During the 1990's the Sendero Luminoso (the ‘Shining Path’), a terrorist organisation responsible for almost as many atrocities in South America as the Peruvian government, were being led by one Abimeal Guzman, a man who’d shared more than his first name with one of the feared Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He was Peru’s most wanted man. At times the organisation he controlled practically ran the country outside of the cities.

Most travellers at that time beating a path from the ancient city of Cusco to the modern(ish) city of Lima avoided the terrorists by flying. But since my finances wouldn’t stretch to light aircraft I had no choice but to put myself in the hands of the clerk at a Cusco bus station.

‘You can go to Lima by the southern route, there are no Sendero there,’ she said, ‘and the whole journey will only take ten hours. Leave now and you’ll be in Lima by midnight.’

The dawn, sixteen hours later, was grey and snowy. My window was jammed open. I was freezing. The peasant next to me had been cuddled up to his pet goat all night. He moved away warily when I tried to share the animals body heat. We crawled upwards on the dirt road past herds of wide eyed llamas. At midday, having at last crested the central mountain range, we looked down into a wide, damp green valley.

‘What did I do to the bus clerk,’ I thought, ‘for her to have sent me to this place?’

What I had done was to be a very young backpacker travelling cheap, possibly the most infuriating species known to man, and somebody who deserved all that they got. And what I’d got was Ayacucho State.

In the local language Quechua Ayacucho meant ‘Corner of the Dead’. It also meant that I had arrived in the stronghold of the Sendero Luminoso. 

I’ll remember the view of this ‘dead corner’ forever. As the potholes worsened every man, woman, child and chicken was made to get off the bus. We trudged despondently in the mud behind the wheezing old machine, heads down, trying to ignore the wind and sleet that had begun to whip into our faces.

The masked gunmen appeared rapidly and hustled us into a tight group. We turned this way and that like cattle, more to make sense of the situation than to look for a means of escape. I had little time to notice what was going on, but it was clear from the fear present that this wasn’t just a passport check.

Women and kids were lined up against the bus. Men were stood in front on a ditch. I realised that this dank valley might be the last place I’d ever see. I thought of all the people I’d ever wronged and was sad. Then I thought of the bad terms on which I’d left my family two months earlier. Damn it. Why did I always say goodbye so casually? A gunman, actually, a gunwoman, begun to ask questions. She prodded her pistol into the chests of those who gave the 'wrong' answers. A peasant pointed at me and hissed ‘Pistaco’.

My knowledge of Peru was slight but I did know that in local myth a ‘Pistaco’ was a white man who carried a long machete with which he cut up Indians and then used their bodies to grease his machines. Now, blinding metaphor for capitalism that this may be, it did not make me feel more comfortable to be labelled as such in front of what I assumed to be well armed Communists.

The gunwoman asked me quick fire questions. I stuttered badly formed sentences in reply, hindered by my pathetic understanding of Spanish.

‘Where are you from, where are you going, why are you in Peru?’ ‘England, Lima, I’m a tourist,’ I somehow got out. She stepped backwards and five men, armed with machine guns, moved in. Was this it? I swore at God inwardly.

‘Of all the places to die, why this hopelessly ugly, cold valley?’

But there were no shots, just commands barked for us to get back onto the bus. I was confused. Why had we, I, been released? Had I given the ‘right’ answers? Had this been an army patrol, and not Sendero terrorists after all?

The gunwoman stood by the bus door and removed her balaclava as I boarded. She was probably only in her late twenties but the harsh hate-filled life that she was living had aged her well beyond her years. Saying that, she still looked sort of interesting and in other circumstances I would’ve definitely made a move, as long as she’d promised to wash the lice out of her hair. I managed a weak smile. She leaned closer, prodded my belly with what I took to be her pistol, and coolly murmured,

‘Lucky you’re not American.’

It hadn’t been the idea of dying but the question that the incident had raised that’d bothered me most. And that was,

‘If I died, would I would be proud of my life to date?’ Being forced to ask oneself this for the first time was not a pleasant thing, especially when the answer turned out to be a resounding ‘No.’