Camp: Peruvian / Ecuadorian border
Dateline: April / May, 2001

It’s 21 degrees and I feel cold. I’m wearing my jumper. If it were 21 degrees in New Zealand, it would be a hot day. Everything is relative though. The sacred literature of India explains that even though beings on other planets and planes of material existence live for time spans that are measured in thousands or millions of our years, their relative experience of that time is equal to our own. Ants live a full life of sense gratification in a matter of days. A beggar can become as morose losing 10 cents as a rich man can losing $10,000 dollars. It is 7am, and we are travelling through the countryside of Peru. When we got on the bus yesterday afternoon in Ecuador, it was 39 degrees.

Peru is a lot poorer than Ecuador. Looking at the countryside, which for the most part consists of a barren desert wasteland, I can understand why Peru entered into a limited armed conflict (some call it a war) with Ecuador in 1998 over territory. After that conflict, Ecuador was practically halved in size, and Peru ended up with some land where you can actually grow something. Driving through Ecuador we passed mile after mile of banana plantations, dotted with shanties of wildly different architectures, materials, and levels of opulence. One thing they all had in common though, was that whether their windows were of tinted glass, or simply a hole in the wall, they all had bars over them.

The bus is very comfortable. It is like being on a plane in many ways, but the seats are more comfortable, as the journey takes over 24 hours. It is a Volvo Marco Polo, very new – two stories with a stewardess. Travelling to a different country by bus is a new and pretty strange experience for me.

Going through the border on the Ecuadorian side at about 5:30pm was pretty easy. The bus stopped, we all got out and walked over to the National Police Immigration office and presented our passports. The officer behind the desk stamped them and we got back on. The bus continued on into the Ecuadorian border town of Huayquillas. We drove through a crowded market where the vendors had to pull their big metal-framed umbrellas protecting their wares from the elements out of the way to let us pass. I looked down on to the street from my second story vantage point and saw one vendor counting out change. He had American dollars, the standard currency in Ecuador, and he had other notes too, which I took to be Peruvian Nuevos Soles. The streets were jam packed with people, going both ways. As I looked around, I could imagine that people here would have been pretty nervous during the 1998 conflict, situated as they are right on the border with Peru, which consists of a river with a bridge over it.

We passed through Huayaquillas, travelling out on Avenida de la Repubica del Peru. On the other side we drove around the corner and were confronted with what is a familiar sight in Peru - barren, brown sandy earth. As we lumbered toward the non-descript bridge that constitutes the demarcation between the two nations, nimble little taxis consisting of the front of a motorcycle with a tricycle cart arrangement welded on the back darted around us. For some reason the whole thing reminded me of Star Wars, from the Anchorage style border town to the desert setting. The little taxis were just like the spaceships zipping in and out of the Anchorage port. On the other side we travelled for a while before arriving at the Peruvian border control post. It looks to me like it would be very easy to enter the country without passing through border control, as long as you didn’t have a lot of luggage to carry. Your average tourist probably couldn’t do it, but it certainly looks possible.

At the border control office, as we exited the bus, we were greeted by a group of people who were assisting the new arrivals, guiding them to the right building. “Hare Krishma!” they said, just as Dharmaraj in Guayaquil had told us a lot of people did. In Guayaquil I had people saying “Hare Krishna” to me in the street, but the response was more muted than in Cuenca. The sense gratification is more intense in Guayaquil, and a large city always breeds more impersonalism. Tokyo was the classic example. I mean how much energy do you have for interactions with people? Not as much as you need to acknowledge everyone in the street in Tokyo, that’s for sure. People end up withdrawing beyond what they would have done anyway, and find themselves alone in a crowd. The difference between interacting with people in the street in Auckland and Wellington in New Zealand has also highlighted the negative impact of super- large urban communities on personal interaction.

We went into the passport office, and were given a form to fill out, but no pen. The immigration people were asking us questions about what religion we were. When we looked around for somewhere to fill it out, we saw two of our friends taking up the only spaces at the bench for filling it out. They gestured us over, smiling. “Come on! Come on!” We went over and they took our forms from us, filling them out. At the same time, a man standing in the door began to offer to change money for us. Time was short, as the bus had pulled out smartly at the Ecuadorian border control post. The whole experience was quite bewildering. I was trying to make appropriate judgements, but I realised that there were too many new factors for me to be able to assess everything in the limited time I had. My form was being filled out - maybe I had some time. “What’s the exchange rate?” I asked. “Tres y cincuenta por uno dollar.” Three point five soles for one dollar. “It said three thirty in the guide book,” offered Vrajadhama.

