Sometimes 3am is a suitable time to go to bed - but never to get up.
Ever!
Drool swinging like a pendulum and heads lolling like rag-dolls on the bus to Ollantaytambo, we discovered Peru’s answer to the Bolivian Death Road.
Standing donkeys and sitting llamas slept by the roadside, illuminated momentarily by the sweeping headlights of the bus as we passed. An untethered bull ran ahead of us in the road. We passed through sleeping mountain top villages and past the fading painted election slogans of the last decade.
With drops on either side steeper than a 9/11 stock market chart, Diego our driver felt that the time was appropriate for his first road duel.
I blame Steven Spielberg.
If he hadn’t made that film about the rogue black truck and the hapless salesman, none of this would have happened.
For three hours he perpetrated a campaign of harassment on a small, under-powered camper-van that had the misfortune to be on the mountain top road with us.
He waved him passed into the face of an oncoming petrol tanker. Poor camper – he braked like his life depended on it and fish-tailed along the gravel behind us, struggling to keep his tin can from going over the edge.
In the wing-mirror Diego grinned his toothless grin.
Camper, unaware of what he was dealing with, took a second wave and began to overtake on a long straight with clear visibility. He was taking no chances.
Halfway through and fully committed to the manoeuvre, Diego began to drift slowly to the right. The screech of grinding metal may have woken a few light sleepers but for camper, the lights were about to go out for good. His wheels left the dirt and he bounced crazily along the rocky strip that stood between the road and the black abyss.
Whatever God camper offered his prayer to – the answer came and with some additional horse-power that the handbook fails to mention, he coaxed the last ounce of acceleration of his tiny air-cooled engine, and surged passed Diego - just before the offside wheels left the edge.
Before the madman could react, camper fell in ahead of us, but his boosted horsepower abandoned him and Diego saw his chance. Closing the gap with his super-charged five litre power-plant, he rammed camper from behind and laughed maniacally as the can first bucked and then slewed across the gravel.
Camper fought the wheel valiantly but on the second impact from the bus, Diego’s eyes burning blood-red on the darkness of the cab, the little van lurched onto two wheels and slowly arched toward the drop.
The last I saw was camper’s tail lights cartwheeling into the darkness and a short time later a pin-prick of yellow light in the darkness below us as he exploded in a mushroom of flame.
I looked around but the heads of all the sleeping crew were still nodding and the drool was still swinging, unaware of the unspeakable act that had just played out.
The sun rose and Diego chatted happily with Smiddy when he woke.
We wandered the terraced battlements of the Inca fortress at Ollantaytambo and learned of the last ditch resistance here before the Inca empire collapsed and ushered in three hundred years of Spanish tyranny.
What could I say?
No one would believe me.
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