Memoirs of a Loner Traveler: Ica to Lima, Peru

Of course, the last two days had to be the most 'adventurous', to put it euphemistically.

I woke up in the morning not really rested, the obvious reason being the sporadically shaking earth, and the less obvious reason being the uncertainty of how I was to get to Lima in time to catch my plane. Earlier in the day I had the guy at the hostel reception help me book a bus ticket back to Lima. He had told me he would have it for me by that afternoon, but afternoon came and went and he was no where to be found. Much later, I found out that immediately after the earthquake, apparently he tried to rush back to the hostel from wherever he was in Huacachina, only to be injured when a brick wall collapsed upon him. Allegedly the injury was so major that some of his toes had to be surgically amputated.

So when morning came, I still had no bus ticket and we had no clue what was going on - no one did. Even the police were useless; with all electricity and telephone lines unavailable, Huacachina remained horribly isolated, besides one battery-run radio whose frantic DJ made me increasingly nervous. From what could be gathered, we found out that going to Lima was nearly impossible, as the infrastructure on the southern coast were mostly destroyed.

When you're 23, and lived a fairly multinational life, the likelihood of you encountering a totally virginial, first-time scenario is very slim, unless you are forced into participation. So in Huacachina, in this isolated neighborhood, I was facing a VERY virginial situation: how to get from point A to point B in the face of a major natural disaster, in a foreign country whose language I did not speak. I couldn't even think of where to begin, especially with limited access to any means of communication.

In truth, I was horrified and wanted to cry, even though that wouldn't have solved anything. I started by gathering as much information as possible, listening to the radio and talking to people who came into Huacachina from Ica. the problem was, no one was really sure about the information they had; it was almost always second-hand, something they had (over)heard in an adjacent conversation. Some people said that the buses were running to Lima, others said that nothing ran to Lima. Some spoke of a bridge by Pisco that had collapsed, other said it was half-collapsed and you can walk to the other side... So, by the end of my information gathering, I felt I had gotten nowhere, and was still as lost as when I had started.

I laid out the options in my head: I could stay in Huacachina until further information could be confirmed - this was something I instinctively wanted to do. Someone would, I hoped, hand me the best answer in time, and I could delay my decision until then. But, the fact that I couldn't speak Spanish, and the hostel owners' unwillingness to do much (like feed us or give us up-to-date info) told me this was a poor option. I feared nothing would be handed to me. And the 30m+ sand dunes on all but one side of Huacachina was nerve-hacking and didn't help my mental health: the image of a gianormous sand avalanche I had so feared causing the previous day appeared all at once plausible of happening.

My second option was to tag along someone else in Huacachina, who also wanted to get to Lima and had already figured out how. There was a Swiss family - a mother and her three kids - who had decided that they would attempt to fly to Lima, as they had a 2pm flight to catch that day. The mother had spoken to some woman at Ica's airport, who claimed that they were already building a substantial waiting list for flights to Lima. There were, of course, a few problems: because communication lines were nonexistent, the airport could not get a confirmation from Lima's airport that they could, in fact, land. Until that confirmation was attained, the lady claimed, there would be no flights. And when this confirmation was to be attained, she had no clue. Secondly, the chances of squeezing myself on to a plane when there was already a back-up seemed to me less than slim. Going to Ica's airport, therefore, had some major risks.

My final option, however, seemed to me at the time the most ludicrous of all: I would gamble my luck with the scant information that bus companies were running to Lima, and/or the bridge crossing the river north of Pisco was only slightly collapsed and I could walk over it. This option was entirely based on my desire - however unsure - to get moving. It was only 8:30am. Even if it took me 20 hours to get to Lima, I would still make it for my flight at 10am. My hesitations came from my lack of any knowledge of the earthquake and its aftermaths; the fact that I would be going right through the epicenter, Pisco, on my way; and that I would be doing this seemingly stupid ordeal on my own. But, in consideration of the other options, I felt I had no other 'real' choice. I have to get back to Lima, I thought, and so, I packed up my belongings.

Tom and Elly accompanied me into Ica's bus terminal. There were long lines everywhere, surrounding the terminal office like a tangled bunch of yarn. I lined up behind a Peruvian couple, in a line I figured would lead me up to a counter. "Do you know if going to Lima is possible?" the man asked, surprisingly, in English. "We have no idea, we're hoping," we said.

When I got to the counter, I said, "Lima," and the woman blurted something in Spanish so fast I couldn't even catch the verb or its subject. I poked the couple in front of me and asked for a translation. "She's saying, you can't go to Lima. The bridge collapsed," the woman said. Then, whom I determined as her boyfriend conversed with the counter lady, then advised me to buy the ticket to Pisco. "Don't worry, we'll help you, buy the ticket and follow us. You can walk across the bridge to San Clementine." Seeing as there was no other option available, I did as I was told.

