A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Carnival

A lot has happened over the past 5 days and I want to write all about it, but I have broken it up into three parts. I have started with the trip to Carnival because it is too classic to ignore. I have all the stories written and will post it in 3 parts.

I travel a lot. But like the vast majority of my trips, there were a few bumps in the road this past weekend. And I use the term, bump in the road, because my travel hang ups always seem to revolve around transportation. I have had some truly awesome travel catastrophes. My dad always thinks he can one up all of my break downs and strange “Benicia triangle” mishaps, but my dad has never pushed his broken down car across the Mexican border, alone. I’m also pretty confident my dad doesn´t have anything quite as unique as my trip to Carnival in Cajamarca.

It’s my fault, I admit it. I was all ready to leave on my 13 hour, overnight double-decker bus up to the mountain town of Cajamarca for Carnival. I had planned on meeting over half of Peru 9 as well as a bunch of other PCV’s from different groups for the famous festivities of Carnival, way up in the Andes mountains. But due to a big misjudgment in Lima traffic, I arrived at the bus station just in time to see my bus role out of the station. Now, my bus was supposed to leave at 7 PM. Nothing in Peru is punctual. I have never been on a bus that has left on time. But of course, Ali’s law says the one time I am running late is the one time a bus leaves on time in the history of Peru. I arrived exactly at 7. If they had waited just one minuet more, I would have made it.
Since Carnival in Cajamarca is popular, and most of the overnight buses had already left, I was certain if I stayed in Lima I was not going to make it Cajamarca in time. So I hopped on another overnight bus to Trujillo, which is 8 hours north, thinking the closer I got, the easier it would be find an empty seat. I called just about everyone I thought might help me. I had two friends leaving out of Trujillo that night. They checked with the bus line they were traveling on, and the 4 busses they had leaving on Friday were all full. My situation was looking grim, there was a good chance I was going to wake up in Trujillo and be stuck there. I had to talk myself down from a panic attack telling myself that I’d been in way worse situations than this. But it wasn’t so much about being stuck and not knowing what to do. It was just that this was my first real vacation I was taking in Peru. It was my first time in the Andes mountains. It was all my friends. It was Carnival! And it was looking like I wasn’t going to make it.

I arrived in Trujillo at 7 in the morning. I went to 9 different bus stations, and nobody had seats. It was beginning to look hopeless. But finally I found an open seat on a bus leaving at 10:30. But the catch was it wasn’t on a “reputable” bus line. Peace Corps gave us a list of busses we are supposed to travel on for our safety and our sanity. Now I know why. This was a seven hour bus ride with no bathroom and no air conditioner (the first 3 hours of the ride were through the desert). I’m not entirely sure what happened, if they oversold the bus or what, but there were more people on the bus than there were seats. I was one of the first people to board and there was already a woman with her two daughters in my seat. I told her she was in my seat and she said that it was all the same. I told her actually, it was not all the same, that I had elected that seat in the very front, next to a window because I get sick. I thought she would pack up her family and move to a different seat, but she just moved over to the aisle seat. She lifted the arm rest in between the two seats and put her two daughters in between us.

I realized then, that this woman had down the classic Peru tradition of buying one seat for the whole family and that I had to compromise my space because of it. I was already in a pretty bad mood having missed my bus the night before and being terrified that I would be miss Carnival all together. I may have been a bit more tolerant of the situation if it wasn’t for my already foul disposition. But because there were other people raising huge to-do’s about having paid for a seat and not getting one, I found the courage to put down the arm rest. I literally put down the arm rest on top of one of the little girls and said “oh, excuse me, excuse me”, forcing the little girls to move over. The woman gave me a look like “what do you think you`re doing you incredibly rude, white girl?”. This was definitely a difference in culture. In her world, it was totally expectable to buy one bus ticket and put three people in it. But in my, totally annoyed world, this was absolutely unacceptable. So when she gave me a look, I gave one right back. And it was settled. She knew she was in the wrong. So the arm rest stayed down the rest of the trip as she tried to balance one girl on her lap and squeeze the other one into her leg room. Of course she immediately wandered over to my leg room, and the rest of the trip became a personal space tug of war.

I felt bad, I was totally being bitchy about my space. But I kept saying to myself “you paid for this ticket, stand up for yourself”. But then the Peace Corps side of me kept reprimanding my behavior for being selfish and unsympathetic. Both the girls and the mom were all so sweet. Once the mom realized that I wanted my space, she was very respectful and polite about keeping her girls on her side. And the girls offered me some of their cookies and soda. But I still proceeded to be annoyed for most of the trip.

When we got close to Cajamarca, the bus started getting bombarded by buckets of water and water balloons. Since there was no air-conditioning, the windows were opened and we all got wet. I actually found it really cool. Welcome to Carnival, I thought to myself. But the little girls did not have the same response. They started crying, which of course annoyed me even more. I couldn´t wait to get off that bus and arrive.

But finally, finally, finally, 24 hours after missing my bus in Lima. I arrived in Cajamarca. Was it all worth it? I’ve rambled on too long already to pour into the high jinx of this wet and wild weekend. So I will post pictures and stories tomorrow about carnival