbing these bowling-ball-sized granite cobbles I’d collected as souvenirs. One of them whizzed inches from his ear, and spooked him enough to run as far as the storage shed. I was tossing plank scraps, 2×4s, everything that wasn’t nailed down. Eventually he got bored of the fusillade and just sat on his haunches in the bushes, snorting loudly. Then he started stamping rhythmically with his front paws, which is typically a prelude to a charge.

I backed off some then.

Eventually he just up and wandered around the compound, down to the beach, where he tore up some rotten driftwood logs looking for grubs, then settling in to graze on the beach grasses. I left Kevin there photographing him, with a backdrop of cliffs and sunset over Lake Superior.

He was back in the campground the next day, causing minor terror. Lots of mock charges, no interest in the traps. So the conservation officers blew through, armed to the teeth. They and the maintenance staff spent most of the afternoon trying to get the bear out of the campground and across the highway into the anonymous bush, where it could be dealt with discreetly. But it wouldn’t go. As I was packing up in the office, I heard the three shotgun blasts. That was the end of it: a sleek black carcass dumped in the bed of a pickup. It was sad.

It’s actually a creepy thing about killing bears: once the body is limp, the proportions of limb and torso and head are eerily human. Someone told me once about wandering into a hunt camp, and there were three skinned bears hanging from tree limbs. Said they looked like men who had been tortured and executed.’

The bear’s little brother, a yearling, has been seen moseying around the camp since I arrived. But he is timid, and thus will probably survive.

The Inca Trail, or Mucho People
Note: This piece is long, even by my standards, so I’ve broken it into titled chunks the size of normal entries. With cavalier disregard for intellectual property, I’ve also illustrated the story with embedded links to photos on my walking companion Simon’s website. For a more concise, reliable account, go straight to World of More and see nice thumbnail images, too.

Dead Llama Tours, Inc
Eurosceptic
The Big Pink Skipping Rope Trail
Your Finger, Idiot
Group Hug
Leo and the Porters
Dawn Flute
Mucho People

Dead Llama Tours, Inc
The Wayki Trek office on Gringo Alley in Cusco smelled really bad. Something had expired in the back room, but Leo the salesman didn’t seem to notice. At this early stage in our trip, Simon was too English to draw attention to unpleasant odor, and I was too busy pretending to Simon to be at one with Quechua culture to point out to Leo that he needed to fumigate his damn office. Instead, we politely booked a guided Inca Trail trek.

In 2001, UNESCO decreed that independent trekkers were destroying the Inca Trail to Macchu Pichu. The path was deep with litter. There were no proper pit toilets. Ancient ruins were crumbling because campers were lighting cooking fires against the walls. The proposed solution was drastic: no more independent trekking. All tourists would have to walk with a certified local guide, using porters but not mules. Group size would be limited to ten per licensed guide, and no more than 500 people a day, including porters, would be allowed to hike. There would be a $50 entrance fee and carefully checked registration. Camping was permitted only at a few designated sites.

We had invested a morning in reading trip reports at the very comfortable South American Explorer’s Club in Cusco, trying to pick a decent travel agency. Wayki Trek, though small and relatively new, was well-reviewed. (No one had mentioned the rotting llama in the back room.) For $200 each, they would take us in a group of six. The price included tax, $25 entrance to the ruins, $50 government fee to walk the trail, three full meals a day, water, snacks, transport up to the trailhead, bus and train back, use of camping equipment, a licensed guide, a cook, and a porter for each hiker. We would carry our own clothes and sleeping bags, and should bring money for extra snacks and tips.

Eurosceptic
Tour groups are not my idea of fun, and I wasn’t cheered to meet ours. There was Chris and Suzanne, the Swiss-Germans, French Ana, Portuguese Joao, English Simon, and me. With Leo the guide (and Raul the trainee guide), we counted seven languages between us, and none in common. At the pre-trek briefing, we made stilted conversation about Alpine skiing over complimentary pisco sours.
    ‘I’m Europhobic,’ I complained to Simon afterwards. ‘Well, Eurosceptic. I mean, they’re fine and all, but we’re hardly going to have a rip-roaring time, are we? Why couldn’t we get a few Australians or Scots in our group? Seven bloody languages and can’t crack a joke in any of them.’

Leo arranged to pick us up at our hotel before dawn the next morning.
    ‘Just remember, you’re on holiday,’ said Simon when he woke me at 4.45. My mini backpack, stripped down to just a sleeping bag, notebook, and washkit, felt luxuriously light as I loaded it onto the minibus. We collected Chris and Suzanne, then Joao and Ana. Next we stopped for a couple of locals. I offered them cake, which startled them. My immediate neighbor was Marcelino, the cook, whose vinegary smell was to season our dinners. At Ollantaytambo, an hour and a half from Cusco, we stopped again so that Leo could hire more porters from the crowd of campesinos jostling for work. The women pushed trail snacks and walking sticks on stray tourists.
    ‘The Big Pink Skipping Rope Trail
The UNESCO Trail Gurus decree a four-day schedule for the trek, arriving at Macchu Pichu at dawn on the last day. The first morning, we ate a full breakfast at the trailhead. After a three kilometer stroll, we stopped for a three-course lunch. Leo mandated lengthy rest stops to tell stories or explain ruins during the next section, another three kilometers on flattish ground. Then we camped for the night in a meadow by a river, and settled down to popcorn and cookies in the meal-tent, followed by a three-course dinner.

