DAY 11 -- TARAPOTO TO LIMA

Early morning street scene from balcony, Hotel la Mansion, Tarapoto

The sounds of motocar traffic and pedestrians on the street below awakens me from an actual nightmare related to my work for the FAA. It’s 7 a.m. and it’s raining. I prepare a bit for my departure later today, then go downstairs for a motocar to take me here and there around centro Tarapoto.

My young driver, Segundo, also drove me around a bit last night. He takes me looking for an embroidered patch, the translation of which has always escaped me. It’s not the easiest thing, to explain the concept of “embroidered patch,” if you don’t have one handy to point at. The search is a failure.

I need to change some large Peruvian bills for something smaller. The banks aren’t open, but the casinos are. We go to one named after that gambling mecca, Fargo, to change a 50-soles note for something smaller. It is difficult to buy anything with currency larger than a 20-soles note (about $7 USD), and many services (street vendors, motocar drivers, etc.) can’t handle those. So, when you leave a cambio automatico (ATM) with a pocketful of 100-soles bills, you don’t necessarily have any money that can be readily spent other than at your lodging or perhaps a restaurant. When I leave Casino Fargo weighted down with 50 soles in the form of coins, airport security 100 miles (160 km) away could detect my every move.

I jingled my way back by Real Grill for a very nice breakfast of juice, scrambled eggs and bacon, rice, and some of Tarapoto's renowned coffee. Afterwards I enter a collection of fairly cheesy shops, purchasing some trinkets to take back home.

Small shop inside a 'mall', Tarapoto

The airline Star Peru has an office on a corner of the plaza where I check on flights to Lima. They have one flight a day—at 3:55 p.m.—but they indicate that there are no seats available. The young man helping me suddenly jumps up, goes to the back room to talk to a supervisor, and comes back with the good news that I can, indeed, purchase a ticket. It’s less than $90 USD including taxes, so really I’m paying only about $50 USD more than my ZED (airline discount) fare. I snatch the opportunity immediately.

I run into Wendy near the plaza. [She is the young American traveling with her husband who shared a ride with me yesterday from Yurimaguas to Tarapoto.] She thinks that the five of us who made the trip yesterday seem to be the only foreigners in the city.

I spend an hour on the Internet, shower once more at my hotel, and have Segundo take me to the airport on his motocar as we’d arranged earlier. Star Peru requires that you check-in two hours prior to your flight, and the flight is two hours late. Do the math: I have four hours to kill at the airport, and not a minute is wasted.

On the road to the airport, Tarapoto;

(below) airport buildings and control tower

I stop at a little shop selling regional specialties—liquers, mermeladas (preserves), coffee—to take home as well as other items to consume on the spot. A pretty twenty-something woman is pouring samples of ten different alcoholic beverages, products of Tarapoto. I soon spot Alan and Guy, the Aussies who have seemingly shared a parallel universe with me since I jumped onto the Eduardo IV in Lagunas. The three of us have a great time sampling first one, then another of the drinks. I purchase two bottles to bring home.

Behind the shop’s counter a precocious teenager makes change, wraps items, clearly enjoying talking with someone exotic. I stick around trying this and that. I taste some local honey, buy some coffee to take home, and order the very unlikely drink called maiz morado.

Maiz morado is a cold beverage made from a variety of purple corn—corn!—that gives it a grape juice-like appearance. A woman on the plane ride back to Miami told me that maiz morado contains a bit of lemon and sugar in addition to the purple corn base. It’s good!

I go outside and sit on the steps in front of the terminal. A young, fresh-faced woman in her early twenties is sitting there as well. Felicity is very British, very religious, and has just come out of rural northern Peru having served—if I recall correctly—several months at an orphanage.

I’m interested in volunteering one day in some capacity—social or environmental—and I asked Felicity about the sponsor of the project where she worked. King’s Care, she tells me, is a British social outreach program serving impoverished areas worldwide.

Back inside again, I place some calls to the U.S. These are very easy and inexpensive to make from the call centers seen virtually everywhere in Peru. I touch base with Barb at school, then try to contact someone at my employer’s in Wichita to discuss my work (or non-work) situation—I’m scheduled to work tonight and clearly won’t be there.

At the airport shop where I’d already spent an hour of time, I talk with a counselor of some kind who travels regularly to outlying regions of the country in her job for the government of Peru. Madeleine is 37, just the age of my own daughters. Barely 5 feet (1.6 m) in height, she is dark featured, handsome, and looks every bit the intense mid-career professional behind her frameless eyeglasses.

