Armed with nothing except the pithy beam of a dying headlamp, ill-fitting cheap plastic flip-flops and the will to NOT pay for a taxi cab, Matt and I tromp unwittingly into danger in the complete darkness on the road leading out of Santa Teresa in hopes of finding Shangri-La. We heard that the hot springs on the edge of town were amazing . . . and open late . . . and sparsely populated after the 8 o´clock hour.

Rudely awakened from my pre-hot springs nap by the cry of, ¨Ultimo combi para los aguas calientes!¨ or Last combi to the hot springs, I  wipe the drool off my face, grab a sarong and get out the door, but the combi is long gone. A cab offers to drive us there, wait for a couple of hours and drive us back, but the charge is steep and I don´t want to be locked into a finite amount of time at the hot springs.

So, we decide to walk it. As soon as we leave the sparse light of the boomtown of Santa Teresa, the sharp rocks in the dark road begin to poke through our flip-flops. ¨Have I mentioned how much I fucking HATE flip-flops??!¨ Matt says over and over, laughing. Turns out that we were like babes in the woods. We had no clue how dangerous that boulder filled road was. Sure, I had an inkling . . .  after all, we were walking down a steep grade.

I ponder for a moment how we are going to get back up the mountain after a few hours of relaxing in the hot springs, but then dismiss it. I find that these types of details usually just take care of themselves. I also have no bathing suit with me, but I don´t care about that either . . . We have no cares in the world . . . well, except the rocks that are tattering our lilly white  toes . . . but we are laughing about that too.

We stumble down the dark road for nearly forty minutes. We know we are getting close because we see the lights to the hot springs looming in the distance. I see a car above us, twisting and turning slowly on the road, and can hear the crunch of rock beneath the tires. ¨Hey,¨ I say to Matt. ¨Watch out, there´s a car coming . . . it´s far away, though.¨ And on we walk.

Suddenly, the car comes around a tight curve and is very close. ¨Here it comes!¨ I said as I point my weak head lamp light toward the edge of the road so we can find a spot to wait as the car passes. Unfortunately, we are walking on the right-hand edge of the road, the side facing the wide open canyon. Obviously, we weren´t thinking . . . otherwise we would have been walking on the left-hand side of the road, the safe side of the road, the side built up against the mountain.

It all happened so fast. The car swings around the curve. We are in the head lights and a split second later as the headlights speed past . . . Matt disappears. I hear him grunt and in the last second of the car´s light, I see his head disappear right off the edge of the road. I have no idea how far he fell . . .

I scream as the car passes us in a flurry of dust and red tail lights. ¨Matt!¨ I yell. I am shaking. I am scared. The car grinds to a halt. The doors fly open and silhouettes of people run toward me. By the time the people get to me, Matt is up, on the road and has only one flip-flop on his foot.

¨Todo bien?¨ the people ask over and over again. Someone retrieves the lost flip-flop. Matt wasn´t even aware that he was standing in the road with only one shoe. Someone points to a cut on his toe, but he´s not aware of that either. Other than a bit groggy, thankfully, he seems OK.

But then he says, ¨Shine the light here,¨ and lifts up his shirt to reveal an already dark purple mass on his ribcage about 6¨ wide.

He escaped with no broken ribs, only a deep tissue bruise. Good thing we were on our way to the hot springs . . . he thinks that´s what saved him from what should have been really painful. It all turned out OK. The family who stopped to help us gave us a lift to the hot springs and took us home later too. I am conviced they are the nicest people in Santa Teresa – and the mom runs a kickin´ juice stand during the day.

¨What were you thinking?¨I ask Matt later. ¨Why did you run ahead, out of the beam of the flashlight?¨

¨Well,¨ he replied. ¨I was just trying to get out of the way, so I stepped into the darkest spot on the side of the road.¨

We went back to the springs the next day while it was still daylight. Let´s just say it´s a good thing that he didn´t fall when we were high up on the mountain road, because there was nothing but sheer cliff edge for most of the way to the springs. He fell off the lowest part of the road, the part nearly level with the valley floor. The hole he fell in was the only hole in the entire stretch of  road – a 6´ square man-made hole of layered rock probably used for water drainage.

