The nosebleed was the first sign that I was probably out of my element. “Shit, honey, you have blood on your face,” Ben said. We’d only been hiking for twenty minutes and had already dropped our packs at a bridge to eat dry discs of bread that Ben had bought from a señora at a […]
Travel
“Below the Surface” in Vela Magazine
At one point Alejandro tosses a fish and it hits me across the face, like a slap on the cheek. “Disculpa, señora, disculpa!” he says, apologizing quickly before he’s back to snapping fins. But the fish doesn’t really hurt (no stinging whiskers or slicing dorsal fins) as much as the feeling that even when […]
Travels in Peru: Cullebrayoc and Quincemil
We didn’t take a bus to Cullebrayoc. And Cullebrayoc isn’t so much a place as a crook in the road–one of those hairpin turns with a single structure at the edge of the road. From Marcapata we hailed a truck that hauls gas cisterns and climbed aboard the platform on the back–with about a dozen […]
Travels in Peru: Tinke to Marcapata
On Friday, June 29th, Ben and I sat in the main plaza of the town of Tinke–3 hours east of Cusco. “The bus will come through some time in late afternoon,” Jason had told us. “Make sure you’re waiting. You can always stand on the side of the road and flag it down if you […]
Travels in Peru: Lima to Tinke
The next few posts are dedicated, much belatedly, to my travels in Peru. I was lucky enough to receive a Nationality Room Scholarship from the University of Pittsburgh this summer–The George F. and Mary Ann McGunagle Memorial Award–in order to research and write about the Interoceanic Highway. The highway runs from Peru’s Pacific coast eastward […]
Amanda Giracca 