You leave the farm through the gate and go up the road, where you can probably catch a moto. A moto is a motorcycle-tricycle with a seat in the back for a passenger. The moto takes you to the gas station. At the gas station you can catch a collectivo taxi. For the equivalent of $2, you will be driven an hour through the Andes back to the city. If there are no collectivo taxis, you can get on a bus. For the equivalent of $0.60, you will be driven two hours through the Andes, turning down back roads to stop at random people's houses, sitting in the bus for ten or fifteen minutes while it idles with no explanation.

The bus will arrive in Cusco, which will seem almost unbearably urban after a week in the town that is really a collection of farms, which is outside a town that is really a single intersection of two dirt roads with two corner stores, which is outside a town that is maybe half the size of one Brooklyn neighborhood. In Cusco, one line of the purest white powder you've ever tasted will motivate you to pack up your large backpack and wait for dawn. It is so pure that you will go hours without feeling that nagging despiration for another line that creeps up after fifteen minutes in America, so pure that when you stop doing it, eventually you can actually go to sleep, instead of to a place where your jaw grinds and your skull shrinks slightly and your eyes dart in the dark until the only solution is more, more more, and a day spent scraping yourself off the soles of your own shoes. You will feel like a superhero packing a backpack, a superhero returning to her home planet. If you had a few more lines you suspect you might not need a plane to get there.

You catch a taxi to the airport. Everyone else there seems to be in some departing tour group. They are dusty from the Inca Trail. They are exhausted from their Third World Adventure. Italian tour group. German tour group. Middle-aged European men, with their names carefully lettered on tags on their backpacks, waiting in line, bewildered as sheep. Women in sensible sweaters, grimly gripping their passports and walking sticks. You pop one of the Xanax you've hoarded for the plane and get in line.

You beep at the metal detector. You always beep. The security agent insists you are wearing a belt. She pulls your clothes this way and that. You've been wearing the same ones for a week, and the funk of travel wafts from your pockets. She turns them inside out, and you are glad you patted yourself down for roaches before you left for the airport. They never find the thing that makes you beep, but they always wave you through.

Xanax is a godsend to coach air travel. You fall immediately asleep and stumble into the Lima airport, realizing, upon burping, that you have consumed a ham and cheese sandwich, and yet do not recollect this. This is why people are advised not to self-prescribe painkillers. Another Xanax obliterates the four-hour layover and the flight to Costa Rica. Again you burp, and realize in horror that you've also eaten airline chicken. You've long ago made it a practice to be unconscious in airports, one way or another. You prefer to enter airports in a state of such sleep deprivation or tranquilized grogginess that you will curl up under the chairs at the departure gate. Reading a paperback will not do--the only way to pass through airports is half-dead, a zombie. You clutch your iPod like a plastic teddy bear; it rests on your chest, singing its digital lullabies all four thousand miles you travel.

In each successive airport there are more Americans, more irreverent teenagers, more bratty children, more fussy-skinned women, more tall, swaggering men, more impatientience, more clever gadgets, more expensive-looking luggage. You are getting closer and closer to home.

You are wearing your filthy army pants, a black t-shirt, a black fleece jacket covered in dog hair, a snow-white furry alpaca hat that dangles like fringe in your eyes, aviator sunglasses and mud-encrusted hiking boots. Sometime last week, you gave up on underwear. You can smell the evidence of everything you've done on you like an olafactory photo album. But you know that soon the clothes will be in the laundry and the whole experience will be catalogged in digital photo files on your laptop. The role of traveller is just one more place you're passing through.

You've been given an unfortunate aisle seat on the flight to New York. You fall into thick sleep before the plane takes off, and the Spanish-speaking couple stuck in the two seats next to you spend the flight trying to rouse you so they can get to the bathroom. You fall asleep again before they get back. "Senorita, senorita," they politely whisper until you fling yourself into the aisle so they can pass. You are still wearing your aviators and fur hat when they shake you awake in hot, muggy New York.

