Tsunami Alert: Gringa en trauma

I stirred my oatmeal over the gas flame, contemplating how late I'd arrive to my orientation for foreign students in the university's Casa Central 10 short blocks up the street. That's when the rumbling started. Since moving to a 12th floor  apartment two days earlier I'd been bracing myself for replicas, aftershocks from the massive 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile two weeks earlier.

The overhead lamps swung back and forth, the glasses rattled in the cabinets, the floor trembled and the giant glass windows facing the ocean shook. I had the sensation of swaying in the high rise apartment tower. My heart raced as I switched off the gas and ran to the door where I'd left my keys in the lock so I could quickly place myself beneath the door frame. About a minute passed before the shaking stopped.

I wondered if I should run downstairs. I didn't know if I'd just experienced a significant earthquake or just a moderate temblor (tremor) heightened by my location on the 12th floor. I glanced in the hallway in search of neighbors to consult, but it seems I'm the only occupant in my hall. So I took the most illogical course of action: I gobbled up my breakfast, brushed my teeth, touched up my mascara and even scrubbed my retainers before rushing out the door. But before I could make an exit I heard the low murmur of the lamps swaying and the dishes vibrating. This time the trembling seemed even longer. I heard the whole building moving.

In a twisted way there's something enthralling about earthquakes -- the earth suddenly feels so alive. There's a sentiment of connection. After riding dozens of roller coasters and thrill rides in my adolescence it feels almost gentle. But the destruction the vibrations wreak on human civilization reminds us of the fragility of our existence.

Scared and alone, I ran down the dozen flights of stairs to the lobby. I tried to get the concierge's attention but he was on the phone with a burdened expression on his face and ignored me. People fled out the door before I could say anything. I asked a hysterical girl what was going on. "Viene una tsunami!" she shrieked between sobs.

Her mother and older sister ran in, frantic and crying. They all sprinted out the door, and I followed. Before they jumped in a taxi I asked if I could get in too. We piled in the car, with their big, smelly basset hound howling and trying to scramble out the window. I yanked out an infant car seat to make room and kept it on my lap. In the streets people ran toward the hills -- janitors, office workers, vendors and children. Some were sobbing and screaming as the sirens blared and horns honked. Our car barely moved in the traffic-choked streets. The women in the car cried out how they didn't want to die, how we would all lose everything in our apartment overlooking the sea. They screamed "Tsunami!" out the window as we passed fist-fighting thugs and shouting police officers. I couldn't understand the car radio in the chaos.

My heart pounded as I tried to calm the women, although I had no idea what was going on. I fought back tears as I tried to call the owners of my apartment and my host family in Santiago, but the phone lines had collapsed. Just like us, the people running in the streets kept looking back toward the ocean to see if the wave was coming. I stared back at my apartment building, thinking about my Mac and Nikon and all the belongings I'd stuffed into my suitcases with so much thought and care four weeks earlier. I accepted that they were all gone, that I'd have to find a new home. If the apartment didn't collapse it would be inhabitable. I wondered if I would have to leave Chile. I was living the most terrifying experience of my live thus far.

The car was making no progress, and I asked if we should get out and run instead. Thankfully the driver ignored me. Instead he went against traffic to a more distant hill where we quickly sped up and up through dingier and dingier neighborhoods until we felt that the maremoto wouldn't sweep us away. After we parked I realized that we hadn't been in a taxi, but a private car with a generous and remarkably calm business man who'd fled his office in Valparaiso. On the hillside we talked to the neighbors, a group of women who worked in waste management. They invited us into their warehouse to watch the news.

The earthquakes (up to 6.9 on the Richter scale) jolted Chile as the new president Sebastian Piñera was sworn in at an inaugural ceremony in the National Congress in Valparaiso blocks away from my apartment, with an audience of international diplomats and journalists. Piñera is the first elected right-wing leader 50 years after a repressive military dictatorship ruled the country, killing and torturing thousands citizens. (I'm not taking a political stance at this point in light of my ignorance of Chilean politics. I'll only acknowledge the new president's intelligence as he has a doctorate in economics from Harvard and is a millionaire entrepreneur.)

