Andes

Ica, in southern Peru, is known as a city of zero unemployment. Work is so plentiful that men with megaphones ply the city's neighborhoods offering jobs. Thousands of mostly indigenous Peruvians from the central Andes have flooded the coastal community, attracted by radio ads and word of mouth, successfully joining the ranks of the employed. Deep-green asparagus fields among gray sand dunes ring the city, the key to its success. Ica sits at the heart of Peru's gigantic agro-industrial business, one of the main motors driving Latin America's fastest-growing economy.

LAOS Slide show Pierre Odier will discuss the remote ethnic villages of northwestern Laos and the Taialue, Kamu Lue, Akah, Hmong and Black Tai peoples. When, where : 7:30 p.m. Monday at Distant Lands, 20 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena. Admission, info: Free. RSVP to (626) 449-3220. CLIMBING Presentation Isabel Suppe will discuss her book "Starry Night," which tells the tale of her survival in the Bolivian Andes after falling 1,100 feet off an ice face.

The plan was simple: Drive up and walk down. It made sense, after all, to use gravity to our advantage, especially because we were traveling in the oxygen-poor air three miles above sea level. But after 4 1/2 hours bouncing over kidney-bruising roads, shoehorned in the back seat of a Jeep with three others, our legs intertwined like spaghetti, I wondered if we had made a mistake. I braced myself with one hand on the seat and one on the roof, trying, with each jackhammer-like jolt, not to land in my companions' laps.

Ica, in southern Peru, is known as a city of zero unemployment. Work is so plentiful that men with megaphones ply the city's neighborhoods offering jobs. Thousands of mostly indigenous Peruvians from the central Andes have flooded the coastal community, attracted by radio ads and word of mouth, successfully joining the ranks of the employed. Deep-green asparagus fields among gray sand dunes ring the city, the key to its success. Ica sits at the heart of Peru's gigantic agro-industrial business, one of the main motors driving Latin America's fastest-growing economy.

A passenger bus tumbled 90 feet into a rushing river in the Andes mountains Friday, killing at least 45 people and injuring at least 15, police said.

On a busy Peruvian street, crammed between a video store and a restaurant, is a narrow, stone storefront with the words "ransom room" carved above the door in Spanish. Inside, in a small courtyard, sits the only significant Incan ruin in this Andean town. It is a smallish building, at least compared with the modern structures around it, and a garish, mismatched roof of adobe and corrugated metal tops its perfectly fitted stone walls.

The road crashes through the jungle like the fevered dream of the indomitable Fitzcarraldo, who schemes to transport a steamship overland through the Peruvian tropics in a cult film celebrating demented ambition. The Transoceanic Highway, evoking engineering marvels such as the Transcontinental Railroad and the Panama Canal, has been talked about for decades, assuming a mythic stature that has led many to question whether the east-west thoroughfare linking Brazil's Atlantic ports with the Pacific docks of Peru would ever come to pass.

Are the businesses and tourists Bradley is courting to come to Los Angeles bringing their own water? L.E. ANDES Northridge

The government has renewed a state of emergency in a major portion of the central Andes for 60 days to fight the Maoist Sendero Luminoso guerrillas, El Peruano, the official gazette, reported Thursday.

About 50 Shining Path rebels attacked a village in Peru's central Andes and killed three peasants, authorities said Friday. Eight villagers were injured during the guerrilla attack before dawn Friday in Sinto, a remote mountain village about 125 miles southeast of Lima.

Friendly Planet Travel is taking $300 off the price of an eight-day, all-inclusive cultural and sightseeing tour of Ecuador. The lowest-priced trip that includes round-trip airfare from L.A. to Quito costs $1,674 for departures in late fall. To get the discount, you have to book by mid-May. The deal: The Exotic Ecuador tour is a mix of culture and natural wonders that includes airfare; ground transportation and transfers; hotels; guided tours; most meals and more. Participants will tour Quito; Otavalo; villages in the Andes Mountains and Amazon River basin; Cotopaxi, an active volcano more than 19,000 feet high; and other sites.

The road crashes through the jungle like the fevered dream of the indomitable Fitzcarraldo, who schemes to transport a steamship overland through the Peruvian tropics in a cult film celebrating demented ambition. The Transoceanic Highway, evoking engineering marvels such as the Transcontinental Railroad and the Panama Canal, has been talked about for decades, assuming a mythic stature that has led many to question whether the east-west thoroughfare linking Brazil's Atlantic ports with the Pacific docks of Peru would ever come to pass.

When writers-directors Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth went to the frozen steppes of Mongolia for their prize-winning film "Khadak" they already had in mind another remote locale for their follow-up: a Peruvian village high in the Andes called Altiplano. Inspired by an actual 2000 incident in such a village, where its indigenous population was blinded and sickened by a mercury spillage caused by mining, their new feature titled "Altiplano" sees Brosens and Woodworth take a bold and unpredictable approach in calling attention to an environmental catastrophe.

This Patagonian winter resort town wears a mantle of white in the South American autumn. But it's not from early snows. Ash from the Chaiten volcano across the Andes in Chile has been falling on the Argentine side of the border since the volcano erupted last week -- its first eruption in thousands of years. The onslaught of ash has yet to cause evacuations on the Argentine side, as it has in Chile.

Ralph Velasco of Newport Beach returned last month from an 11-day trip through South America that took in a lot of territory: Uruguay, Argentina and Chile. One of the highlights of the drive from Chile to Argentina was this slithering crossing of the Andes on Ruta 60. "There are 28 curves on this road," Velasco said in an e-mail, "and it's amazing to see 18-wheelers try to pass each other going up the hill. " His camera? A Nikon D70.

For several anxious days this month, the prospect of war in South America was sharp and real. Colombia's bombing of a rebel camp in the jungles of Ecuador roiled tensions not seen for decades in the Andean region. Ecuador rushed troops to its border; Venezuela sent 10 battalions to its frontier; Nicaragua broke diplomatic relations with Colombia.

Maoist guerrillas bombed a freight train in south-central Peru, derailing two locomotives and four coaches and blocking traffic on the sole rail link between Lima and the mining centers of the central Andes, officials said Tuesday.

Torrential rains pushed two rivers over their banks in a lumber and coffee-producing region of the central Andes on Sunday, killing at least 43 people, authorities said. At least 200 other people were left homeless by the flooding of the Entas and Llamaquisu rivers in the state of Pasco, civil defense chief Jorge Del Aguila said.

The crash of a passenger plane in the Andes killed all 46 people on board, officials said. The twin-engine plane was shattered upon impact, leaving only its tail largely intact and a swath of charred ground. Search teams reached the remote spot by helicopter and rappelled down. The plane, carrying 43 passengers and three crew members, crashed shortly after takeoff Thursday from Merida, a popular tourist destination wedged between Andean peaks.

An airliner with 46 people aboard went missing and probably crashed in a remote mountainous region soon after taking off Thursday from the Andean city of Merida, authorities said. Mountain villagers reported hearing a loud noise that they thought could have been a crash after the twin-engine plane took off for this capital city, roughly 300 miles away, Civil Defense official Gerardo Rojas said.