A long and winding road

Why think of a good title, when you can pinch one off someone else?

Last Sunday at 5:30am I was at the bus station in Cusco to get my stuff loaded on to the bus for Ayacucho. It was the beginning of a marathon bus journey, 22 hours to be precise! Now the distance from Cusco to Ayacucho as the crow flies is not actually that far but there are several reasons why it takes so long:

1) The bus is not that fast when it's running and during the early part of the journey it stopped twice - they managed to run out of petrol 20m from the gas station they wanted to fill up at, which resulted in lots of running about with buckets of fuel and hoses; the second time I don't know what the reason was but when they took the cover of the engine off inside the bus the whole thing filled with smoke! That took about 30 minutes to fix

2) The road is only tarmaced for the first four hours and once it gets dark the bus driver only has his headlights to follow the quite narrow, "afirmada" road.

3) The Andes are very tall, steep mountains and so the road spends a lot of time zig zagging up the mountain only to zig zap down the other side into a new valley, and repeat.... a lot

The plus side of all this is that you get lots of time to talk to your neighbour ( I was lucky I had two during the journey, one was an economist and one a lawyer, both working with rural populations, so we had interesting conversations. My Spanish was slightly pushed by the economist when I was trying to explain the role of the Queen in the British parliamentary system and how it works given we don't have a written constitution! I hope I haven't completely confused him).

You also get to look at the spectacular landscape and see country life going on. Basically it seems that the further you get from the towns the poorer it is, I guess because people can't sell things at market easily. The lawyer said that the land is fertile and v.good for producing potatoes but that transporting them to market is very difficult for people. And realistically I don't seem how you could farm this sort of land in the commercially intensive way that is normal in more developed countries, I have a nasty feeling you'd lose all the top soil.

The last half of the journey was in the dark (because we're reasonably close to the Equator the sun rises and sets at around 6) and bizarrely I found it easy to sleep all night and wake up when we got to Ayacucho. Why can't I do that on planes?

However probably my abiding memory of that journey will be 22 hours of a music form that seems very close to Chinese. To my unappreciative ears it sounded whiney and piercing! Fortunately it wasn't on very loud, but it was on the entire time.....

Tomorrow another bus journey, but this time just the 8 hours from Ayacucho to Cusco.