The tsunami alert remained in effect, so the women in the warehouse served us lunch. My apartment neighbors told me they weren't returning to the building that night, and I shouldn't either. When the tsunami advisory ended we drove back into the city, and they insisted I pack a bag and go with them to stay with a friend who lived on a hill. The chaotic center had converted into a ghost town, with all the businesses closed for the day. Although I didn't consider them the ideal emergency company considering their exemplified tendencies toward hysteria, they convinced me I would sleep through another tsunami alert if I stayed the night alone.

So that's how I ended up spending an uncomfortable night in a humble house in a neighborhood of wild dogs and feral cats. The next morning I made it back down to the city in time to sign up for classes in the university.

Still, every so often I tense up and look for swaying lamps. I don't know when the tremors are real or when it's my imagination. Scientists say the aftershocks from Chile's big quake will last up to a year, which is beyond the date of my departure flight. However, I now know that a tsunami is highly improbable in Valparaiso, and I think I'm safe in my building as it survived the big quake and therefore should hold up in the weaker replicas.

Basically, I'm in for a seismic year.

Life unexpected: La vida inesperada

I planned to spend my final week in Chile's elegant capital Santiago exploring the Museo de Artes Visuales, the ritzy outlying neighborhoods, and the Parque Forestal, the last sites on my to-see list. I mentally prepared to leave my leafy and sunny Providencia neighborhood and the comfort of my bustling host family for a new city -- Viña del Mar.

I'd made finding an apartment my mission, having arrived to a foreign continent with only four weeks to locate housing in a city two hours away with no prior knowledge of price ranges, neighborhoods, transportation or lease contracts. After weeks of frantically searching through Internet postings and interrogating professors that culminated in a rushed visit to the resort city of Viña, I'd found an apartment in a new tower (by an artificial lake!) half a block away from the beach. With a pool, a gym and sweeping ocean view from two generous patios, everything about it was luxe.

The Feb. 27 earthquake didn't severely affect anyone I know -- I only heard stories about co-workers and cousins whose families had lost everything in the South. However, after the natural disaster I soon realized that my year in Chile wouldn't go as planned. My host family insisted I remain hunkered in the house during the following days. Even though that seismic night passed without any panic or tears on my part, I've felt like I'm carrying a heavy backpack ever since. I'm grateful rather than fearful, but living with a family dealing with post traumatic stress and the constant flow of damning news reports took its toll.

Four days before my planned move to the coast of Viña del Mar to start classes at the Universidad Católica de Valparaiso I got the news that I'd have to look for another place to live. I felt so incredibly alone. I now had to find a room in an apartment with strangers, in a hectic period when shaken-up residents in apartment towers were scramming to move into solid houses and residents of older houses were quickly renting modern apartments; when the few students who hadn't solidified their housing plans months earlier had returned home to be with their families rather than staying in their university city to show their apartments to potential roommates.

But I made it my life's goal to move myself to school on time, spending my days staring at the computer screen and making bus trips back and forth between the two cities. I visited some houses that should have been condemned, with putrid, horror-movie worthy rooms, but I also met some of the most hospitable people I've ever encountered. They'd offer me a bed in their house until I found a place. After I told them I wasn't interested in their apartment they'd still insist in showing me around the city to the other rooms on my list. And they all gave me their phone numbers in case I ever needed anything.

Monday (only two days late) I moved into an apartment, not in the modern beach city of Viña del Mar as planned, but in the gritty neighboring historic port city of Valparaíso. The apartment is small but comfortable and modern. The terrace with the bay view and the familiar American kitchenette sold me. I'm eagerly waiting for my Chilean roommate to move back in next week. The surrounding neighborhood is not a place I should ever be walking through alone at night, and that's disconcerting. But the main highway connecting Valparaíso to its sister city Viña is right outside my front door, with transportation at all hours. I'm hoping that the earthquake repairs in the building happen soon because I miss hot water and more than one functioning elevator would be convenient. But I can't complain when half of the city went without any water the past three days, and further south people are homeless.

