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.

Matt is a big sweaty guy. When he rides in a cramped bus, he likes to feel the air from an open window. The only problem is that Peruvians often insist that people close the windows while riding through the high cliffs of the countryside.

We found out that this is because of local superstition regarding the mountains, or apus. Each mountain has it’s own apu, or mountain spirit, each one sacred and each one considered to be a god. According to the locals, some mountains, or apus, are good and some are not. Regardless of their personality, no one wants to attract the spirit of the apu toward them. They are afraid that the spirit of the apu might take an interest in them and ‘want them.’

So, if riding in a hot, cramped bus and an old Quechua mamacita asks you to please close the window, just do it, out of respect for the mountains. It’ll get hot and stuffy on board, but it will keep the apus from wreaking havoc with the humans. And with the roads and bus conditions in this country, everybody needs every little bit of help that’s available.

So when we get on a bus, Matt usually tries to get on first, open as many windows as possible to let the bus air out before the journey begins. Then the windows slide closed one by one as the bus careens through the mountains. We sweat, smile and watch the gorgeous apus as we glide by, undercover and with respect for the gods who watch over this sacred land.

I wouldn´t write about this, except I see a need for it . . . so here we go, travelers!

Be aware! I can´t tell you how many tourists I spy here in the Andes of Peru who are completely, utterly and totally unaware of themselves and their packages, backpacks and purses. Really, I promise I will find at least one tourist today while I´m in Cusco who is oblivious and I´ll take a picture. Click here for an example of how not to be. When you travel, you must be aware. Without a sense of awareness, the truth is that you´re a target for thieves.

Got a great camera and lens? That´s awesome. Make sure you don´t flaunt it around. People living in high-tourist areas often do not have the resources to buy a camera like yours. If you must sport it around your neck, do something to disguise it. I suggest slinging the stap over your shoulder crossways and push the camera to the side of your body. Then put on your sweater or jacket. The camera will be easily accessible, yet less visible between the folds of your clothing. Make sure you know how to use your camera before leaving home. I see many, many photographers with a furrowed brow who are too busy trying to figure out their settings and are unaware of what is going on around them.

Um, wear your money belt under your clothes. Yes, I still see people tromping around with their money belt latched around their waists, on top of their clothing. If your money belt is visible, you are asking for trouble.

Walk around with a sense of awareness. Thieves are only looking for the easiest of pickings. If you are walking around loudly talking to your friends, camera out, while chomping a croissant, hands full and carting around a huge pack with lots of stuff dangling from it and completely unaware of the persons in the crowded street who are next to you, then you are once again asking for trouble. Besides, those people are just downright annoying to everyone, locals and other travelers alike.

Check out the sights. Be unobtrusive in the country where you are a guest. I would say try not to wear khaki shorts at all costs, but that´s just me . . .

My little friends who live down the road still pop out from the pigpen occasionally and scream, “Ho-o-o-ola!!” in a low growl. Sometimes, they can be mean, and try to act like they are going to hit me with their tiny fists, but of course, they never do. I surmise that some day soon when they are a bit older that they might be troublemakers. But for now, I just try to do what little I can as a transient foreigner in the neighborhood and keep them from punching or throwing things me. I greet them with humor and smiles always.

“Mis amigos! Hola!!” I called out when I saw the two of them on my way into town yesterday.

“No-o-o-o!” the little one cried as he stuck out his fist when I got near.

“Hey,” I said calmly, stretching my palm out flat toward him in an effort to gently correct his behavior. “No. Pare,” I said, which means ‘stop.’ He’s so tiny that as I did this, I had to bend my body down toward him.

He put his fist down and his gaze fixated on my necklace. “Daime esto,” he said as he pointed to it, which means ‘Give me that.’

I sighed with a little smile. “Creo que tu nombre es Daime, Daime,” I said, which means, ‘I think your name is Gimme, Gimme.’

Daily the “Daime Propina” kids continue their ritual of asking us for a tip while their pants are down around their ankles. Matt had a couple of friends in town visiting for a few weeks. One of them, our friend Hardy, pulled out a two sole coin one day and said, “Today when he jumps out and shakes his thing at me, I’m gonna tell him to come and get his tip.”

But that day was different. As we walked by, we didn’t see the children anywhere at first. Then, we saw the little one, fully clothed, hiding in the bushes, watching us as though he did not want to be seen. Although his eyes were dry, he looked like he’d been crying for quite some time. He saw us and didn’t say a word, not even the customary scream of  “Hola!” He just looked at us with a tear-streaked face and great big eyes.

“Aww,” Hardy said. “He looks really sad.”

And ever since that day, they’ve never spoken the word ‘propina’ again.

There’s a bend in the dirt road that leads to our house, right at the point where a mostly clear little fast-rushing mountain stream merges with the Urubamba River. In this crux where the two rivers meet sits a little mud brick house. Almost all the buildings in Peru are constructed of mud brick, mine included, but this one is a bit more primitive. There are no windows, just flour sacks covering the space where glass might normally be and they have no electricity and most likely no running water. The most modern feature of the place is a wooden front door with a padlock.