Simon and I were disbelieving. This was the badass Inca Trail? At the Explorer’s Club, we had read accounts of oxygen-deprivation and altitude sickness, of gruelling passes and knee-destroying descents. Trail of Feathers, an entertaining, wildly exaggerated account of a trip to Peru, starts out with a quote from an unnamed guidebook, which claimed that the Inca Trail is ‘harder than Everest’.

It isn’t. The Inca Trail is for pussies. For Big Girls’ Blouses. For Big Pink Skipping Ropes.

Honestly. The porters race the Inca Trail once a year for fun, and the record is under four hours. We sad-sack gringos had four whole days to do it, and we didn’t even have to carry packs. The trip reports we’d read had clearly been filed by people who counted a stroll in Central Park as hiking. To be fair, we did have to work the second day, on the famous Warmiwanusqa, Dead Woman’s Pass, a climb to 4400 meters. I’d half-hoped Simon would be breathless, coming from sea-level London, but I was the one who had to trot, panting slightly, to catch up. Our biggest fear was that they would make us carry our own gear again, but one by one the porters jogged past us on the steep slope, leaning forward against the 25-kilo loads tied to their bodies with complicated rope arrangements. They were seemingly hardly troubled by their burdens. A green-tinged gringo was carried down past us, splayed across a mule.

View from Dead Woman’s Pass

Your Finger, Idiot
Far below, the Urubamba river wound through the valleys. Behind was a snowy, jagged peak. We asked Leo the name of the mountain.
   ‘Veronica.’
   ‘Veronica? How can a mountain be called ‘Veronica’? What’s the one next to it called, Susan?’
   ‘A European lady called Veronica was the first person to climb it, about forty years ago. So they named it after her. All the placenames around here are fairly arbitrary. For example, when Hiram Bingham discovered this area in 1911, he asked the locals what the ruins were called. They told him ‘macchu pichu’—Quechua for ‘the old ruins’. Of course he thought it was some mystical Inca name, gringo fool. Half the placenames in Peru mean things like ‘A mountain’ or ‘Your finger, idiot’, when the foreign archaeologists asked ‘What’s that?’ They wrote ‘em all down.’
top

Group Hug
It’s hard for me to appreciate natural beauty when there are new people around. It’s the failing of an extrovert, and it’s why I like to travel alone. Otherwise I busy myself harvesting human stories rather than noticing the cara-cara eagles swooping through a gorge. With six new people to play with, including Leo, I was as wound-up as a six-year-old at a birthday party. Simon and I chattered all day long on the mountains, swapping life stories and sad romantic histories, making up silly characters, and reciting whole scenes from Father Ted. He had a penchant for very bad, very long jokes, his enjoyment of which was in inverse proportion to the limping punchlines. At the top of the mountain passes, he would launch into a medley of mournful Smiths’ songs ‘because I’m so happy’.

‘I crashed down on the crossbar
and the pain was enough to make
a shy, bald Buddhist reflect
and plan a mass-murder…’

In return, I lectured him cheerily on Cromwell, the Irish potato famine, and the Penal Laws.
   ‘And then Trevelyan, the Lord Lieutenant, decided to withhold the Indian corn set aside for famine relief, to teach the Irish to plan a bit better in future.’
   ‘Good grief, did he really? I’m so sorry. So, the Dalai Lama goes up to the hotdog stand and says “Make me one with everything…”’

We especially enjoyed the fact that our European neighbors changed into fresh outfits, matched by couple, every day, while I wore exactly the same clothes four days running, as usual. Simon took to calling me ‘the fragrant Mary Archer’. The third morning, as I put on my stiffening socks, he asked innocently if I’d ever seen the Al Pacino movie, Stench of a Woman.
    ‘Simon,’ said Suzanne in the meal tent one night, ‘I think you are always making the jokes when we are walking. I think this is very English. And when you make fun, you don’t zmile, you have the serious face. This is also very English, I think.’

