Teresa Bruce's Blog, page 8

The Sacred Valley (Drive Day 173: Dec 19th, 2003)

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After the coldest night we’ve slept through so far, we spend the morning buying alpaca blankets from the family that guarded our camper while we explored Machu Picchu. This is when the ability to pack your house on top of your ride is hug-yourself lucky. We don’t have to race to catch a train, check out of a hotel at a certain time or stick to any kind of schedule in the Sacred Valley. Our bones ache from the altitude but long hikes work out the kinks. Besides, it’s hard to complain when you’re getting passed by old ladies carrying bundles of firewood on their backs with nothing more substantial than flipflops on their bundled feet.

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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.

Machu Picchu revisited (Drive Day 172: Dec 18th, 2003)

 

[image error]You know that feeling you get when you step into an elementary school classroom and marvel at how little everything seems? Machu Picchu is the reverse.

 

[image error]As a kid I was more impressed with the llamas than the ruins they grazed among. And the curse word my little sister practiced under her breath to complain about the steep terraces. Thirty years later I am awestruck, humbled and grateful Gary can capture it in images where words simply pale.

[image error]photo by Gary Geboy

 

[image error]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.

Towns that tumble from your tongue (Drive Day 171: Dec. 17th, 2003)

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It takes a considerable amount of practice to pronounce the name of the town that is the closest place to Machu Picchu it is possible to drive.  But saying Ollantaytambo (oh-yawn-tuh-tom-bow) is easier than spelling it. Peru’s sacred valley is as stunning as it is multisyllabic.

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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.

Need a solar skateboard? Check out Cuzco (Drive Day 170: Dec 16th, 2003)

 

[image error]Cuzco is justifiably famous for its mortar-less stone walls and majestic cathedrals. But perched, as it is, along the remnants of the Inca Trail it is first and foremost a market town – a stopover for runners delivering messages and goods to ancient kings.

 

[image error]But somehow the hard-sell tourist trade seems over-the-top today. Craving vegan pizza? No problem. Eco-mystic treks? Step right up. If it was made for hiking, camping, photographing, cooking, bathing, combating altitude sickness or killing bacteria you’ll find it in one of the used-equipment stores mingled among internet cafes and bars. I’m sure if I look hard enough I’ll find things my parents were forced to sell in this town thirty years ago – on the tail-end of a rapidly dwindling budget.

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[image error]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.

 

Almost to Cuzco (Drive Day 169: Dec 15th, 2003)

 

[image error]In 1973 this stretch of “highway” almost broke my parents’ spirit. My little sister broke her collar bone (with some assistance from her equally undernourished older sister) and the truck suffered near fatal injuries as well.

 

[image error]The road is better now, less punishing in our new Ford F350, but the drive is still harrowing.

 

[image error]We could try to find a campsite in Cuzco but the roads are too narrow and our nerves too shattered. So we pull in next to long-haul truckers at a gas station and try to ignore the rumble of diesel engines as we fall into an exhausted sleep.

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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.

To never know is just fine (Drive Day 168: Dec 14th, 2003)

[image error]photo by Gary Geboy

Seven-year-old me discovered how motion sick I get in any moving vehicle, so 37-year-old me knows better than to take an afternoon flight over the lines of Nazca. The winds are less puke-bag-inducing in the morning – so we sign up for the first Cessna 182 overhead tour offered. And nothing I could have read, studied, surmised, pontificated, opined or imagined comes close to the mystery of these ancient etchings. I recognize the monkey and whale only because I know to call them that – but in truth these markings look like intentional erasings of earth that just happen to create patterns. Meaning? Not for us mere mortals to know for certain – though personally I like the Erich von Daniken theory attributing them to visitors from outer space.

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Which is what I feel like as we begin the drive up from sea-level Nazca on our way to Cuzco and Machu Picchu. We ascend 14,261 feet in a matter of hours, and a lunch break watching altiplano flamingoes sets off hallucinations I will never forget. You, however, can read about it if you buy the book – it’s one of my favorite chapters.

 

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.

Bones beyond the lines of Nazca (Drive Day 167: December 13th, 2003)

[image error]Photo by Gary Geboy

We are driving south to Nazca, site of the famously unexplained earthen lines and figures visible only from the sky. We stop to watch a man in his 20s slog behind a pair of oxen – rice for market will someday emerge from the muddy sludge – and make it to a cemetery 20 kms south of Nazca in time for sunset.

 

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Some 400 tombs are reportedly dug into the foot of the world’s highest sand dune – and most have been plundered by grave robbers. Except this one – a mummified woman so startlingly intact that I leave a bottle of Don Claudio’s pisco for her travels through time.

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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.

Pisco maestro Don Claudio (Drive Day 166: Dec 12th, 2003)

 

[image error]Don Claudio too has driven the day’s journey south of Pisco to his ranch – just to meet us. He gives us a tour of the concrete fermentation tanks and the copper contraption called an alambique that distills the liquid. He is a gallant, gracious host with Italian origins who recovers from a pulled tooth by joining us in a taste sampling of his finest varieties.

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The sun sets over draping grape terraces and sand dunes and we decide that this is the most beautiful campground in South America.

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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.

Stiffer drink needed (Drive Day 165: Dec 11th, 2003)

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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.

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[image error]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)

 

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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.

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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.