Travel is difficult. That’s something we don’t factor into our little travel dreams.

It’s hard on the body and often pushes good people to behave poorly.

I have seen astronomers and psychologists and archaeologists melt down because their key didn’t work in the hotel door.

I have seen marathon runners and long distance hikers hooked up to an oxygen tank, sick from the altitude in a mountainous region while the overweight electrician on tour sits in the hotel bar sucking down a beer and breathing just fine, thank you.

If any tour I’ve ever led exemplifies this truth, it’s this one. And if ever I were to think twice about a career in travel…well, this would surely be the time.

The 22 people on this tour to Peru are mostly professionals with a big handful of PhDs including an astronomer, a geologist, several professors, two psychologists, a computer genius, a biologist and the list goes on.

Everyone here is certainly smart enough to know this is a third world country and that If they expect the first course to come out in 40 seconds at dinner then they should be in Paris – not Peru.

Things move slowly here. Our first-world expectations must be tempered. Our impatience must be shelved. And as Americans we must show our best selves. After all, we live lives beyond the wildest expectations of the average person in Peru.

Picture this: the staff of a four star hotel in Cusco waits expectantly for our bus to pull up. They’ve been working all day on our meals, running to the market for vegetables they think we might like, cleaning our rooms to a degree they imagine Americans require, polishing the silverware and puzzling over the list of names which they’ll barely be able to pronounce when we hop down the steps of the bus.

They’ve never lived like us – in big houses with modern amenities and shiny cars and happy kids swimming in backyard pools and with lives filled with all sorts of little dreams that are very likely to come true.

Most of the world doesn’t live like this but very few people live like this here.

Neither do they understand, quite often, exactly what we want, exactly what we expect. They only think they do based on their past experiences with Americans. They’re relatively new to this tourism thing so what they deliver is often a watered down version of what we expect with a little of their own culture thrown in for the benefit of our experience.

So imagine their faces as 22 tourists move warily from the bus and throw tantrums in various spaces of their hotel.

I can tell you what happens: the staff’s happy and expectant faces vanish fairly quickly and the next hour turns into a Chinese fire drill as everyone runs around with keys or mops or fans or drinks trying to figure out how to make us happy.

Last night, one woman on my tour actually threw herself into her husband’s arms and cried when the couple was asked to move to another room just two minutes after they’d walked in their room.

Another duo – a mother and daughter team – stammered into the hallway outside of their room, yelling that they weren’t spending their last three nights of the trip in the dingy little room that had been provided for them.

For the record, we are staying in an old monastery that has been converted into a hotel. It’s different yes, but it’s interesting and it’s comfortable.

One guy – a biologist who hasn’t had one good thing to say about anyone or anything for two entire weeks and should not, as a rule, ever travel outside his own four walls again – complained about the air circulation in his room, just as he has done in every hotel we’ve stepped foot in.

To be fair, this trip is priced at $8,000 and our travelers have a right to their expectations – at least some of them. And these travelers were tired, too, having climbed 1,000 feet up a mountain earlier in the day at an elevation of 8,000 feet above sea level at Machu Picchu.

Then there was the long train ride afterward.

But that does not dismiss the behavior.

This is not a story about the so called “ugly American.” People of all privileged nations are apt to behave the same way given the right conditions.

Travel is stressful and tiring. It tests our mettle.

But I’ve always felt that every act is an act of self-definition. We are always at choice to make the best of things and handle ourselves with dignity.

Especially in a place where the simplest things are a source of pride. A loaf of bread, for example, is a source of pride here.

We must remember to be gentle with the world. And with our neighbors too.