On the Road -- Cusco to Lima

* this entry from 5/1 & yesterday *

Read something this morning about May -- the 1st of May -- being "the new start of your life". I'm celebrating with a MilkyWay bar; it got smashed beneath a water bottle, but the flavor's still the same. On the road, same routine -- metal detectors and videotapes of bus passenger's faces. The only difference though, is that this is a fancy bus -- leather seats, blankets with gold embroidery, a lady dressed in a black pant suit walks up and down the aisle asks passengers to buckle their seatbelts, hands out hot food (Lomo Saltado), Bingo cards, and little bags of toothbrushes and paste. I'm waiting for a yellow facemask to come dangling from the ceiling, for the bus to lift off the ground and sprout wings.












19hrs later an arrival to Lima.

After showing up on the doorstep of a no-vacancy Hostel, walking, then hopping in a cab and going in circles looking for a non-existent address to accommodation attempt #2, then settling at random Hotel, I went out for some fresh air... and then started running, with a book and cigarettes. Forrest Gump came to mind, and I tried to embody his spirit by continuing to run to nowhere in particular for no particular reason.

Unlike Forrest, the run ends maybe thirty minutes later on a rocky shore embedded with bright soda bottle tops, plastic bags, and crab claws. A man and a small boy with a long line cast out to sea stand on a thin peninsula. A fellow is skipping stones. Further along a group of surfers congregate, their bodies half out of wetsuits like peeled bananas. Small black bodies straddling surfboards dot the water, rise and fall with the swell of the ocean.

What's it like to be out there sliding along the crest of waves? When the ocean is gliding under them, are they thinking about their technique or does everything flow, like the ocean is giving them a piggyback ride. And when the waves roll on top of them and they dip below the surface does it muffle out the traffic of noise, is there a peaceful quiet in that underwater world? Rather than set, the sun seemed to take a mysterious route out, disappearing behind a rolling mass of clouds and leaving in its place nighttime.



...at the moment, Residencial Alfa
In the morning news -- swine flu possibly ebbs, Japanese couples wed more economically in US, and Captain Mo leaves for Afghanistan.