I'm still soaking up Valparaíso. The surrounding hills I've explored (so far I've opted to climb up the impossible staircases and vertical streets instead of paying for the antique elevators, an indication of masochistic tendencies, perhaps?) have confirmed the adjective 'breathtaking' that I've read in every guidebook. The spectacular views of the bay and the ramshackle city built on the surrounding hillsides are bewitching. The quirky and colorful neighborhoods spilling on the hilltops are World Heritage sites, and besides their official historic value they have a bohemian charm and energy like no other place I've traveled. These are streets with proper multi-colored British mansions with flower boxes lined near hippie-ish cafes. Streets with elegant restaurants on steep slopes that end in a flamboyant graffiti wall murals leading to 19th century Anglican churches or eccentric castle-mansions turned museums. And did I mention the views?

As far as the center of Valparaíso, well it's grungy, compatible with the disagreeable image the average North American has of a South American city. Ugly modern (Valpo was the epicenter of the devastating 1906 quake and before that victim of a Spanish naval attack) buildings stand beside decrepit Victorian palaces from the port's glory days. My favorite guidebook cliche, "crumbling grandeur" was written for this city. There's too many abandoned warehouses, stray dogs and litter for my taste, but maybe this jewel (in the rough) of the Pacific will win me over before the year's up. For now braving the streets isn't a pleasant stroll. My wrist is sore from clutching my bag so tightly. The maniacal buses, called micros, are a third-world experience. But on a brighter note, my daily routine now includes a trip to the intimidating  city market to stock up on the rainbow mountains of gleaming produce on sale for mere cents and a stop by the bakery for fresh bread.

Sometimes I wonder how I ended up here. I have the next nine months to figure out why.

El terromoto de una vida

Last night I waited in the lobby of a restaurant bar in the Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago, where I was spending time with my language school classmates, including my two closest friends who were set to leave the country the next day. I wanted someone to share a taxi with me back to our Providencia neighborhood. Meanwhile my Brazilian friend Betaña started to tear up thinking about how we might never see each other again. I tried to comfort her, feeling shaky myself, from exhaustion and the recalcitrant illness I'd tried to kick all week, annoyed that I'd wasted my $2,000 pesos on that Red Bull I'd ordered earlier.

That's when the floor trembled. I noticed the vibrations that rattled the building right away, but my professors and host family had told me that minor temblores are common in Chile, one of the most active earthquake zones on the planet. However the trembling only intensified. With the passing seconds we could hear the building shaking, bottles breaking. The lights went out. I grabbed my Brazilian friend Evan in a death grip hug, and we didn't let go. They say the quake lasted less than two minutes, but that's a long time when the earth beneath your feet is bouncing, when your mind is racing to recall earthquake safety protocols, whether you should crouch under one of the empty tables or run outside in the street so not to be crushed alive in the building, when suddenly news reports about thousands dead, missing or trapped in Haiti seem all too real.

It was 3:30 a.m., and you might ask why I would be out and about at such an ungodly hour, but you must understand that for Chileans this a perfectly reasonable time to be out on a Friday night, as the proper dinner party at my host family's house yesterday didn't start until nearly 11 p.m. I can assure you that the neighborhood was packed with (mostly) respectable citizens.

Afterward I had the urge to cry but couldn't. Without any taxis or buses, we walked home with the full moon serving as our only light most of the way. We didn't encounter any panic or chaos, but it was a long two hours before I made it back to my house. We maneuvered the sidewalks littered with broken glass, fallen telephone poles, broken bricks and caved in walls. Even crossing the street without stoplights was tricky. It was chilly, I was desperate for a bathroom and a drink of water, and my bronze flats weren't made for distance walking. The ambulances wailing and car radios blaring news only added to the state of emergency atmosphere. Evan offered to walk me to my house, which is 20 minutes away from where everyone else lives.

(As I'm writing this I felt another mild temblor, or replica as they call them here.)

