Saying, as He Drowned the Third...

Saturday 1 May
Cusco – Lima

I woke up nice and early to catch my bus. I had breakfast at the hostel and while I waited I checked the internet. And then I waited. And then I waited some more. And just to change things up a bit, I did some waiting. A couple of days later, my breakfast arrived. DON’T THEY KNOW THERE’S A WAR ON?!?!? It was lucky I had woken up early...

I had a quick shower and packed and then managed to share a cab to the bus station with some Dutch girls who were also heading there. They were good fun to spend a ten minute cab journey with and it was a shame they weren’t going to the same place as me.

On the bus I had a seat right at the front, which was good for the view but short on leg room. The bus was OK, so not as good as the ones in Argentina but not as bad as Ecuador. In fact the worst buses are in Ecuador and not Bolivia, where bad buses do exist but you can pay a small amount more for the nicer ones with personal butlers and fine wines*. It was also a shame that I didn’t take the one I had originally intended to – I saw one of their buses and it looked like a sleek, black spaceship.

At first I had two seats to myself but then an hour or two in and a fat, old, smelly Peruvian woman came and sat next to me. At least I had a great view of the mountains as we worked our way down to the coast.

I drifted in and out of sleep. And then, across from me, there’s a couple with a child. The kid is screaming. Constantly. I resign myself to no sleep, and start to watch movies on my laptop instead. The kid has a nasty habit of screaming for an hour or so and then stopping for about an hour and a half, before starting again. It makes me worry that if I were a parent, I might think that at times murder might be an entirely reasonable parental behaviour.

I worked out later that the distance to Lima from Cusco by road is around 600 miles (which makes an average speed of 30 miles an hour) but as the crow flies it’s 350. The mountains almost double the length of the trip, and possibly slow it down by more than twice as the average speed would probably be much faster if the road was direct. Then divide by the number you first thought of.

The wilderness out there was something else, though I wouldn’t want to get stuck in it. I try and get what sleep I can in between thoughts of infanticide.

*may not be true