Fire, Rocks, and Empty Roads

At 5 am yesterday morning I was peacefully asleep on an overnight bus from Cuzco to Arequipa. At 5:30, I was still asleep but the double-decker bus had rolled to a stop in a random, run-down suburb of the city. Nearly there but not quite. By 6 am, I was awake, listening confused to the commotion on the bus. One guy a few seats behind us was saying, "I just want to have my coffee and get out of here." An English woman told her daughter "Not sure, I think we´re in a traffic jam of some kind."

Well, it wasn´t exactly a traffic jam. It was a road block. We could see the lights of Arequipa below us in the distance. The sun was just rising. By 6:15 Sergio and I were just about the only people left on the bus. The young attendant (it was a luxury bus) was telling everyone they were welcome to wait it out in the bus, or if we wanted to walk we´d be in the city in about an hour.

By 6:30 we had our backpacks on and were walking beside the dozens of stopped buses and trucks. It only took us a few minutes to get to the road block itself. It was a mass of people yelling, burning tires, and throwing the biggest rocks they could find onto the two-lane highway. "Watch out for the pedestrians," someone called out as we nervously ducked under a strip of yellow caution tape. Yeah, please don´t throw a rock at us.

Once we got past the hordes of rock-throwers, I optimistically thought that maybe we could find a taxi to take us into the city, which shouldn´t have been too far.

By 7:30 we were still walking, no cars in sight except for a few police vans. And then it was 8:00, and then 8:30. Locals walking the other way stared at us and the other gringos around us. Sergio and I ate the Snickers bars I´d bought at the Cuzco bus station for breakfast. We dumped out most of the 2 liters of water we still had-- it was too heavy. By 9:00 we were exhausted, still walking through dusty suburbs, nothing bigger than a bicycle on the rock-strewn road. We walked past the airport, which according to the Lonely Planet was 8 kilometers northwest of the city. It was getting hot.

At about 9:30 the road finally split and it started to look like we were in a real city. Billboards advertised Arequipeña beer. People walking along the road in both directions carried their plastic duffel bags on their shoulders, on their heads. People were laying exhausted on the grass median.

Sergio had just thrown his pack on a pile of rocks for a little rest when we finally saw and successfully hailed a little yellow taxi. "Hurry up," the driver said as we struggled to get our packs into the back seat with us, "get in before those crazies come." Six nuevo soles and ten minutes later we were at our hostel, our fancy bus most likely in the same spot we had left it in three hours earlier.