South America
Stiffer drink needed (Drive Day 165: Dec 11th, 2003)
There is nothing sadder or scarier than riot cops, but modern day, post-Shining Path Peru is full of them. It is also full of guardedly optimistic locals who believe the best days are ahead. We meet four of them at a lunch we’ve been invited to by the friends of a friend back in Maryland. And they insist that we sample their cousin Don Claudio’s pisco. Which soothes Peru’s rough edges and refocuses the mind on finer things. Like the ranch where he grows the grapes. Another invite we cannot refuse, so we leave Lima behind and begin the long drive south to Pisco.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Lima the horrible and majestic (Drive Day 164: Dec 10, 2003)
We could try to find a more central place to “camp” in the city writer Sebastian Salazar Bondy called “Lima the Horrible” but the guard at the rec center where we’ve parked says we’re welcome to stay. So for the second time we lock up the Avion and hop on a bus. Which breaks down and requires swapping for a smaller van. The driver’s helper provides the entertainment – yelling out approaching stops, jumping out at those stops and twirling our destination sign like a sidewalk vendor, flirting with girls, collecting fares, slamming the side panel door shut and leaning out the one open window until the process repeats itself the next block over. It takes two hours to arrive and another ten minutes to uncramp our legs and unstoop our backs. We walk through streets lined with majestic buildings of another era, heading for the intriguing museum of torture. It’s short on signage but houses what look like implements of an inquisition and we decide that it should commission one of the outskirt buses as a modern exhibit.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Lost in Lima (Drive Day 163: December 9th, 2003)
We usually avoid camping in major capitols; wary of maneuvering the big rig through chaotic city traffic. So we are attempting to make it to the outskirts of Peru’s capitol, Lima, but end up utterly lost. And right smack dab in the middle of one of its famous slums. This is the view outside our camper window:
Best way to process unbearable shock and misery? Catch a bus into city center Lima and drink a Pisco Sour at the Aero Club. The contrast is mind numbing and requires another drink.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Chan Chan vs. Trujillo (Drive day 162: December 8th, 2003)
I’m beginning to think we humans have de-evolved, lost our imagination and aesthetic. We make it to the ruins of the Chan empire at the magic hour and its bewitchingly beautiful — even 600 years past its prime Chan Chan is more elegant, more peaceful, than any place we’ve seen on this continent.
Granted, at one time 60,000 people lived in Chan Chan — it was the largest adobe city on earth — so Gary wouldn’t have had it all to himself like it looks in this shot. It might have been even more beautiful, with intricate irrigation features engineered to counter a dropping water table. The air around a scalloped, now dry pond still smells like marsh.
But just beyond this crumbling reminder of a majestic architectural and engineering feat lies modern Trujillo. Filled with belching buses and cement houses slathered with political slogans — the paint is free if the owners agree to serve as billboards.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
A few years too late (Drive Day 161: December 7th, 2003)
Thanks to the hotel owner in Huanchaco we know Billy Bob’s real name, Wilbur Holden, but a guy across the street from the club where we camped 30 years earlier tells us Billy Bob died of lung cancer in 1989. Which kinda makes sense when I look closer at my mother’s journal entry.
I remember that night. My dad paced up and down the length of the camper’s tiny corridor, saying “The kids are asleep, right? They can’t see me like this.” Of course we weren’t.
It’s sad, not getting to meet the man who got my father to loosen up, and who fed us hamburgers from his cool club. A dreary drive back along the beach and we talk to the hotel owner who knew him once. Apparently my dad wasn’t Billy Bob’s only party partner. He drank away the club’s profits and before it finally closed he couldn’t pay the light bill. Customers had to drink by candlelight. Sounds lovely, actually.
Canoes of a different kind (Drive Day 160: December 6th, 2003)
We’re headed to Trujillo, hoping to track down a man who helped my family through a particularly awful breakdown 30 years ago. But the thought of camping on crowded city streets forces a detour to the nearest beach town: Huanchaco. It’s a surf tourist spot now but you can still see vestiges of the native culture – like handmade reed boats used by local fishermen.
We park in front of a nice hotel and happily pay three bucks each to swim in the pool and use the showers. We hang out at the hotel bar, meet the owner, and tell him we’re trying to hunt down an expat named Billy Bob.
“Same guy who used to own a club in Trujillo?” he asks. We’re stunned. What are the odds? But then the bubble bursts. He’s pretty sure Billy Bob’s son owns the club now and not at all sure the man who once rescued my family is still alive.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
El Señor de Sipan (Drive Day 159: December 5th, 2003)
After turning down a baggie of hallucinogenic San Pedrillo cactus from a vendor in what the guidebooks claim is one of the largest witches markets in South America, we make our way to another set of ruins.
This time we are met by human guides but they’re kids. Who want to sell us bits and pieces of pottery they’ve scavenged from the ruins of Sipan. Twice in one day we’re declining things apparently most visitors don’t.
But who needs hallucinogens when sunsets look like this in the magic hour of sunset and when, surely, taking anything other than photos results in some seriously bad karma. So instead, we buy the disappointed kids a round of foosball in town and inadvertently set off a stampede of would-be players.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Canine companions of Tucume (Drive Day 158: December 4th, 2003)
We arrive too late to find a human guard at the gates of the Tucume ruins. But two homeless, hungry hairless dogs make us feel more than welcome. More as in instantly heartsick: for them and for Wipeout. Nevertheless, they lead us through a break in the shrub fence where we can duck into the deserted ruins and to what looks like a giant termite mound. It’s actually one of the site’s 26 eroded pyramids basically carved out of a mountain, supported by beams and at one time plastered over with adobe. It’s spectacular and haunting all at once.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Lost and found, cats and memories (Drive Day 157: December 3rd, 2003)
Photo by David Bruce
We have to drive through the Desert of Sechura to follow the same route my parents drove in my first roadtrip down the Pan-American highway 30 years ago. And I remember this bleak stretch of highway like I drove it yesterday. It’s where we pulled over to make sandwiches for lunch and somehow let the cat escape. We didn’t discover we had left Pantera behind for hours and yet somehow convinced my father to turn around and go back. The cat was waiting in the same spot – it was so miraculous, on so many levels, that he took a picture of the spot.
Fast forward 30 years and we find ourselves staring at the exact same spot. The peaks and dunes align in perfect symmetry to my father’s photo. We take the same picture, and know at that instant these two images will become the cover of the book I will write about this journey.
Photo by Gary Geboy
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
Bonjour and Bon Jovi (Drive Day 156: December 2nd, 2003)
Landscape by Gary Geboy, see more in this photo book
If it is possible for two sides of a land border to be more different than Equador and Northern Peru I’ve never seen it. Leaving Vilcabamba we pass a scene that Gary captures in what is one of my favorite images of the roadtrip – a lone figure in teal walking through a timeless, massive landscape of breathtaking beauty.
The border crossing is so remote that the guards spend their days trying to decipher Bon Jovi CD liner notes. It is surprisingly easy to translate “on a steel horse I ride,” when you are crossing into Peru in a silver Avion truck camper.
The other side? Bleak and desolate would be too glamourous to call these vistas. I’m actually happy to camp inside the gates of a dumpy hotel in the town of Sullana – the wind whips through the treeless landscape like punishment.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
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