Lost Vegetarian

We were somewhere between Cusco and Urubamba when our van hit the wall. It was almost 6am, still pitch black and pouring rain, and the wall – about a foot high and made up of rocks about the size of grapefruits – stretched across both lanes of the road. Our driver had been going a bit too, but I think the sheer improbability of the wall made it harder to stop in time. We hit the wall with a loud crunch, and stopped a few feet past it. There were 13 of us crammed into a van built to hold 11, and only five of us were tourists headed to Machu Picchu. The rest were locals who just needed a ride.
It was harder and more expensive to get to Machu Picchu than I thought it would be. There are two companies that run trains there, but they don’t leave from Cusco, they leave from a town called Ollantaytambo (shortened to Ollanta by the locals), which was almost two hours from Cusco. One of those companies offered a bus ticket to Ollanta, but it added around $40 to the cost of the train. A taxi would cost around $30. At my hotel they told me there are minivans that cost around $3, which leave early in the morning every half hour (or when they were full).
So I found myself at Pavitos, a small dark road in southern Cusco, around 4am. There was a minivan waiting, half full, with a young woman nearby calling out “Ollanta!” to all passersby. It took a while for the van to fill, and in the end we had to take some passengers who only wanted to go to Urubamba, about halfway to our destination. They were a couple of Quechua women, instantly recognizable by their bowler hats and tightly braided hair. By the time we left it was raining pretty hard.
The roads were narrow and winding, and our driver took the curves with a kind of casual recklessness that didn’t help when we came across that wall.
It looked like a trap set by bandits, but it was just strange enough that there was nothing scary about the thought. I also wondered if the rain had somehow washed the rocks across the road in a way that merely looked like a wall. After some experiments with driving, we all climbed out of the van to wait for whatever happened next. As we stood on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere in Peru, none of us spoke. The sun was just starting to rise behind the mountains; somewhere in the distance a rooster crowed, then a baby started to cry. Our tires were eventually changed, and we continued on our way with no explanation