When winter descends on Lima, blanketing the city in fog, we take advantage of the natural break that school holidays afford teachers to escape to sunnier parts of Peru.

This year’s break coincided with a visit from my in-laws, which provided the excuse I’d been looking for to treat us to a trip on the Andean Explorer; a luxury Peruvian train that runs along the 351km route between the historic city of Cusco and Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, and links two of the country’s top tourist destinations.
Alison Roberts (left) on the Andean Explorer from Cusco to Puno, who was entertained by the conducting staff (below). Colourful peasant women on arrival at Lake Titicaca (above)

Since we are the first passengers to arrive at the poster blue and canary yellow train I set about exploring our surroundings for the 10-hour journey ahead.

The dining carriage is decorated with fudge-coloured smoking chairs, olive curtains, cream table cloths, brass table lamps, and a flowery wallpapered ceiling studded with tulip-shaped lights.

I pop my head round the toilet door and note, besides the space, vanity mirror and marble-topped sink, that there is a window. I don’t need to worry about missing any scenery on this journey.
Life in Peru: Visit the ’superstar of supermarkets’
Expat in Spain: Dreams that crumbled in the sun
advertisement

I half expect to run into Hercule Poirot, but instead the other passengers include a group of American women, with pashminas and pearls celebrating a year of 60th birthdays, some camera-happy Japanese tourists, two Rastas and an elderly English gentleman and his immaculate lady friend. Reaching across the table he gives her hand a squeeze. “Isn’t this wonderful,” she purrs.

The train sets off at 8am sharp. I am impressed. It is a short but sluggish crawl out of Cusco and then, as if eager to show us the beauty beyond, the train rattles along, passing fields of freshly turned soil, regimented rows of maize and artichokes, red-roofed adobe cottages and dry stone walls.

The track is sandwiched between steep forested valley slopes and beneath a powder-blue sky. I have dressed for low temperatures at high altitude but begin to peel off my layers as the sun bakes me through the window.

“Good morning. My name is Carolina. Can I take your order for lunch?” one of the train attendants chirps as she slides a gold and navy menu across the table.

Our eyes digest the choices: spicy pumpkin soup or Andean sushi with quinoa, followed by beef in fig sauce, oriental chicken, or, unusually for Peru, a vegetarian option.

There is champagne, but since it costs more than the £70 one-way train ticket we settle for an Argentine Malbec.

Waiters carrying a silver tray bring a “Welcome Pisco Sour” (a brandy-based cocktail) to our table and a map so we can follow the route.

We pinpoint our location based on which side of the train the road and river are running. Then the river begins to meander and, as if this is a cue to the entertainment manager, those needing a change of scene and pace are invited to a fashion show in the bar.

Intrigued, I wander along to find Carolina, transformed into a pouting model, working her Latin hips on the carriage catwalk.

Strutting in time to the beat of Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics, she happily poses for photos, her hand resting on the back of a chair.

The waiter, Santos, however, is less keen on this part of his job description. More like a wooden toy soldier, he models a hideous collection of grandpa cardigans.

Carolina on the other hand wears a colourful collection of baby alpaca hats and gloves, decorated, I notice, with pinned luminous price tags.

The Japanese travellers take photos with the ferocity of the paparazzi (maybe they plan to rip off the knitting designs to sell on the streets of Tokyo).

Later, back in his crisp white shirt, navy bow-tie and apron, a more relaxed Santos brings round a basket of woollen goodies and we are encouraged to touch before buying.

At the level crossings the kids eagerly wave up at us, but their mothers are expressionless. Perhaps they are calculating how many years it would take for them to afford a ticket to travel to Puno this way.

The train starts its climb. The river has shrunk to a trickle. We catch our first glimpses of snow on the pyramidal peaks and grazing herds of alpacas and vicunas.

Santos discreetly lays our table with white china, silverware, linen napkins and polished wine glasses, but before lunch we stretch our legs at La Raya station (the highest point of the journey at 4,319 metres).

The pashmina-and-pearl set are swept away by hardy Andean women to stalls piled high with woollen souvenirs.

The women are dressed in uniform Nora Batty stockings and felt Aunt Lucy hats. Two thick black plaits trail down their backs onto which a baby is bound.

After a short stop the train pulls off while the women hold jumpers up at the windows, hopeful for a last-minute sale.

And so we begin the juddering journey down hill to Lake Titicaca. Santos teases the cork out of our bottle of wine and, despite going through a tunnel while filling my glass, not a drop is spilt.

The waiters line up in the aisle and, when given the nod, like robots place the plates they are holding at the appropriate table setting, one to the right, one to the left.

The main course is garnished with sweet potato shavings and red pepper twirls and wouldn’t look out of place in one of Lima’s fine restaurants.

