It was a few days before I walked the Salkantay Trek, and was faced with the first dry season blizzard in six years on the Salkantay pass at 4700 m.a.s.l. I was situated at a wee hostel right on one side of Plaza San Francisco. It was the time for Inti Raymi, aka Inka’s Festival of the Sun and the streets were teeming with tourists. In Cusco, everything was built or paved with shiny stone bricks: the houses around, the churches, the colonial streets as well as the acient ruins faintly visible on the hills. Though fairly undeveloped, it was a nice culturally vibrant town. Yet, I had seen too much of the museums and chapels during my trip in South America and was deterred from getting that bulky one-for-all ticket that covered over a dozen main attractions of the city, and costed around 130 soles. I remember going to the counter at Palacio de la Municipalidad Provincial del Cusco, where the clerk whipped out that monster of a ticket and I was like, no thanks. I’d just go rot in my hostel.

Or would I? I remembered this place I long had in my “Want to go” folder on Google Map. It did look like far too distant a place from the city center of Cusco, and coming back from there could prove too difficult (it was), but as always I didn’t care. I pulled out my phone to call an Uber, and in a few minutes a blue Audi sedan pulled up to me at Plaza San Francisco, the driver was a young man in his 30s.

The half-hour ride was a 17 soles (4.8 USD), which was honestly way too cheap. It was the first time I felt sorry for my Uber driver. It probably cost him hundreds of times more to fix the damage that ride must have done to his car’s chassis. As we drove away from the city center, up windy roads onto the hills, and into more remote areas, the driver got more and more nervous, and it was evident from his driving. The paved road ended at some point, replaced by a bumpy dirt road winding up the hills. ATVs and dune buggies were rushing by from on top the hill, stirring up unholy amount of dusts, people riding were screaming in fun. I thought my driver must be screaming inside too, as our ride was accompanied by the arrhythmic thuds of the base of the cars hitting against the bumps on the road. Our heads were both involuntarily nodding from the shake, though not in union. The driver’s hands firmly gripped onto his steering wheel, eyes straight ahead, pushing forward at a formidable 15km/h like a sailor in a storm. I did not say a thing, but kept nodding.

The driver stopped at the foot of yet another hill. This time a even narrower and steep road up. He signalled that my destination was right on top (and that I should get off and walk there), and I could see it from the app on his phone. I on the other hand, being the living devil that I was, mentioned to him that it didn’t look like he could end the trip on the Uber app since he wasn’t close to the destination enough. 10 seconds of silence and then he started the engine again, this time onto that dangerously narrow and overgrown path up this last hill.

At long last, we were there. I briefly thanked him and got out, paying no tribute to the blobs of sweat on his head. His car seemed to have anchored there, and I realized this was more like a 8.5 soles (2.4 USD) one-way trip. Since there was no way in hell he could get a passenger from near here. I silently wished him a safe journey back. Oh, the misery of man.