Our trip back to Cusco with Omar, our driver, started out quite peacefully and we all thought that St. Dennis, our guide, had left him with strict instructions to drive calmly. Our tranquility started to evaporate when Omar kept stopping to get out to check the tires and was driving so slowly that even the big tour buses were whipping by us. Finally, he pulled over to the side of the road and indicated (since he had no English) that the tire was hot. We all felt the tire, but I couldn´t help thinking...doesn´t friction cause heat? We were stopped for half an hour in this sketch little wild-west ghost town where the three people we saw were dressed head to toe with hazard suits with SARS masks. Had we hit a town with the Bubonic Plague? For entertainment, we decided to do a photo shoot with the hippie bandanas that Stephanie had bought us. Bored after that episode, we remembered that St. Dennis had told us that all new cars are blessed before they are driven so we decided to perform a blessing-of-the-tire ceremony. We laughed so much and Omar even participated. We promptly got back into the van and Omar soon there after started to drive like a bat out of hell, succumbing to his Peruvian testosterone and I guess believing in the power of the tire blessing. The rest of the drive was spent with Ruth Ann gasping in horror, Stephanie yelling at Omar to slow down, Linda stunned into silence but her hand going up as if she could stop catastrophe, Carrie yelling out in Spanish that we were going to vomit, Janet mimicking vomiting, and Kathy waving the hippie bandana out the back window so we would not be hit from behind.
On the plus side, we did arrive back in Cusco ahead of schedule, which allowed us to get in a little time to shop for a few items for our trekking tomorrow, which would start with a 4:00 a.m. wake-up call.
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