My second blog entry before I had a blog (5pm Friday July 8, 2011)

5pm Friday July 8, 2011

Today has been quite eventful, yet I have been on a bus since 9:30am.  This is perhaps the longest and most beautiful bus ride I’ve ever taken.

I woke up early and waited for Juan at the hotel.  His father is sick in the hospital with some gastrointestinal problems, so Juan stayed with him during the night. Due to this difficult experience, he arrives late to pick me up from my hotel, but I wait patiently, putting together a Spanish dvar-torah (speech) for the community, relating to the weekly Torah portion.

He arrives in a hurry and we hop into a taxi. There is no order on the highways near Lima. Cars travel slowly, behind the sluggardly truck, and there is often a gridlock of traffic. Juan is very popular with the Jews from Huánuco, and people from the community seem to keep calling him. Every time he greets them and tells them, “Ya estoy saliendo con el Chazzan desde Lima.”  (I’m leaving Lima with the Chazzan.) Whenever he says this, I can’t help but smile.

We get to the bus station on time and our bus leaves at 9:30am and of course gets stuck in the traffic as we leave Lima. The bus costs $12 one-way, compared to ~$80 one-way for a flight from Lima-Huánuco, and the bus is quite comfortable. All of the seats essentially become beds and there’s an equivalent to a flight attendant who serves you a free drink and bag of chips.

The ride is long, especially getting out of Lima. 

 

We climb the Western range of the Andes Mountains, which is a serpentine paved road with one lane in each direction.  Often times there are delays due to trucks that max out at 30 km per hour.  

As we climb the mountains, we nearly reach the top and snow can be seen in many of the peaks. The views are quite beautiful.  

The bus takes a lunch rest stop, at which I am able to act as translator for a few British tourists who speak but a few words of Spanish. Vegetarian food is difficult to find.  There’s fried guinea pig (cuy), chicken, and pork everywhere. So far, I’ve eaten plain white rice, a baked plantain, a tomato omelet, and some fresh fruit shakes.

The bus continues. We climb our way into the Central highlands of Peru, where the climate is cool and there are llamas all over. I hope we arrive to Huánuco before Shabbes. Due to delays, we will probably arrive at 7:30pm, an hour and a half after it should have.  The community brings in Shabbes at 7:30, although according to my Jewish calendar for Lima, Shabbes begins at ~6pm. Nonetheless I give the community of Huánuco the benefit of the doubt and hope Shabbes actually begins at 7:30pm. There’s nothing I can do anyway. I’ll be on the bus whether I like it or not due to traffic; the only thing I can do is minimize what I do that is not in the spirit of Shabbes once I’m off the bus.