Abandonar toda esperanza, usted que entra aqui.

In the 14th century, Dante Alighieri wrote the epic poem The Divine Comedy, which illustrated the Christian conception of an afterlife as it existed at the time and which is now considered one of the great pieces of literature in the history of Europe. In it, Dante described how when Satan was cast down to Earth from Heaven, the impact of his body hitting the Earth was so great, that it created a giant crater reaching all the way to the center of the Earth. The crater was filled over, thus forming Hell, but the impact also caused the earth surrounding the crater to lift up, creating a mountain. Thus, "Mt. Purgatory" was formed as a place for those who had not sinned greatly enough to be sent straight to Hell. It was there that they would have to wait for eternity, attempting to scale the mountain to cleanse themselves of their sins and ascend to Heaven.

In other conceptions of Purgatory, it is a place of tormenting fire which cleanses the soul, a place merely of limbo-like eternal waiting, or an intermediate stage between life and death.

According to Dante, Mt. Purgatory was somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere of the Earth. Though the Roman Catholic Church no longer officially supports this conception of Purgatory as an actual physical place, I feel I must disagree. I have experienced it and it does involve mountains.

Purgatory, as it turns out, is a 14 hours bus ride from Nazca to Cuzco.

I know...I was surprised too.

We boarded the bus and things started off quite whimsically, with a game of Bingo on the bus. Interspersed with the numbers being called at random were trivia questions and various challenges that the passengers could compete in. To get a question correct gave the winner the right to choose which number was called next. Chris was the first to jump up when the challenge was to make three animal noises into the microphone and after successfully impersonating a pig, duck and a cow, he was allowed to pick three numbers. Now, since we were both playing, one would think that he would have compared our Bingo cards and selected numbers that we both needed, thus increasing the chances of one of us winning. Instead, he just picked numbers that he needed. Then, when he realized what he had done, he was so flustered that he stopped translating the new numbers being called over the speaker for me, which effectively screwed me out of any chance of winning Bingo since I had no idea what numbers were then being called.

After Bingo, it was announced that a movie would be beginning shortly. We were also asked not to use the bathrooms for anything other than urination. Considering the large dinner Chris and I had had shortly before boarding and the already delicate status of our digestive systems, this announcement was cause for concern, since we were only 1 hour in with 13 hours to go and no stops.

Then, the movie began. I generally expect movies in such circumstances to be like those on airplanes; highly edited action films or bland romantic comedies. The bus company Cruz del Sur, however, felt that the 1980 World War 2 epic The Red One, starring Lee Marvin, Mark Hammill and Robert Carradine was the optimal choice as everyone futilely attempted to fall asleep. Thus, for the next 3 hours, we couldn't help but watch such classic moments from American Cinema such as when Lee Marvin spanked a Nazi youth or when one of Mark Hammill´s testicles was blown off, in all its gory detail.

It was also around this time that we started to enter the mountains. There were no streetlights, which is probably for the the best since if we´d actually been able to see the "road" twisting through the mountains, we would have been scared out of our minds. However, we could certainly feel every single curve and switchback as we wound our way through the Andes towards Cuzco and both Chris and I slowly began to get nauseous. We tried to sleep, but Lee Marvin wouldn´t allow it. The film eventually did end, but even then the constant lurching of the bus and the moderately uncomfortable bus seats made sleep little more than a desperate wish.

The next morning, still with hours to go, another film was played. I firmly believe that the bus company people were screwing with us at that point because their selection for the morning movie was Lilo and Stitch...2. This was accompanied by a breakfast of olive paste on a roll and a cookie. After Lilo and Stitch 2 ended, one might wonder what the natural follow up to a straight to DVD children´s cartoon and a WW2 film from the 80´s would be. If you were to guess VH1´s Divas Live, a benefit concert starring Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin, Gloria Estefan and Shania Twain, you would be correct. You would also be out of your %$"&! mind.

There´s nothing quite like arriving in Cuzco, Peru, the capital of the Incan Empire, to the strains of "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" Were it not for the fact that we knew it would eventually end, we would have thought we were actually in Hell. However, because there was a definite and eventual end to the ordeal, we realized it was all just some contemporary manifestation of the cleansing fires or simply a modern means of travel up Mt. Purgatory.

And that´s how we got to Cuzco. To get back to Lima, we´ve decided to fly.