Suzanne herself was smiley, a grown-up, snowboarding Heidi. When we brought this to her attention it bonded our group.
   ‘Also you see Heidi in Switzerland? I like Heidi,’ said Joao.
   ‘Heidi was Swiss,’ said Suzanne proudly, ‘The book was by Johanna Spyri.’
   ‘Oh my Got!’ roared Chris, who looked like Peter, ‘Clara wass so hot!’
We all sang the theme tune as we waited for dinner, and we discussed raclette hungrily. Joao wanted to contribute to our deepening togetherness, and loosed some strangled yelps from the corner. Eventually, he took a deep breath and produced ‘Day-veeed Beck. Ham. Now go to Real Madrid.’
Chris, Simon, and Joao dribbled this conversational football until bedtime.

Leo and the Porters
We were blessed with Leo as a guide. With his sleek bowl haircut and bright brown eyes, he had the look of an intelligent forest animal. Every mealtime he told us long stories of Inca legend and history.
   ‘The Inca could only marry a woman from a noble family. But one day, he was traveling in a village far from Cusco, and he saw the most beautiful woman imaginable. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen. And he fell in love with her on the spot. Of course, she wasn’t an aristocrat, but he couldn’t believe that she was just an ordinary village woman. So he brought her back to Cusco, and he asked his priests to tell him who she was, where she might have come from. And the priests agreed that she was very special indeed. It was out of the question that she marry the king, since she didn’t have noble blood, so they decided she must be sacrificed. On the spot where her blood fell, the first coca plant sprang up. That’s why coca has always been regarded as a woman, a sacred woman.’

Leo was a local, one of seven children from a small village outside Cusco. His father was illiterate, and determined that his children would get an education.
   ‘He was a very unusual man,’ said Leo, ‘He said to us once “I have a very small plot. I can’t divide it up and leave it to each of you; it would be unusable. The only gift I can leave you is an education.” So two of my brothers are lawyers and I studied tourism in Cusco for three years. My sister is a teacher. The others didn’t want to study. All through college, I dreamed that soon I would be able to support him so he could retire. But he died the month I graduated.’

He had run for local office in his village the previous year. His platform was spreading the benefits of tourism from the trail throughout the community: better conditions for the porters, extended transport links. Porters are paid 120 soles, or about $34, to work the trail for four days. Out of this, the government charges them entrance to the trailhead each time, at the local rate of $11 a head. Then the train monopoly charges them full local price for the journey back to Ollantaytambo. They are supposed to pay tax on the balance. There is a complicated scheme whereby registered porters could request rebates on these entrance fees, but most of them don’t. They are just poor farmers who try to bring in extra cash for their families when crops allow. When I asked, most of the porters said that they walked the trail about four times a month in season, which, counting tips, still brought in an income higher than a teacher’s salary for sixteen days’ work.

Things had got slightly better in recent years. Now there was a weigh station at the start of the trail to make sure they were carrying no more than 25 kilos. Previously, tour companies had saved money by hiring fewer workers and loading them with up to 60 kilos. Back in Cusco, I’d seen flyers for The Andean Porter Project, an organization that tried to improve their conditions. They were recruiting traveler volunteers to help measure the porters for ergonomic backpacks. Listening to Leo, I was exasperated at this well-meaning, cack-handed nonsense. These people have been carrying loads on tump-lines for generations, and will continue to do so long after they’ve sold the daft charity backpacks to buy multinational fertilizer for their fields. Pressuring their government to ensure that they hold onto the money they work so hard to earn would do a lot more, but I suppose it doesn’t deliver the meaningful, personal connection that the volunteer/consumer demands these days.

Leo came from nowhere to be a favorite in the mayoral election, he said. People were surprised by his youth and ideas. He wanted to persuade PeruRail to reopen the link to his village, and to offer cheaper ticket rates to locals than they currently did. He wanted to set up a center to help porters with rebate paperwork, while lobbying the central government to drop the entrance fee. He wanted to represent country porters and guides in Cusco, where the high-level decisions about Trail management were made. As an educated city slicker and guide with strong roots in his village, he felt he had a unique insight into the needs of the tourists, the porters, the agencies, and the guides. Everyone thought he would win. But the vote count, which normally took two hours, stretched to eight. Something odd was going on: many extra votes had crept in. It turned out that his main rival had gone to every house the night before and offered a dollar a vote. Leo didn’t know how much he had paid for the extra box of blank ballots. He came in third.
   ‘So will you run again?’
   ‘Who knows? Peru can get you down.’

It was Leo’s idea to bring the porters into the meal tent after dinner on the first night. It’s an Inca Trail tradition to introduce them to the tourists on the last night, just before tips are presented. Leo wanted us to get to know them earlier so that we could chat to them on the trail. They liked to know about their tourists, he said. They often asked where theirs was from, what they were like. So he decided we should make friends.

