out of the jungle...into the mountains...

Since Tarapoto, I´ve been moving pretty quickly. I want to get to Bolivia sooner than later, and I was pretty far in the north of Peru, so I´ve made a couple big jumps. From Tarapoto, I got on a bus to Tingo Maria. It was supposed to arrive at midnight, after having left at nine in the morning. However, the road through the jungle is a dirt road that barely exists. The bus crept at a snail´s pace and often rocked back and forth when going through puddles or uneven ground. Sometimes it seemed to be on the verge of tipping over, and other times, the bus would stall out a good 4 or 5 times in a row just trying to get through a big puddle. I should have known when I saw the condition that the bus was in to begin with...it looked like it had gone to war. Unfortunately, there is only one company that makes the trip so I had no other option. At about 10 pm the bus stopped in its path, behind a couple of big trucks. Here, one of the big trucks had gotten stuck right on a curve and on the edge of a cliff. If they would have tried to push it out, it is likely that it would have gone over the edge of the cliff. So they had to wait for a truck to come in the opposite direction that could pull it out.

The bus driver told us all to use the bathroom so he could shut the door for the night, because that is where we were going to stay. Everyone got off the bus and found some place along the road to do their business and then got back on. People were a little upset, so the bus driver decided to play a cassette of romantic music to calm everyone down. It was pretty comical. So we slept, sitting up straight, until seven in the morning, when a big enough truck came to pull the stuck truck out of the ditch. We ended up arriving in Tingo Maria at two in the afternoon.

Tingo Maria is just as hot and humid as Tarapoto, maybe even more jungly. The first place that I went to ask about a room, I pulled back the sheets to find two big fleas, a stone and an obviously slept-in bed. So then I got to wander to the other side of town looking for another place. Finally I found a hotel with a very nice owner and clean rooms and bathrooms. After having gone out and walked around town, I was back in the room practicing and I saw two huge dengue mosquitos. It was too surreal. I decided to go back out and hang out on the street until as late as I could. I met a couple guys who are students in the universidad. They took me around town and then we hung out in the Plaza until about 11 pm. When I went back to the room to sleep, I first bathed in mosquito repellent and then slept with all of my clothes on and the blanket, sweating like a pig.

Needless to say, I left the next day for Huancayo, where I am now. In the seat next to me was a woman with her 5 yr old and 1 yr old baby. That means that between two regular bus seats were four people and a cello, aka uncomfortable. At 4:30 in the morning we arrived in Huancayo to freezing cold weather and an obvious change in altitude. Breathing is still a little weird (here is 3300 meters) and I feel that I have a good case of chapped lips coming my way. All the concrete and lack of vegetation is a shock too, I don´t really like it, but I´m sure that here are a lot of things that are lacking in the jungle...