No More Odysseys For a While, Please…

Yesterday I had to get to Lima. This involves leaving the project at four in the morning and driving the six hours to Cusco, catching a plane in the afternoon and flying to Lima by late afternoon or early evening. Sounds simple doesn’t it?

We left the camp at 4:45am, Danny, a driver, a coworker, Juana Aparcana and I. The secretary had booked my flight for 3:45p.m., so I had plenty of time. I put on clean clothes so I would not have to take a bunch of stuff, and after all, I just had to sit in the car and plane for six or eight hours to get to Lima.

Things seemed to be pretty well on track. I had worked until midnight so Danny started off driving, but I could not sleep in any case. I took over at about 6am and we made good time. Along about 7am, I began to notice some issues with the gears and thought I had just gotten clumsy and then, suddenly, the car stopped. The clutch had no effect whatsoever and despite the fact that I could get the stick into the gears, nothing happened when I let off the clutch. We got out and had a look see. Danny looked under the truck and the hood and pulled out a handful of fibers and said, here is the clutch disk… We had seen a cellular signal on a phone a few miles back so I just started walking in the frosty altiplano morning light. Juana and I hiked downhill for a mile or so but found no signal. I wandered off into the ichu grass and saw only a pair of comuneros from the local town Capaccmarca with whom I visited for a few moments to be cordial, nice guys, my age I would guess. We said goodbye and I kept up my cellular signal witching.

The hours whittled away and I had decided that I was not meant to get to Lima that day. When I had just given up hope, we saw a van coming up the road towards us. We flagged it down and it was a passenger “Express” from Challhuahuacho to Cusco. It had left at 6am. We asked the driver if he had space. He did and we loaded into it and left Danny there to keep track of the pickup. “We will call when we get a signal,” I told him.

Off we went and at every town, the driver asked for fuel which gave us a little concern. He had said we would be in Cusco by 1pm but I had begun to doubt that. I quit believing fairy tales many years ago and Peruvian punctuality promises fall into that same category. An hour out of Cusco in Yurisque, we stopped to take on a couple of women and the driver continued his combustible (fuel) quest. The ladies loaded large bundles of corn stalks atop the bus and the older of the two muscled her way to the back and wedged in, smashing me against Juana like another sardine in the can.

In Quechua, she told her daughter that this was Saturday and they don’t sell gasoline in town on Saturday. By now we had a clear idea that the driver knew his van’s gauges and that we were not going to make it. He seemed somewhat frantic going about looking for the owner of the “gas station” a house with barrels of diesel fuel in it. At last the owner came out with a key. What a sigh of relief went through the toasty van. We opened the doors and relaxed while the driver bought one gallon of fuel and poured it into the van with a large metal funnel, shaking in the last drips.

We made the last hour in good time but by the time I rolled into Cusco, it was 2:15pm and I had to be in the airport in a half hour. I made it and made my plane despite all of the shenanigans. Many years ago, I told my son William, “If you go on a trip and everything goes fine, “no clutches blow up, no microbuses pick you up and stop in every hamlet looking for fuel etc.”; you don’t have stories.” I recently read a book that said, “Stories only happen to those who can tell them.” I would be happy to have a few less.