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.

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.

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.