Peru at First Sight

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It was time for a sightseeing trip to the mountains of Peru. We had lived in the north-coastal city of Chiclayo for four weeks teaching English at the Intercultural College of Peru & North America (ICPNA). The college took students from high school age to graduate and professional levels. These were not poor people, and our work was not charity, although we met plenty of the former and had opportunities for lots of the latter. This was a nation still becoming, and its brutal colonial past was in evidence as much in lowland cities as in high Andean villages.

The staff at the college had opened their arms to us—quite literally, as we found out that everyone kisses and hugs everyone else as a normal manner of greeting and farewell—and helped us find a one-room apartment and showed us where all the important places were, such as restaurants, hair stylists, and markets. With those things managed and our suitcases unpacked, we took another few days to familiarize ourselves with the curriculum and technology resources at ICPNA. We found a good library, two computer labs, five floors of small classrooms and very detailed programs for five levels of courses in English. There were textbooks, workbooks and teachers’ manuals for every class as well as supplementary materials contributed by previous staff. Every room had a teacher’s console from which audio and visual material could be presented, and every lesson in every course had such resources. After 40 years in the cash-strapped schools of Canada, this was a dream. Preparation time could be minimal, except for the extra oral-aural work we wanted to incorporate.

The college was eager to have native English speakers working for them, especially those who were also teachers, and we wanted to give them their money’s worth. That money was 17 soles per hour or $5 US.

With three classes of two hours running from 4:30 to 10:30 P.M. for 18 days in a monthly cycle, it worked out to 1836 nuevo soles per cycle. After living expenses—and we could live very cheaply in Chiclayo—we were left comfortably rich, and we were determined to spend it all in Peru, hence our trip to the mountains of Cajamarca. As soon as our first cycle of teaching was complete, we took a new friend from the staff at ICPNA as translator and guide and headed for the mountains.

We took a night bus to Cajamarca [Khy-ha-mar-ka] (clear your throat on the first syllable and don’t look back) and so we missed the view on the way in. Popping ears and hairpin turns with the driver going through all the gears he had, told us we were gaining altitude, but not how much. Once there, at 2600 metres, we rested up before busing further up to alpine meadows and the pre-Incan ruins at Cumbamayo.

Our lungs protested a bit at the 4000 metres elevation, but we didn’t notice any real mountains. We crammed 22 people into a motor van built for 12 and visited villages and ate trout and picked oranges. We burned up the batteries recording llamas and native dress and water channels carved in solid rock and burial sites. But those few rock formations on the horizon were scarcely worth the pictures. Mountains? Well, there were some high hills where clouds grazed by in bovine indifference and turned down into new valleys, but no great snowy peaks. We British Columbians come from the most scenic part of our country and are not easily impressed when someone says we’re going to see mountains. Then we took the day trip down.

That six-hour daylight bus ride from the top down to the coast was a mouth-gaping experience of hairpin turns on narrow roads that prompted countless “lookit-that!” comments at views unimpeded by guardrails. We came down through mountains that aren’t snow-covered rock, but massive green domes, impossibly steep but still patched with shades of green high up that testified to cultivation. There were crops growing on land I couldn’t imagine being able to walk on, it was so steep. Those alpine meadows we had trekked over, just dropped off to sea level. It looked as if the hills went down the 3000 metres in one great sweep, and we in our bus were just zigzagging down their flanks.

The books say that moisture-laden air makes it through from the central basin, but let me tell you about moisture-laden air. We had seen the phrase “cloud meadows” in the guidebook—as pretentious a phrase as ever was writ, I figured. But when you come round a bend and you’re looking at what should be another valley but there’s just a big cloud covering the whole expanse, the topside of which is a huge cotton pad, and you’re hoping the bus driver really knows this road because you’re about to descend through it, “cloud meadow” pretty well does it. Around the next shoulder a new valley dropped away, and this went on for well over an hour. It was awesome; it was all those expressions I swore I’d never use because they’re so overused, especially in guidebooks.

Derek is a retired educator who has just returned from Peru where he spent months teaching and exploring with his partner, Beverly Brookman.