The Way Is Shut

“The way is shut. It was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it. The way is shut.” Little did I know when I awoke this morning, that I would be thinking about this quote from Lord of the Rings very soon.

We got up early since we knew that we had another long day of climbing up and over expansive valleys. A short time down the road, there was a man in a little village flagging us down for a ride, so we obliged and picked him up. The day before, we had heard that there was a protest in a city further down the road, so we pumped our stowaway for more information. He made it sound like the protest had been going on for quite a few days, but he thought the road would be open. Not long after, we started to get close to a village, and started seeing debris, primarily boulders, in the road. After a few miles of boulder dodging, we came to a woman walking in the road back towards the village we just came from. She was a bit high strung, and essentially was saying that the road was totally closed ahead, and if we were trying to get to Cuzco, we have to turn around and go another way, a twenty hour detour. We just weren’t up for another twenty hours of driving, so we forged ahead to see what all the fuss was about. We came around a corner to a chokepoint in the canyon, and were stopped by a long line of tour buses, semi’s and vans, with people just milling around. We parked and walked to the front of the line and it immediately became clear that there’s a difference between protests in Peru, and those we’re used to in the U.S. The entire roadway was covered with a mix of large and small boulders, and a quick glance to the ridge above revealed where they came from. About a dozen men were high on the ridge, using long bars to dislodge the boulders and send them reigning down on the road. We headed back to the van and started talking to folks to get the scoop. From what we could gather, the teachers were upset because their schools weren’t getting enough money, so this was their way of trying to remedy the situation. It sounded like they had been doing this for the past eight days, and the only thing to do was to wait until later in the day, when they might let people pass. So we did as everybody else, we set up shop and started the waiting game.

At about five, a flurry of activity coming from the front of the line indicated that it was time to move. We fired up the van and watched in awe as dozens of people jumped off the tour busses and ran in front of the caravan, clearing the road of boulders as we crept down the road. We initially thought that this was an isolated incident, and that we’d be on our way, but soon we came to a town and a mob of angry protesters lined the narrow street. We hesitantly kept creeping forward as busses and semis in front of us were tagged with red paint as they passed through the mob. For once it seemed that being American paid off, because once the mob saw we weren’t Peruvian, they backed off and peacefully let us pass.
We spent two more hours driving into the dark, dodging debris the whole way until we hit the town of Abacay. We had originally planned on getting a hotel and staying there for the night, but as we entered the edge of town, it looked like we were entering a war zone. Gigantic trees, burning tires, boulders and abandoned cars were all used as roadblocks. In addition, a copious amount of broken glass and thorn bushes added that extra sense of ‘what’s next?’ The caravan suddenly stopped and after half an hour, we were informed we weren’t going anywhere soon. A man that seemed to be affiliated with the protesters came by and told us that the protesters weren’t going to let people pass until 1 a.m. and that before that happened, they were going to march down the line of cars and create a little havoc. Everyone was instructed to pull off to the sides of the street, turn off the lights and be quiet. So there we sat, not knowing what was going to happen next. We pulled out a pipe and our machete and just waited. After waiting for a few hours, we could start hearing chanting of a crowd up the road. I got out and looked up ahead and sure enough, a large mob carrying spray paint and buckets of paint were coming down the road, shaking semi’s, painting busses, etc. Go time. I woke Noah up (somehow he was able to catch some zzz’s during all of this) and told him to get ready. The mob enveloped the van on both sides and the protestors laughed and pointed at the two wide-eyed gringo’s huddled inside. We nodded and said ‘hola’ and to our surprise they kept moving further down the street. A few younger stragglers came up and when they noticed we were gringos, they seemed to get excited and we thought they were going to put their brushes loaded with red paint to use, but just in time, the same guy who originally told us to park on the side of the street came up and told them to move on and not to touch our van. Whew!

We watched the mob move further down the street for about an hour, it was now 1 a.m., when all of a sudden there were a couple of big bangs from the front of the caravan. People started running franticly down the street past us. I jumped out of the van to look down the street as I heard diesel engines starting up. A large group of riot police were standing guard with guns while people from the busses were moving the boulders. In a scene I can only compare to something from BlackHawk Down, the caravan started moving again. The police were busting us out of the city! They apparently used tear gas to disperse the remaining protesters and were buying us time to get out. We slowly crawled up out of the city, the whole time, dodging more boulders, trees, burning tires and glass-lots and lots of glass. We winced every time we heard it crunching under our tires. Every side street was blocked with large piles of rocks, so the caravan just followed the lead bus until we were on the highway above town. We drove for another two hours, still dodging debris the whole way, until it seemed like the roadblocks were subsiding. At 3 a.m., blurry eyed and nerves frazzled, we finally pulled off the road and crashed in the van for a few hours.