Western & Ends

I crossed over the border to Peru under a bright and burning sun. In winter and in summer, the air over the mountains is a perpetually thin cover, neither holding in heat at night nor filtering the sun during the day. Standing outside the border crossing, Tuesday morning coming down, and my red pack radiated heat into my back. We were held up at immigration as someone, some American, didn't have an entrance visa and was trying to get an exit visa; always a problem, for me and for her.

And then it was a bus around the lake, from the south to the north, on the way to Puno. Winding back and forth by the lapping waves, the little kitten waves rushing over the rocks on shore, and I was stuck in the fourth seat of the second-to-last row, my knees stuck together and my head leaning to the right. A young girl to my right peeled an orange, breaking each wedge off and tossing the peel out the window. She wore a heart-shaped locket and as we rounded a bend, she closed her eyes and opened the heart and kissed it - once, because once was all she needed.

I walked through Puno and caught my bus to Arequipa. The ride was quiet and uneventful.

Into Arequipa at night, past the chicken shacks and car parts, empty-lot restaurants lit with florescent bulbs, the endless parade of brick-built walls and stained-tin roofs. Peru's second city.

The great cathedral is made of sillar, some sort of luminous volcanic rock, and in between the bell towers the form of a volcano rises, hazy through the dust and the smog; the perfect cone-shape volcano on the edge of town. In the sunshine, the white stone walls are just a single sheet of bright light drifting through the air, but as the sun passed to the west, the rocks still glowed; the lighter lines where the blocks meet, the grayed reliefs and blackened shades.

The plaza is bright and well designed, flanked on three sides by Doric arcades, also made of sillar, with balcony restaurants and wooden roofs. It is, perhaps, the most beautiful plaza I've seen in Latin America.

I spent two days in Arequipa just wandering around, eating ice cream, and drawing a little. It was the end of my trip, the last place I came to I didn't know. Eventually I boarded a bus, the most expensive bus I took, and came back to Lima.