So, you’re asking, when is this guy going to get to his point of beggars can be choosers? Ok, I won’t string you along any further; I’m not a big fan of teasers myself.

A group of us were in the northern city of Chiclayo and had just finished lunch. For dessert we were sharing King Kong, which, is a local pastry made of various fruit pastes and fillings between layers a thick cookie like cracker. I never was a fan of them. For one I didn’t much like the flavor and secondly, they were just too sweet. No to understand what happened next you need to know that the best known brand of King Kong is San Roque and comes for the nearby town of Lambayeque.

Lunch was along the main drag going into the central plaza area of Chiclayo. This particular stretch was the exclusive domain of one particular beggar. He was an elderly man with legs withered to the point of being no more than dangling appendices. He would scoot around on a little cart similar to the one that Eddie Murphy used in Trading Places, only I never did get a Merry New Year out of this guy.

We felt he may be hungry; after all he did spend every day on the street begging for money. Since we had one more piece of King Kong left, the one I had refused to eat, we decided to offer the supposedly hungry guy a nice treat. Now how good were we? To our surprise he looked up and asked, “San Roque?” When our response was no, he looked up again, this time vigorously shaking his index finger back and forth, the Peruvian signal for NO. He didn’t say a word. Needles to say we were a bit shocked at this. Then we tried to talk him into taking it. He still refused. Finally we got our message through to him and he accepted. I never did check to see if he had eaten it. The way I figure, looking back on the incident is that he probably just wanted to get rid of us so he accepted it. But imagine if you will, having to beg a beggar to accept something from you. To this day I still look back upon this as one of my strangest experiences and believe my, I’ve had many. It’s also one of my favorite stories of Peru.

Oddly enough this wasn’t the only time that something like this has happened to me. Incredibly it had happened once more, this time in Salt Lake City. A lady approached my truck in a parking lot and gave us the line that she was just passing through town and her daughter was in a motel room in need of medical attention. She was shaky and obviously on meth and plus we had heard this story before. To get her away from us I reached to