A hair’s breadth away from disaster
Friday morning around 9 a.m.: Tobias Lächele, head of our workshops, and I drive the road to Cusco. We still have a lot to do for the festival. After 90 minutes we find ourselves on a pass road that will take us from 2000 m to 3600 m. The abyss lurks to the left and the rock face rises up to the right. We are almost at the top when suddenly there are lots of stones on the road. Strange, it didn’t rain at all during the night and landslides are extremely rare in the dry season. We feel our way forward. Suddenly Tobias shouts: “Stones, stones!” He ducks forward and presses his hands into the back of his neck. I press my right foot down hard on the gas. The car shoots forward. At this moment, we hear a mighty thud at the back. A few hundred meters further on, we stop and get out. A stone caught us after all and smashed the rear right tail light. A good ten minutes later we get a call. An eyewitness knows exactly what happened. Some unscrupulous workers have removed stones and chippings for sale above the road. The rock avalanche came loose. They did this without securing the highway further down. The South American usually says: “Nothing will happen!” Unfortunately, this statement is wrong. In relation to the number of traffic and people, there are around 10 times more tragedies on the roads in Peru than in Europe. /KDJ
