Dayarrhea, With a Spectacular Finish

An old lady picks up a brimming crockpot and totters back and forth as she tries to walk across the room. Liquids, equidistant from poles of homogeneity and emulsification and littered with hunks and flecks of matter varying in color, size and structural-rigidity, slosh perilously in a single wave that breaks constantly and barely seeps out from under the clear glass lid before dribbling over the sides and onto the floor. The old lady remains oblivious to the slosh and the drips of multi-colored steaming slush she transports, and carries out her practical task of moving with no regard for the way in which age has tightened some of her bolts and loosened others and generally distorted a once-graceful glide into a frenetic, animatronic lurch....

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I woke up in the Stop and Drop bed, iPod alarm sounding insistently, and found that the old lady from my dream had my guts. Yesterday’s lunch was now preeminently influencing my consciousness. This was awful. Miriam was also quite unwell, though not so fiercely as I. She made the trek upstairs and retrieved our morning rations on a tray, and I decided that I’d better give dry bread half a chance, and so slowly dissected my crusty roll. We debated simply taking the day off, a reluctant first up to that point in an otherwise busy journey. We didn’t take the day off, but we waited until the afternoon to return by bus to the old city and check out the official black market. There are exactly zero photos from this day, because we were warned (by Footprints and Lonely Planet and, I think, our hostel proprietors) that carrying too many goodies might be a bad idea in this part of town. However, all of the discomfort that we felt during this outing was digestive, and I wouldn’t give Polvos Azules the distinction of a particularly dangerous part of Lima, unless you’re in charge of copyright enforcement.

This time, we exited our bus toward the end of the great big park that signals the approach to the old city. From here we walked to the edge of that park and back along another massive road to one of the largest intersections that I had ever seen, where police officers were stationed in the road to direct the traffic and also in elevated boxes on the street corners wrapped in yellow vinyl
Inca Cola signs. We crossed two streets and began to see vendors selling metal implements, vicious looking knives and knuckles and a handgun or two generally with smaller items and jewelry sprinkled around. It seemed like we must be getting close, and in two more blocks we found ourselves in the shadow of the vibrant blue concrete structure we sought.

Entering Polvos Azules is just like going to a run-down mall only, unlike the case of run-down malls that I’ve encountered in this hemisphere, this mall is disproportionately alive compared with spots in the U.S.A. that feature its crumbling facades, permanently fused escalators and unkempt stalls. This place and the shoppers and vendors therein showcased a wonderful divide between the desire to have these properly prestigious artifacts of current media and fashion (at least insofar as they were reasonable facsimiles) and the indignation that most main-stream urban consumers in the U.S.A. would feel at having to procure them in a space that has no interest in sharing in this sparkling, consumptive aesthetic. We moved from overcast afternoon sun into the dim fluorescence of the great, blue box-cave, which smelled like frying oil and dusty cardboard rolled in sugar. The whole thing had the feel of something between a warehouse and a parking garage.

Aside from simply wanting to see the market, we had the idea that we should pay special attention to the offerings from the knock-off clothing vendors for especially witty instances of Engrish. We’d seen a few good shirts up to that point on our journey, though I don’t recall specifically what they said. The first stalls on our end of the first floor we visited in Polvos were skater/surfer/generally-male themed, then there were the girlie dress shops, the video-game shops with a couple of young guys each playing futbol or shooting zombies, the movie shops, the tool shops, the camera shops, the cellphone vendors, the poster shops, and some shops whose theme was anyone’s guess and that seemed to carry a little bit of everything. We made one pass down the length of one floor before we realized just how gigantic this box actually was.

Miriam decided, or more precisely was selected, to undertake the job of reviewing the facilities, and we followed signs to a weird shanty on the roof guarded by a wizened man at a card table rolling two sheets of toilet paper into little bundles and also selling some assortment of unmarked productos higenicos para damas. I fished out fifty soles and some extra napkin wadding from one of my pragmatically overstuffed pockets, Miriam paid the old man and I waited, gazing out off the roof into the sea of buildings. I was beginning to feel unwell again, and pulled a cracked pink bismuth tablet from my pocket before slowly chewing it and working pieces of it loose from my molars. I had no lust to fully confront my errant plumbing on this rooftop, and kept it to myself for the time being.


Miriam came back out, not too impressed, but at least somewhat relieved. And we went back in to take another look at potentially hilarious shirts. Miriam may dispute this claim, but I don’t remember coming across too many really exceptional examples, and the Engrish generally lacked the spontaneity of stereotypical Japanese examples where the object is to arrange spatio-aesthetically acceptable combinations of English words. The shirts we found in Polvos often seemed to be constructed by making screen-prints based on actual designs of shirts sold by major labels transposed from some kind of degenerate source material like a low-res online preview image or an out of focus snapshot. Images came through this process perceptibly unscathed, but text was rendered retarded through the use of what seemed like attempts at applying OCR to the fuzzy source text.

