Losing My Nerve in Peru - Peru, Part 2

“There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign.”— Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters

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The truck had now been in the garage for three weeks. The parts were somewhere between Europe, DHL, Peruvian customs and the garage in Arequipa; the bills were mounting, and nobody could tell us when it would be finished. There is only so much walking, sleeping and waiting you can do, so if we couldn't move the truck, we would move ourselves. We flew northeast to Iquitos, deep in the Peruvian Amazon.

Iquitos sits in the Peruvian Amazon and is often described as the largest city in the world that you cannot reach by road from the outside. You either fly in or arrive by river, which made it about as far removed from our normal overlanding life as we could get. As soon as we stepped off the plane the heat and humidity hit us. After weeks high in the Andes it felt like walking into a wall. Private cars seemed few and far between. Instead, the streets were full of mototaxis - Peru's version of a tuk-tuk - buzzing around everywhere, weaving in and out of each other and competing for space. Engines rattled constantly. The heat, noise and traffic seemed to merge into one continuous background hum.

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The many tukTuks around Iquitos.

Then we went to Belén market. Charlotte and I have spent years wandering around markets around the world. We have seen all sorts of things, eaten things we probably shouldn't have eaten and coped with smells that would clear a room back home, but Belén was something else. It was vast, unkempt, hot and full of outrageous smells. Salsa music came from every direction. Pigs' intestines were pickled, boiled and fried on street corners, piranhas were sliced and diced ready for cooking, huge catfish lay with their whiskered heads cut open and, worst of all for me, there was turtle meat for sale. We even found a food stall using a turtle shell as a serving dish, with hungry Peruvians gobbling down large platefuls beside it. Everyone seemed to have a swagger, so we joined in and tried not to stand out, which was a bit difficult when we appeared to be the only two white people around.

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Belen market -Pigs intestines, Some rodents, possibly water rats and Kaiman (Aligators) tails, all for sale.

A hardy stew cooked and served from a Turtle shell.

They mince the meat and cook it in the shell. Its a delicey ?

Normally I can cope with all this. You look, smell, occasionally hold your breath and get on with it. It is part of travelling, particularly the sort of travelling Charlotte and I have chosen to do. This time I wasn't. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the smell. Maybe it was five weeks of things slowly getting on top of me. Things that I would once have found fascinating were beginning to feel oppressive. Bolivia had worn us down, the truck had nearly gone up in flames, and now our home was still sitting in pieces in a garage hundreds of miles away. My capacity for this sort of travelling suddenly seemed to be getting less.

Maybe it's time for the end of this type of travelling for me? That thought had actually been building for a while. I won't let an emotional low make us stop. We set out to finish this journey and we will finish it. I also think things will become easier once we reach Central America. But the thought was there.

We hired a boatman and went out onto the river to see some of the communities living along its banks. Houses stood on stilts over the water and people carried on with their lives around us. The toilets emptied into the same river that people were using for everything else. We have seen poverty all over the world, and I think after a while your mind develops a way of blanking some of it out. Perhaps it has to. Then something small happens and suddenly it becomes real again.

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A few views of Iquitos and the shots from the river

The boatman eased us closer to the bank where a woman was washing in the river. I smiled and raised my hand to wave. She just looked back at me. For whatever reason, that look stopped me. There I was in clean clothes and decent sunglasses, paying somebody to take us along the river looking at other people's lives. I suddenly wondered what I looked like to her.

I felt embarrassed. Not because we had done anything wrong, but because the difference between our lives was so enormous and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Life really is a postcode lottery. Charlotte and I were born where we were born. She was born where she was born. None of us chose it. We tipped the boatman generously and went back to our air-conditioned room. That contrast bothered me more than I expected it to.

A simple shared river toilet

Eventually, after five weeks and three days, the truck was ready. Not that I was counting. The garage had taken around two weeks just to establish that the rear brake drums, pads and associated parts couldn't be sourced in Peru. We eventually found what we needed in Europe and thought we were getting somewhere. Then DHL entered the equation. As foreign nationals we weren't allowed simply to import the parts ourselves, so paperwork had to be sorted to make the garage the importer. Nobody had told us that beforehand. Then came bank holidays. Then the garage took its time fitting everything. And finally they couldn't accept payment from a foreign bank account. Individually, none of those things sounds disastrous. Put them together and you get five weeks and three bloody days.