It was so dark that we couldn't read the street signs and ended up lost. Occasionally someone would pass us in the shadows, and my heart would race as I imagined a looter taking advantage of the situation. I finally arrived at my candle-lit doorstep to find my host family and seven children and two dogs huddled in the living room. "Te hemos llamado mil veces!" they explained. Although most cell phone communication had been interrupted, they'd entered my room and stepped over all my belongings and the broken glass strewn in the floor to find my mobile phone box with my number on it in a drawer.

We didn't go to bed until dawn. The Chileans I was with were in a deeper state of shock than I was, with reason. They had babies and small children and other family members to worry about. Some of them lived on the 13th floor of an apartment building, and they'd felt the tower sway, breaking their windows and knocking over their flat screen TV and lamps. They could only huddle under a doorway while they clutched their three daughters.

Our lights didn't come back on until the next morning. The electricity grid in Chile is programmed to automatically turn off in the event of earthquakes above 6.0 on the Richter Scale, and this one was an 8.8, 100 times greater than the 7.0 quake that devastated Haiti in January. In fact it was the fifth largest earthquake since 1900. But so far in Chile about 400 deaths have been reported in comparison to the 250,000 in Haiti. This has a lot to do with the advanced engineering and strict earthquake-proof construction codes here along with the organized relief infrastructure. Bordered by the Andes cordillera, Chile is one of the most seismically active places on earth (funny how I don't remember ever reading that before now). The strongest earthquake ever measured occurred here in 1960, a 9.5, and another disastrous quake hit in 1985. In fact three of the 10 most powerful earthquakes in recorded history have occurred in Chile, today's disaster included. Chile is a developed nation with its own disaster fund rather than an impoverished, overpopulated state, so the two recent earthquake situations aren't comparable.

Although the TV news shows images of fallen bridges and a church with a collapsed steeple here in Santiago, everyone I know is safe. Our house only suffered one crack in the wall. South of us in Chile's second largest city Concepcion, which is closer to the earthquake's 22-mile deep epicenter, the damage and suffering are on another level, especially in the poorest areas. This evening we sat around the table in the patio to say prayers for those in the south who have lost so much and to give thanks that we are all safe.

And the excursions begin: El Cajón de Maipo

I laced up my hiking boots, stuffed my big camera into my bag and whipped my hair into a Lara Croft braid at 6:30 a.m. to power walk the 30 minutes to the metro station Saturday. At 8 a.m. I climbed into a rickety van with a spacey Canadian construction student, a Norwegian senior Hydroelectric engineer with some impressive eyebrows, and a teeny Brazilian woman who studies at my school for a one-day trekking excursion into El Cajón de Maipo. "We have to use an old vehicle because the road we're taking would ruin a new car," our guide Alejandro said.

After an hour and a half of driving away from the capital we stopped at the village of San José del Maipo, a world away from modern Santiago. A grocer in a hair net made us jamón y queso sandwiches that we packed for lunch. We continued into the wilderness for two hours, where the road soon dissolved into a dirt trail with the sort of bumps and curves I've only seen on SUV commercials. I felt my organs bouncing inside me and avoided looking down at the steep ledges and thinking about blown out tires and other vehicle malfunctions. The dust our van stirred up was so thick I could taste it. The path is impassable in the winter due to avalanches, so the few goat farmers that live in the area move away during the dangerous season. No one bothers to make a real road because it will inevitably be destroyed every winter.

We stopped at El Embalse del Yeso, a glass-like, deep-turquoise-colored lake with snow capped mountains in the background on our way to El Parque del Valle del Yeso. It's a giant private reserve beside Argentina (it's a three-kilometer, one-day trek over the mountains to the border) lacking any tourist infrastructure or marked trails. We acclimated to the altitude at Las Termas del Plomo, thermal glacial springs fed by a waterfall cascading over an orange rock wall. Our hike took us deep into the valley, so profound that it's name, cajón, is the Spanish word for box. Low green shrubs spotted the desert mountains, where Alejandro stopped to point out lizards, wildflowers, and the rock piles of fossilized oysters and snail shells (one monster mollusk was perfectly intact) from a prehistoric era when ocean covered the valley.