It was excruciating. We Europeans sat on our little stools, trapped by the table so that we couldn’t stand up in greeting, while the Quechua porters lined up for inspection, heads bowed. They whispered their names at Leo’s prompt.
    ‘Tomas.’ ‘Marcelino.’ ‘Simón.’ ‘Javier.’ ‘Ramon.’ ‘Rigoberto’.
We said our names, and told them where we were from.
    ‘Do you have any questions for the porters?’ asked Leo. We squirmed. I asked if they had families. They all did, except for the shy 18 year old. Leo slapped his back and joked about his girlfriends on the trail. Suzanne asked how old they were. Late twenties, mostly, slightly younger than us. Leo asked if the tourists had families, in a new, loud tone that people use in seniors’ homes. Nope. The porters marveled a little at these six childless thirtysomethings.
   ‘Europeans aren’t sure how to make babies,’ we explained. ‘We’ve come to Peru hoping someone will tell us.’
They filed out after a decent interval of fixed grins from both sides. Leo explained that their shyness was a documented psychological phenomenon in colonized, mistreated people. I elbowed Simon in the ribs.

To be an Inca Trail guide, you need a three-year qualification in tourism. I asked Leo how much they taught of local history, culture, or archeology. Almost nothing, he said.
   ‘It’s all bookkeeping, marketing, and sales. People just sit through the classes because they need the piece of paper to work. If you want to teach tourists about the other stuff, you have to study on your own.’
He had worked for the big Cusco agencies for ten years, and eventually got sick of their treatment. They didn’t provide porters with tents or food, they crammed tourists into huge groups, they exploited wherever they could. So he recruited six other experienced guides, and they started Wayki Trek as a co-operative. They never took groups of more than eight, and they looked after their porters. They made less money that way, but more than they had working for someone else. He was happy.

So were we, until Leo disappeared halfway through the second day, apparently to attend to a client from another Wayki group who had been taken ill. Raul, the trainee guide, would look after us until he came back that evening. We never saw Leo again.

Raul was a raw graduate with an adolescent air. He hadn’t got to the part about studying on his own: we knew more about the ruins than he did. We wondered if the disappearance was prearranged. Leo himself had been filling in for a guide who was ill; a back-to-back shift on the trail. Perhaps he brought Raul along while he sussed out how self-sufficient our group was, and then took off back to his family. We never found out.

Dawn Flute
On the third morning, the porters brought coca tea to our tents before dawn so that we could be first on the trail. Baby Guide Raul explained we were starting early because there were several ruins on the way, which filled up with tour groups later in the morning. Although the trail was overcrowded, by always being the first or last to leave, or by taking alternative, harder routes, our group was mostly alone. We were also the smallest group on the trail. SAS, supposedly the plushest outfitters in Cusco, brought about 30 people, and the mix of pace and temperament never seemed like fun when we passed them.

The full moon hanging over Dead Woman’s Pass lit our way as we hiked up the slope. This section was true, paved Inca Trail, and easy to follow even in darkness. These paved paths had once supported a relay messenger system that brought news and produce from all over the empire: a Cusco noble could enjoy fresh fish from the coast in just two days.

A few pale streaks appeared above the mountains as Raul ushered us into Runkuraqayand gave a halting lecture. He was nervous in front of his first-ever tour group, and it didn’t help that we felt conned by his boss’s disappearance. Raul kept asking me to translate for Simon—he didn’t even speak English—and I wanted to tell him that I would as soon he told us something new or accurate. But his charisma deficit was more than redeemed by the mountains at dawn. As we continued up the pass, we spoke in cathedral whispers when we spoke at all. Below us, an early porter followed playing ghostly flute music like a wood nymph.

I felt sorry for us tourists and our camcorder minds. It was so hard for us just to be in the mountains at dawn. A wandering porter with a flute felt somehow staged, and we assessed the scene for corniness while we tried to enjoy its beauty. We photographed. We imagined how we would describe it later. We pasted the memory into mental scrapbooks, and flipped through them looking for comparisons. Often, we were too bent on having memorable experiences to experience them.

Mucho People
We climbed to Sayacmarca, a ruin perched on an outcrop so isolated that it wouldn’t seem like prime real estate to a modern eye. Simon speculated that all these ruins were elaborate Victorian fakes, built by hurling stones up from the valleys using steam-shovels and Irish navvies. We wandered through, stroking the smooth stones, wondering if the holes punched through some the corners at waist height were for drapery tie-backs. Velvety ladies’ slippers grew among the stones.

From Sayacmarca on, the trail mostly descended. The Quechua call this region ‘la ceja de la selva’; ‘the eyebrow of the jungle’. We stepped down through high jungle and rock tunnels, through elaborate agricultural terracing, through spearmint-scented meadows. Our group had been spoiled with solitude on the trail. Reaching the final campsite, where every hiker had to stay on the third night, was a shock. We picked our way between row after row of blue-domed tents, catching unwelcome glimpses of pale bellies drooping over y-fronts. There were two filthy toilets for 500 people. At one end of the campsite there was a pumping disco—on the Inca Trail, for God’s sake. Sometimes I want to take Peru outside and smack it. Hard.