JFK is empty at 2 a.m., an almost calming oasis of buzzing flourescent lights and cycling baggage carousel. You are waved through customs and thirty-four hours later, a taxi that costs twenty-five times as much to travel the same distance as the one that got you to the airport in Peru takes you to an apartment where one month's rent is equivalent to two years in the last house you slept in. You eat an avocado that costs fifteen times as much as the last one you ate, drink water from the tap without fear of ingesting microbes, flush toilet paper in the toilet without fear of destroying the plumbing, strip off the clothes that smell of tobacco and dope and fire smoke and dirt and sweat and unfamiliar beds, and wait for the sun to come up.

Mesclun

They were the stars of another hemisphere, flung in unfamiliar patters. This time, the constellations were easy to discern, being three-dimensional and in a vague kind of unwieldy motion, like balloons at the Thanksgiving Day Parade. We started up the road out of the town. The walls and shadows and street and sky were perfectly painted by some deceased magic realist. A lonely banner, the kind that advertises gas station openings, flapped over the cobblestone street. "A party!" said Holly.

"There is definately a party," Steve and I agreed.

We admired the stone wall and the garbage can in front of it. We decided to clean up all the litter in the empty plaza to make the view more aesthetically pleasing. We admired the results of our cleanup effort.

Further on, the road turned to dirt and the stars were even brighter. The Milky Way was spread across the sky like fuzz from a dandelion. All over the valley, dogs howled and barked at the echoes of their howls. Far away on the mountain, the tiny lights of cars wound their way down the switchbacks. I began to discern subtle differences in the smells of the different mountains.

I got thirsty and just then there was a store. We had walked to the next town. The store was located at the exactly genesis of all space and time. I was fortunate to buy a bottled water there.

Inside the store at the exact genesis of all time and space were a little boy and two older guys. We all played a game of checkers (me and the little boy vs.). We lost, badly. "Itīs the only way weīll learn," I sighed to the boy, in what I hoped was correct Spanish. He nodded ruefully in agreement and we shook hands.

Back out on the road, we stood silently, looking at the stars, the mountains, the outlines of trees. There was a point where the mountain met the Milky Way and we watched it and watched it until we all saw a shooting star and gasped in unison.

They said there was "mesclun" in the green drink we drank but it didnīt taste anything like it does when they juice greens at the health food store. I did feel great after I drank it, though.

Much later, after the walk back through town, after the dog that threatened us ran off and was replaced by a new dog as if they were changing shifts, after I spent some time on the balcony with a particularly amazing spiderweb, after the man who had painted all the paintings told me all about them and we agreed on a number of important matters, after the eternal joints and cigarettes that circled the room for hours had all burnt to stubs, after the movies and the sandwiches, after the owner of the bar into which we had locked ourselves had passed out cold, after we had coaxed all the dogs into lying on us for warmth, the dawn was breaking and the men were cleaning the steps of the church. I walked across the plaza and the men waved me over to them. Each one of them introduced himself solemnly and I nodded and shook his hand. One of the men said something about "hands." I didnīt understand.

"No entiendo," I said.

"Sus manas," he said. "Limpio o soucio?" (Clean or dirty?)

I held out my hands, turning them over. "Limpio,"I said.

The man held out his hands. "Soucio," he said, with some flourish.

"Es verdad," I agreed, though I wasnīt sure if it was as simple as all that.

Your Super Lefty comes to you now from the Southern Hemisphere. She looks North to see the sun and shivers in her hiking boots at night, since it is winter here. In addition to her hiking boots, she wears at all times a fleece and a backapck, making her indistinguishable from the other gringa backpackers. Until yesterday she was also wearing at all times a black photojournalist's vest with eighteen pockets, in which she was keeping lip balm, eyedrops, a Zippo lighter, a box of tea-tree oil flavored toothpicks, a little black notebook, a Canon SD100 Digital Elph camera, extra battery for said camera, a selection of hair ties, three paper cocktail umbrellas, her passport and assorted American and Peruvian cash, a pen, a pair of aviator sunglasses, sunblock, a small Altoids tin with edge-rounding tools rattling around in it, and two extra contact lenses of frighteningly strong prescription. (Your Super Lefty is legally blind without opthamalogical correction, but soon hopes to have her vision surgically altered to the strength of Air Force pilots.) Then Super Lefty realized that including her pants, jackets and said vest, she had 38 pockets on her person at any given time and even she could not stay on top of this system. Also, the vest and its contents sound like a maraca when one is riding a horse through the countryside.

