The morning is a delight, warm and sunny. It is 44°, almost deck weather. The dogs have been out for a while appreciating the day. Nala is lying in the sun stretched out in the warmth. As for me, I’m still ailing a bit. This whatever it is lasts a while. I missed two concerts this week, the first time I’ve missed any, and am still wavering about today’s concert. It just takes so much effort to get moving.

I traveled in the days of maps, travel books and brochures. I planned everything ahead of time for long trips. The eight weeks in South American were the most amazing. We did just about everything I’d planned and some surprising side trips I hadn’t. The start of our trip was Caracas. Eight weeks later we left from Rio having traveled a continent. During that whole trip, we met one American. He had just given his suitcase to a cab driver who wasn’t. The cab driver was a thief. We did meet a British woman on the 3 day boat ride from Paraguay to Argentina down the Paraná River, and she was the only one who spoke English on the boat. My two years of college Spanish held me in great stead on that trip as did the South American Handbook, put out by BOAC back then. The book was thick. It covered everything. I read through all the countries, made notes and compared that handbook to another handbook or two, but no other handbook came close. I used it to plan the entire trip.

On that trip, every geography book I ever studied popped into life. We managed to travel a good portion of a continent by ourselves. Mostly we rode in locally scheduled town to town busses, some long distances. The trains too were local, no tourist trains back then in Peru. We left Cusco to Machu Picchu on a train with all the women vendors on their way to markets. Some got off at each stop. We got off at the end, down the hill from Machu Picchu, the place which seemed to appear in every geography book I studied. You know, the place with the tall mountain in the middle and the whole city across in front of it. No tourists back then.

We rode regular buses and trains. We took a couple of flights because of time and distance. We had that one long boat ride and another couple of boat rides, short rides: by train from Quito to Duran, Ecuador then across by boat to Guayaquil. The next was a train ride from Cusco to Puno then a hydrofoil across Lake Titicaca from Peru to Bolivia. We stopped at the Islands of the Sun and the Moon and at Copacabana mostly to see the church of Our Lady of Copacabana. We walked and toured and and got all our information from the handbook. No one spoke English. We saw Incan ruins on both islands and we were awed by that Basilica. After wandering a while, we boarded the boat then across more of the lake to the Bolivian side to a bus to ride across the altiplano on our way to La Paz.

There must have been a border in Puno, or maybe not. Back then, in the 70’s, few American tourists were traveling country to country as we were so we were an oddity. Sometimes that meant quickly stamped in with a visa. Sometimes we waited.

That trip is my most spectacular trip. Awesome was everywhere. I saw bananas growing and mountains covered in snow. I rode through cities with their grand Spanish architecture cathedrals. I saw the front of the train from the back on quite the curvy rail on my way to the Valley of the Incas. I have memory drawers bursting with scenes from that trip. It was so amazing.

This entry was posted on January 19, 2025 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.