The wind blew and the sun beat on us as we climbed along a waterfall up a mountain. (Despite repeated applications of SPF 30 my nose is now so red that it glows.) I had to use my hands to crawl up at times, and we all stopped every five minutes to adjust to the altitude. Nick the Canadian guy, who periodically paused to chug his liter of Fanta, lagged behind and heaved with exhaustion.

After nearly two hours of climbing we came to a clear, turquoise lake at the summit. It's a secret that Alejandro said his father found as a mountain climber -- I believe him because I couldn't find anything about it (or the park) listed in my guidebooks. The water flows from the glaciers above and is pure enough to drink. "Es el agua de los dioses," Alejandro said. Still, I only had the nerve to take one sip over lunch. (How can it be so clean if it's floating over dirt?) Stein from Norway listened to Pink Floyd on his smart phone as he took in the view, and Nick the Canadian smoked a cigarette while I snapped away on my Nikon. The steep walk down was even trickier than our ascent with the loose dirt and rocks. I couldn't take my eyes off my dirt-encrusted boots.

On the drive home we stopped at a small goat farm. Inside the shanty-like house I bought a kilogram block (one-size-only) of goat cheese made the day before for $5 to share with my host family. And less than four hours later we were back to Santiago, civilization and the world of metros and public bathrooms.

Santiago: Week One

I head to class in the morning wearing sunblock and sunglasses. Bikes and strollers pass me on the 20-minute walk up the tree-lined streets of the Providencia neighborhood to my language school. The five of us in the advanced class, two from the United States and three from Brazil, practice conversation in a small classroom on the third floor. The breeze rustles the trees and blows through the open window during the four-hour lesson with our profesora Andrea. I'm learning new things about my South American classmates (while trying not to stare at the hyperactive Brazilian-supermodel-with-an-attitude across from me who's always bringing up the "Latin fire that burns within her"), like how their families beg them not to visit the United States because it's dangerous -- too many news reports about mass shootings and terrorist attacks.

I come home to my room in the Munoz family's house. It's a small rectangle with blue walls, high ceilings and wood floors. I sleep in a vintage twin bed and my door opens to the patio. Nine family members live in the house, including two kids and a Cocker spaniel named Coni who likes to doze in my room. My first night we ate completos, hot dogs with avocado, tomatoes, and mayonnaise. Last night we had pastel de choclo, a Chilean version of shepherd's pie baked in a clay bowl topped with creamed corn and and filled with olives (have to watch out for the pits), beef, boiled eggs and chicken.

In the evenings the school has activities -- My first night was cooking class. We made cancon, salmon fillets with tomato, cheese, oregano and sausage, and terremotos, white wine with pineapple ice cream. The next night we went to a futbol match, La Universidad Catolica de Santiago versus Colón de Argentina. When a student asked if it was safe, the director said that it wouldn't be dangerous like the games in Italy and England.

The giant stadium sits at the foot of the Andes mountains that loom over the city of Santiago making for a dramatic sunset. The fans sang and barked chants throughout the game, spewing giant confetti and waving flags. I really tried to pay attention to the field, but the men still in their work clothes who jumped up and down and embraced one minute and nearly shed tears the next before spitting out a string of obscenities rivaling that of a delinquent adolescent were more entertaining.

Last night we had salsa lessons in a Cuban club with a dynamic teacher dressed like an Abercrombie model. I was getting into the steps in the wedding reception-esque setting and thinking how this was the coolest dance class I'd been to and how I'd finally gotten the hang of Latin rhythms after all these years. That is, until during a dance circle in which we exchanged partners every minute when one of the pros (invited to compensate for our group's lack of men) told me to stop jumping and move "más suave."

Today when we twisted into a deep and delicious stretch in my yoga class I had the same dreamy sensation I had earlier that afternoon, when I was biting into my empanada Napolitana and looking at the water shooting from the fountain that sparkled in the sunlight as I sat in a grass with my new friends from school. I keep reminding myself to savor this -- because winter always comes and school always starts and reality always sets in.