The family who lives there raises pigs. They have two cute little boys, who are always smeared with grime. One is about five and the other might be two and can barely talk; I sometimes see him still with a pacifier in his mouth. Both of the kids run around all the time unsupervised. This is normal in Peru, and honestly, I think it’s actually really great that kids are able to roam free in nature and play in this country without the need for constant monitoring. So, these two little kids are always running around in the dirt, playing in the rivers, hiding in the bushes and grasses along the road and sometimes it’s their job to chase down errant pigs. I even see the little one sometimes with a stick, herding pigs bigger than he is back home from their daily grazing.

These kids wear the same clothes every day. The little one can’t seem to keep his pants around his waist; they are always falling down. In fact, a lot of the time, these kids wear no clothing at all. It’s not uncommon to see them running around naked. Even if the kids are nowhere to be seen, they seem to know exactly when we are walking by. They will suddenly pop out from behind a bush, or open the corrugated metal door of the adjacent family pigpen and stick their heads out and scream, “Hola!”

“Hola!” we reply.

“Ho-o-ola!” the little one will yell again.

“Hola!” we reply again.

Then the little one, barely even to say the words properly, began to say something quite perplexing and at first, kind of annoying and even slightly alarming. “Daime propina!” he yelled one day as we walked past.

Daime propina?!  Did I really hear that correctly?

“Did he really just say, ‘Give me a tip?!’” I asked Matt.

We ignored him. But after that first day, he and his older brother too, began to say it every single day as we walked past, whether they were clothed or not. Some days when they are naked down by the river, they will shake their little ding-dongs at us and scream it – “Daime propina!”

We’ve learned to laugh only in private as we don’t want to encourage them. We’ve run the gamut of emotions about this whole phenomenon. At first, we were really annoyed, but now, we’ve learned to just accept it and walk on.

. . and bowel movements in general while traveling in Latin America, or for that matter, any country that is foreign to the body. It seems as though when traveling in a foreign country, a lot of the talk begins to center around bowel movements . . . and for good reason.
A foreign place has foreign bacteria and when the body encounters it, often the result is traveler’s diarrhea, or what the medical establishment has within the past few years began to label as “TD.” I read an article that was tacked up on the bulletin board of the local café here in Pisac that talks about using antibiotics to cure TD. Oh the dreaded TD!

Well, I did get some TD my first few days here while I was getting used to the altitude and the food and the water. I took precautions such as only using boiled, filtered water and using safe and proper food preparation methods. I didn’t eat any raw food. I peeled my own fruits, etc, but I still got the dreaded TD. Altitude can cause it. Bacteria can cause it. And eating differently can cause it – for example, the typical American diet is full of preservatives and chemicals, which aren’t as common in other countries. When your body encounters something different than what it is accustomed to, then it’s going to react, and often the reaction is noticeable in it’s excrement.

I’m going to go ahead and say it, even at risk of offending some – TD, like shit, happens. Did I take antibiotics for it? No. Hell no. Did my stomach cramp up? Yes. Was it uncomfortable? Very. But, to take an antibiotic when your own body can stave off the intruder on it’s own, is, in my belief, very dangerous. The over-prescription of antibiotics by the Western medical establishment is well documented and  is becoming an epidemic that is becoming harder and harder to overcome.

So, if you encounter TD out there in the big, wide world, all that will happen is that your stomach will be in an uproar and you’ll shit rice water for a couple of days. Big deal. A helpful remedy, and a supplement that should be in any traveler’s pack, is a bottle of charcoal tablets. Charcoal will suck up the bad stuff in the gut and help the body get rid of it quickly. Avoid alcohol, dairy products and refined foods. Drink plenty of water, with a little sugar and salt added to help balance your electrolytes. Get some rest. You’ll be feeling fine in about a day and will bounce back more quickly too.

The problem is that Western medicine wants to sell some drugs. And frankly, most Westerners have been bred to want the quick fix that the drug companies have made so readily available through unscrupulous doctors, who get kickbacks from the drug companies and through the media who’ll gladly take their money for advertisements on your TV. But, what the drug companies and the unscrupulous doctors won’t tell you is that there are repercussions to these quick fixes – like throwing the delicate balance of your body off-kilter, encouraging the growth of super-bacteria that are immune to antibiotics and weakening your own body’s very capable immune defenses.

If you do get TD it’s usually gone in three days. Be worried if it is accompanied with bloody stools, if your extremities become numb or if the symptoms last 10 or more days. In any of those cases, then you should absolutely seek the help of doctors and antibiotics, because whatever is inside of you is growing and not going to go away easily on it’s own. I’ve endured that before, and while I never want to have another creepy crawly growing inside of me, I certainly am not scared of a little TD.

