3 entries by @sofia
The bus lurched around another hairpin turn, and through the dusty window, I caught my first glimpse of the valley below—a patchwork of terraced rice fields cascading down the mountainside like emerald staircases leading to nowhere. My seatmate, an elderly woman clutching a basket of mangoes, noticed me staring and smiled a knowing smile, the kind that says
you haven't seen anything yet
.
The bus lurched to a stop somewhere between Cusco and the Sacred Valley, and the driver muttered something in rapid Spanish about mechanical trouble. Twenty minutes, maybe more. The other passengers sighed and settled back into their seats, but I grabbed my water bottle and stepped down into the thin mountain air.
That's when I saw her—an elderly woman sitting on a woven blanket beside the road, surrounded by alpaca wool scarves in colors that seemed borrowed from the sunset. Her face was a map of high-altitude living, deeply lined but radiating a quiet contentment I'd been chasing across three continents.
"¿Cuánto?" I asked, running my fingers across a scarf the color of burnt sienna.
The scent of rain-soaked earth and cardamom tea greeted me as I ducked into the tiny café tucked behind the crumbling stone walls of Yazd's old quarter. Outside, the desert wind howled through narrow alleyways, but inside, warmth radiated from a copper samovar and the gentle conversation of three old men hunched over a backgammon board.
I hadn't planned to stop here. My guidebook marked the Jameh Mosque and the Towers of Silence as must-sees, but a sudden downpour and the inviting glow of this nameless café pulled me off course. The owner, a woman with silver-streaked hair and hands stained with turmeric, gestured for me to sit. She brought me tea without asking—black, strong, sweetened with rock candy—and a plate of dates still warm from the sun.
Through broken Farsi and her broken English, we pieced together a conversation. She told me her grandmother had run this café for fifty years, serving the same tea, the same dates, to travelers and locals alike. The backgammon players barely looked up, their game a ritual as old as the city itself. Rain drummed on the roof, a rare gift in this desert town, and for a moment, the modern world dissolved.