Economics With A Face

Exploring the Andean highland town was interesting. There was a large church that we toured off the main plaza that was being refurbished by several workers who showed us around. Outside, we walked to the outskirts, which turned into fields of various crops. A good deal of the crops growing were small plants with leafs identical to the coca leaves I’d had the night before in my tea after dinner. It is really amazing how much wasted U.S. taxpayer dollars goes into destroying that plant.

In one of the fields we stopped and talked with a young man who was helping his mother take his grandparents cattle and donkeys out area to get them water. They were actually his grandparents animals but they were now too old to care for them alone so the rest of the family helped. The field was not theirs but they rented it from someone else in the town for grazing the animals, as did others who had livestock.

He was nervous speaking to us at first, he explained, as Spanish was not his first language which was Quechua. We were obviously in the same boat so there was nothing for him to worry about. We took a photo together and then said goodbye as we were about to head back into town. We realized he was having a harder time than us saying farewell as he said things like “Well, maybe I’ll see you later on this evening in town if you decide to come back” and when we said that no, unfortunately we were heading to Arequipa but maybe one day we would travel back to Peru, maybe with kids, and see him then. Or possibly one he would travel to the states and look see us there. “Well, we’ll see each other then…” not wanting the encounter to come to an end. Living in this small town in the Andes I’m sure he was not used to people coming in and out of his life.

We realized that we are getting so used to meeting great people that we might never see again in our lives. It was a much sadder feeling at the beginning of the trip but of late we are getting more and more numb to it. It helps that we hand out our card to so many people that has our email, website, phone number, and address in the U.S. Hopefully we will keep in contact with as many people as possible, but time will tell.

We caught a collective back to Chivay and then were on the bus back to Arequipa. Once again we made our way over the steep Andean passes surrounded by vicuña, llama and alpaca, but luckily this time nobody fainted.

Once back in Arequipa we had dinner at another restaurant overlooking the plaza and by 8:00 we were on yet another overnight bus on our way to Cuzco. If all goes according to plan we should arrive at 5:00am, which will give us enough time to catch the 6:00am train to Machu Picchu.