This was the kind of stuff that they’d counterfeited. The large, messily aligned letters of “Abercrombie and Fitch” or “American Eagle” or “Rip Curl” or “Billabong” were clear enough, and then all the half-faded gibberish writing that is (was?) frat-boy fashion catnip du jour made little to no sense and often contained obvious algorithmic garbage characters. It’s difficult to understand all that effort undertaken to loosely copy something so cheesy, but once you’d stuck your head into this locus of fashion, it was impossible not to notice the fact that nearly everyone who had any business trying to look hip on a budget in Lima was sporting this swag. I was beginning to come unglued, something that I will admit is regularly a part of extended encounters with retail that I undertake without a clear enough goal. Miriam took her time, and I progressed from the slumped shuffle of the overshopped to the tighter, more erratic, gait of someone who feels as though they might void their bowels arbitrarily.

Eventually, we just gave up, not sufficiently enchanted with any one piece of Polvos Azules, but reticent to leave such a grand oddity without some official talisman. Back on the street, the air was still hot and oily, but the breeze felt good, and I bought some kind of coolish fizzy liquid from a woman with a cart. Early field reports from the pink molecules I’d sent in to civilize and organize my sub-esophageal riffraff suggested that perhaps my intrepid chemical strike force (this is a bad metaphor, I assume they’re really more like a specialized hugging brigade) was making headway in its campaign. We crossed back along the great intersection and entered the park alongside a museum surrounded by temporary fences, apologetic signage, and construction flotsam. The evening was coming, though how fast exactly was hard to say. I sipped soda and Miriam and I tried to decide what was to be done next. We’d been told that it was essential that we go see the lighted fountains display (http://www.circuitomagicodelagua.com.pe/), a major spectacle that happened a couple nights a week, and we determined that we wouldn’t have enough time to return to Miraflores and grab cameras before the show. Instead, we went straight to the park and got in line.

The sun set shortly after we paid our five dollars each and walked toward a towering, multi-colored, triangular grid formed by wide, high-pressure jets of water. The magic water circuit sprawls within a fenced park, and passes under a road by way of a tunnel lined with a giant (highly political) photographic essay on the impact of the construction of this park on the surrounding community. The park was an amazing place to watch people of all ages, and by the time we emerged from tunnel they were beginning to pack-in tightly. Without really trying, we found ourselves in a throng waiting for the exposition of the fantasía fuente. The fantasy turned out to be a pretty amazing combination of laser and digital image projection onto screens of flowing water, set to a number of generic classical masterpieces (when isn’t Beethoven an appropriate selection? no, really, I’m asking) and numerous repetitions of El Condor Pasa. Luckily, the crowd was mostly armpit tall, so it was very easy for me to see what was really an incredible visual feast. I had a good view of the lasers blasting through the plumes of water and right into the windows of an adjacent apartment building, whoops!

After the fantasía finally burned itself out, we wandered the rest of the circuit in the increasingly brisk darkness. It was fun, and the air in the park was weird and highly variable: sea breeze meeting city heat meeting cool mist meeting dense crowds. Any sadness we felt at not having brought our cameras along for the day’s outings, was allayed seeing nearly everyone snapping copious photos and videos on all manner of devices (google it, see every fountain in detail). We made sure that we’d checked all the fountains, and then circuited fully, out to the street. We hopped a bus and squeezed together for the loud, windy, bumpy ride.

Real-time Homecoming and A Hot Day in Piura

Jiggity Jig - April 25, 2010

I'm back in Iowa (likewise, Miriam is back in Pennsylvania). This actually happened about four days ago, but I still haven't quite gotten used to the feeling. The adventure is still warm in my senses and on my limbs. The way to describe this place and its familiar features seems to take the form of only one word, thus far: opulence.
My stomach too seems to be experiencing difficulty understanding what has happened in the last few days. Suddenly the milk is fresh again, not that stuff that will stand forever at room temperature in a box. The cupboards are brimming full with a well-stocked collection of the rare elements that drive tastebuds mad the world over. My guts aren't prepared for this access, and they're letting me know that I must take things slowly.
Anyway, among the opulent features of the life I find myself rejoining is a constant access to the internet, which should be a real boon insofar as the updating of this blog is concerned. So, without dwelling any longer on understanding and telling the concluding portions of this tale, let me continue with our trudge into the depths of Peru.

