We Walk the Inca Trail, So We Will Meet Again

It was cloudy and rainy on my journey by city bus from Bath to Bristol. I was headed that day to Worcester where I’d be settling in for four days and, as I had been in Bath the previous four, and I needed to get myself to a more major port of call in order to begin heading north. Unlike the train or long distance buses (coaches as they’re known here), it’s an altogether different cast of characters that usually ride the double-decker city buses that run from town to town. There is a lot less heavy luggage and most people are on their way either to or from their workplace. There are gentle nods hello and motions to borrow sections of newspaper or polite invitations to sit in a free space, but as the journeys tend to be quite short the conversations, likewise, are brief and often about the weather. In actuality, most people stare into their cellphones and the sad truth is there isn’t much time to learn too much about anyone on a single ride on a local bus.

I was plotting out the next few hours I’d need to make use of in Bristol, and how I might best profit from those hours whilst not risking missing my train to Worcester, when suddenly the sonorous beauty of an unknown exotic instrument strummed delicately against my eardrums. I looked behind me to locate the origin of that beautiful sound and found an uncommon looking character for those parts smiling apologetically in my direction.

“It’s beautiful,” I said looking quizzically at his instrument.

His skin had been born into too much sun for him to be confused for any Englishman, but his accent, without even a hint of the Somerset drawl that I had become accustomed to, betrayed his foreign nature completely. “Thanks man!” he said smiling wide and offering me a thumbs up. 

Too small to be a guitar and just a bit too big to be an ukulele the instrument in question had five courses, ten strings. This particular instrument was well worn with much of the varnish of the wood scratched and stripped away. Still, it maintained a soaring and majestic sound. “What is it?” I asked. 

“Is a charango, man.”

“A charako?”

“Chrango, man!”

“Charango?”

“Yeah, man!”

“Where’s it from?”

“This one is from Peru. But the instrument is common all over.”

“South America, you mean?”

“Yeah, man, the Andes.”

“Is that where you’re from?”

“Yeah, man!”

Origins confirmed. Having never been to Peru I am in no position to make broad generalizations about the locals, but the hue of his skin was so ruddy that I immediately categorized him in my mind as indigenous as he bore almost no resemblance to the Latinos from South America, Mexico, and Central America that I had met over the years either at home or on my travels.

“Where are you going today, man?” he asked me.

“Well right now I’m headed to Bristol,” I explained, “but I need to get to Worcester. What about you?”

“Yeah man, cool. I’m gonna go to Bristol.”

“What are you going to do there?”

“There’s this bar that am I going to play at and hopefully I’ll get to see my son, but I don’t know.”

There was a lot to unpack just from this one sentence. When living a nomadic life, you’re never really anywhere long enough to forge strong friendships, so when you meet someone, who’s perhaps on their way to the dentist, or heading to play music in a bar and perchance to see their son, it’s normal to try to find a piece of yourself in them so that you can make as firm and strong a connection as quickly as possible – if the world remains strange, then it becomes lonely pretty quickly.

“Yeah, he’s all grown up now and finishing university,” he continued, ‘but we’ll see.”

“So you’re not from Bath, then?”

“No, no. I’m from Peru, but I come back here because I have a wife from before when I lived here and my son is going to university here. I was just playing in a bar there, now I’m going to play in a bar here”.

“Is that what you do, travel around and play in bars?”

“Yeah, kind of, man.”

He introduced himself as Eduardo and he had recently turned fifty which was reassuring to see that ten years on nothing would necessarily need to change. He did confess his Quechua heritage to me, but the bus ride wasn’t long enough for me to learn all about his past life. He, like myself, had been on the road for a while playing his brand of music on his guitar and his charango (two instruments at once thanks to a loop pedal). From England he was set to be on his way to Germany and eventually to India where he said he had played many times before which I found fascinating.

“Is there an audience for that kind of South American, Andean music in India?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s not bad,” he said. “There’s a lot of people, so they have, you know, everything. I know some musicians down there and they play their instruments and I play mine and we just make music, you know man.”

I’ve often wondered in my life, perhaps once upon a time on a beach in Florida maybe, there might have been someone visiting at the same time as I and then years later without us even knowing it we might have ended up on the same train travelling to Whoknowswhere from Whoknowswherefrom. Perhaps if I had had enough time I could have dug a little deeper into Eduardo’s story and discovered that we were both in Zacatecas in 2005 and he was playing his charango in that dusty cantina with the saloon doors where I drank mezcal for the first time. Who knows how many people we’ve all passed more than once in different places and just never had the presence of mind to say, “Oh hey, it’s you again!”? Most people that pass us in the street are just a solitary small part of the mass of strangers that occupy a small corner of the place we call planet Earth and most of them we never pay much mind. Had Eduardo not suddenly strummed his charango that day he may have just blended in with the all the other strange faces on the bus that I assumed I was only seeing for the first time.

With the Bristol train station at Temple Meads in view I needed to disembark to check timetables and ask about fares to Worcester so Eduardo and I shook hands and bade each other farewell. “Hey man!” he called out to me as I was descending from the bus. “We walk the Inca trail, so we will meet again!” He motioned a thumbs up to me accompanied with another wide smile.

The drizzle in England, which never seems to stop, had me hopping quickly off the streets and into the station. From there, with the sun desperately attempting to poke holes through the cloud cover, I dragged my luggage through town over bridges, through market streets and narrow alleyways, up through Castle Park to the coach station at the north end of town. This was where I learned that a train fare can actually cost less money than a coach. Right around the corner from the coach station, right where Whitson street meets Lower Maudlin street and right in front of St. James’ Priory, is a pub called The White Hart. After deciding that the train would be my best option I took a left turn to head into town checking the map on my phone to make sure I was going the right way when suddenly I hear, “Hey Ian!”

It was Eduardo walking out of The White Hart. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Oh, this pub they say that I can’t play there today so I have to find a new place to go.”

He trotted up the lane to the coach station still smiling before turning back to me one last time and saying, “Ian, I told you, we walk the Inca trail, so we will meet again, haha!” 

Whatever happened to Eduardo after that I can’t say. I went to Worcester later that afternoon after a nice lunch overlooking the Avon and he got on a bus to somewhere, no doubt. I wonder if he found a place to play his charango. I wonder if he got to meet up with his son. I wonder if we really will meet again.