The Police Station

Early on in my relationship with Max, my partner in the climbing business, we travelled to South America. It was part reconnaissance for a guiding trip he would do in the spring and part vacation for us, the plan was for a bit of climbing, a bit of paragliding, some exploring and lots of relaxing spread out over six weeks.

Accompanying us was our trusty sidekick, Dustin. A tall, quirky smiling, towheaded, six year old, Dustin was not only our son but the door-opener to many adventures. If there is one thing we learned during our travels in the south, is that South Americans love kids. This tale is a prelude to how he metaphorically brought a Peruvian police chief to his knees.

We had just spent the night, with several hundred others, sitting next to the bomb disposal team's headquarters on the upper floors of the Lima airport. The Shining Path was active and no one in their right mind left the airport after dark. That didn’t stop us from trying but, well, tease that I am, you’ll have to wait until my book comes out to read that story.  Regardless, after a long night of rich, dark coffee—the bomb disposal team was located right next door to the all-night expresso bar—we headed out.

Excerpt from The Bottom of the Box: The Search for Identity by a Modern-Day Renaissance Woman

We entered the airport’s main foyer and quickly learned the meaning of insanity: taxi drivers, tour guides, hotel owners, shoe shiners, drink sellers, food venders, money changers and thieves all vying for our sleep-deprived attention. We didn’t lose our luggage in that mess; we lost our airline tickets.

The plan was not to be in Lima for long, but when flying AeroPeru, the cheapest airline at the time, we were required to stop there between all destinations: Miami, Lima, La Paz, Lima, Rio, Lima, Miami. Without tickets, however, we were going nowhere. The airlines were no help. You must make a police report, they said. In daylight we easily secured a taxi and drove through the war-torn-looking suburbs—scrappy lots with scores of barefoot boys playing soccer, potholed roads, scrub, half-dead bushes and run-down tenements all draped in la garua, the dreary fog typical for autumnal Lima. After depositing our packs in what was normally a five-star hotel in Miraflores— we got it for ten dollars a night—we wound our way to the police station.

The station was a stone and brick edifice, heavily guarded by semi-automatic machine guns. We headed up the entrance stairs and found our way barred, once again. Although Max’s Spanish was almost understandable, la policia refused to even look at us, let alone listen, just locked their gleaming weapons in front of their chests and made motions to clear the way. We left the front doors and approached some cops loitering nearby. They shrugged at Max’s pigeon Latin and said, Aquino. We shrugged back, and they shrugged again, Aquino, aquino. Finally, after multiple exchanges of international indifference, one cop felt compassion and beckoned us over. Very carefully he pronounced the word we had been hearing over and over, esquina, and pointed to the corner. And there, sitting in a little kiosk at the corner of the street was a tiny woman with a big grin on her face. Dollars, she smiled. Fifteen dollars later we entered the station.

Stay tuned for more weekly excerpts from Notes from the Bottom of the Box. If you like this blog, please like me on my Modern-Day Renaissance Woman Facepage.  Thanks for the support!

If you like my writing, check out my other blog, The Interdependent Life.