However, the inevitable finally happened: I filled Eve's hard drive, which stopped me from uploading photos onto the Internet. This, in turn, zapped my enthusiasm for writing in the blog. Also, poor Internet connections in the towns we stayed in further conspired against my writing. So my plan was to catch up once back in the United States.
And this I will do. But first, let he tell you, faithful reader, about our bus ride from Cusco to Lima.
After having visited Cusco, the ancient capitol city of the Inca empire, and after having gone trekking in the Sacred Valley, and after having visited Machu Picchu, we took a night bus to Lima. Our trip had been capped by a wonderful few days and we were all felling a certain nostalgic reluctance to return home. Still, after dinner on the bus, darkness came and we all slid off one by one to sleep in our seats. The bus ride was cold, but this is something we had grown accustomed to after many months in the Andes. Eve was resting comfortably next to me. Mary was across the aisle.
When I awoke the bus was already off the road and in the air. It was tilting to the left through the darkness. I could see hand luggage tumbling down on us from the overhead compartment and I could tell the bus was crashing but before I could feel fear, I was knocked unconscious.
I looked out the window and down at the ground knowing the bus was not moving and feeling annoyed that so many other passengers were screaming that we were sliding over a cliff.
Suddenly, I was standing outside the bus, helping people one by one through the emergency exit. There was a strong smell of diesel fuel that was leaking out of the bus and onto the ground. At some point, I made my way across the street where the other passengers were congregating. I was shoeless and cold, standing in my thin sweater. I felt nauseated and my head hurt. I heard someone was trapped under the bus, but I did not believe this. Then there were buses and lights all around. I was standing on a coat or sweater to keep my feet warm. Mary was crying. Then the other buses left and we were in the dark again.
I don't remember when I knew my nose was broken and that the blood on my clothes was mine.
At some point, another bus came and I got on near the end, sitting on the floor near the back. Some people gave me tissue paper to sop up the blood coming out of my face. I held hands with those who were crying, assuring them that the worst was over.
We made our way to the village of Puquio and into the clinic. Getting off the bus, I noticed that I was carrying our bags. We set these down in the Ob-Gyn exam room where there was a dog lying under a desk. It was cold in the unheated clinic. In the room with Mary, Eve and I were two Australians, Clair and Casey. Casey, like Eve, had a clearly dislocated shoulder. Clair and Mary were bruised but had no obvious injuries. My nose was still bleeding. A Nurse came in to examine Casey, who was clearly in a lot of pain.
She then returned to clean my face. I told her I could do it myself and so she left me to it. There was a lot of dried blood in my beard and on my forehead. My teeth were all still in, but my nose was deformed and my lips, bridge of my nose and forehead were abraded and bleeding. After washing up, I asked Clair to take a photo of me.
Soon thereafter, I was seen by a doctor and put on a saline drip. The exam was quick and I was moved via wheelchair to a room with four beds. In the bed next to me was a Canadian named Damien. He had been dug out from under the bus, where he had indeed been trapped during the accident. He was awake and oriented and apparently had escaped without any broken bones or major internal bleeding. Amazing.
We stayed in the clinic a long time. I was given 200ml of a 20% solution of Maintol, which I was told would control/reduce any swelling in my brain. Doctors continued to ask me if X-rays of my head had been done. "No, todavia" I would answer. This would send them away. Eve finally tracked down a nurse, who confided that no X-rays were being done because it was too uncomfortably cold in the X-ray room. This seemed ridiculous, as it was daytime and Eve had already had an image of her shoulder before sunrise. Ever persistent, she eventually organized a portable X-ray done of my head while I lied in my bed. This confirmed that my nose was indeed broken and helped to rule our any other fractures in my skull or neck. The surgeon came to reduce the fracture, which he did to little effect.
Eventually, Eve was given a bed near mine. Her shoulder was dislocated and her clavicle had a distal fracture. Mary curled up in a ball near my feet and slept. A reported came by wanting information. Eventually, after many hours, a police officer showed up, taking down our names, nationalities and ages. He argued with Eve that they had been quick to the scene of the accident, although she eventually got him to admit that it had taken at least an hour and a half for any officer to arrive on scene. We began to hear rumors that the bus had been pillaged, and someone had died or that the driver had been alone and fallen asleep. We were never seen by any representative of the bus company.
After a nice lunch (difficult to eat given the pain in my front teeth) I spent the afternoon sleeping and talking on the phone with the embassy and family. At some point, Eve's arm was bound, but only after the surgeon demonstrated the mobility of her fracture to a student by pushing on it. This quickly reduced Eve to tears at which the surgeon joked, "she's crying and I haven't even cut her!" Eventually and without protest, we were all discharged and told a bus would take us to clinics in Lima.
Indeed, the bus company had indeed organized another bus for the remaining ten-hour trip to the capital. Likewise, everything - so we were told - had been brought from the sight of the accident to the town in the new bus. Many found this not to be the case. Indeed, my camera and Mary's iPod and headphones went missing whereas our boots were delivered to us. We all suspected the police of this malfeasance, as they assured us that the bus had been under their control the entire time, but were simultaneously obstructive when we asked for a police report of the accident or to file a report for the missing items.
We were eventually seated in the bus and began our trip to Lima a little after 4:00 in the afternoon. We had been at the clinic for nearly 11 hours and it was good to leave, knowing better treatment would be available to us soon. Taking a bus run by the same company on Peruvian mountain roads so soon after our ordeal was trying to say the least and we were relieved that the driver was sensitive enough to our trauma to take it slowly around the corners and past the cliffs.
We stopped in Nazca for enough time for me to re-purchase the medicine I had lost in Puquio. I felt better; my headache and nausea had subsided, but higher mental functions, like planning, organization and execution were still beyond my reach. I was relying a lot on Eve to think for me. In Nazca, the bus company changed drivers and we coasted down in Pana-American highway, eating our dinners and watching Mary's copy of "The House of Spirits." Then the driver changed again. For whatever reason, our new driver drove like a maniac and refused to slow down despite the ongoing screams of his traumatized passengers and the crying of children who had so recently been in a bus accident. After two or three hours of this pseudo-torture, we arrived in Lima. Collecting our bags, I was greatly subtlety relieved to never need set foot on a Peruvian bus again.
