So many books, so little time.......

We are preparing for our adventure in South America with some reading. Although we have our route carefully planned and will be taken care of most of the time by the helpful people at Journey Latin America, apart from our month in Buenos Aires, we want to have at least some idea of what there is to see and where we might look for it. Besides, although the baggage allowance is much bigger than we are used to on short haul flights within Europe, we will have to be selective about the books we take in order to leave space and weight for our boots and much else that we will need (or think we will need!) on this sort of trip. It is a challenge to pack for a journey that will include mountains, deserts, big cities, the Orient Express (to Machu Picchu), lots of movement between places etc.

Part of the key to all this is to bear in mind that it is the journey which is the holiday as much as the arrival. Paul Theroux takes this as the starting point not for his packing (although I suppose that he may have done this as well) but for his book The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas. In it he describes a train voyage- the word trip hardly does it justice and even to describe it as epic would be to collapse all its quirkiness into into a bland cliche-from his home in Boston Mass. to the tip of Argentinian Patagonia. We are not actually going to Argentinian Patagonia (although we have been urged to do so by two of the young Argentianian women who work in Meson de Los Americas down by the beach here) but to its Chilean counterpart, but we follow some of the same route as Theroux, probably in slightly more comfort (we are not looking for good copy) and hopefully with some better results at some stopping points. He arrives in Peru, for instance, to find there is a strike of railway workers. and that, "Peru, once a golden kingdom occupying a third of the continenet, had taken a mighty tumble and in defeat looked incapable of supplying those muttering workers with any hope. Few great cities in the world look more plundered and bankrupt that Lima. It is the look of Rangoon, the same heat and colonial relics and corpse-odours: the imperial parades have long ago marched away from its avenues and left the spectators to scavenge and beg.....Like a violated tomb in which only the sorry mummy of withered nationalism is left and just enough religion to console a patient multitude with the promise of happier pickings beyond the grave, Lima-epitomising Peru-was a glum example of obnoxious mismanagement."

This story of Peru's decline is also the gloomy and distant backdrop to Mario Vargas Llosa's Las Travesuras de La Nin(y)a Mala-translated as The Bad Girl. Although most of the action takes place in Europe, its two chief protagonists are Peruvian exiles and the book provides a commentary on the state of Peruvian politics-failed democracy, military dictatorship, the terrorist activities of los sonderos luminosos-and the nature of exile.

Anyway, Theroux's book was published in 1979 and, although Vargas Llosa's is newer (2006, I think) it is looking down the tunnel into Peru's past. We shall see what we find...and report back.