Recuerda?

This is how I remember Peru.

A nephew of our host mother picks us up at the airport. When I see his car, I start laughing and can’t stop. We ride through the city for the first time in the Peruvian equivalent of a rusty VW van, with a peace sign on the gear shift and mystical keychains dangling from the rear-view mirror. He’s chattering in Spanish which I half-understand, catching glimmers of understanding like fireflies about his being some kind of mystical tour guide, but I’m only half there: I’m staring out the window, trying to look in every direction at once, images rushing into my head in stop-motion. We spin through neighborhoods of tile-roofed houses that rise up into the mountains, through chaotic rotaries and wrinkled faces and angry taxis, past a giant rainbow playground, street vendors, statues of local heroes, intoxicating glimpses of Cusco the ancient Incan city of ghosts.

The delirium is almost dizzying when I realize, Here I am. This is not a National Geographic article. I still haven’t stopped laughing.

On one of the weekends we go to a small town called Paucartambo to see its notorious Virgen de Carmen festival. Troupes in intricate costumes of dragons, lawyers, jungle people dance out stories about the homosexual practices of the conquistadors, fever dreams of crazed malaria sufferers, etc. They tear through the streets beating drums and whacking people with sacks of flour. As the sun sets the madness increases with the fading of the light. Giant firework towers are set off in the middle of the square. Masked dancers careen around the plaza outrageously drunk, leaping over the bonfires with spark-shooting planes on sticks. Limits do not exist. Feather headdresses through thick smoke in the air, a firework part shooting off and hitting a man in the neck, his laughter and stream of obscenities…Threading through the crowd to get as close as possible to the fireworks, whirling lights and showers of stars in the air, sparks in my hair as I’m trying to photograph the dancers, thundering adrenalin - And suddenly it’s 3:00 in the morning and we’re jolting through dust and eerie blackness around snaking mountain bends in a crammed Comvee, on and on towards the sunrise at Tres Cruces where we find ourselves up above the clouds with the sun rising and the rainforest passing beneath, flitting in and out like a dream, that night after the monsters and the fire in the street.