![]() ![]() In the middle, blocking a portion of the city center section, is a large photo of the local beauty queen dressed in a glowing pink gown, triumphant white sash and tiara, her face full of pride and claws. Peru’s answer to Highway 1.Ī map is hung on the wall that leads to the open-air entrance, faded now and lined on the edges with ads for local businesses. The roads ahead are cliff-huggers and treacherous, I now remember. Highway protector forces like a Pan-American-style Super Friends, etched in echoes of ships’ helm carvings. A cherub, with blond ringlets and pink lips, a beacon of purity and innocence. A Herculean loin-clothed god, posing majestically under the rays of Heaven, surrounded by clouds. A redheaded mermaid, encircled by a fiery setting sun. Double deckers with shining new paint jobs, elegant stripes and potent colors, each one with a specialized center art piece. The little office faces outward to the street, buses squeezing by each other on the narrow strip, crowded by palms and crumbling facades and yelping dogs, in and out of the town´s main artery. A TV plays overhead, and the sexy male voice whispers intently, passionately, luring his prey into the mysterious joys of MasterCard. I am in the hyper-vivid now that will bloom a gilded memory, one that floats down from the flickering florescent bulbs of the van office and makes the moment feel like it should be preserved in a glass block of time. The old man looks at me, smiling apologetically, almost sadly, and says cuidate. We come across a group of men standing, bickering and laughing over something, and they nod, eying me. Of course, this also is the kind of authentic adrenaline rush you can’t buy online and so I start to smile, despite it all. I am grateful for his help, and a little surprised at myself for feeling nervous. ![]() He insists on bringing my bag down the block and helping me find someone to go to Mancora. We arrive at a busy street and now my pulse is racing just a bit faster as we step out into the hawkers and the dogs, the children and stalls of food, the smoke and the earth and the visceral real. He looks at me in the rear view.ĭangerous, I say, thinking. The driver curses, it´s been like this for over a year, he says.ĭangerous here now. The streets start to narrow as we burrow deeper into the heart of this dry desert scrub town, the once grand boulevards are mud or worse, stalled roadwork has left bricks jutting out everywhere, creating an obstacle course for speeding cars. Children shriek and play in the streets and women walk in purposeful groups along the sidewalks. The roads twist past rows of cinder block buildings their open-air windows throw colorful curtains to the sky. Probably not the best answer but the mood doesn’t change. He eyes me with a weary friendliness through the rear view. A legit taximan with lines on his face deep like ocean trenches pulls up, helps me get my bag in the car. ![]() I am waiting for an official cab, though the gypsies hover on the other side of the curb with laments and pleas and intensity. The passive voice of the driver echoing- anyone else going to Bogota? Anyone? The joy in the eyes of the smiling grandfather whirring along side me, on his way to a family reunion in the countryside of Colombia. Everyone I see, all the idiotic things, the lamentations and prejudices, the angelic offerings and the petty short changings. I am breathing, living, moving from one life to the next, remembering my always-on travel mantra that helps me dive full-in whenever I travel: I am that.Īll of it. I am whirring on the back of a golf cart speeding to the closing gates of a midnight flight to Bogota. ![]()
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