The next day as we slurped freshly blended juice, the kind juice lady asked, ¨What are you all doing today . . . he´s probably hurting bad.¨

¨Going on a hike, ¨I said. ¨I can´t believe it either, but he wants to go climb a mountain.¨

¨Ooooh,¨ the juice lady smiled, ¨A macho man.¨

Let me recommend Ampay bus line for all of the above.

We hop onto the afternoon bus bound for Quillabamba and I am impressed. This bus is a Mercedes-Benz with freshly ironed curtains lining the windows. The entire bus has a crisp appearance, every surface has clean edges that don’t seem to be worn down with years, grime and abuse. But the best features are the padded, plastic covered leg rests. Ah, luxury! We recline our seats, kick down the leg rests and breathe deep. I am looking forward to a relaxing, comfortable ride to the jungle town of Quillabamba.

The lady across the aisle from us is the only other rider I have an awareness of. She’s holding a cute little puppy in brightly colored manta. Great! We’re riding in comfort next to a cute little puppy . . . can it get any better? We play with the puppy and his little blanket. The puppy eventually shits on the bus floor. We all laugh and the lady cleans it up and throws the toilet paper out the window.

The journey to Quillabamba is long and arduous. Not many travelers take the trip because it’s an eight or nine hour bus ride and the last few hours are on a bumpy, unpaved road and there aren’t many popular tourist destinations in that direction. Quillabamba sits in the high jungle just on the other side of a range of 14,000’ mountain peaks that overlook the popular tourist town of Ollantaytambo. We want to go to Quillabamba for an experience of the high jungle, locally grown coffee and just to see what it’s like.

The bus twists up and up and up for a couple of hours, on a really nice smooth paved road. Then we hit the clouds and we glide through mist. Every once in awhile, the bus is flagged down by little Peruvian kids wearing traditional Quechua clothing. We stop for just a second, the driver hands the kid some bread and we are off again. I’m so comfortable and I’m thinking about how I need to have an Anna-tude adjustment about riding the busses and just learn to relax and trust that everything will be all right. The clouds are so beautiful, we’re crossing the apex of the mountain peak, the cute little puppy is running around . . .

. . . and all of a sudden, there’s a bit of a commotion. No less than four Peruvian matriarchs, including the one sitting next to us with the puppy, run toward the middle of the bus. “Que paso?” I ask the guy sitting next to us. He makes a rounded-belly motion with his hand. “Nacimiento?” I ask. A birth? He shakes his head an emphatic yes. The bus still twists and turns through the clouds, not slowing down at all. I look up. Sure enough, there are four matronly ladies with concerned looks, swaying and staggering in the ailse as the bus rounds the curves, looking down at a passenger who is reclined in one of the comfy bus seats. All I can see from my seat in the back is that they are pushing on a woman’s belly. I’d like to get a picture, but feel it just wouldn’t be right . . .

They ask me if I want to see. I stand up and make my way, swaying with the bus, toward the woman. She’s reclined and her fists are clenched into the blanket that covers her waist. She’s made not one sound, hasn’t cried out in pain at all. “Has she had the baby?” I ask, thinking that the woman is still in labor. Then I notice the man sitting next to her. He’s holding the cloth that the puppy had been wrapped up in earlier. He pulls the cloth back to reveal a tiny baby so new that it’s still covered in goo.

“Close the windows!” one of the matrons calls out. Another passenger offers a sprig of some kind of plant. The woman holds the sprig over the baby and murmurs a prayer in Quechua. The Andean people revere the surrounding mountains as gods. The fact that this baby was born on the very top of this apu is not lost on these mountain women. This baby is special. That apu wanted it to be born right at that moment.

Sometimes the apus claim lives in horrific bus crashes. It’s a daily fact of life that Peruvians just live with. But this time, a new life is born, innocent and new at 14,000’, in the clouds and mist at the top of the mountain.