The man and woman whom I thought were a couple turned out to be siblings. "We'll take you to Pisco and across the brdige so you can catch a bus on the other side for Lima," the brother, named Pepe, said. I gave my bag to the bus driver to stow away, and bid Tom and Elly (who decided to leave Ica the next day) farewell. "Good luck, you'll be alright," Elly said. I wasn't so sure about 'being alright' but really, there was no other positive thought to sustain, and so I took it in as much as I could.

Inside the bus, Pepe took my ticket and told me to sit next to his sister, Paola. "We're from Pisco," she said, and continued to tell me about where she was at the time of the earthquake, how she was working at her bank, and was worried about the whereabouts of her brother who turned out to be in Ica as well at the time, and how her father, who was in Pisco, was also doing alright.

The ride to Pisco was peaceful up until the last bit, approximately two miles away from Pisco's outskirts. The bus, in fact, had stopped behind a hundred other buses, and the bus driver merely sighed. Obscenities flew around for no more than 10 seconds, and everyone started getting off the bus. "Let's go, we're walking!" Pepe shouted. So there I was and Pepe and Paola, two miles away from Pisco, the asphalt cracked in various locations, hundreds of buses lined up all the way to the horizon. "I'm a man!" Pepe claimed, and took my 11kg bag, as we walked towards Pisco under a very aggressive sun. I felt like a refugee carrying her entire life on her shoulders, migrating to some unknown land somewhere beyond the horizon on the bare hope that things will work out in the end. To be sure, things WERE starting to work itself out, since the moment Pepe and Paola offered their help, and for this I was unspeakably thankful.

Evidence of the earthquake's realities were painfully visible the closer we got to Pisco. Not only was the road destroyed, shacks and housing were flattened, brick walls partially standing, heaps of rubble were everywhere, food scraps and human feces rotting away on the side - the sewage system was done for. About twenty minutes after we left the bus, we entered the city of Pisco, and even Pepe and Paola were shocked. "We had no idea it was this bad!" Paola exclaimed. "My house is partially collapsed, my friend said." The extraordinary thing, I thought, was that she said this in the most lightheartedly way possible; she was even smiling, laughing, and I was terribly grateful of that, too.

Pepe, in the meanwhile, was talking to various people - friends, I assumed, from their familiar interactions - and asked about how to get to Lima. "We're going to find a friend to take you to Lima," he said, and I was shocked.
"A friend?"
"Yeah, we're from Pisco, we know lots of people. Don't worry."
Still shocked and not knowing what to say in the face of such kindness and really, my luck to have met these two, we continued to walk towards the notorious bridge.

Probably a good two miles from the bridge, Pepe found a family - a woman and her two daughters - who were headed towards Lima, and gladly conceded to take me along. here, Pepe gave me my bag, I gave Paola my email address, and they both smiled and said, "Go, go! You don't have much time!" I turned to the woman with her daughters, who looked at me urgently and pointed towards the bridge, saying something in Spanish at the same time. I looked around for Pepe and Paola, and they were already gone, lost in the migrating crowd.

The sun was hot, very aggressive. With the heat rose the stench from the side of the broken asphalt. And soon, the collapsed bridge was visible, and its pseudo-standing surface swarmed with people. I conversed in my broken Spanish with the two girls, Nadia and Paola, who were fascinated by the fact I was from Tokyo, and asked all sorts of questions, only less than half of which I was probably able to satisfactorily answer. Sharing a bottle of water between us, we half-ran, half-walked towards the bridge, the mother claiming we had to stick together.

The bridge was in terrible shape. Thankfully the river was very shallow, being the dry season, and we were able to cross it without getting wet. Police were fully armed and protected, guarding both ends of the bridge. Some were chasing down prisoners who had escaped a nearby prison that had broken apart during the quake. When we finally reached San Clementine, people were in a slightly rioting state, banging on cars and yelling at its drivers who were forcing their way on to the bridge. I assumed people were angry at such a selfish action that could very well fully destroy the barely standing bridge.

Once on the other side in San Clementine, we forced ourselves on a bus headed towards Chinchay. We literally flagged down a bus, and ran up to and into it while it drove on at 20 km/h. for a couple hours we rode on in the bus along the coastline and I could smell the salt in the air. Along the way we saw more houses collapsed, more roads broken, more people not knowing what should or should not be done.

Somewhere beyond Chinchay, we got off, and the mother pulled me towards another bus where I paid for another ticket. The bus, however, kept trying to go, and the mother kept trying to stop it. They took my bag, opened the side of the bus and launched it inside. The mother gave me a hug and kisses on my cheek, the ticketseller pushed me on to the bus, and like that, like it was with Pepe and Paola, the lady and Nadia and Paola were gone. The bus was off, and I was headed to Lima.

On the bus I sat next to a man who kept insisting on showing me pictures of Pisco and Ica's devastation - mainly in the form of dead bodies - on his cell phone. I looked at him in disgust and was very happy to move to another seat when it became available. This ride, too, took place through a menagerie of destructed environs, the bus tipping this way and that as the tires tried to avoid the gaping cracks in the asphalt. I dozed off for a bit, and when I woke we had arrived in the district of Lima.