Day 46 - from Puno to Cusco.

While checking out of the Los Pinos hostel, I meet my companion for the bus journey. Niki from Canada, a substance abuse counsellor with an easy laugh, is my seatmate.

The ten-hour drive is nice enough, and the frequent stops along the way help to break it up nicely. We stop at the museum at Pucará, dedicated to one of the earliest cultures to live in the area, where our guide gives us a long talk and we then have five minutes to ourselves. I buy two painted clay bulls, to be put on the roof on my house for good luck. We stop at La Raya – the highest pass on the route, with brilliant views of the grassy plains and mountains behind them, and the obligatory circus of trinket sellers and women in traditional dress posing for photos with their llamas; they’re holding baby lambs for extra cuteness. A blue train chugs past us, heading towards Puno; it’s the service catering exclusively to tourists, it takes twelve hours, and though all your meals are included and you get great views of the countryside, you get the same views from the bus, and for a fraction of the price, too.

We lunch at a gringo buffet at Sicuani, where Niki proclaims Stuttgard to be the most romantic city in the world, to the surprise of the two Austrians sitting with us. She then asks me to name my most romantic city in the world, and I’m stumped. San Diego is certainly the most memorable as far as tortured relationships are concerned, but romantic? “Erm…San Francisco?”

Then come the ruins of Raqchi – a huge adobe wall and remnants of columns and mud brick walls, some mud brick houses with thatched roofs. Our guide drones on, talking for a while in Spanish and then giving a short English translation. He’s a nice enough young guy, but his English is not so hot and he sounds a bit bored, and I think that if you’re offering a ‘luxury bus service with bilingual guides’, you should make sure that that’s the case. I fidget and stifle yawns; when it comes to boring tour guides, I have the attention span of a gnat in a hurricane. He goes on for far too long, and then says: “We go back to the bus in seven minutes.” Why couldn't he have given us the explanation beforehand so that we'd actually have time to wander around the appreciate the ruins?

Last but not least is the colonial village of Andahuaylillas, with its colourful San Pedro church. ‘Sistine Chapel of the Americas’ is overselling it somewhat, but it’s certainly intricately painted and everyone seems impressed. It’s a bit too much for me though; gaudy Catholic churches are not my cup of tea. Much more interesting is the little museum next door, with its mummies, ritually deformed and trepanned skulls and a bowl of coca leaves for chewing.

The best thing about the journey is the conversation with Niki. Not only is she well-travelled, but she is very knowledgeable when it comes to the field of addiction, a subject of considerable interest to me. She thinks that a large part of the problem is social attitude to addiction, inability to put things into perspective and a belief that there’s only one correct way to get clean. “AA has done considerable disservice to addicts,” Niki tells me. “It makes them believe that they all have to admit that they’re powerless before their addiction and that they have to ‘give themselves over to a higher power’ before they can combat their addiction. It’s rarely mentioned that statistically, a large number of hard drug users give up by themselves after a few years.” That’s not to say that AA’s Twelve Steps wouldn’t work for some people; my friend David’s a successful example, and I think my friend Forrest could also have benefited from it if he’d stuck with it, but I agree with Niki that it takes the power away from the individuals concerned and kind of babies them. “A person who has the willpower to give up completely surely has the power to have a casual drink every now and then,” Niki says. She’s frustrated by the stigma attached to drug addiction; in the States and Canada, it’s either treated as an immoral act to be punished with imprisonment, or else the US, which funds 80% of all research into addiction, tries to find a ‘medical answer for a social problem’, by trying to isolate the part of the brain that may be responsible for addiction, rather than addressing and revising people’s unhelpful attitudes. It’s interesting to note that while drug taking is seen as a conscious moral choice, when Tiger Woods claimed to be suffering from ‘sex addiction’ he was effectively absolving himself of responsibility. ‘I couldn’t help it; I’m addicted to women.’

We discuss changing attitudes to addiction through the ages, and the fact that in our society, we do so many things that are harmful, yet some are looked down upon and some are revered. Niki points out that ballet has been repeatedly linked to repetitive strain injuries and eating disorders, American football results in countless broken bones and brain trauma, as does boxing, yet that kind of deliberate damage is deemed okay, and even commendable, while ruining your internal organs with crack is not. Some compulsive behaviour is okay, and some is repellent.

There is a strong correlation between substance abuse and compulsive behaviour in general and psychological problems – depression, psychosis, bipolar disorder, and so Niki and her fellow practitioners treat both at the same time. The only thing that can be said for sure is that there’s no uniform approach that would work for everyone and sometimes people quit for surprising reasons. One woman gave up her 80 fags a day smoking habit because she got a cat and didn’t want it to suffer from second-hand smoke. “Some people wouldn’t even give up for their own kids,” I tell Niki, thinking of my friend Sara and her mother, who insisted on smoking indoors: “My house; I do what I want,” even when Sara asked her not to.

“The important thing is not to pronounce judgement; with my patients, we talk around the issue and I ask them indirect questions,” Niki explains. Too many of her fellow counsellors have staunch views on drugs and it’s apparent in their approach, which doesn’t resolve the problem and puts the patient on the defensive. One of Niki’s patients was a young man who kept getting into fights after drinking on Saturday nights and it took a lot of roundabout talking to make the connection between the two; he seemed to think that these people who have a problem with him come out of nowhere, and only on Saturdays, strangely enough. They agreed that he’d switch from rum to beer, and he stopped fighting.

I keep thinking back to my fights with Forrest and how I displayed all the unhelpful behaviour possible – anger, condemnation, disappointment – without being able to truly talk to him about how he came to be where he was and how he could get out of it. A part of me looks down on substance abuse because I see it as a weakness of will and disrespect for one’s body, and also because it’s a weakness I don’t have, personally. There’s something not right about comparing ballet to heroin, but I haven’t yet worked out what my issue is with that comparison. Perhaps I should revise my views on substance abuse altogether.

Since Niki doesn’t have a place to stay, I offer her a bed in my room at the Casa de la Gringa, warning her of my snoring, and she gratefully accepts. We get to Cusco just in time for my briefing at the Pantiacolla office, so I dash off to the Plaza de Armas, a bit breathless from running at the altitude of 3,400 metres. Make it just in time; introductions are made; I meet Marianne, the Dutch biologist running the enterprise, plus the three couples and the single American coming on the trip tomorrow. Jungle rules are explained to us, and I dash off again to meet Niki and Esther (Swiss girl from bus) for dinner. Back home in north Ontario, Niki eats moose and deer because her father goes hunting every autumn; she promises me lots of wild game if I come visit. While there's no wild game in Cusco, we do stumble across Gastón Acurio’s ‘Chicha’, and enjoy the best dinner I’ve had in a long time – trout ceviche and anticucho de corazón (beef heart kebab). The latter’s a popular street food, but here it’s divine. Niki tries my ceviche and agrees that it’s ‘heaven on a plate’. And the deserts – oh my gaaad! Words fail me.

Now for the 4am wakeup…