“Okay, we’ll just change $10 here then, so we have money for a taxi or whatever if we need it when we get to Lima.” I wanted to change my money in a bank, not on the street. At the same time, we needed some local currency. I had a feeling that either we wouldn’t be able to use our US dollars, or else that using them would see us being ripped off even more. I stepped outside and met the man who did the exchange. I gave him ten dollars, and he punched figures into his calculator, showing me the result. “30 soles, fifty centavos.” Inside the immigration people were calling me over to the desk. He quickly counted the money out and gave it to me. Something didn’t feel right. Shouldn’t it be 35 soles? I grabbed my passport and form from the youth who had filled it out and took it over to the desk. The passport control officer asked me: “Travelling through in transit?” “No, quiero estar en Peru por noviente dias.” (No, I want to be in Peru for 90 days). He grunted and wrote 90 days on my visa, and handed my passport back.

As I got up to leave, one of the other immigration officers asked me if I had any incense. Many of the devotees live here by selling incense that some of the devotees bring back from India. I told him that I had none and then went outside. I was still trying to calculate how much I should have received in the exchange. My math was rusty, the use of the calculator shook my confidence in my own ability, and the whole situation was overwhelming. I was sure that those two guys had slipped away with my ten dollars, but no, they were standing outside. Perhaps thinking that I wanted to exchange more money, they came over to me as I approached them. I began to question them about the exchange rate. The man with the calculator began to do the calculation again. I looked closely at his calculator. It had the numbers worn off the buttons. I watched very closely, and saw as he punched in 3.050. “No! You said tres y cincuenta, not tres y cinco!” “Tres y cinco, mas o menos,” he said.

The youth who had filled out my form showed up, with his friends. “Fifty cents, fifty cents,” he said. “What for?” “For filling out your form.” “No dijiste nada antes” (You didn’t say before) I said. A crowd formed around us. Would they get hostile? I didn’t think I’d get my money back. It looked like we had been ripped. I ignored the youth for now, and demanded: “I want to change back!” The stewardess from the bus showed up and began to say something in rapido Spanish. I pulled out the money I had been given and thrust it back at the man. He took it, and began to count out Peruvian money again. I grabbed at my two American five-dollar bills in his hand and began to pull. “Hey, hey, no, no!” he said, and everyone became a little tense. He gave me another ten-dollar note, and I scratched it, as I had seen shopkeepers do with my money, to ascertain if it was a cheap imitation, which would smudge. It was bona fide. He counted out thirty-five soles and handed it to me. I gave him back the ten dollars, and we rushed out of the terminal. The youth was still with me. I gave him 10 US cents. “No, no, fifty cents, fifty cents is one sole,” he pleaded. At 3.5 soles to a dollar, one sole is about 30 cents in actuality. I gave him another 10 cents. “La proxima vez, digas antes,” (Next time, say first) I told him as we boarded the bus. Probably if he did say something beforehand, he wouldn’t get any business. He obviously makes his living this way, from tourists travelling through, who can undoubtedly afford to give him 50 cents for his service. Hey, I could have afforded to give him 50 cents, but after the whole scene I wasn’t feeling too well disposed.

Earlier, in Ecuador, I was coaching Vrajadhama about how to deal with people at places like this. “Don’t take anything from anyone without establishing how much it will cost in advance,” I told him. “These people make their living out of looking like they want to help you, and then ripping you off.” Even with this realisation, the whole set-up at the immigration office was so well choreographed that we were sucked right in. Next time we’ll be doubly cautious. Having said this, we got off lightly. I’m sure that if the same thing had happened to us in Ecuador, we wouldn’t have gotten our money back from the money changer, and the youth and his crowd would have been heavier about the fifty cents. We were cornered by a crowd late at night in Guayaquil after engaging a porter to carry our bags without negotiating a price first. To carry them 20 meters on his cart he wanted $1. In Cuenca, we had paid 25 cents for the same service. When I resisted this exorbitant charge, we were immediately surrounded by a hostile crowd. “Never take anything without first establishing the price,” I cautioned Vrajadhama. We hadn’t engaged the youths in filling out forms, so our position was a little better this time. It’s hard to tell what is normal, what is official and what is just a scam when you don’t know anything, and that’s what these people play on. Live and learn, I guess.

In Lima, we’ll just tell anyone and everyone to back off, and wait it out until the devotees arrive to pick us up. If they don’t, we’ll have to hunt down a taxi and bargain a fare. I have some strategies for this. One is to engage a taxi by myself, without our luggage, and then pick it up. The other is for both Vrajadhama and I to talk to different taxi drivers and call out our prices, forcing the assembled taxi drivers to tender for our fare. We probably can’t do the second one because we have to keep the entire luggage under our control. The advice we received was this – get a porter to help you with your luggage, and once it’s on his cart, keep your hand on it.

Two pieces of advice about Lima I received in Ecuador were these: “En Lima, mucho cuidado! Hay muchas ladrones” (In Lima, be very careful, there are many robbers!), and “Lima – infierno! Wow!”

We’ll see what Krishna has in store for us here.