But Wayki Trek had done well again, and our camp was tucked in a spot that was as private as possible in the circumstances. We would need the quiet: Raul wanted to get us up at quarter to four to be first to see Macchu Pichu at dawn. At 4 am, we were bleary, trying to force down the pancakes and hardboiled eggs of our last catered meal. At 4.45, we were waiting for the ticket office to open, head of the line while other groups straggled in behind us. A large, impatient group who had passed us the previous day tried to barge us, but we stood firm.
   ‘I feel like a German in Majorca, up at 3 am to get my towel on the sunlounger,’ I grumbled. Chris pounced.
   ‘You also have this joke about the Germans? In Switzerland also they are famous for that.’ He paraded up and down the ticket office loudly mimicking a middle-aged German package tourist determined to reserve his spot. We giggled and shushed him: who knew where the other trekkers were from.

At five we passed through the ticket booth and onto the last few kilometers of the trail. It was very dark, and my flashlight was to weak to see the path clearly. The crowds behind us forced us to jog-trot, and I kept stumbling on the slick rocks. The boorish leader of the enemy tour group told us to get in against the wall so his 30 clients could pass on the narrow path.
    ‘Non! Ils ne passent pas!’ spat Ana, ‘Il est cochon! Et j’espere qu’il comprend francais.’ We cheered her bolshy spirit as we rushed and stumbled along, resenting the mob after the peace of the early days of the trek. I wished I’d stayed in bed.

Suddenly, it seemed, we arrived at the Puerta del Sol, just before six o’clock. The Sun Gate is high above the ruins. At the June equinox, the sun shines directly through it and lights up the main temple in the valley below. We were a five days early. Below the gate are steep terraces, both for defence and agriculture, and this is where the trekkers arranged themselves as they filed in. We sat with our legs dangling over the edge, waiting for the sun to rise over Macchu Pichu.

And we waited. The sky got light, but Macchu Pichu was hidden behind a valleyful of dense fog. An American with a camcorder narrated the scene:
    ‘Down below here is where Macchu Pichu is supposed to be. So they say.’
On a terrace above us, a group of rowdy Brazilian Seventh Day Adventists waved their football shirts and the Brazilian flag. We watched as a Dutch hiker dropped to his knees and proposed to his sweetie. The crowd cheered as she covered her face and accepted. An English pal we’d met in Cusco had been entrusted with videotaping the proposal and he dutifully panned from future groom to bride: unfortunately, he had forgotten to press ‘Record’.

I ticked off t-shirts from other backpacker destinations: a ‘Danger! Mines!’ shirt from Cambodia, a Beer Lao shirt, a Bolivia Death Ride sweatshirt. Several Galápagos slogans.

On a far terrace, a tour group sang Happy Birthday, and the crowd joined in. Chris turned to me.
   ‘Do you want that we should also sing Happy Birthday?’
   ‘No! God no! Let’s just sit here quietly and enjoy the lovely fog.’
Simon disappeared, and returned with hands behind his back.
   ‘I have a special birthday present for you, my dear,’ he said, offering two very squashed Mars Bars. I was touched, since I’d thought he’d hoarded them unsportingly since Cusco (while I’d demolished a 1lb bar of Dairy Milk in a single sitting).

Birthday or not, Macchu Pichu refused to put in a dawn appearance. One by one, the tour groups gave up and headed down to the ruins proper. At 7.30 our little band followed down the jungle path. As we walked, the clouds dissolved and revealed the whole valley. Tired, cranky hikers stopped complaining about the dirty French hippie blasting Bob Dylan, and stared at the ancient city. The llama grazing on the terraces stared back with an insolent gaze. Macchu Pichu, swirling in the mist, was an even better birthday gift than my precious squashed Mars Bars.

I had arranged to meet Simon in Cusco to do the Inca Trail to Macchu Pichu. We’d met only once, for three hours in London last July, but I was confident that he was a sound fellow who would make an excellent traveling companion. I later found out that he had been nervous about flying all the way to Peru to meet a half-cracked Irish girl prone to scrapes and escapades. This was reasonable. Two weeks is a small fraction of my journey, but a huge proportion of his annual holiday allowance. I was up for either a wonderful experience or a nightmare yarn I could exaggerate to entertain myself, but Simon wanted a Nice Holiday as well as an adventure.

I was in a slight sulk while I waited for him at Cusco airport. First of all, this being Peru, they had canceled his morning flight from Lima because there weren’t enough passengers to pack it like a local bus. As usual there was no information available at Cusco, so I assumed they would jam him onto the afternoon flight, which meant a five-hour wait for both of us. And second, this being Peru, I wasn’t in Bolivia. I had fallen in love with Bolivia on sight, as quickly as I’d disliked Peru. I wrote to Simon the week before he arrived and asked him to come to Bolivia instead, promising Lake Titicaca, jungle, and salt deserts. Long-range travelers think nothing of swinging left to check out a new country but sensible holidaymakers balk. Simon feared I was deranged at this fourth suggested change of place, and counter-proposed that we meet in Cusco as planned. I sulked on the night bus from La Paz to Cusco and nursed the grudge up to, but not beyond, his bleary arrival. I couldn’t stay cross at an Englishman who was so discombobulated by a welcome hug.

