Buzzards and Bananas

Join George and Mary Ayers in the late seventies when South America was a little rougher and a little wilder, for an incredible journey through Peru, the Amazon, Chile, and Bolivia. Fusing together details scoured from their personal journals, photos, and letters home, Buzzards and Bananas captures the essence of everything from the mundane and sometimes humorous moments of day-to-day travel to the emotional strains on relationships; from the excitement of a midnight Federales raid on their Amazon riverboat to the desperation and horrors of military rule. Along the way they spend time with remarkable people: an Argentine couple in love fleeing for their lives; a young man in Santiago whispering about the cruelty of government; a desperate American imprisoned in Bolivia and anthropologist Maria Reiche, the guardian of Peru’s Nazca desert mystery. Buzzards and Bananas is more than a simple travelogue. George narrates his journey with enduring enthusiasm and heartfelt honesty bringing alive for us the reality of the times and places through which he travelled in a way seldom seen by those who have visited these South American countries.