In the early Summer of 2025, I cursed as I made the wrong reservation for the Train going from Cusco to Alguas Calientes, which ment that I had to buy a new ticket, and with the 'Premier' tickets as the only option left, urgency took it over from my sense of frugality, and as we departed direction the Inca Valley, I cursed quite a while. 

After having calculated the damage, I found peace with the fact that the premium experience would amount to more or less the same price of a TGV INOUI ticket from Paris to Lyon, and settled in.

Later, as the train would find its way through the Andean Jungle, the views got more and more impressive, and the atmosphere on board actually started to prove to be a real premium experience, as atleast half of the train attendants would start playing instruments & perform. 

It would have been easy to dismiss the journey as something destined to harden into a familiar tourist ritual. Yet as the train descended in its measured zigzag, surging forward, then retreating, metal crying against rail at every switch, the noise grew denser, almost deliberate. The clatter and groan, the breathless pauses before each reversal, began to echo the rhythm of the performance itself, as though the mountain and the machine were quietly conspiring.

I couldn’t resist capturing it. First in photographs, and then by letting the memory of that sound settle into this drawing.

Funny enough, the Perurail trains are actually operated by Belmond, and I'd never thought I would be in something operated by that company, as it's ofter catering to a really high-earning demography.

It's hence the slow but surely pattern I'm seeing evolve in my life, as I've worked so much service jobs, and will work quite a lot more, to be able to travel, and in the end, be served myself.

The circle is round.