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We sat, sweating and thumbing through our respective guidebooks (Peru was the only country for which we had afforded this kind of redundancy, hauling both the Footprints 2010 and the Lonely Planet 2008). We had already bought our tickets from Piura to Lima, and were now on an endurance race to kill the many hours that lay between us and our departure time, something like 1800 hrs, in the least unpleasant way. I don't remember exactly what we were looking for in our books, and in fact the search was probably more of a general survey of Peru-bound possibilities, but I do remember at least one thing that we found.

Somewhere in Lonely Planet 2008, I think near the front of the book and perhaps in a section giving some cultural overview of the country to be toured, I ran across a passage warning travelers about a known hazardous time of year for the South America sojourner: Semana Santa. Holy week, the book informed, was a time when all forms of transportation and lodging clogged with use, and also a time when fares were jacked up from sixty to one hundred percent. Unfortunately, for erstwhile Lutherans like myself, holy week is not something that falls on a hard and fast date year after year. Rather, one can find it lurking vaguely in the range of March-April. This, as many of you know, was nearly the entire range of our trip, and a very scary unknown indeed.

We left the bus terminal, each of us carrying all of our possessions once again, and hobbled off through the streets of Piura. We had goals now, and because the sun had not yet reached its zenith we were still confident in our ability to enjoy accomplishing them.

The first problem to be addressed was a lack of food. Our maps of Piura were terrible, and we ended up at a bank first, so Miriam withdrew some Nuevo Soles. As we once again entered the flow of Piura foot traffic, we began to notice that we were still too early in the morning to hope to find food on the street that was not sold in a package. We sat down on some benches in front of a huge church and waited in the shade for half an hour. Now things were beginning to wake up, this must have been around 1000hrs. We located a little place that appeared to do some food and while I ate a jamon y queso, Miriam tried out the first ceviche of Peru, one so memorable for its quality that she would reference it throughout the remainder of our trip. It was a refreshing, albeit not (relatively) cheap desayuno: the ceviche probably cost between three and four dollars.

From 2010-02-25

From there we walked back out to the main plaza and had a look around. Miriam had noticed a tourist information office that had been closed before, adjacent the bank. That office was now open, air conditioned, and likely to know all about Peru's potential diversions and probably the precise dates of Semana Santa this year. We went in and were given what I found to be a completely hypnotic and exhaustive explication of every archaeological site in Peru by a pleasant young woman with a very methodical, rhythmic and soft tone. At one point, during something like the fifth of seven or so maps of different regions of Peru, my head slipped off of my left hand and lurched quite close to the table. After learning about more than a lifetime's worth of Peruvian attractions, we finally had the good sense to ask about the dates of holy week. Which, as it turned out, was scheduled for precisely the time when we would hurriedly revisit this expansive, international road trip on the way to a date with the Galapagos. We left, freaked out about our newfound scheduling debacle, though now equipped with an extensive collection of maps and pamphlets and two fine complimentary ballpoints.

Our next stop: LAN. We crossed the plaza again to investigate the true malleability of the terms and conditions of our South America Airpass. As I recall, we entertained a few ideas about how best to overcome the problems then coming to light in our itinerary. If we were lucky we could just rearrange things to suit this obstacle: shift each flight outright, cut out one leg, add another. If we were less lucky, we supposed, we might have to do something more drastic altogether, such as lose our second stint in Peru altogether and fly directly from Santiago back to Quito. As it turned out, neither of these options was within the range luck afforded. The details of our itinerary had become final once we made our initial flight, and any additions to the trip would fall under the insane pricing schedule that usually applies to foreigners flying under LAN. The best we could hope for was to shift the dates of one flight for a less insane fee, and hope for available buses when the time came.

As we left LAN, worried and somewhat underwhelmed by the apparent inflexibility of our trip, we soon forgot thoughts of our grandiose logistical problems in favor of thoughts such as "Why are we carrying all of our stuff right now?" or "Are we on the surface of the sun?" and, of course, "I know I'll regret saying this but, I wish we were on the damn bus already!" We dragged our under-rested bodies through the streets, almost as though we were pulling dying pack animals (ourselves) through some hellish desert, while onlookers smiled and chuckled, and made me wonder about just how stupid we looked and whether we weren't really that stupid. At that moment, we seemed to me extremely stupid, though a very nice person could probably get away with simply describing us as ridiculously unfortunate or perhaps retarded.

Not wanting to melt, and seeing few options aside from pushing on, we bought water, checked our email, and then headed for an ice cream shop. One great thing about traveling with Miriam is that ice cream has an almost cinematic ability to save the day.

From 2010-02-25

This ice cream experience was, thankfully, no exception to the physics of Miriam, and the good vibe carried us back to the stifling bus station, and all through the end of the wait and the process of boarding. And that's where the next chapter begins: on the road to Lima.