For the first day or two, we were Stanley and Dr. Livingstone. He solemnly filled me in on the C-list London celebrity gossip I crave. I proudly showed him the running water in a hotel that was five times as posh as my usual fleapits.
   “Hot, look, all day! Just ignore the concrete chips on the shower floor. And here’s iodine water for brushing your teeth.”
(Simon is a consultant who lives in hotels, and was not as thrilled as I was by the little bars of soap, nor as impressed by the fabulosity of a television set, which showed only Peruvian gameshows.)

Next he handed over the loot. Vogue, The Economist, Private Eye and, for some reason, three issues of New Scientist. Three Crunchies. A giant bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, “for hiking”. Earl Grey teabags. A jar of Marmite. Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love. Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces. I stacked a triumphant little pile of treats, and decided we would be friends.

We inspected his kit, which was several degrees cooler than mine. I wondered if he had special-issue English Gore-tex hankies too, as we admired the Camelbak drinking pouch, the fully waterproof backpack (I use a sack to cover mine), the Oakley shades, the Windstopper jacket, the titanium cookset and teeny stove, the hi-tech walking trousers. (Which I was to stop referring to as ‘pants’, he instructed. ‘Pants’ are underpants in London.) I showed him my little immersion heater for making bathroom-water tea, my coca leaves for chewing, and my two pairs of socks. Finally we went outside to take a look at Cusco.

Cusco is Peru’s treasure, the capital of the Inca empire later ransacked and rebuilt by the Spaniards. At 3,310 meters, it’s crisp even in midday sunshine and chilly at night. Mid-range hotels rent space heaters for an extra two dollars a night. On the sloping, cobbled streets, the sidewalks are so narrow that hierarchy is apparent: indigenous people step down for mestizos and criollos. No one makes way for tourists.

During the Inca empire, every important citizen tried to visit the sacred capital at least once. Whenever they conquered a new region, a handful of earth was brought to Cusco to be mixed with the soil of their great square, Huancaypata (the Place of Tears). The Inca, or king, was paraded on a litter here, wearing costumes too heavy and magnificent to walk in. Later, the Spaniards executed Tupac Amaru, the last Inca here, too. They tied a limb to each of four horses, then spurred the horses to tear him apart. Then they built the Plaza de Armas where Huancaypata once was. Archeological digs still turn up remnants of rituals held in the Place of Tears: tiny bone llamas, jewellry.

A baroque cathedral stands now in place of Inca Wiracocha’s palace. Inside, it is glitzy with gold crucifixes and a high altar made of beaten silver. I startled Simon by genuflecting out of habit: cathedrals are best admired on your knees. The tourists gathered in front of a Last Supper scene that showed the apostles ready to dine on guinea pig and chicha beer. We giggled at the stiff Cusco School paintings: picture after picture of smug, redhaired Virgins trampling seraphim and clutching two-dimensional Baby Jesuses shaped like Victorian lampshades. One local painter hadn’t grasped that cherubs had wings, and his fat little angels clung to the curtains during the Annunciation.

Outside the cathedral, toddlers too small to make change for postcards beg when they remember. Even breadwinner three-year-olds are easily distracted.

The Companía de Jesús church is just southwest of the cathedral, its splendor a direct challenge. The audacity of the Jesuits angered the pope when it was built, and to curb the church’s magnificence, he decreed that the entrances must be small and off the main square. Along one side of the church, a side-alley is walled with Inca stonework (or, more accurately, Inca-style stonework, which the Spaniards admired and forced their new slaves to reproduce after they had destroyed the city to conquer it). Huge, irregular stones were worked to fit each other with perfect, mortarless joins. Each edge and corner is rounded. The alley is narrow and the walls slope inwards, as comforting as a cave. Simon ran a hand over the curved granite. He read Geology at university, and could see stories in stones that I couldn’t read.

I couldn’t take to Cusco despite the beauty of its red roofs in the evening sun. I’ve been spoiled with leisurely time in ordinary towns and villages, and the gringo capital of Latin America made me feel suddenly like a tourism product whose yield must be increased.
    ‘No gracias, no gracias, NO, GRACIAS!’ we chanted wearily as we skittered down the steep cobbles, refusing an endless offering of shoeshines, postcards, restaurant menus, cigarettes, tour group flyers, ugly ponchos, finger puppets, alpaca sweaters, marijuana, and watercolors. One old bag hit me with her hat when I stepped off the sidewalk she was blocking in a panhandling holdup. Every hotel and guidebook warned tourists to take taxis after sunset, even for a few blocks, now that strangle-muggings are Cusco chic. A huckster with twangy Miami English offered to take us on a personal guided tours to see the real rural Peru.
    “Around Cusco? I don’t think so.” I spat in Spanish before dragging Simon to the market for a respite.