Getting back into the truck felt good. For most of this journey movement had been the cure for almost everything: start the engine, point the truck somewhere else and whatever happened yesterday usually begins to recede. We left Arequipa, headed back towards the coast and began the long drive north towards Ecuador. The truck was moving again. I wasn't quite resetting with it.

Directly ahead of us were the Nazca Lines, the enormous ancient geoglyphs scraped into the desert floor and best seen from the air. We had planned to take one of the small aircraft that fly over them, a short thirty-minute trip that gives you the proper view. We found a truck stop in Nazca, parked up for the evening and were due to fly the following day. Charlotte settled down to read and found the news: earlier that day a tourist aircraft flying around the Nazca area had crashed. All thirteen people on board had died.

There was very little discussion. We both knew immediately that we were not getting on a light aircraft the following morning. For years we have accepted a certain amount of risk because that is part of travelling the way we do: bad roads, questionable ferries, remote areas, borders, breakdowns and plenty of situations where afterwards you think perhaps that wasn't particularly clever. But by then the brake fire, altitude, breakdowns and everything else had accumulated somewhere in the background. The Nazca crash was different because it was exactly what we were planning to do the next morning. It could quite easily have been us on another day. We had got away with a lot already, and both of us felt that being a bit more risk-averse from now on was probably sensible.

…and I've got to say, the Nazca Lines looked pretty damn fine to me from that observation tower.

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The Lines of Nazca

By then Peru was beginning to wear on me. We hadn't found people particularly friendly on much of our route and, spoilt Westerners though we undoubtedly are, the everyday food available to us had often felt fairly limited. There were exceptions. Ceviche was one - raw fish cured in lime rather than cooked with heat, and something we enjoyed several times. Pisco sours - Peru's national cocktail - were another. We managed those several times as well.

The road took us through the outskirts of Lima, where we had already spent time while sorting out our American visas. Central Lima had felt safe enough and was an okay place to hang out, but driving through the outer suburbs was different. They seemed to go on forever: dirty buildings, dust, rubbish, traffic, more buildings and then more rubbish. Eventually Lima disappeared behind us, but the scruffy, unkempt feeling carried on. Much of the coast was desert and in places plastic waste was everywhere, caught along the roadside and spread across the sand. At times a putrid smell hung in the air and came straight through the truck.

Lima Gold museum

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The roads themselves were mostly okay, but there was endless heavy lorry traffic and the drive north started to get to me. The trip to the Ecuador border would take several days, yet even early on every lorry coming towards us seemed too big, too fast or slightly too close. Roadside shrines also seemed to become more frequent. Or perhaps I was simply noticing them now.

I found myself looking at each one and wondering what had happened there. Had it been a lorry? Had somebody come around a bend too quickly? Had a driver lost his brakes? A few months earlier I would probably have driven past without giving any of it much thought, but now my mind was filling in the gaps. We have driven difficult roads all over the world and dealt with conditions far worse than these. I knew that. It didn't stop me looking.

I think I am losing my nerve.

A few weeks after we had passed through, mudslides and rockfalls blocked the Pan American highway, between Atico and Ocoña and more than 300 trucks were reported stranded. We had already driven that road. In the past, I would probably have looked at the news and thought, lucky escape. This time my first thought was how easily we could have been stuck in the middle of it. That probably didn't help.

Just in case you wanted more from Iquitos market ?

It wasn't one particular thing. It was everything accumulated together. And perhaps age has something to do with it as well. Risks that I might once have dismissed seem to stay in my mind longer now. That doesn't mean we are stopping. We have to finish. But maybe finishing and taking every risk put in front of you are not the same thing.

One thing did puzzle me before we left Peru, though: Paddington Bear.

After all those weeks we had seen remarkably little evidence of him. Given the British obsession with a bear supposedly coming from darkest Peru, I expected somebody to be exploiting it?

The drive north towards Ecuador took several days, although by then it felt more like several weeks. Eventually the desert began to disappear. There was greenery again. The air became more tropical and the Ecuador border grew closer. I don't mind admitting that leaving Peru was no hardship.

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The costumes were amazing

But I wasn't sure Peru itself was entirely the problem.

We were still moving and we were not stopping. We had come too far for that. But somewhere along the road I had stopped assuming that because we had got away with everything so far, we would keep getting away with it.

Maybe that is experience. Maybe it is age.

Or maybe I really am losing my nerve.

Either way, Ecuador was ahead of us.

So we kept going.

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