Spring break 2008: 10,800 feet above sea level

My roommates in Charleston don't get it. Fly to South America alone? Am I out of my mind? “She's always locking herself out of the house. She can’t even drive off the peninsula without getting lost,” one of the Southern belles says. “Now she announces that she's flying off to the Third World.”

Ten days later I hike up Wayna Picchu, gasping for air and peeling layers. At the peak I gaze down at Machu Picchu, the Lost City of the Incas, inducing a wave of vertigo. I recognize the view from advertisements and postcards and sit on a rock near the ledge just long enough for a stranger to take my picture. The rush of having made it on my own and the conflicting urge to share the experience with someone overwhelms me.

It's spring break my senior year of college, and I've booked a $450 flight to Lima on a whim. At the airport gate I wait in a crowd of brown Latinos in scruffy clothes who whisper in Spanish and cradle small children on their laps. I feel like a lone Caucasian diva and start to worry about more than the two days of classes I'll miss.

That night at the Lima airport my friend Julia, ultra-tanned and wearing teeny shorts, waits for me. "You need some sun!" she squeals and hugs me. "This is Pedro," she introduces a short guy dressed like a Hollister model. Of course she’d try to set me up with one of her friends. On the one-hour drive to Julia's house her Mazda speeds around sand mountains looming over deserted beaches. She's the only one of her friends with a car, and they say she thinks she's the Paris Hilton of Lima. "Hola niñas," her family’s live-in maid, a tiny woman in a nightgown, greets us from the kitchen where she watches a telenovela.

The next day we lounge on the beach before lunch in the bohemian Barranco neighborhood. We sit on a terraza and eat fresh ceviche, chunks of fish marinated in lime juice, anticuchos, grilled marinated beef heart, and papas a la huancaína, boiled potatoes with creamy spiced cheese sauce.

“You should talk to Pedro,” Julia winks a few days later when I tell her I want to travel outside of Lima before I leave. “He studies turismo.” We both know I should go to Machu Picchu, one of the new Seven Wonders of the World, a remote archaeological masterpiece 8,000 feet above sea level. But with only four days left I don’t have time for the 24-hour, cliff-hugging bus ride through the Andes.

Julia touches her heart whenever she mentions Cuzco, the entry city to Machu Picchu and the capital of the ancient Inca Empire. It combines her two favorite things – a perpetual party scene with lots of foreign men. "Tienes que ir," Julia says. “You can’t come to Peru and not go."

At 3 a.m. the next morning Julia shakes me awake. My taxi is here to take me to the airport for my 5 a.m. flight. As the plane descends in Cuzco the majestic peaks of the Andes jut above the clouds. We’ve gone from about 1,000 to 11,000 feet above sea level in 45 minutes.

On the ride into town my taxi driver asks where I’m staying. “That place is full of drug dealers,” he says when I name the hostel. He suggests I stay at another pensión instead and parks in front of an office. I’m confused until I realize we’re at a travel agency. His friend has a deal on a trip to Machu Picchu for me, he says. “No necesito un paquete,” I try to explain. I’ll get to the pre-Columbian enigma on my own.

I arrive to the main Plaza de Armas at 7 a.m. It’s 40 degrees and empty. I feel like death and circle the square until I find an open kiosk selling Diamox, altitude sickness pills. I head to the train station to get a ticket to Machu Picchu for the next morning, praying they're not sold out. I snag a departure trip on the budget Backpackers train. The agent tells me that it leaves at 5 a.m. from Ollantaytambo, a village on the way to Machu Picchu. That means I’ll have to go there tonight. Bussing to a remote village without a map or hostel reservation terrifies me. A wave of nausea strikes again as she writes the address of the bus station.

As the sun rises and warms the air I start to feel better. I go on to visit to a colonial church built over an Inca sun temple and watch a parade of Quechua women in colorful traditional costumes break into song and dance. I wonder if it’s a performance for tourists or if life in Cuzco is like a real-life musical.

