Of Pisco and Peru: (Mis)Adventures in South America!

Today I’ve got a guest post from Doug Tesch. He describes himself as a word geek vagabond who spends his time in Las Vegas, Mexico, Peru, and Portland, Oregon.  Sometimes all at once.

This is an excerpt from a book he’s writing called Of Pisco and Peru.

He said ‘I’m in the midst of writing a humorous ‘Curse of Lono’ type travelogue about my (mis)adventures in Peru and was thinking it might fit your style.’

Of Pisco and Peru is about a troubled every man who ghosts his job in search of adventure in Peru.  Will he find his peace of mind?  Love?  Or something more sinister?

Here it is!

Of Pisco and Peru: Introduction

Piscoreto Sour Cocktail: Perfect for any moment of the day. Appreciated by lovers of Amaretto.

Ingredients:

• 2 ounces of Pisco pure.
• 1/2 ounce gum syrup.
• 1/2 ounce lemon juice.
• 3/4 almond liqueur “Amaretto”.
• Egg white.
• Ice.

Place it all in a shaker and then serve.

It’s the edge of midnight, and he’s losing it. Pouring sweat, our driver peers past the fog roiling around the bus, out into the gloom.

My thoughts skip beats like a Ritalin-addicted ferret. Not again!

Thick, flesh-filled neck folds twitch as he fidgets with his Panama hat. There’s a chuckle, and we’re off, slaloming into the oncoming lane for a better angle of attack on the next S curve.

I press my head against the seat in front of me and close my eyes. “The train would’ve cost twice as much,” I tell myself. So now I’m the sole gringo on a bus crammed beyond a clown car’s capacity, creasing mile after stomach-churning mile through the Andes.

The bus lurches violently, provoking an outburst of frenzied Spanish from the voices in back.

My mind screams, “Do something, you idiot!” but the body’s glued to the seat. A hapless prisoner to the joys of travel.

What is travel, anyways, if not a flight away from normalcy?

Why did my electric razor start smoking when I plugged it in this morning? What’s a Delta-Wye transformer? For that matter, what is the proper etiquette for hailing a cab in Mongolia? How did my luggage make it to Calcutta without me? Hola. Excusez vous but vas linguaggio naar je sprechening? And why am I straddling a freshly dug pit, swatting away tropical sand fleas when I could be on a modern toilet with all its newfangled technologies, like rolled toilet paper?

And what’s this oversized ladle for?

Where am I?

My stomach tightens. Bodies twist from the torque of another S curve.

What’s that smell?

I tuck in my arms and do the calculations. Five hours walking at altitude, bookended by a full day’s worth of jitney shuffles on planes, trains, and now what technically counts as an automobile. The tourist trifecta. Did I even shower today?

None of this fazes the Peruvian guide to my left. She’s sleeping, head burrowed deep in her red traveling jacket, a strand of spittle vibrating from her chin as she snores, blissfully unaware of the mass psychotic breakdown afflicting all passengers still awake.

The driver exchanges glances with his thick-jowled wingman, who flashes a devious smile. Ear-splitting Andean flute opera cranks up from the battered boombox perched lazily on his lap.

High-pitched screams of dissent.

Now what?

The playlist swiftly shuffles to fare from ABBA, Journey, The Beatles, and some Phil Collins thrown in for good measure.

What’s going on?

I look back just in time to see an old lady slap some young
guy so hard his chullo flies off.

Maybe he got too handsy?

The brim of a cowboy hat pokes the back of my head, and a wrinkled face juts past me, mottled lines creased with age. A spastic finger shakes circular jabs at the driver’s back, drilling home some urgent point lost on me.

Is this normal?

Wait! Calm down. This is my fault. A proper penance for waking up one morning, taking a good, hard look in the mirror, and heading off to the first place picked at random by a drunk at my favorite dive bar.

Voila! Instant lifestyle change.

Now I’m a world traveler. Sounds so exotic. Never mind the dead-end job I’ve just ghosted. That’s so last week. Now I’m an expat. Worldly. Cultured. Cosmopolitan. Really? How will this play out? Twenty years from now will I be posing in a blazer and khakis at far-flung cocktail parties, drinking wine spritzers, and boring everybody within earshot with my ‘most interesting man in the world’ travel snob stories?

No house. No pension. No wife. No life. But hey, I’ve been to Mumbai. Every year zipping to far-flung countries in search of another adventure to soothe something. Cure an emptiness. Maybe I should go run with the bulls, before I need that artificial hip?

Everybody hates travel stories. Especially the insipid details and insignificant incidents people tell, such as, for instance, falling off a precipice sometime after midnight from a mile up in the Andes.

Our driver could take us straight off this cliff yawning beyond his windshield, and he might not even care. Anything to quell the mutiny behind him. A little zigging when he should have been zagging, then a fleeting, final nanosecond of wide-eyed, doomed clarity. The wheezing sound of thirty sphincters puckering in unison as we crash against the escarpment. A churning eggbeater of dashed dreams, bashed brains, crunched bones, and ripped arteries.

Then, a final banshee’s shriek from our collective psyches as our bodies break apart all set to the beat of ‘Sussudio’.

Ha ha, probably along with some Spanish Curse Words!

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