Just the day before I was supposed to pick my car up at the Avis Rent a Car centre in Miraflores — a suburb of Lima — the system error showed my booking as cancelled.
Long story short: instead of an automatic and reasonably powerful Toyota RAV4, I was now behind the wheel of a three- or four-year-old 1.6-litre Nissan Versa for my 22-day road trip around Peru. The girls at the Budget Rent a Car counter, two blocks from Avis, where I had run in desperation so as to avoid my meticulously-planned road trip fading away into oblivion like the Inca culture, had gently steered me towards the manual version of the car. The route I was planning to drive went to altitudes above 10,000 feet at times. The basic automatic gearbox and the clutch found on auto versions in the class of the car I could afford at the last minute, might baulk and burn respectively.
Hence, after nearly five years of road adventures around the globe, where I have been pampered by intuitive modern cars (read: auto lights, auto wipers, adaptive cruise control, in-built apps, Bluetooth sync, advanced rapid change auto gearboxes and a plethora of creature comforts), here I was standing in a dusty parking lot in Lima, looking at a car that looked like a flashback to the 20th century.
The next day…
I started my journey down the Carrera Panamericana Sur/Route 1S and began to realise the idiosyncrasies of this Nissan Versa. The steering wheel was a little misaligned, and if I wanted to keep the car in a straight line, the steering wheel needed to be in a 2 o’clock position, instead of dead centre at 12. But my main concern was the clutch, and thankfully, that showed no sign of fade or slippage. By law, Peru requires that all cars run with headlights on, but at the first gas station I topped up in, when I tried to crank the engine to life with the lights still on, the battery sort of groaned in protest. So I switched off the headlights, started the car, and forgot to switch them on again.
Ten clicks later, the Peruvian Highway Patrol pulled me over. They didn’t speak English and I only spoke Swedish Spanish, as in Abba’s ‘Hasta Manana’, but I managed to convey my road trip plan by pointing to my map. They were very impressed that I was doing this all alone and hence one of them reached into the car, switched on my lights, waggled an index finger at me and waved me along. The Carrera Panamericana all the way from Lima to Nazca is an easy-peasy drive. Sparsely trafficked and with a speed limit of 90kph (forgiveable to 110), here I could stick the Nissan into its rudimentary cruise control mode, surf FM channels and enjoy the bossa nova.
The way ahead
It was on the roads beyond that — approximately 2,200km — that took me on a circuit, from Nazca to Arequipa to Puno to Cusco to Abancay and back to Nazca, that the fun started at the wheel. From Nazca, the road hit the coastal mountains and then snaked inland towards the creased and crumpled topography of Southern Peru. Since my car was a manual, cruise control couldn’t change gears for me, so once the rpm slipped below the power band, the torque would wither away and die. What I thought would be a frustration actually turned out to be quite invigorating. On those twisty mountain roads skirting the deep blue Southern Pacific, my main ‘competition’ were slow trucks snaking their way up inclines and braking their way down declines. With modern cars, all I would have needed to do was mash the accelerator and the car would find the right gear and the sweet spot and overtake with a burst of power.
This car needed a sort of bureaucratic procedure. If I was in a high gear and low revs, first I needed to shift down to get the revs up and the engine into the power band. The gearbox wasn’t exactly precise, so sometimes the fifth would slide into the 4th instead of the 2nd as I had intended. Now, with some grunt being generated in the crankcase, I would ease out and pull alongside the truck that, thanks to my slow speed and its long length, felt more train than truck. The anaconda of fear would start to slide in my stomach, when halfway past the truck, another truck — or worse still, a fast-moving car — would come around the corner, blazing its lights in righteous indignation to find my little Nissan blocking its way.
Then, my move of desperation would be to kill the air conditioning that would win me a little more power so that I could overtake and get back into my lane.
My learning process for this was the drive to Arequipa. Ahead of me lay mountainous 8-hour drives to Cusco and then over the mighty Andes to Abancay and back to Nazca.
I found…
The more I tackled these roads with this car, never mind its whimsical wheezing and intermittent baulking, the more I started to realise that I was actually starting to enjoy using my dormant driving skills. My ears could tell from the sound of the engine when it was making most power and that helped me plan my overtaking moves with greater efficiency. It took me back to the time of Fiats and carburettors from my teens, when the joy was just in using skill and precise gear changing to squeeze out the maximum speed from a car.
Added to that, every road that I drove in Peru was baby-bottom smooth, well marked and ergonomically designed. I think I must have come across just about 5km of bad stretches in 3000km. The views were just breathtaking, because in June, with no rain and clear, blue skies, it is a great time to be on the road in Peru.
By the time I did the drive from Cusco to Abancay and Nazca, over the mighty Andes, this little car and I were on song. Its quirks and queers were second-nature to me now. On cheeky overtaking moves, my feet played the pedals like the fingers of a piano virtuoso skimming the ivories of a Steinway & Sons, keeping the engine in that rev range so that all the horses in the crankcase were at full gallop.