By the time we arrive in Paucartambo it is nearing midnight. We just want to find a hostel and get the skinny on how to get to Tres Cruces, the place with the amazing sunrises.

We find a hostel/hair cutting place. There are actually still wet hair cuttings on the floor of the entryway. We explain to the clerk/hairstylist that we want to go to Tres Cruces to see the sunrise. She looks at us sort of funny, shrugs her shoulders and begins her schpiel. The taxi leaves around 3:30 in the morning and the cost is 100 soles for the cab to transport us there, wait for two hours and then drive us back. Taxi? I explain that we don’t need the extravagance of a cab and are really just looking for a bus to take us there. We could hang out in Tres Cruces for the day if we needed to. She looks at us funny again.

After I ask the same question four times, I finally realize that Tres Cruces is not a town or a village. It is a lookout point only. There is nothing there. No town, no village and no busses to get there. The clerk assures us that there will be lots of clouds and most likely no amazing sunrise. She does, however, show us a wall calendar with a golden picture of the three-sunrise optical illusion that only occurs in June and July. Yeah, most of the time I skip using a guidebook, or else I might know these things – but the trip would also be a lot more boring. I crave the ups and downs of self-exploration.

But we decided that dammit, we came all this way in a rusted tin can of a bus, bouncing around on dangerous, rocky roads for eight hours to do one thing – go to Tres Cruces – and nothing, not even clouds obscuring that magical rising sun was going to stop us. We hired the cab. After a couple hours of sleep and we get into the cab at 3:30 in the morning and head off, Matt with the hostel’s pillow and blanket in hand.

We are pretty much delirious from bad planning and lack of sleep. We just laugh at the ridiculousness of our journey and decide to have a blast anyway. The cab drives at approximately 25 MPH for over an hour, slogging through thick mud and big rocks. The driver and his partner in passenger seat both comment on how ugly the road is and how a month ago a bus driver they used to know lost control of his bus and slid off a cliff. Now the dry season was starting up again, so there was less to worry about.

It is still the dead of night when we finally get to the Tres Cruces area, where our drivers stop at an abandoned security shed so we can pay the ten sole park fee. They bang on the darkened door, but no one answers. We drive onward, to another park ranger building. The driver’s partner gets out of the car and pounds on the door for a few minutes, until a sleepy-eyed ranger opens the door. He explains that some people want to go to Tres Cruces. The ranger shakes his head and demands a 50 sole fee to walk to the gate and open it so the cab could drive through.

“So, I guess no one comes here during this time of the year?” I ask the driver.

And just like an American with attitude would shrug his shoulders as if to imply that my question was ridiculous, the driver says in an incredulous tone, “No, nadie!” No, you crazy gringa, no one comes here in April!

The driver himself gets out of the car and talks the ranger into walking down to open the gate so we can get through. We drive down a neglected path for about another half hour. When we finally get to the coveted overlook spot, Matt and I laugh together as we stand on the simple concrete slab while freezing in the pre-morning light. We watch the clouds lighten and cackled to one another, “No, nadie!” every once in awhile.

But just knowing that we were standing on the lip of a mountain that plunges down over 10,000’ into a cloud covered jungle, whether we could see it or not, was enough. We watched the sun rise and it didn’t matter to us if the three suns were rising behind grey clouds or not. We were acutely aware of everything, appreciating even the smallest details of the obscured morning – first the infinite quiet, then the sounds of the earth waking up. Every dew-drop, every frog croak and every scrap of light that made it through the layers and layers of fast-moving clouds that engulfed us were sheer wonderment and excitement for us. That was the real magic of the morning.

All the locals around here stare openly at Matt´s giant red beard.

Peruvian men don´t have the genes for  growing much in the way of facial hair, so his is a real novelty around these parts. Yesterday, we sat in a shady spot and did our normal thing – watched the Sunday market in the Plaza De Armas in Pisac, Peru. We were quietly resting when Matt suddenly exclaimed, ¨Aha, I caught them! I caught all four of those ladies staring at my beard!¨ He pointed toward four Andean women across the walkway from us who were sitting on blue tarps in the bright sun selling onions, peppers and carrots. They all smiled and quickly looked away, giggling.

