Cusquenita

Cusquenita

"Mercado San Pedro, baja baja!" the kid called forward to the collectivo driver. As our scruffy white minivan pulled abruptly to a halt, he wrenched open the broken door, ushered commuters off, and chanted "sube sube sube" to those clamboring in. As soon as the last heel lifted from the pavement and the new passengers were perfectly off-balance muddling around for a seat, he yelled "vamos!" to the driver and we swerved back out onto the road.

I learnt to love these twice-daily collectivo rides, but this was my first one, and I had no idea how it worked. I was terrified. I was in Cuzco, Peru, living my dream of total integration into a new language, a new culture. The first day is always the hardest, I told myself, that's how you know it's the start of something new.

A cross-section of modern Cuzco squeezed in the minivan with me every day. There were Quechua Indian women; their hair in two long plaits tied together at the ends to form a loop. They had full skirts, high socks, bowler hats and lumpy bags of market produce. Their bodies round and squat, old. Younger ladies in jeans and polar fleece jackets, babies in colourful sling wraps on their backs. School kids playing with ringtones. Young professionals in suits and heels. The smell of sweat, and meat, and dust.

Remembering where I was in space. Not on the metro to work at sea level in my own developed city. A cramped van, in an ancient city, in the thin cold mountain air. I found it hard to picture myself over three kilometers higher in altitude to normal; I wished there were a cliff I could look down to the ocean, a sheer drop to illustrate the height. A long way from home.

Through the cobbled, narrow streets. Smooth Inca block foundations under colonial Spanish cathedrals. During two earthquakes the Spanish parts collapsed, someone told me, but the Inca bases never shifted. Past a witch market. Past a plaza where the Incas were massacred. Steep alleys winding higher and higher into the hills which surround the city, the walls of the bowl. Look down over Cuzco; the sprawl of flat brown roofs.

“Baja!” He calls, every couple of hundred metres. I try to memorise landmarks, to know when to signal my stop. A towering pile of tyres. A rubbish skip full of dogs. A broken down Inca Cola truck. All the stops look the same. I realise my stop is the end of the line; easy! Small victories. Having observed everyone else pass the kid fifty centimos when they want to get off, I do the same. Twenty cents for a thirty-minute bus ride.

"Senoriiiiiita buenos diiiiias!" A miniature mosh crowd of clawing hands greeted me, grabbing at my arms and legs. Grubby grey regulation tracksuits, broken shoes, woolly beanies. Couldn’t speak the language yet, but my nerves vanished. I fell in love.