Altitude adjustment has gone swimmingly, thanks in part to the calming, stimulating properties of coca tea. Super Lefty no longer pants for air when climbing around on Incan ruins. However, Super Lefty is still a klutz, and has managed to cause small injury to her person each day so far. She has had unfortunate run-ins with a sharp boulder edge, a cactus and the newfound muscles required to stay on a horse intent on veering off the trail.

Lax liability and fire code laws make Peru a marvellous place. For $8 American dollars, a guy who speaks no English will outift you and your friends with horses and lead you to the mountains. You are permitted to exhort these horses to go at top speed (which is not very fast), and the only thing the guy says to you is "izquierda" or "derecha." I am told this is not the standard for American trail rides. Also, the bars have cool little lofts built into them and open flames everywhere.

Travelling with an archeologist/anthropologist has its perks, one of which is attempting to say, "mi amigo es un archeologisto/anthropologisto," and another of which is being lead on hikes to deserted Incan ruins, instead of ruins crowded with tourists.

Today Holly and I went whitewater rafting. I promptly fell in. Then the raft got stuck on a rock, and the guide told the all the women to get out and wait on a big rock in the middle of the river, while he and the remaining men circled around and eventually retrieved us with ropes. As soon as these mishaps began occuring, I achieved the sense of total liquid calm that always comes with unstoppable chaos. Rafting is therefore an excellent sport for me. It's like a ride on the Cyclone in which you have a satisfying, repetitive job--to row.

As for the non-wilderness, Cusco offers much opportunity to study the anthropology of backpacker culture. The other night we enjoyed a heartfelt set at a hookah bar by a guy who sings in Quechua (the language of the Incas) while accompanying himself on the electric guitar. But we were soon driven out the by the antics of some Hare Krishnas wearing, of course, sandals with socks. There are two kinds of backpackers--those who have normal, boring jobs and lives elsewhere and are studiously, if a bit overenthusiastically, outfitted for the Peruvian wilderness, and those who are part of that long-term backpacker culture. I haven't been among them in a few years. They wear amalgamated outfits of all the cultures they have visited recently, carry around drums, and have hair that Holly points out is always on the brink of being dreaded without actually being dreaded.

Even more interesting, if a bit more problematic, is the political economy of tourism. There are kids everywhere, dressed in traditional clothes, holding baby sheep, asking you to pay one or two soles (about thirty or sixty cents) to take a picture with them. Heartbreakingly little kids walk around alone, selling postcards and crocheted handpuppets of llamas and Spiderman. One kid last night, who looked to be about four or five, reponded quite clearly to our "No gracias," with a "Fuck you." It's sad, but it's also eerie, because these kids are already hustlers, and their pleading voices are theatrical. Everything is incredibly cheap for Americans, even the really upscale places, and it's not because you're so rich in America, though to even come here you must be, but because America is so rich in the world, and you can order everything you want because of this. You go on your wilderness experiences, oohing and ahhing at the scenery, and ride or raft or hike right past people who live in tiny adobe houses and herd sheep or alpacas or cows around all day, who will probably never ride in a New York City taxicab and marvel at how genuine you look in your traditional hipster outfit, how quaint are your rituals of getting coffee and reading the paper and shopping at the Korean deli, or taking drugs on national holidays, or showing up forty minutes early for a movie, or sacrificing your t-shirts with scissors. You wonder if they hate you the way you hate tourists in New York, or the way you hate people who are far richer than you are, or they've seen so many people just like you that they don't think about you at all. You romanticize the simplicity of life here, the way little kids can run around and play outside in beautiful mountains, the way people don't seem to have as much oppressive stuff, but at the same time, you can't truly imagine any other life than the one you've lived, and you think fondly of your DVD player and reliable plumbing waiting for you at home, which despite all fancies of fleeing to the mountains, you know you will return to and embrace. I take back "problematic." That's a word I picked up emulating the TA in some undergraduate seminar. The political economy of tourism is fascinating and disgusting and guilt-inducing and inveitable all at once.