We waited, resting for a few more minutes. I let my eyes drift over toward the row of women. I waited until they all stared again, because I knew it would happen . . . and then . . . just when all eyes were on Matt, I reached over next to him, still staring straight ahead and with no emotion and without looking at him, I gave a good solid yank on his beard.

They all fell into fits of laughter again, this time whispering to one another behind their hands. Then we got an idea. We practiced the whole schpeil in Spanish a few times first. Then I went over to talk to the women.

¨Hello! Good Afternoon!¨I said to the ladies in Spanish. ¨You know, if you want to touch his beard, it´s ok with me. Only ONE SOLE.¨ They knew I was kidding. They shook their heads and the laughter started again. ¨But, you can touch it for free if you´ll let me take your picture while you´re doing it!¨

No takers. Darn. We would have traded – a little touch of the beard for some onions . . . why not?

 . . . . all this time we’ve been paying nine soles for a quarter of chicken and fries. It’s good, but it always seemed a bit expensive to me.

 The other day a girl was walking down the road, pushing a bicycle cart. Just as I was about to pass her, we were coming upon a slight incline. I grabbed the back of the bicycle and began to help her push the bike and cart across the little footbridge and up the hill. I wasn’t paying attention and my foot went through the slats of the footbridge and I fell all the way up to my knee, hand still on bicycle.

Luckily, I didn’t get hurt at all. The entire situation was funny to me and I couldn’t stop laughing as I stood there up to my thigh caught in the footbridge. I couldn’t stop laughing as I climbed out and I certainly couldn’t stop laughing as the girl and I finished pushing the bike up the hill.

She stopped to make sure that I was all right. We ended up talking (even though we barely could understand one another) and walking all the way to Pisac. She’s a nice girl. We sort of became friends on our walk. We got to talking about restaurants.

I told her that my favorite was Las Gamelas Polloria. Her eyes lit up. She said in spanish, “Isn’t it a great place? And only 4.50 soles for a quarter chicken!”

Wait. Just. One. Minute. They always charge us nine soles for a quarter chicken. Ah! Gringo pricing has struck once again! I’ll go back, for sure, but this time, I’ll do some more bargaining, even if I need to take it up with Mama Chicken herself . . . .

I knew it when I stepped out of my favorite quiet cafe and counted fourteen tour busses lined up on the cobblestone street of the Pisac square. Any doubts I had were immediately erased from my mind when I saw a gaggle of blonde girls run past me, loaded down with plastic shopping bags. One of the trio squealed, ¨So, like, where´s our bus anyway?¨

The rainy season in Peru is officially over. Peru has two seasons only – wet and dry.  Most books you read and people you talk to will tell you to come to Peru only during the dry season. Well, here´s my insider tip: I highly recommend visiting Peru during the wet season, mostly because the ´wet season´ isn´t really all that wet.

When I arrived in late December, everyone I knew in Pisac talked about how dismal the wet season was going to be. That´s when I also found out that everyone I knew planned their vacations from January through March – all the local bed and breakfast owners, the cafe owner and even alot of the shamans. As far as people I know, it´s been sort of a ghost town around here but I´ve still enjoyed this place immensely, even though I´ve missed my local friends. The cafes were still open, as were the hostels and don´t worry – there´s always a multitude of shamanic medicine available here.

The friend I´m house-sitting for comes back in two weeks. The new school year began for the children of the Andes yesterday morning – many of them wore uniforms and shiny dress shoes. The epic water balloon fights of school vacation have officially come to an end. And – no matter what the media says about the economy – the tourists are back in force.

January and February were not all that rainy here in the Sacred Valley. Most days began a little overcast and misty, but after a couple of hours, it would be all blue skies and puffy white clouds. The mud dries quickly around here. I only wore mud boots once during the entire rainy season. There was only one night where it rained all night long and maybe two days of solid rain – every other bit of moisture was intermittent and even enjoyable.