 Matt is a southern boy and he loves his grits. He couldn’t bear to be without a steady supply of his favorite hometown staple, Adluh Grits, for the four or so months we would be in Latin America. When it came time to lighten the load in his backpack, he forsook extra underwear just so he would have enough room for his 5lb bag of stone-ground grits. That’s dedication.

We bought one-way tickets from Columbia, South Carolina to Lima, Peru and checked no baggage, so we knew we were going to get the thorough TSA security shakedown. Little did we realize just how closely our packs would be scrutinized. As Matt’s mom anxiously waited in the background to see us through the security checkpoint, we were suddenly stopped cold at the conveyor belt.

Matt’s bag went through the x-ray first and like I suspected, the attendant jerked the machine to a stop and squinted into the monitor for what seemed like an eternity.

“Ah, there’s a corkscrew in there,” she said. Matt fished out the offending wine key. So that it would not be confiscated, he marched it back to his mom, leaving the security area in clad in socked feet. The bag began to lurch through a second time and was again stopped. This time they weren’t sure about his tweezers. He pulled them out; they were regular old tweezers. He got to keep them. The bag went through a third time with the same TSA officer looking at it’s contents.

“Hand inspection!” she called out.

Matt looked at me dumb-founded and followed the officer toward the metal table. She proceeded to pull every single item out of his pack. When she got to the bottom of his bag, she pulled out the package of yellow grits and breathed a sigh of relief, “Ahh,” she said, “On the x-ray, these look just like liquid!”

Last Sunday in Murfreesboro I roller skated for hours in the hot mid-afternoon sun. After a bit of that, I was hungry – and thirsty. Being a holiday weekend, not much in the way of eateries was open in the historic downtown area of Murfreesboro, where I was happily tucked away with no car.

I rolled up to the square. Sadly, no coffee shops open. In fact, nothing open at all. I was headed back home when I noticed that B. McNeel’s was open for 20 more minutes. This restaurant is elegant; housed in a historic building just a block off the square. This establishment reminds me of something one might see adorned with magnolia blossoms and featured in Southern Living Magazine, it’s that beautiful on the inside.

I walked up the stairs to the front door on my skate stoppers and a smiling hostess opened the door for me.

“Can I eat in here?” I asked. The hostess kind of gave me a funny look. I pointed to my skates. “I don’t want to mess up your hardwoods.”

“I’ll go ask my manager,” she said.

I waited, sweating outside no more than thirty seconds before the front door was flung open yet again by another smiling face. It was Barbara herself, the owner of the restaurant.

“Get in here, girl!” she said, laughing. “Just don’t fall.”

I did have to catch my balance momentarily as I rolled across those slick, polished hardwood floors. The menu at B. McNeel’s is simple for Sunday brunch. There’s a buffet with everything you can imagine, but I didn’t want to get out of my seat or walk up to the buffet line in my socked feet amongst all the families who were sporting their Sunday finery.

My waitress came to get my drink order and informed me that Barbara was taking care of my tab! I wanted something special and made-to-order and insisted that I pay. “No,” the waitress repeated. “It’s on us.”

“Thank you! How nice!” I said. “I’m a guest in this town!”

I ordered the huevos rancheros and was very pleasantly surprised by this Southern restaurant’s rendition of my favorite Latin breakfast. The refried beans were whole beans, not refried bean paste. And the sauce! Oh the sauce! It was just spicy enough and very dark reddish brown, full of speckles of peppers and herbs and goodness and full of flavor too. I’m sure they make it in the kitchen from scratch.

The restaurant is full of dappled light from the long windows and has a great feel in general. I indeed felt as though I stepped into a magazine. And then, just when I thought the experience couldn’t get any better, Lyle Lovett’s voice pumped through the loudspeaker. My favorite song was playing.

Travel has become commonplace in our globalized world. All it takes is a few hundred dollars and a person can buy a plane ticket to just about anywhere on the planet and stomp around to their heart’s content. Just because someone has the money to purchase a ticket and visit someone else’s country doesn’t automatically give them class. And just because a person can stomp around someone else’s sacred ground doesn’t mean they should.

One of my pet peeves is when some overpriveleged white kid says in an offhand way, “Oh yeah, I just did Belize,” or “Have you done India yet?” Countries and cultures are not things to be conquered, like a frat boy does a kegstand. I don’t think that people who view travel in these terms are necessarily evil, I just think that words are powerful and that having the mindset of trampling your way across a place circumvents possible chances for experiencing a place fully and honoring it’s people and culture.

When I think of people who do a place, I can’t help but think of anything more than khaki and mud and litter. When I think, however, of experiencing a destination, instead of mental images, I get the inexhaustible feelings of expanding my awareness. These two concepts are very different. Go, though, do your guided tours while flaunting your khaki shorts, leave your Coke cans behind in a trail of mud from your boots, just do one thing for me please, be respectful to the local people, so that I can come in and actually get to know a few of them and maybe experience some things that would never be revealed on a pre-packaged tour with a gaggle of sight-seers.