Tomorrow we are heading out of town in a variety of unknown directions. Reports to follow.

Since Saturday I have observed the following:

1. Coney Island is an ideal place to spend your final night before leaving the country for the Southern Hemisphere. Your memories of your hometown will be at once surreal, quaint and trashy.

My travelling companions and I scrambled our way out onto one of the rock jetties to catch a particularly spectacular sunset--a sunset so spectacular we took it in by continuously rotating 360 degrees to watch the sky turn little-girl-bedroom pink and purple over the housing projects, amusment park rides and cruiseship-dotted horizon. When this mission went well, we felt adequetely prepared to travel to a foreign country, ascend to 12,000 feet and undertake unsupervised wilderness expeditions.

2. It is a terrible mistake not to stay up all night if you have to leave for the airport at 5:30 a.m.

3. Getting bumped to first class for the entirety of our New York-Guatamala City-San Jose-Lima plane trip has taught me that it is better to be rich than not to be rich. It turns out that what makes plane flight horrible is the lack of space and failure of coach class to provide constant cocktails. When provided with more space and constant cocktails, I found plane flight to be a marvellous experience.

The twinges of guilt and self-loathing one feels as the economy-class passengers file by, thinking to themselves, as I always do, "ASSHOLES!" when they see the first-class passengers, are quickly alleviated by the closing of the magical curtain that makes coach class disappear.

For the last leg of our trip, only I was bumped to first class. Holly and Steve, left to suffer in coach, emerged from the plane looking angry and talking of crying babies. I emerged deep in conversation with the Bolivian Representative to the United Nations Population Council.

4. Anthropologists are fun people to go drinking with.

5. You can almost converse in languages you do not speak if you convince yourself that you speak them and use the four verbs you know creatively.

6. Within five minutes in a foreign city, even if we are innocently exiting the postage-stamp museum, Holly and I will be found by the local potheads, led to the marginal public space and offered free marijuana, a windfall that pales in comparison to the fact that

7. They sell Xanax and Valium over the counter in Peru.

Tomorrow we ascend to 12,000 feet altitude. If only I had implemented my plan to get my blood doped before we left. Illegal in international athletic competition, a perfect solution for only marginally fit people who desire to see parts of the world where oxygen is in short supply. Alas, I'll have to go it with only my usual allotment of red blood cells. As I so often imagine, my brain cells must be saying "we who are about to die salute you."

Seeing a movie in New York City is almost more trouble than it's worth. It costs nearly $11. You have to get tickets hours, if not days in advance. You have to get to the theater at least forty minutes early so you don't end up sitting way in the back of way in the front. It's always packed. Stadium seating (a godsend for short moviegoers) is not as widely available here as it is in the rest of the country, where I presume people to be both larger and more serious about physical comfort. New Yorkers are clearly not concerned with physical comfort. Nearly everything we do is very uncomfortable.

Therefore, seeing a movie in this city, like doing most things in this city, requires a certain amount of grit and a hypercompetitive attitude that will catapult you past the unpleasantries of actually completing the task. I will see this movie. If all these people are seeing this movie, I will see this movie too. There will not be people all over talking about this movie that I will not have seen, because I am going to see it.