The best part about visiting Peru during the rainy season is the lack of other tourists. During the months of January and February, it seemed as though I spied a fair number of khaki-covered, lens-toting tourists. But now that March has arrived and the tour busses are backed up down the narrow streets, choking everyone with noxious exhaust fumes, I can tell that the droves of sightseers have officially arrived.

Honestly, I´ve begun to avoid the market even more than normal. All the restaurants are packed. The local B&B´s are over-booked. My friend Rosie says that the American tourists are the ones who spend the money. And so, in a way, I´m glad that the dry season has returned. The people I know who have businesses here are about to flourish once again and the vendors who sell their wares will once again have buyers.

But I feel so very lucky that I´ve had a chance to experience this beautiful place when it was just a little quieter than normal . . . !

A relatively new Peruvian phenomenon are strikes, or los paros. If the strike lasts a longer than a day or so, then it´s called la huelga. In any case, the people of Peru have only recently begun to implement strikes as a form of protest. Usually the strikes revolve around transportation, which can make getting from town to town difficult for locals and tourists alike. (Such a bitch when you´re trying to get to Maccu Pichu, ya know . . . )

Apparently, when the transportation strikes first began,  the protesters would hide on the edges of highways and throw big rocks at passing traffic. But, after several busses were hit with rocks and subsequently fell off of sheer roadside cliffs, killing everyone on board, they´ve re-vamped their stategies. Now they block the roads with huge rocks or cut down giant eucalyptus trees to stop the flow of traffic. I´ve heard also about riots and fighting in the streets of Cusco on occasion.

So far, the strikes have not directly affected me, as I usually stay close home. The strangest thing of all about the strikes are that, believe it or not, they are actually scheduled events. This is very helpful and considerate of los paros in my opinion, because at least it gives people a chance to make alternative arrangements.  Most of the time we find out the day before about an impending strike from Ulreke´s, the local ex-pat cafe.

One day when we went to Ulreke´s for breakfast, we noticed that there weren´t very many vendors set up in the market, which is usually packed. There was a military truck parked in the town square filled with soldiers in full riot gear, guns and sheilds ready. Although there were children scrambling all over the hood of the truck, there was an unsettledness in the air.

Ulreke, the cafe owner, came to take our order. She informed us in a very matter-of-fact way that the neighboring city of Calca was demanding Pisac´s solidarity in their strike over a land dispute with the jungle provinces. Any shop or vendor caught doing business by any of Calca´s protesters were promised to receive broken store windows and smashed stalls and merchandise. Ulreke just shrugged her shoulders and said, ¨If los paros show up, then we´ll just lock the doors and the shutters and we´ll have a party.¨

And about 25 Calca protesters did show up that day, brandishing broomsticks and chanting in the streets. No broken windows or looted market stalls to speak of – in fact, most of the vendors kept right on selling their food and wares. 

Today there was supposed to be a strike, but it was cancelled. There´s talk that it may happen on Wednesday instead, but everyone just kind of shrugs their shoulders and says, ¨who knows?¨ I´ve noticed a bit of a lackadaisical attitude in local people and tourists alike regarding the strikes. The issue at stake this time is a bigger one: the people are angry about possible government privitization of water. With such a bigger issue looming on the table, it will be interesting to see if strike days remain business as usual.

Pisac sits at 9,800 feet above sea level. The stars here are amazing, bright and they seem so close you could almost reach out and touch them. Peru is an amazing place in general and because of that, full of folk-lore about mysterious happenings. The energy here is certainly strong, just about anyone here can feel it. Numerous New-Age Westerners have settled here for just that reason. But, you don’t have to be into New Age stuff to notice the lights flashing in the sky.

“It can be whatever you want it to be,” says my friend Javier.

Javier officially explains that the quick flashes that sometimes light up the night sky are from lightning in the jungle, which is only about fifty miles away just across the tall mountains of the Sacred Valley, where Pisac sits. The flashes appear to be heat lightning to me. There’s never any accompanying thunder, but I don´t think there ever is with heat lightning. Anyway, the weather here isn´t the humid kind that usually causes heat lightning.

