RANSVESTIA

The next day it was down to the little railway station for the trip on the narrow gauge railway to Manchu Picchu. The sides of the valley that Cusco lies in are too steep for regular railroading. Because of this the train gets out of the valley by a series of switchbacks, not like a road going up a mountain, but the train takes off with the engine in front of course, goes up a ways and stops, the switchman at the other end throws the switch and the train backs up onto another track for a ways when the process is repeated and the train pulls forward again onto a third piece of track, etc. This is repeated about eight times until the train has made it to the top of the cliff when it can then continue in a straight line across the alpine valley it comes out on. It takes about three hours for this trip, much of it alongside a roaring river and I do mean both of those words. It is no bubbling mountain stream but a good sized river that goes downhill at a considerable slant so that the rapids are a fearsome thing to see. I've ridden the Colorado and the Snake but I wouldn't get out in that water for any- thing.

There were a group of Soviet tourists on the trip. Surprised? So was I. We get the notion over here from the propaganda we read that Soviet citizens can't get out of the country. These people were workers, engineers, pilots, artists, teachers, etc. Most of them had been to England, Scandinavia, Italy and elsewhere. They weren't just a picked group, though they did all come from Volgagrad. I made myself acquainted with the interpreter and told them all about my visit to Russia in 1975 and what I saw and learned and she passed it all on to the rest a few sentences at a time. They were all very friendly and interested and insisted on giving me some postcards of their city and a couple of pins. It was very interesting. On the way back this same group held a songfest in our car singing in Russian, of course, but some of the songs were American to begin with like "John Brown's Body"—where you leave out one phrase each time around. They did the same in Russian so everybody was entertained.

We finally arrived at the rail station for Manchu-Picchu and boarded buses for the climb up the side of the mountain. It was just one switch back after another because the mountains in this area are very steep. We arrived at the top in a misty drizzle and had to do our exploring of the Incan ruins in raincoats. The clouds obscured some of the surrounding peaks so we couldn't see the place in all its glory but we saw enough. It is all built of stone very carefully dressed stone by stone to fit closely since the Incas didn't use any mortar. And its

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