Ayacucho Hotels
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The Pink Spirit
Entry 24 of 49 | show all | print this entry |
Ayacucho means "The pink spirit" in Quechua, but in the last decade it was rather "famous" as the capital of the region where the terroristic group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) was active. This group proclaimed that it wanted to help the peruvian peasants and tried to isolate Peru from the external influence. Basically Sendero Luminoso was persecuting and killing people who were cooperating with the government from Lima or with other countries. Since several tourists were also killed, this region really became isolated. The most tourist were overpassing this region in the nineties and even today, when it is safe, not many people know about this beautiful town (I spent in Ayacucho almost two days and met only 5 gringos :-)
But from the beginning: From Pisco you have to take a combi (about 20 minutes) to San Clemente and then you can hop on the bus comming from the north to spend almost six hours crossing pretty high mountains. It wasn't a real chicken bus (like the one I used from Ayacucho, read the next story), anyway it was quite strange for me. When you book a bus, you can choose your seat and by the occupied seats you can see the gender of the person (everything is on-line via computers, some Peruvian bus companies are much more up-to-date than e.g. The Czech Railways). I found out that knowing the gender of your neighbour is so usefull! If it is a woman (Peruvian) it's very probable that she will have one or two children with her (on one seat of course). This time I was so lucky, I sat next to a man, but across the aisle... On one seat there was a young woman with her daughter (cca 5 years) and a small puppy (poor doggie - the girl was treating it like a toy, steadily hurting it). The girl sat on the seat, the dog was somewhere under (sometimes running across the whole bus) and the mum was standing between the seats. There was another young woman with a baby (about 1 year old, it was almost running) right on the next seat (and I didn't mention bunch of luggage which the both women had by their legs).
It was stunning what the women got under control during the ride: to suckle the child (in Peru the kids are breast-feeded very long, even when they have teeth), to change the nappies (with one hand holding the baby standing, with the other one changing the nappies), to let the girl do number two into a pot (The buses have a toilet for number one only, some of them not even this) - of course that the pupe (I don't know how to spell turd - not vulgar) was smelling in the bus whole the rest of our journey...
At one moment we were overpassing a really high mountain (I felt like on the Cotopaxi, but this time I didn't drink any alcohol). Later on the map said there're peaks higher than 6000ms so I guess we must've been in about 5500ms. Other people seemed to be fine, it was only me who felt sick and the baby who started to cry and wasn't to stop. The mother definitely didn't know what to do, she tried to feed the baby, to rub baby's belly, to play lead away its attention, but nothing helped. Then the mother started to cry as well from desperation. Other passengers willingly started to give her advice and differentes remedies. So the mother tried to rub the baby with a kind of ointment, with a weird alcohol and the most bizzare advice was to spirt the breast milk on the babies back and to rub it.. I think that the baby didn't stop crying until we got back to lower altitude.
Since I was the only gringo on the bus, people started to speak to me during the lunch break. People are quite curious about foreign countries (mainly about the wages, prices and the standard of living), but Czech Republic doesn't help usually, sometimes not even Czechoslovakia so I try Europe, next to Germany and Poland.
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Funny intermezzo: in Cusco I spoke to a young girl, when nothing helped to explain her where I was from, I tried the "next to Germany" version. Then she took me aback asking me "So you must be a racist?!".
To defend her - what did I know about South. Am. countries before I arrived here? Not much either.
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Anyway, during the lunch break I met Juan Jose, a funny chap from the jungle. He led me through Ayacucho, we went to several discos and I danced my first cumbia and salla dances (salla looks like the dances which Janet usually danced in Shohola - kind of jumping from one leg to another). Juan Jose is 24, has about 5 siblings, two kids (but doesn't live with their mother), works like a truck driver and served several years in the army. One of his brothers is in a Bolivian jail (sentenced for 8 years), 'cause he was captured with 80 thousands USD's in his bag (In Bolivia it's illegal to have a big amount of money without explanation). But what can you do, if there is no job for you and everybody needs money.
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