“No,” another American friend who’s lived here for over a year says, “That’s not heat lightning. I have my theories, but that is not lightning.”

Whether the flashes are lightning or not remains to be seen. But what I do know is that the other night, as we lay out on the front patio, looking at the stars, we saw a  moving point of light that did not appear to be an aircraft. It zoomed across the sky, grew in size about ten times bigger than it was with a warm, steady glow and then went back to it’s original size as a small point of light. Then it disappeared.

Airplane? I don’t know. I’ve never seen an airplane do anything like that. It was a completely clear night. Matt laid in bed a few nights ago with a torn knee muscle, alone in the house, waiting for my friends and I to return. When I got home, he said he’d heard a strange, sustained humming noise for about 30 seconds that seemed to envelop the entire house.

“My knee hurt. The dogs were going crazy. I wasn’t about to get up and investigate,” he said.

I guess these things can be whatever we want them to be.

The work crew shows up six days a week just after the crack of dawn. There’s a lot of work to be done – refinishing the adobe on the house, constructing a network of stone pathways and building raised flowerbeds and a gazebo. Like any construction site, it can get noisy. Most of the noise around here comes from the workers as they break, by hand,  giant rocks that are about the size of car tires into the more useful size approximating that of a dinner plate.

They used to start early. Very early. Too freaking early. That is, until one day, when a bleary-eyed Javier went outside around 7 AM, clad in only his underwear and said in the kindest way possible to the work crew, “Please don’t break rocks until at least 8 o’clock in the morning . . .”

Last night, our little group headed out to Five Points in Columbia, South Carolina to grab some coffee. Along the way we had an altercation with a notorious local.

Hardy stops to grab some cash from a free-standing ATM  located outdoors next to a brick wall on it’s own tiny island of concrete inside what possibly may have been a flower bed at one time. In a sudden split-second, just like a cartoon character, an extrememly drunk (and normal-looking enough) man pops out from behind the ATM. It is as though he was spit out of the ATM right along with Hardy’s cash.

He comes right at me. I am a bit taken aback because my brain is still trying to figure out where he came from . . . . the dirt, the ATM itself, or did he just simply materialize? It is all so surreal. I smell alcohol on his breath.

“What’s your favorite band?” the troll from behind the ATM asks me.

“Um, well . . . ‘favorite’ is such an all-encompassing word . . . ” I answer, “It’s impossible to narrow it down to a favorite.”

I notice my friends begin to move away very quickly. Matt grabs my hand in a silent effort to drag me along.

“Yeah, well how about you stop trying to avoid me with what you believe is such witty banter and just answer my fucking question?” the troll yells at me as I’m being pulled away.

“You guys know him? Who is he?” I ask.

“He’s just this guy who is always just such an asshole!” says Matt as we all hurry down the sidewalk. I’m still confused.

The troll keeps yelling, but none of us are really sure who within our group he’s addressing.”Yeah, you think you are so cool with your black shirt, you fucking hipster. I’ll kick your ass if I see you in Columbia, South Carolina ever again. Do you hear me? I’ll kill you!”

For the record, he doesn’t look like he has the ability to hurt anyone. I think that’s what threw me. He just looks like a dorky office worker in a crumpled button-down shirt who had waaay too much to drink at happy hour.

Hardy, who never has a bad word to say to anyone, calls out behind us, “Fuck off, man. Why you gotta be an asshole?”

The troll follows us down the street, yelling and causing a scene. People sitting at cafe tables on the sidewalk look up, a bit horrified at the skirmish that’s coming their way. By this time, we all just want to get away and we’re walking as fast as we can past the cafe. I hope we lose this guy in the mix.

“Because I want you to confront me! Confront me! CONFRONT ME!” the troll screams.

In front of me, a lady from one of the patio tables jumps from her seat and says with sweetness and understanding to the troll behind us, “Confront me! Confront me!” and moves to grab him.

And we emerge from the fray and dissappear into the crowd.