In this manner, we became consumed with the idea of seeing La Dolce Vita in its revival at the Film Forum. So, too, apparently, did many other New Yorkers. They beat us to it on Saturday night, but not so on Monday. We bought tickets on the internet. We got there early. Or so we thought--we barely got the last three seats together in the theater. We settled in for an ass-numbing three-hour Italian commentary on modern culture, and man, did we get one ass-numbing three-hour Italian commentary on modern culture. I sat in the middle and tried not to eat twice as much popcorn because I was the one passing it back and forth.

Midway through the movie, I thought, "How much longer can this go on? I must check the time and find out how much longer this is going to go on." It wasn't that I wasn't enjoying the film--I was enjoying it as much as one can enjoy anything that lasts for three hours and is subtitled and partially obscured by someone's incredibly large head. But I had lost track of time and needed to know if I would be sitting there for one more hour or two more hours.

I bent down and removed my (silenced) cell phone from the strap of my bag. I pushed a button and its little indiglo-type screen lit up, revealing the time. A whole two hours to go.

Suddenly, I felt a hand smack me, hard, on the forearm. I guiltily squirreled the phone away and straigtened up.

"That's odd," I thought. "How unlike Rebecca to smack me."

Then I notied the woman sitting next to Rebecca was glaring at me.

"Did that woman hit me?" I wondered. "Nah. She must have glared and Rebecca must have smacked me because of the glaring. Maybe I should ask Rebecca. But if it was her who smacked me, she won't be very happy if I bother her by talking. Though I am going to tell her later that smacking is not acceptable."

I snuck a look at Rebeccca. She looked quite calm and faintly bemused. She did not look like someone who had just smacked me. The only time she has ever smacked me is to retaliate when I have pushed or shoved her roughly, as if she grew up in my family, which is raucous and pushy, instead of her family, which is placid and softspoken.

"I really think that woman smacked me on the arm," I thought. "What the fuck? What the fuck? I didn't say anything. I didn't shine a flashlight in her eyes. I turned on my silent cell-phone screen for a split-second. And if she had a problem, she could have said something. Or even tapped me. Who the hell reaches across the person on their left to smack the total stranger on that person's left? Who the fuck does this lady think she is? Does she want a piece of me? She'll get a fucking piece of me. I will kick her snide little film-nerd ass, right here in Film Forum."

But then I remembered that on the way to Film Forum, Rebecca had in fact accidentally smacked me on the shoulder when she meant to tap me. "It had to have been Rebecca," I thought. "Maybe she's having a day of accidental smacking."

Two hours later, we emerged, ass-numbed and immersed in Italian cultural commentary, into the stewey August night. We bid Holly goodnight and started for the L train.

"Did you smack me during the movie?" I asked Rebecca.

"No, that was the lady next to me. She smacked you. I couldn't believe it. I saw her do it and I thought, 'I can't believe that lady smacked Emily.' Then I could see you seething and I thought, 'I better not tell Emily it was that lady and not me, because then Emily is going to say something to that lady and maybe even start a fight with her in the middle of La Dolce Vita and disrupt the entire theater.'"

Fueled by Rebecca's apparent view of me as a highly volatile and dangerous individual, and the safety of hyperbole, I began shouting.

"Well, it's a good thing you did let me think that, because you're damn right I would have started a fight with that bitch if I'd known it was her who smacked me! You don't smack a stranger on the arm in the middle of a movie and get away with it! And let me tell you, one of these days, someone is going to touch me inappropriately and get one motherfucker of a bloody nose! I am going to do it, I am going to smash someone's face in someday. Someone is going to pick the wrong day to fuck with me and I am going to LET THEM HAVE IT!"

As she often does during my violent tirades, Rebecca waited patiently for it to end. I concluded my outburst by throwing several practice punches into the humid air of Seventh Avenue South, which was at that moment full of the exhaled carbon dioxide of tourists who had located the Greenwich Village sections of their guidebooks.

Now I don't know if I would have had the guts or the ill judgement to actually start a fight with that lady in the middle of La Dolce Vita, but that is a true friend--a friend who believes in the best version of you, but sees the potential consequences of your worst version and tries to protect you from them.