Lluvia, turismo y descriminación

Dear all,
I owe you a blog about my second time Machu Picchu, so here it comes…but I have to warn you beforehand, it was a day with more insights than tourists sights, so this blog might be more about my insights than about Machu Picchu itself…
It all started the day before, Tuesday 29th of March. The tickets for the kids had been given out by a special program for poor people and, in their right, they refused to give two extra tickets for gringas who could perfectly pay for it themselves…So Levana and I had to go and organize the thing on our own…Now, I have to explain something to you about the fabulously working Peruvian railway system which is owned by the even more fabulous company PeruRail. And I can tell you dutchies who are reading this: NS together with ProRail are actually really nice compared to this (train is the only way to get to Machu Picchu if you don’t want a very adventurous trip – see previous blog)… In Peru, you know, there is still some kind of Apartheid: Peruvians have their national trains and are not allowed on the Gringo train (which is of course much more luxurious) and gringos have their tourist trains and are by no means allowed on the national train. I mean, of course I do agree that we can pay a bit more than the Peruvians for our train ride, but why do it have to be different trains? Why can’t Peruvians enjoy nice trains in their own country, having to travel in some kind of perverted second class with its own time table and engine? Anyway…this frustration apart, Levana and I actually really wanted to travel together with the kids (that was the most fun part) and so we visited two different offices of our PeruRail friends to try and get it organized. In the first office they were nice but they did not sell tickets for the national train, in the second office they did sell tickets for the national train but they were not nice!!! How unfortunate… We did everything: we had a letter of recommendation from Inti, we pleaded, we offered to pay at least tourist class price for the second class train, we explained that we really wanted to go with the kids, we sighted, we almost cried but nothing did the trick…gringas without a residence permit were NOT, I repeat, NOT aloud on the national second class train no matter what! This meant that our train also departed on another time as the train in which the kids were travelling, which meant that we also had to take another bus (1,5hours) to get to the train station. I must say we had a very enjoyable and relaxed trip but we were both quite frustrated from the day before. In Aguas Calientes, the town at the foot of Machu Picchu, we waited for about an hour until the train of the kids arrived. A happy reunion followed and the kids gave us an update about who had thrown up how many times in the bus…after quite some organization of tickets and busses we finally got up at the entrance of Machu Picchu and then it started to rain…we did not know it at that point, but during that day, the rain would not stop anymore…we waited for 20 minutes until we accepted our fate and stepped into the rain. Quite many kids had not brought the poncho that had been advised for the simple reason that they did not have one and within 15 minutes half of them were soaked. One of the older girls who studies tourism tried to give us a tour, but people were busier with getting cold and wet than with listening to her, and most of the time we spent it in different leaky shelters along our way. I was quite disappointed with Pachamama, why not grant these kids a nice and sunny day up here he?! But she refused and the rain kept pouring down…how thankful I was, only then, for the bright and sunny day I had up there with Lotte and Christoph! We decided to head to the entrance around four and then ate the lunch under some leaky sun screens. By the end of the meal some of the kids were shaking with cold and had blue lips. I took a little one on my lap in the bus, putting my fleece around him. Within 3 minutes he was asleep and I even more wet. There had been nothing really planned for the three hours until their train would leave but luckily I found a primary school which lessons were just about to end and where we could warm up in a warm classroom with…a TV!
Soon Levana and I had to leave for our train and we waited in Ollantaytambo for the kids in the next train. When we received them I walked Jimmy to the bus and he stopped me asking: ‘Profe, what happens when your heart freezes?’ without really thinking about it I replied that you probably die when your heart freezes. I only realized what I had said when he looked at me with frightened eyes, and almost crying said: ‘it really hurts!’. I took him into the bus, took off my soaked hiking boots and got him on my knees trying to get him a bit warm. The bus had not even left yet or he was fast a sleep. He assured me yesterday that his heart no longer hurts!
It was 23.00, pitch dark and most kids were sleeping when the bus was stopped by the police. They came into the bus, had a quick look around, went out again and ordered the director out. The driver – they said – had no right to transport us, because on the bus it said ‘Servício Turístico’ (they all do) and we were obviously NOT tourists…
By this time I had steam coming out of my ears… ‘WHAT? Not tourists?! They are coming straight from freaking Machu Picchu you idiot! How touristy do you want it to get?! Just because they look poor and they look Peruvian, what right do you have to tell them that they do not have the right to consider themselves tourists?! What kind of discrimination is this? They have a once in a life time experience, for which they have to beg at some special organization otherwise they would not even be able to pay the visit of a place build by their ancestors, that is easier for me to reach then for them, and you come up in the middle of the night, telling us we have to find a bus that does not say Servício Turístico on it (they do not exist) because these people do not have the right to call themselves tourists on this day?! Go…yourself!’
But I had a sleeping child on my lap, and moreover I felt that, as the only gringa in the bus, I might better leave this to other people, so I sat quietly biting my lip…in the end after some more complaints, grunts and insults from both sides they let us go and everything got calm and sleepy again. But I could not sleep. How can people be so discriminatory toward their fellow citizens? Why does a train company only show its best face to foreigners? Why do police officers do not consider the possibility of some poor kids having right to a special day out? Why are people so unfriendly to each other? The day before I had actually, for the first time in my life, felt to a certain extend discriminated against…but after this incident I realized that it was not I who was discriminated against (even though I was not aloud to go on the national train) but the Peruvians themselves, in their own country, because they cannot sit on the nice train, because most of them cannot even afford to visit their own Machu Picchu, because they cannot afford a lot of other things, and because their own policemen treat them like shit…
Sitting there, looking at Jimmy’s perfect little sleeping face that reminded me of the Buddha’s at Angkor Wat I was startled at the different faces of this world, how beautiful and how horrible, and how intertwined…

Love,
Sara


Arrival of the kids


Waiting for the rain that never stopped


Waiting...


Rainy Machu Picchu with rainy people


With Celia


So different...


You can always be cool, wathever happens!


Another group picture!


A nice and warm calss room to stop shivering...