Madeleine has some elementary English learning materials with her which we look through with the two shop girls. She’d like to join her sister in the Los Angeles area within a few years, hoping to improve her family’s lives and opportunities. We continue to talk in the gate area while waiting for the flight to arrive. It finally does, of course, and the Star Peru flight to Lima departs at 6 p.m., two hours late.

The late-thirtyish woman seated next to me looks like a good bet to be English-speaking. She is. Susan is a born-again Christian who has dedicated the past 15 years of her life to serving the underprivileged in Central America, Africa, and now—for the past seven years—in Peru.

I ask, and she tries to explain where she lives, telling me that it’s 140 km (85 miles) north of Tarapoto via a difficult road. I try to recall what roads there are north of Tarapoto other than Highway 8A, and can’t think of any. I tell Susan that I’d been north of Tarapoto to the outpost river town of Yurimaguas, and asked where she worked in relation to it. “That’s it!,” she said, unbelieving that she was seated next to someone who knew where her mission was, and understood a little about how desperately it was needed. She said that I knew more about what she did, and where, than anyone in her own family with the exception of her mother who, at the ages of 75 and 80, had twice endured the arduous journey to Yurimaguas to visit her daughter.

Susan is from Michigan. She dropped out of college following her spiritual re-birth, choosing to take an active role in social service—and, I assume, evangelism—in impoverished areas.

She is on her way today to meet a volunteer team of medical professionals flying into Lima from the United States to assist at her mission for a time. We talk about her work. I ask about the laborers loading the Eduardo boats in Yurimaguas, whether she had seen them carrying loads of caged chickens onto the boats, liquid waste pouring out of the cages and down the men’s backs. She said that she’d been on the Eduardo line boats to look around them, but had never witnessed what I described. [My account of the brutal conditions endured by the laborers can be found in Day 7 of this narrative.]

Susan took a little time to talk about the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, just west of Detroit. She clearly considered this an excellent, interesting attraction.

There was a group of perhaps 15 U.S. doctors aboard the flight from Tarapoto to Lima, beginning their journey back home. They were boisterous, in high spirits at the end of their mission somewhere in northern Peru. Susan was naturally interested in talking with some of these men, professionals who might well have contacts that could benefit her work in the future. I changed seats with one of those contacts—a young Peruvian physician—so that the two women could talk about shared interests for the remainder of the flight.

This is a good point to offer an observation. On board this flight from Tarapoto to Lima is an American woman who is devoting her whole life to service in the world’s impoverished regions. She is on her way to meet a team of volunteers—Americans—who will return with her to her mission where they will serve the health needs of impoverished indigenous people. Also on this plane is a team of volunteer physicians returning home following a period of service. They were also Americans. All told, I can account for perhaps 30 people who will be in transit between Lima and Tarapoto today and tomorrow, coming or going to or from volunteer work in truly uncomfortable environs and conditions. Each of those 30 is American.

With the exception of Felicity (the Brit I met in front of the airport in Tarapoto) and her friend who had completed a significant period of work in an orphanage, and Katty, a young German woman who had performed volunteer work helping street kids in Trujillo, I encountered no other outside nationals performing such service. That is not to say there aren’t French or German or Australian teams in significant numbers doing the same sort of work, but it is to say that I didn’t encounter any. I’m convinced that Americans have much to be proud of, perhaps most of all to be proud of the commitment to voluntarism demonstrated by some of our fellow citizens. As Americans, we may be far more negative about ourselves than other nationals are of us.

I spent a significant amount of time during this trip with young travelers from Germany, Australia, France and Switzerland and I never heard one negative word about America or Americans. And I was listening, expecting to encounter criticism. Many Peruvians, with whom I spent the most time, would in fact like to be Americans one day. I must also say that I heard not one solitary word about U.S. politics or policy, foreign or domestic…none spoken to me, none overheard. That truly surprised me.

It’s only about an hour’s flight from Tarapoto to Lima. I claimed my bag and was at the American Airlines ticket counter before it opened at 8 p.m. I checked-in as a standby passenger for the flight to Miami but could not go to the gate until all ticketed customers had been processed. I was finally cleared to go to the gate area to await the 11:30 p.m. scheduled departure. I stopped for something to eat, shopped a bit, thought about going into the duty-free shop, but didn’t. Good thing! I barely cleared customs and security, ran to the gate hearing “final call for American Airlines flight 918 to Miami,” hearing my name being called over the airport P.A. system. I made it, but just barely.

Inside the terminal, Lima, Peru: Families and friends attend arrivals and departures in great numbers