Daylight Robbery.

We sat down together´on stools next to the hut and after an earnest discussion agreed on a price of $4000. $600 for Roger to pay back Susanne and $3,400 for me. Roger and I initially wanted a much higher figure, 7 or $8000 but Malleaneo had realised the amount of problems that were there and was only willing to pay $4000 and was quite insistent about it. We shook hands on the deal, it was the best we could get under the circumstances, and walked half a mile up to Malleaneo´s house. Under a bed he had $3000 in rolls of notes $100 and $20 bills wrapped in elastic bands. He would pay me the last $1000 in a couple of months. We counted the money, put it into an envelope and Roger stuffed it deep into his pocket.

I decided to change my money into travellers cheques. An altogether safer and cheaper way of carrying large amounts of money around Peru. So we went back to Cajamarca, and stopped over at my hostal to pick up my passport. We arrived a few minutes after an armed robbery had occurred right outside the hostal. Apparently the bank employees were filling up the cash machine there, strangely with no police and minimal or no security around when they were threatened at gunpoint by a gang who stole all the cash. 100,000 soles or more than $30, 000 by all accounts. The robbery happened in broad daylight on a busy street and was surely seen by many families and young children. There must have been at least 50 witnesses to the crime, tourists out shopping for souvineers and handicrafts for carnival. Roger made the point that it was clealy a well planned and carefully timed raid because of the lack of security. Absolutely incredible. I was stunned, tired from my journey and still nervous about the deal I had just made.

We went to a (different) bank branch and I bought the cheques with Roger´s help and sealed them up in an envelope. I decided to give it to Roger for safe keeping in his house. We went for lunch and then later we went drinking. We got throught a crate and a half with Malleanio and some of the campesinos at Huacariz. Then later we went back to someones house for more beer and food provided by the women. I threw up outside but we managed to get back to the city centre ok where we engaged in more drinking and I made a complete fool of myself before retiring to bed exhausted at 3am. Luckily the woman on duty a the hostal was Sonia, a kindly and reliable lady who had been working since I last stayed there 18 months before, ´upgraded` me to a nicer single room downstairs.

It was a day that I don´t think I´ll ever forget and it was the end of a turbulent saga for me which I will attempt to describe in much more detail in my later blogs. I tried to write a book about it while I was working in South Korea last year, but I could only write about 40 pages. I will however try to use what I wrote as a basis for these blogs. I am not a good writer at all, but I htink I have an interesting story to tell which will hopefully come out of what I write.

Tom

first blog

Well, this is the first of many travel blogs I am planning to write concerning my time in South America. I´m staying at Samay Wasi Hostal in Miraflores, Lima now. Nice place and I reccommend it. So during the next few days I will tell you about my last month in Peru and over the next few weeks hopefully I will be able to describe some of my previous visits to this great country and what happened to me.

Two weeks ago I arrived on the overnight bus in Cajamarca, Peru. I paid 110 soles ($30) for my one-way ticket which is expensive here to say the very least. I took a taxi into the centre of town to a friend´s house. He wasn´t home, but there was plenty of activity in the school for street children next door. In there I met Susanne who proudly showed me around Inca Wasi school, the place has changed considerably since I was last there. A second storey is being added to the building, the school is expanding and they are building extra classrooms and a library for the kids with donated money from abroad. Instead of graduating children at 11 years old like before they are educating them up to the age of 16 and those street children with the ability to go to university will be helped to do that. A real success story although small children I remember from three years ago who left before Susanne and others arrived are now selling bottles of Coca-Cola or cheap alcohol on the city streets, or washing the windscreens of cars as they wait at traffic lights.

After forty-five minutes Roger and Mallenio arrived by motorbike. Roger is Susanne´s Peruvian fiance, a stocky confident man of 28, he´s an excellent friend of mine and someone who features very heavily of the story of my time here. Mallenio is a slim man of 32, but he looks a lot older. The palms of his hands are as tough and as coarse as old leather after years of working on farms, and he speaks an almost unintelligible rural Spanish dialect which Roger needs to translate for me. It is a warm reunion for us as I´ve been away for well over a year. So they help me carry my bags over to Hospedaje Belen where I was planning to stay.

After dumping my bags with the rather unpleasant Señorita who was working there we traveled by taxi to Huacariz, Roger´s family farm about a couple of miles outside Cajamarca city. There Malleanio´s family were busy digging up weeds in the fields where the alfalfa grew with trowels. Old men women and I believe children also were helping out. Lunch was cooking on the fire inside an adobe hut nearby and the toddlers were playing with the dogs and the cats in the dirt. Mallenio then showed us the broken pipes or the irrigation system for the fields and complained loudly that he would have t o spend a lot of his hard earned money to fix them. He seemed agitated and full of worry about it all.

Well, someone else wants the computer in the hostal now. I´ll write again tomorrow.