That afternoon I give a taxi driver the bus station address. He drops me off on a gritty side of town in front of a crowded dirt yard littered with trash. This can’t be it. I’m the only tourist. Everyone is Quechua. The indigenous women have braided hair and bowler hats and carry babies wrapped on their backs in colorful shawls. The word baños is spray painted on a cinder block wall where men urinate, barely concealed by a low ledge. “Éste es la estación de autobus?” I ask.

“Si, Si,” everyone says. Still I’m sure there’s a mistake. I run down the street looking for a taxi, but there are none in this part of town. Half an hour later a bus pulls in. I wait in the long line, panicking as the sun lowers. The little man in front of me, Luis, assures me that this bus will take me to Ollantaytambo. "You just have to change líneas once," he says. “What? Change buses?” I ask. I pay the 20-cent fare and squish my way on. I feel suffocated under the backpack in my lap, inhaling the stench of unwashed bodies. Passengers stand crammed in the aisles, hugging their belongings in garbage bags.

We curve up into the mountains. We’re flying along the cliffs, winding through peaks and valleys of gargantuan proportions. Luis in the seat beside me senses my fear and occasionally makes reassuring comments on our progress. I’m having a minor nervous breakdown, imagining that I’ll freeze in the mountains or bandits will kidnap me. No one in the world knows where I am right now. I am alone in the Andes with a backpack.

What seems like hours later it’s pitch black, and we’re deep in the Sacred Valley of Urubamba. Finally, we come to a town. “Vamos! Rapido!” Luis nudges me. The last bus to Ollantaytambo is leaving. He pushes aside his wife and baby and jumps off the bus while clutching my arm. He runs with me across the dark parking lot to a white van ready to pull away. Inside sit an old man and a couple with a baby who gawk at me. It feels like midnight when the driver pulls down steep gravel driveways to let passengers off in front of what look like shanties in the darkness.

Eventually we turn on a road guarded by an original Inca stonewall. I climb up the hill to Ollantaytambo to a plaza where children play tag and teenagers flirt. Adults chat outside storefronts. Relieved, I find a hostel listed in my Lonely Planet. I’m the only one in the cold, dark, two-story building. I wash my face with the icy water but skip a shower. I try to sleep in the silence but think about Julia and Pedro back in Lima. Pedro showed me around Lima all week, but it doesn't matter now. "You've already ruined it," Julia told me before I left. I replay the scene in my mind.

"Are there no attractive men in Peru?" I'd said to Julia at a dance club. When Pedro glanced toward me and walked away I knew he’d heard.

My alarm goes off at 4 a.m. I look in the mirror and see that my eyes have nearly swollen shut. I imagine I've been bitten by an exotic bed bug. Outside I get disoriented in the rainy night. My train leaves in 10 minutes. I’m panicking. I see headlights ahead and wave. “Dónde está la estación del tren?” I ask the handsome driver with a mustache. He nods to the teenage boy in the backseat and says he’s dropping him off there. He tells me to hop in, and I do.

On the four-hour train ride into the Amazon basin my exhausted head throbs to the blaring laughter and German conversation of the women beside me. We hear the violent Urubamba River rushing down the mountains in the darkness as the train climbs up the steep tracks. Finally dawn breaks, revealing the Andes in all their mystic glory. My classmates are sitting listening to a Media Law lecture right now, and here I am in deep in the South American jungle.

Our train journey ends at the little town of Aguas Calientes where I join a bus with a group of perky visor-wearing and Nikon-toting Japanese tourists. We ziz-zag for 30 minutes up a narrow dirt road to Machu Picchu. I shiver in the dense fog that shrouds the mysterious city. Its isolation protected it from invaders until a British historian rediscovered it in 1911. It lies between two mountains, with its edges dropping down a cliff into the surrounding Urubamba River 1,500 feet below. The self-contained city is invisible from beneath and guarded by a formidable mountain from behind. The fading fog reveals the Indiana Jones-worthy ruins -- houses, temples, and staircases. Llamas graze between the agricultural terraces and aqueducts. Crowning the city is the Intihuatana stone, an astronomic timepiece that aligns with the sun during equinoxes.

