de·ba·cle – A sudden and ignominious failure; a fiasco.

So come Monday we got back to thinking about the camera! We had been so busy with the wedding and all of the shoots that we had had very little time to chase up the camera or to find out what was going on.

Basically, we had paid Fed-Ex £100 to deliver our camera from England in 3 days. By now it had been 16 days since we had ordered our camera, and 2 weeks since our friend had posted it for us! We contacted Fed-ex several times and they refused to help us.
With Luis’s help we had found out that the problem had been that the name of the street we had delivered the camera to was the name of a person (ie. Alfred Gelder Street)…so Fed-ex thought that we were Peruvian and importing from the UK and wanted us to pay import tax.
We explained the problem and they shrugged it off as a problem that was not theirs! Long story short they handed it over to customs who would not let it out unless we went back to Lima (the customs office, 1500 km away) to prove we were not Peruvian. Obviously this was not an option, Peggy was still not 100% and a 3000 km round trip would cost us upwards of $750 in fuel alone!

Luis kindly offered to help where he could but that meant we had to give him power of attorney which meant going to lawyers in Cusco and getting the relevant paperwork, getting copies of our ID etc, etc and posting it all on a bus to Luis in Lima. That took 3 days to get the papers together and on a bus. Inbetween all of this going on we caught up on the blog, watched a movie or two and drank a few bottles of wine to calm our anger at the terrible service from Fed-ex.

Once the papers were on the bus we decided to take the bull by the horns and get Peggy fixed. The streets in Cusco are not a place for a vehicle that does not like to go uphill. Alex started on odd jobs inside Peggy like the water pump and we went to the market to buy her some new tie backs for the curtains. We hoped that prettying her up would make her more likely to fix when we took her to yet another mechanic! We bought Alpaca rope for tie backs, got a new key cut (as the original one looks ready to snap), watched a baby playing with a dead mouse (it looked like she had hugged it a little too hard) while her mother tried to sell its siblings and we almost bought a baby rabbit just to get it away from the baby!

By the end of day 1 Peggy had new tie backs attached, a key that didn’t work and sensibly no additional animals!
The next day we took her to the mechanics and explained to him the problem.
We asked him to replace the fuel pump as we had come to the conclusion that that MUST be the problem. It was the root of all of the trouble we had been having and was the only thing left to replace! He nodded and disappeared under the van. He reappeared and asked for some money to go for parts and we obliged. He came back went back under the van and and hour later reappeared and said he was finished. Alex went to have a look and instead of replacing the fuel pump the guy had fixed a suspension bar! Alex was furious and asked him why he hadn’t looked at the fuel pump like we had asked and he responded with ‘I don’t do fuel pumps’!

We left in a cloud of dust with Alex loosing his mind and no better off other than for a squeaky suspension bar that had clearly been disengaged due to the awful racket it made!
We had wasted half a day with this idiot and now had to find yet another mechanic. We drove for an hour before we found someone and asked him to look at the fuel pump and to replace it.
Of course he spent hours looking at all of the things we had already replaced as we spent hours telling him it MUST be the fuel pump.
Finally he gave in and took the ‘new’ pump off and confirmed that it was broken. There was an audiable sigh of relief from Alex and they went in a taxi to buy a new pump.

The mechanic soon had the new pump fitted and waved us on our way. We set off  dubiously (surely it can’t be THAT easy) and within minutes the pump burst and fuel started to leak all over the road. Alex went in a taxi back to the garage and retuned with the mechanic who took several hours to refit our old pump. It was midnight by time we got away, Peggy still spluttering and hating every minute of being run.
The mechanic told us to return at 8am the next day and then we would try again.

8am the next day came and we were there…and the garage was closed. We had checked with him as it was Sunday that he would be there and he insisted he would be. We waited 4 hours for him and he finally showed up. He took Peggy in and explained we couldn’t get a part until the following day. We couldn’t drive Peggy anywhere as she was leaking (very expensive) fuel every time she was running so we booked into a hotel. It was a lovely little room with a kitchenette and in a part of Cusco we had not been able to get to because Peggy was too big. We settled in for the night and at 10pm a brass band started to play at 100 decibels in the nearby square. It continued until 4am and Alex was just about to go and call the police when it came to an abrupt stop.

Back to the mechanics the next day after 4 hours sleep in a hotel we had paid for (who wouldn’t reimburse anything) we were on a short fuse.
Alex went in a taxi for a new pump with the mechanic, they fitted it again and again it failed. The mechanic came back to recover us and actually set fire to the engine (which is INSIDE Peggy rather than under the bonnet)! After an emergency evacuation and thinking our home was about to be lost to the flames we had absolutely had enough. Another day wasted and another pump useless.

We went back to the shop alone this time to buy yet another pump. We explained to the man (you must bear in mind that this is all with basic Spanish) that he was selling us faulty pumps. We told him we needed another one and he said I will call and order you one for your van. He had basically been too lazy to order what we had asked for the first day we had asked for it and had sold Alex a pump for a tiko (a small car with a 0.6 litre engine and Peggy’s engine is 10 times stronger at 6 litres!)…no wonder the things were blowing apart within seconds.
I told the man he would exchange the correct pump for the ones he had sold us and he refused point blank. We had ourselves yet another nightmare. we argued until we were blue in the face and in the end he discounted the new pump for us by $20. We had paid $100 for the wrong pump and had to pay another $80 for the right one AND wait 2 days for it to arrive! We agreed to pay and Alex went to the tourist police and asked if the man was in the wrong. We also had to stay in a hotel as Peggy couldn’t be driven so the cost was spiralling out of control.

We were loosing our minds being stuck waiting for the camera and for Peggy to be fixed and we were struggling so hard to remain positive. To top it all off I got food poisoning and was sick for two days in the midst of all of this AND in the van! When people ask us how we are still in love when we live in such close quarters its at times like these that I wonder how we do it. Being in a van with someone being violently ill is not something many would cope with and Alex just looked after me, held my hair and stroked me to sleep.

Once I was better we carried on with the camera rigmarole, poor Luis was running back and forth to offices for us and completing paperwork left right and centre and suddenly we were stuck with no peggy, no money and no hope!