The expanse of burnt yellow, spiky, tuffs of altiplano (high plain) is interrupted with half-built settlements made up of corrugated roofs, cracked concrete splashed with mint choc chip and Peach Melba paints. It is clear which department is the poorer neighbour.

Those hoping for a siesta after lunch, nicely relaxed by the pastel tones and soft sculptured scenery, have no chance since next up is happy hour and dancing, announced by the ear-piecing cat call of the multi-talented Carolina, who is now twirling down the carriage in a full skirt of petticoats, enthusiastically pursued by a band of pan pipers and drummers.

Some of the passengers are up dancing even before their happy-hour order has arrived (this is their birthday party). The music gets faster and faster and, exhausted, I go in search of a drink.

Teatime coincides with the train’s arrival in the not so attractive town of Juliaca, which, nevertheless, is fascinating since we chug through a scrap yard of written-off combis (mini vans), a market selling underwear displayed on coat hangers, stacks of rubber tyres, wind mirrors and transistor radios lined up like dominoes, an open-air pool hall (the players are warmly dressed in 1980s-style furry hooded parker coats), and a line of barber shops.

All too soon, however, we are skirting the lake, beneath a darkening sky and sun-gilded clouds and gliding towards the twinkling lights of Puno.

“That was extraordinary,” the immaculate English lady mouths to her gentleman friend and he squeezes her hand. I have to agree. Costing less than a standard single rail ticket from Bristol to London I’ve had an Orient-Express experience, albeit South American-style.

I’ve never been entirely clear about the point of books like these, and never less so now that I’ve read Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s quasi-autobiography “Know Your Power.”

Subtitled “A Message to America’s Daughters,” the 21-year congressional veteran says she means to do two things by detailing her life story:

Pay homage to the women who smoothed her path to become the first female Speaker of the House and second in line to the president. And offer insight, advice and inspiration for women trying to find and use their own power. (Unfortunately, what she mostly did was constantly remind me of a tepidly received Dennis Quaid/Jessica Lange movie from 1988, but more on that later.)

However well-meant, though, what has to be said here is that “Know Your Power” is mostly a chronicle (and not a particularly intellectually demanding one) of how Pelosi found her power — and not much else. And while this perhaps was predictable, it was still disappointing.

But more than that, it was a bit scary. Scary the way it was last January, when Sen. Hillary Clinton tried to explain how personal the election was for her and suddenly found her eyes teary and her voice quavery; she was suddenly, achingly and undeniably real. And then it was gone. Even though her poll numbers skyrocketed over that, that Hillary never came back. Her people didn’t get it.

Scary that way.

Because Americans know “real,” and they know truth when they hear it, see it and read it. In fact, they’re dying for it — some of them literally in Iraq and millions metaphorically in their yearning for a president who doesn’t set off every hard-working citizen’s b. s. meter the minute he opens his mouth.

Yet time after time, politicians and their staffs, handlers and data insist upon giving us their own version of “real” — thin, sanitized, crowded with banalities and platitudes — and think we either won’t notice or won’t care.

Speaking the truth

Pelosi devotes literally half her book to her charming coming of age in Baltimore’s Little Italy, replete with tales of family, Catholic duty, service and the de rigeur John F. Kennedy meeting. The rest is an occasionally feisty but generally trite accounting of how she got elected and what it all means.

Raw realities? Shrewd advice on how to find, keep and wield power? Inside truths? Good luck.

Why is this? Why is it that those who cloak themselves in the pashmina of “speaking truth to power” have such a hard time simply getting the “speaking truth” part down?

In Olympic-speak, that’s called nailing the compulsories. And if pols with power like Pelosi’s can’t (or won’t) nail to a few hundred pages some raw realities and blunt advice, then who and what are these books for?

Does she truly not understand that inside the Beltway, D. C. insiders will roll their eyes over this, if they read it at all?

Or that outside the Beltway, readers likely will give it a few chapters before erupting: Who gives a &@#%$, lady? I’m about to lose my house, my wife’s depressed, my kid’s sick, I have no health insurance and my nephew just came back from Iraq missing a leg and most of his mind. You got power? Fix these! Heck, fix one! I’m OK with that! DO something!

I suspect Nancy Pelosi knows her power perfectly well — and not the type of power she spends precisely half the book describing as having been achieved despite blushing protestations and Who-Me? astonishment. We’re talking the steely kind that comes from being a millionaire many times over, a 21-year member of Congress, the first female Speaker of the House and the highest-ranking elected woman in American history.

The kind that comes from being, in short, a woman of substance, contradiction, complexity and craftiness, which is the kind of person anyone would want to read about. And yet here, she has chosen to not be that person.