We drank a 30-cent pint of orange juice each, perched on stools on a street corner, watching the bargainings with not a baggy khaki backside in sight. I tried to see the market through his fresh eyes: the mangy dogs, fed or kicked depending on a stallholder’s mood, the babies tied on tightly in bright shawls, the piles of strange merchandise, the English-language instruction tape played on public speakers.
    “Warrr-drobe. Warrr-drobe. Guardarropa.”

There were pyramids of maize, chirimoya, and prickly pear; a whole crispy pig hanging up for chicharron (crackling); torsoless mannequins modeling jeans with more booty than J Lo. As usual, I grew babbly with excitement.
&nbps   “We have to try leche asado. It’s a milk pudding tart. And I’ll get you some salteños later. Have you ever had chicharron? It’s brilliant.”
    “Okay,” said Simon doubtfully.

On the way back, we attached ourselves to a religious parade that was in full swing. The Virgin—several mid-sized Virgins, in fact—swayed overhead on a litter as the crowd swayed behind the brass band. A man was selling popcorn and Inca-Kola.
    “What’s the parade for?” asked Simon, unused to the daily procession that is Peru.
    “Who knows? Probably because it’s Tuesday.”

I need a small algorithm. Any volunteers?

I am getting more and more tangled in my attempts to write local English. The solution is custom dialect editions of Dervala.net for Irish, British, Canadian, and American readers. Or for days when I lurch more towards one nation than another.

I want to assign country-specific words and phrases in a custom dictionary and grammar check tool. Simple spelling differences would be covered: color/colour, realize/realise. I’d include basic vocabulary changes, such as couch/sofa/chesterfield or gobshite/pillock/shit disturber/idiot. The tool would strip out (or add) irritating American grammar, such as the dastardly serial comma (apples comma oranges comma and comma pears). It might even swap brand names: Irish Mars Bar for American Milky Way (it’s the same damn candy bar!) And pop culture references: with a single click The Magic Roundabout morphs into Fortycoats, Degrassi Junior High, or Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood. The All Ireland into Superbowl, Grey Cup, or Test Series.

The Canadian version would substitute Cold out, eh? for Hello, but only from November to April. The Irish version would say Desperate weather we’re having.

I need this tool because Canadian English is a mess. Take ‘Tire Centre’. American spelling of ‘tire’, British spelling of ‘centre’. They pay for gas with a cheque, not petrol with a check. They eat potato chips, not crisps, but porridge, not oatmeal. (1) In fact, Canadian English sounds just like the hodge-podge dialect I’ve always served up right here on this website: no wonder I feel at home.

Oh, and until you figure out full context-sensitivity, give me some keyboard shortcuts to turn your wizardry on and off as I type, so that I don’t tyre of manual corrections.

(1) Examples from How to be Canadian, by Will Ferguson & Ian Ferguson. Yes, I’m trying.

On the first morning, I stood in my sister’s bathroom in Ottawa, helplessly looking for the used toilet paper basket that doesn’t exist in this world of power plumbing. I scolded myself for forgetting to bring along bottled water to brush my teeth. (Though in truth I’ve been gargling tapwater giardia for months. I’m the only person I know who gains weight on a constant diet of Third World street food, and I’d hoped to pick up a nice hungry tapeworm to dissolve my new little potbelly, which appears to be appears to be iron on the inside, blubber on the outside.)

I keep scalding my mouth. I never took physics, but even I know that water boils at a higher temperature at sea level. After months at altitude, though, I haven’t yet trained myself not to swig thoughtless gulps of tea.

I am mildly fascinated by all the white people on the street. Am I that pasty? (No, I’m pastier still, despite a whole year outdoors.) Would I look like that in the unlikely event I wore Bermuda shorts?

I ran five miles by the canal in Ottawa yesterday. No stinking diesel buses caked me in black smoke. Though I haven’t run in a couple of years, I didn’t even pant in this sea-level oxygen so rich I can almost taste it.

Where are the foodstands and the vendors shouting their wares? There’s not a single dried llama foetus on sale in the whole city. There are no six-year-old shoeshine boys. None of the walls have graffitti saying ‘Please Don’t Urinate Here! Have Some Respect for Yourself and Others!’

I can’t get over the comfort. The air-conditioning, the cars, the sleek supermarkets, the multiple bathrooms, the beds that don’t fold like tacos when you climb in, the telephone, the home internet access. I stand in front of my sister’s huge wardrobe and then put on the same black shirt I’ve been wearing for a year, unable to make a choice. I tell her about my two-dollar hotel rooms in Bolivia, and she wrinkles her nose.

I am thudding around in this oxygen-rich, cash-rich Canadian gravity.

