Running for Cover

South America continues ot be fascinating. I had my cocoa leaves read by a Peruvian lady on a bus and she told me all sorts of interesting things.

I have developed an obsession with the cuteness of Peruvian children. I think it is largely because they wear really lovely little hats and have such big brown eyes and nice skin. It seems to be a specific condition to all girls in South America, even those like myself who aren´t particularly enamoured with children generally.

Anyway, today we got up at 4am (for the 3rd day in a row, this is not a relaxng holiday) to head out to the Sacred Valley, and so the others could start the Inca Trail tomorrow. The reason we headed off so early was that they like their protests in Peru and there is a big one in Cusco today and we were trying to avoid it.

We didn´t. We passed burning tyres, burning rubbish, large bricks and stones thrown onto the road only to come face to face with protesters blocking the road and generally being pretty angsty. A whole lot of tourist buses were caught there, and some went through the line, but it was pointless, because you could see the next bloackade about 100m up the road. And if you couldn´t pass that, you got trapped. We sat there for a while in the bus, assessing the situation (at least our tour guide was assessing the situation) and absolutely shitting ourselves.

By the time they started trying to life a small Peruvian cab off the ground, we decided it was better to make a mad dash back for the hotel. The police offered no deterrence whatsoever and the whole striking and rioting mentality is beyond me. Here, they use strikes as the first tool of ´negotiation´ which doesn´t make sense to me, coming from a country where it is always the threat held over the negotiating table.

The strike was about the fact that the cost of living in Peru is rising. Something that is happening everywhere. The difference being that if the cost of livng rises in Australia, we can´t afford a DVD player. It rises here, they can´t afford food. I can understand why they are angry. But it seems so self defeating. They destroy and block roads which affects them and other Peruvians, they piss off tourists that spend a significant sum of money here, they enlist the help of their children that should be at school. It seems that all the harm they cause falls on their own heads.

Apparently the other GAP Tours bus is still sitting between two protest lines, unable to mnove forward or back, slowly dehydrating. At least we´re not fending off protesters with hiking poles.

The plan is to head out really early tomorrow morning if there isn´t a second day of the strike. But because I am not hiking I am staying at the hotel to sleep in. Which will be nice. I don´t know how the others are going to do it.