I kept thinking about that scene as I paged faster and faster through Pelosi’s book.

Words such as “bipartisan,” “organize,” “constituents” and “coalition” kept popping out, and no Krispy Kreme glaze ever covered a doughnut more heavily than those words glazed my eyes. Stories about races, legislation, trips and tradition rolled on and on.

They must have mattered to her.

But they didn’t to me. These weren’t the stories I wanted to read about, stories we should know, stories only Pelosi could tell.

Which brings me back to that Dennis Quaid/Jessica Lange movie, “Everybody’s All-American,” which despite a Frank DeFord-based script and Taylor Hackford directing, was called corny, dopey, boring and worse, but which I found incredibly engrossing and heartbreaking.

Toward the end, some 25 years after Gavin Grey has faded from stardom as a Louisiana football star, he sits on his porch and plays for a guest a taped memoir of each play of each game he ever played. Grey is lost in each detail; the others are lost in boredom. It’s an excruciating moment, until his beauty-queen college sweetheart and longtime wife, Lange, softly urges with exquisite compassion, “Turn it off, Gavin. Turn it off.”

It matters deeply to him; not to anyone else.

Missing information

From Pelosi, I would’ve liked to have learned:

• Just how she’s managed to stay married for 45 years. It’s been written that her schedule gives them about a week per month together, which, if true, is definitely something women and their daughters should know. What’s more empowering than saying bluntly: “Look, frankly, once the kids are grown, take at least half the month to yourself, more if you can. You’ll find out who you are, and boy will you get along if you see each other only a week at a time”?

• The grittier details of having had five kids in six years, the mere thought of which triggers a cluster headache behind my right eye. The sheer brutality, organization and endurance that was required had to have prepped her for the snake pit of D. C. better than anything. But the closest hint we get is a chirpy, “Some days I didn’t even have time to wash my face,” which strikes me as a tad dainty when most mothers I know will cop to consecutive days without showering at some point along their parenting journey.

• More about the blasphemy of America’s health insurance system from Pelosi — more anger, more ideas, more everything — instead of merely this: “Think of it — 40 days in Iraq could pay for 10 million children getting health care in America. And the president says we can’t afford it.”

• But above all, I am dying to know (and, to stay on-message, I think modern women and their daughters would be well-served by knowing) exactly what went on at the pivotal moment of Pelosi’s political life when she was elected speaker, which, bizarrely, gets a mere paragraph at the end of Chapter Nine: “I immediately went into action and called over 150 Democratic members to personally ask them for their vote, and in 24 hours I had the votes I needed. And I was ready to be their leader.”

Pelosi’s book could have included all these things, and more.

But it didn’t. It may be because it didn’t have to — which is why this seems less a primer on how to know your own power and more a flaunting of Pelosi’s own.

For with everything she could have clocked us with, right across the psyche, she inexplicably churned out what seems little more than a political resume leavened by name-dropping, homespun froth and policy banalities — and then she had the front to market it as an homage/empowerment guide for women and daughters everywhere.

Or, as the news release describes it: “It is a keepsake to turn to again and again, when you need to be reminded that anything is possible when you know your power.”

And when you squander it.

Today brings the joyous news that ovary-shaking Idol demigod Clay Aiken has become a father to a healthy baby boy through the miracle of cutting edge fertilization techniques (the specs of how it was all accomplished are available here, if you care). In honour of this most improbable celebrity parenthood, we thought we’d compare and contrast Clay’s siring achievement to that of another unlikely new dad, Matthew McConaughey:

1. Spawn
Clay
Sex: Male
Name: Parker Foster Aiken
Weight: 6 lbs., 2 oz.
Birth Defects: Highlights

Matthew
Sex: Male
Name: Levi Alves McConaughey
Weight: 7 lbs., 4 oz.
Birth Defects: One flip-flop

2. Privacy
Clay
Shield your newborn for as long as possible from the public eye, then premiere him on The View at age four-days-old.

Matthew
Flashbulb innoculation: Subject early and often to as many red-carpet events as possible. Try not to forget car seat cradle on a counter of marked-down “Paris For President” T-shirts at Kitson.

3. Bonding
Clay
Father-son spa days…Front row seats to the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular…Blind cheesecake taste-testings.

Matthew
Mutual wingman duties while combing Maui for honeys…bong shopping…post-weightlifting body-scrutinizing sessions.

4. Bedtime Rituals
Clay
Laser tooth whitening…Re-telling of the story of Goldilocks and the Big Fat Ruben Studdard…Christmas carols regardless of season…reassurances that there are no razor-toothed Claymates lurking under the bed.

Matthew
1000 crunches…bongo-accompanied African tribal lullaby…Reminder to “stay strong, little man” before administration of tender kiss on forehead.