I feel like a draft dodger.

On July 1st, 2002 I left New York to travel around the world for a year. On June 30th, 2003, I arrived in Ottawa the night before Canada Day. The exact timing was accidental, of course—I never plan that far ahead. My sister lives here now, and for immigration reasons I can’t go back to the US until the end of the summer. So here I am, marveling at the niceness of the Ottawans and their civilized city. I am getting used to not having skeevy Peruvians follow me with their shouts of ‘Gringa! Gringa!’. Doubtless they are here too, but they are quieter in their new home.

Claire has a New Yorker cartoon hanging on her fridge. ‘You seem familiar, but somehow strange,’ says the woman to her dinner date, ‘Are you by any chance Canadian?’

I lived in London when I was 18, and again from 22 to 25. It was a sort of homecoming to see Leicester Square, Bloomsbury, and Sloane Square at last, and to find the more obscure pushpins on my childhood map: Kings Reach Tower, where Jackie magazine was published. Cromwell Street, where the children in Ballet Shoes had lived. I fell in love with the placenames that were odd yet familiar: Leather Lane. Costermongers Alley. Piccadilly.

When I first moved to New York I couldn’t forgive the dreary street names. 41st and 9th: Christ, it was so rational. Still, they were storied streets, and as in London I felt again that I was finally meeting an old penpal when I walked down Broadway for the first time, and saw Greenwich Village, Wall St, and Central Park. Judy Blume books had prepared me for the United States. Though I’d never tasted them, Baby Ruth, Oh Henry!, and Reeses Pieces were names of my childhood. I knew how to spell American. I knew not to correct them when they mistakenly referred to the pavement as the sidewalk. I knew to say cookie. Faucet. Ga-rawj, not garridge. I never quite figured out how to pronounce pasta, Palm Pilot, and television without making my friends laugh, but on everything else I was good to go within a week. Good to go.

That’s what I’ve specialized in since childhood. Faking it, acting like an insider inside a week, being a method actor of the English-speaking peoples. I horrified my parents with a gin-soaked, diphthong-ridden drawl after a just a summer in London when I was 18, and I had a South County Dublin accent down by October of my first year in college. After a year in New York no one ever asked what part of Ireland I was from. If they thought I sounded strange they assumed I was Canadian.

But I’m not Canadian. I know that now. Being in Canada is like walking in a dream, an odd mixture of different pasts and yet another thing entirely. None of the Ottawa streets and buildings preexisted in my mind. I stare uncertainly at the Queen on their dollar bills and note that she needs to get her eyebrows done. Claire translates the stores/shops.
    ‘Second Cup, that’s their Starbucks. Tim Horton’s is their Krispy Kreme, but better. Roots is sort of their Gap.’

I am flubbing the basics, I who pride myself on passing instantly.

   ‘Do the states control education, or…?’
   ‘Provinces. We have provinces here.’
   ‘Oh. I knew that. Sore-y.‘

   ‘When the separatist government came in in the Seventies—do you know about that?’
   ‘Oh, um, yes, of course…’

   ‘Who’s that guy?’
   ‘Chrétien. The Prime Minister.’

I’ve been a diligent student this past year of travel. I scoured the travelers’ bookstores in each country, looking for material on the next. Not just guidebooks, but history, travelogues, local literature. I wanted to cram in advance so that I could arrive at strange places and have some sense of recognition, however vague.

But it didn’t occur to me to study up for Canada, any more than for Ireland or New York. Without noticing, the last three novels I picked up were Canadian: Carol Shields’s Stone Diaries, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Anne Michaels’s extraordinary Fugitive Pieces. I’m absorbing the country through its own words, immigrant and native, and recognizing in them the slow rhythms of my Canadian friends. I spent my last Mexican pesos on a copy of The Economist to read on the plane, and felt obscurely patriotic when I read about Canada’s legalization of gay marriage. I’ve already started to bore email friends with exhaustive lists of Canada’s comedians and writers, their intelligent laws, their humane welfare state. I cheered when Vancouver won the Olympics bid. Claire had to talk me out of buying a Roots Canada sweatshirt and baseball hat for July 1st.

I’m still no more Canadian. They interrogated me at the immigration desk in Toronto when I arrived. A backpacker? Arriving from Mexico? Why did I want 60 days in Canada? Where was my onward ticket? Late at night, after four solid days of traveling from southern Peru and a year with a backpack, I felt my throat swell with a need for a home where I would be welcomed back instead of peppered with questions. But next day, as I trawled the Canadian immigration website, I felt weepy again at the kindness of the layout, at how clear and helpful they made the process compared to the unfriendly US, where one is a deadbeat/terrorist/dirty foreigner until proven otherwise over and over. I would be prouder to become Canadian than American now, a result of the belated political education I finally picked up by spending some time in the developing world. Surviving a Toronto winter, though, is a different story. We’ll see.