Overdue Peru/Bolivia musings, and pictures!

Posted on Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 at 7:56 pm. There is 1 comment so far.

See other posts about Bolivia, hiking, history, Michigan, music, Peru, travel.

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I know, it’s a little late to be posting about the Peru/Bolivia trip I returned from several months ago. You see, when I first got back I wasn’t sure what to write about. We traveled a lot. We hiked a lot. We saw lots of spectacular scenery and some very impressive pre-colonial architecture, toured a coffee plantation and ate some really nice ice cream. But somehow I thought there should be a more meaningful, more transformative, message to come away with. So what else could I do? I devised a reading list, downloaded some podcasts, and stopped by the library for an armful of educational videos. If my life hadn’t been changed through touring the country, maybe I could at least construct how I though my life should have been changed, by acquiring as much information as possible. Right?

Turns out enrichment doesn’t work quite like that. Reading about the history of a people will never give me license to make broad statements about them, or change the deep fibers of how my brain works. I can’t force myself to see the world in a different light. And maybe that’s ok. Not every trip has to have the same message. Costa Rica is a country built up around a tourism industry of self-discovery and introspection; beach resorts and organic farms abound with free-spirited travelers and it’s hard to not meditate on race, nationality, entitlement and inheritance. Peru and Bolivia, on the other hand, seem to encourage foreigners to move on through, tour the gringo trail, leave some money behind, and then continue on their way. Traveling outside the established zone is apparently putting your life at risk.

Which brings me to – the scenery. The whole country seems to be some of the most incredible and most harsh landscapes I’ve ever seen. And we based ourselves in the hospitable regions! The first bus ride along the coast passed along 16 hours of absolute dessert. Aside from small fertile valleys along river begs, there was nothing growing, nothing but rocks, sand, endless views, and… villages. I don’t know how people were living in these places, but they seemed to be. One of the most touching things I saw was the carefully arranged rocks outlining roads and properties in apparently a town in the dessert – there was no other way to distinguish borders in the endless changeless dryness. But yet the human brains clings to order and meaning and creates a village in the sand.

Moving inland we passed into the mountains where switchback roads climb and fall, generally with a sheer cliff face to one side making me hope the driver doesn’t lose concentration and the brakes don’t give out. In the books I’ve been reading armies passed over this mountain range several times, and countless people fed themselves by building terraces and farming the sheer cliff faces. What an incredibly soft life I’ve lived. And we barely skimmed the edges of the jungles which make up over a third of both countries, partly because many of the roads are simply impassible during the wet season and partly because, without hiring a guide, you are likely to get lost or eaten.

So what overarching messages did I take away with me, after 7 weeks in Peru and Bolivia, as the taxi pulled in to the Lima airport? 1. That I like western-world comforts more than I would like to admit, and 2. that, even after traveling through some unbelievably sublime countryside and splurging on accommodations and half-kilos of ice cream I could never afford anywhere else, I was incredibly glad, and lucky, to be going home to Michigan.

And now, here are some pictures from the trip! Click images for more information on the trip.