To Pariacoto…. tracing the footsteps of my father and mother
Our next stop was Pariacoto, a very small town in the middle of nowhere Peru that none of my Peruvian cousins have ever even heard of and that no one would have any reason to go to but was very moving for me. This is where my dad was stationed with the Peace Corps in early 70’s and that is where he met my mom. If there was no Pariacoto it is likely there would be no Anthony so to me it’s quite a special place.
The trip from Lima to Pariacoto got off to a rough start and looking back maybe we should have read the complicated and inconvenient nature of getting out of Lima as a sign not to leave just yet. Here a taste of what you have to endure sometimes when you’re backpacking around the world…
Our bus to Pariacoto finally showed up at the sketchy Lima central bus terminal two and a half hours after our scheduled departure time, not much to our surprise as we have learned any good operation in Peru (and many other parts of South America, as we have found), operates with the mission statement of “better late than never”. In this case ´never´ might have been better as 2 hours later, after we had left the city, we started to smell burning rubber and oil. Another hour later, we were back at the bus station in Lima waiting for a replacement bus. Our replacement bus turned out to be an old, ratty local bus which didn´t look like it would make it much farther than our last bus did but “beggars can´t be choosers”, so in the middle of the night we climbed on and fell asleep hoping for the best.
We were relieved to finally arrive in Cazma, the closest large city to Pariacoto around 4:30AM. Unfortunately this relief was quickly replaced as we realized that after 10 months of good karma (that we willl both admit was too good to be true), we finally got robbed! Someone must have stuck their hand in our backpacks while we were sleeping on the bus from Lima to Pariacoto and took our camera along with a headlamp, some batteries, and a battery charger. Fortunately, the culprit didn´t get anything valuable like our passports or moneybelts, we didn´t lose any pictures because Shan had downloaded them all, and Shan was looking for an excuse to buy a new camera anyway!
But we were pissed because we were originally on an ok bus with hardly any people on it and then got transferred to a not-so-nice old bus with many more people. Chances are the robbery probably wouldnt have happened on our first bus. And more importantly we were pissed that we weren’t going to be able to take any pictures of Pariacoto to show my parents.
We got over our frustrations and stuffed into a station wagon to ride from Cazma to Pariacoto and had a nice relaxing day there just wandering around the small town imagining what it must have been like for my parents to meet and begin their relationship there. I even managed to find a couple people in town who vividly remembered my dad and the helpful contributions he made and that was better than any picture we could have taken.
– Anthony
Tags: Travel
Shan