Back in Aguas Calientes I follow the signs to the eponymous hot springs when a hole rips in my backpack. My things spill so I hold everything to my chest like a giant baby. When I pay to enter the thermal pools the toothless man wearing a fitted gray cap at the counter offers to sew my backpack. I ask him how much he’ll charge. "Nada," he says. I hesitate, unsure if I should trust him but hand over my backpack.

The pools have a muddy look and the faintest sulfur smell but are soothing and warm. South American women wearing T-shirts and shorts in the water whisper among themselves. “Que bonitas y bronceadas,” one says, admiring a gaggle of bronzed French girls in bikinis.

Back at the counter the toothless man presents me with my sewn-up backpack. "Mil gracias. Un milagro," I say and offer him a few soles, but he flashes his gums and shakes his head. I run to the station in a rainstorm of Biblical proportions.

I join middle-aged American couples wearing designer hiking boots who’ve just trekked the Inca Trail on the tourist train this time. I notice the big diamond rings on the fingers of the women and wonder how they’ve maintained manicured nails. "Why do the parents allow this?" they say when village children chase our train. "They're as bad as the suicidal bus drivers."

At dawn the next morning a taxi drops me off at Sacsayhuamán, a prehistoric walled fortress forming the head of a jaguar overlooking Cuzco. No one is there. When it starts raining I wrap my pink scarf around my hair and wander the ruins alone in the wet silence. From Sacsayhuamán I walk along a deserted, muddy roadside and imagine Pedro and Julia lazing on the beach in Lima and my friends in Charleston hustling to class. I veer off the road to a maze of unmarked ruins in a valley. Then I ask the clerk at a desolate orange store how to get to Puku Pukara and Tambomachay. He points across the road and tells me to wait there for a bombi. While I wait a shepherdess in colorful indigenous dress leads her herd and two dogs up the road. Soon I realize that bombi means another Volkswagen van like the one I rode to Olllantaytambo. This time, I climb in with confidence.

I catch my overnight flight home to the States from Lima two days later, arriving so discombobulated that I circled the long-term lot almost an hour before I find my car. I nod my way through the three-hour drive home. A nasty waterborne bacteria keeps me in bed the next day.

Still, for weeks I walk around campus glowing with my big secret: Who’d believe that the shy girl with the lip gloss and pink scarf just got back from backpacking in the Andes?

Classical Majesty: A West Virginia Symphonic Series

I went to hear the West Virgina Symphony Orchestra at the Clay Center with my dad last weekend. Guest solo violinist Corey Cerovsek performed on his glossy Stradivarius in a performance entitled Classical Majesty, part of the Symphonic Series led by resident conductor Grant Cooper, a dapper New Zealander.

The event almost sold out (they didn't open the second balcony). Although it was an older crowd in long coats (even a few furs!) I did spot some younger faces and families in the well-heeled audience.

The evening opened with Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, my favorite hands down. "What?" my dad said. "You like that stuff better than Mozart?" I appreciated Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 (with some surprise string effects), but sometimes we just like the way a piece of music makes us feel. And I thought Williams' interpretation of British composer Tallis' liturgical music had the qualities of a killer movie soundtrack with the power to inspire imagination and spark emotions. (I just looked it up and it has served as a soundtrack in various movies. Now I don't know whether to feel perceptive or uncultured.) It was a strings-only piece, and I have a thing for violins and cellos, even in pop music. (Now that I think about it, that's probably the reason I appreciate bluegrass.) The full orchestra didn't take the stage until the final segment, Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8.

The three featured composers mastered the architecture of classical music, the structure that keeps music's tendency of passionate explosions in check, to create majestic statements. (My summary of the program description -- I was curious about how it all fit together.)

The Canadian violinist Cerovsek, 37, lives in Paris. Although he's not a household name like, say, Paganini, his international performance credits, along with a few network TV appearances, took up an entire page of tiny type in the program. But what impressed me the most was that he graduated with bachelor's degrees in mathematics and music from the University of Indiana at age 15, earned masters in both at 16, and finished his PhD's at 18. Oh, and he's a concert pianist too.
 
Left Photo Credit: jwestproductions.com 
Right Photo Credit: (c) 2008 Claves Records