Camp at Foot of Mountain. 16 September
Poor Rachel was bug-struck last night – that kitchen! She vomited copiously three times from our balcony, which I thought showed commendable presence of mind if not much civic spirit. But by dawn the thin dogs had tidied up.
Today the Intrepid Traveller, now for all practical purposes off the only available map, demonstrated yet again her inefficiency and led the expedition wildly astray. Rachel has just distilled the essence of our morning – ‘We found a track that Mummy thought was the right one but after about an hour of going quite steeply up we found it ended at a farm. We hunted around a little for something but didn’t find anything apart from a tiny track that we thought looked like a goat track, really, but took for fun. It ended in a tiny little piece of grass that we could see a bit of our road from and that we tried to battle our way down too, but we couldn’t because the crupper came off and we had to load all over again. Then, after another little escapade, we retraced our steps untill we came to a track leading off the one leading up to the farm which we dicided to take.’
The ‘little escapade’ over which Rachel has skated froze my (not easily frozen) maternal blood. When we turned a sharp corner to find our goat-track broken by a landslide Rachel had to dismount on the edge of a fearsome abyss and perch on the landslide while I backed Juana, as always astute and cool in a crisis, to a safe turning point.
This afternoon our track climbed gradually across uninhabited heathland – rough, brown, rock-strewn and flecked with green patches of bog. When an icy wind brought driving rain and hail from the sharp, high mountains to the east poor Juana was shocked and dismayed; probably she has never before experienced the like. An hour later the force of the gale ripped Rachel’s cape at the neck but happily the rain/hail/sleet eased off soon after. We were climbing ever higher. Now occasional hovels crouched on the bleak moorland, far back from the track, and in fenced-off areas sheep, cattle and horses were huddled together with their backs to the wind. “Juana must envy them,” commented Rachel, who had had some difficulty keeping her steed facing into the gale. At 4.30 we found this sheltered stretch of level, slightly boggy ground between a long, high, smooth-topped ridge and a much higher, jagged mountain. Short green grass grows between tall clumps of coarse brown ichu grass – which last, perversely, Juana seems to prefer. In the soft bogginess it was difficult to find a reliable spot for the picket. The clouds spat warnings at us as we got the tent up but we were safely tucked away in dry clothes, eating buns and sardines, when the next deluge came. How to dry my sodden bush-shirt and jeans is tomorrow’s problem. I’ve no idea where we are this evening but the setting sun confirmed that we’re moving south, which is the general idea.
Camp on Verandah of Casa on Mountain-Ledge. 17 September
A slightly uneasy night, wondering if Juana would lift her picket – which I changed twice, to facilitate grazing. It rained hard until midnight and one of the challenges of this life-style is how to pee in such weather while remaining dry. Fortunately our medium-sized saucepan makes an adequate chamber-pot.
By 5.45 we were breakfasting off buns and sardines while a ghostly light seeped into our glen through the clouds that sat on the mountains. Juana was then close to the tent and I moved her because she likes to investigate everything as we pack up. Ten minutes later Rachel noticed that she was loose – and grazing towards the track. We advanced cautiously, but she reached the track first and there the sound of the picket rattling behind her on the hard ground sent her galloping, panic-stricken, towards Huamachuco. (Just laugh at anyone who tells you mules can’t gallop.) We also began to gallop, no less panic-stricken, but soon discovered that at approximately 11,000 feet walking and galloping are two quite different activities. As Juana disappeared over the hill I ordered Rachel back to guard the camp and trotted in pursuit – being quite overwhelmed, despite my anxiety, by the beauty of that dawn. To the west a long rock mountain was suddenly pure gold, while the rest of our world remained green-brown bog below and pale grey cloud above.
Ten minutes earlier, a campesino boy in a maroon poncho had galloped up the track on a palomino pony – and now, from the crest of the hill, I saw him tethering Juana to a low bush. I paused for a moment, panting painfully and almost sick with relief. Then, as I hurried on planning a suitable reward, the boy vaulted into his saddle and went cantering up a mountain-side without a glance in my direction – not even waiting to be thanked. Although I shouted my gratitude he never once looked back before vanishing into a cloud. He was the only human we’d seen since noon yesterday; had he not chanced to pass, who knows when (if ever) we would have been reunited with our mula bonito? It distressed me that I’d not been allowed even to thank him. And his melting into the mist, when I so desperately wanted to communicate, somehow symbolised the elusiveness (and disdain for outsiders?) of the campesinos – just as his altruism recalled the disinterested courtesy and generosity with which the Incas received the original conquistadores.
An excess ofoats, as everyone knows, is bad. Despite the stinging cold of the morning air I was dripping sweat when I rejoined Rachel; Juana had fought me over every yard of that mile-long walk. While I completed the packing-up, Rachel attempted to soothe Her Grumpiness by grooming her fondly. But this applied psychology didn’t work and I was kicked in the ribs while loading. Luckily a feeble kick: those ribs have been broken four times over the years and must by now be rather fragile. When we set off at 8.10 I was still wearing my pyjama/husky-suit and carrying yesterday’s casualties in my knapsack.
Where we turned onto the high mountain that overlooked our site a grass-thatched stone hovel, with two tiny windows on either side of the low doorway, reminded us both of an Irish peasants’ cabin of times past. Presumably our knight had come from this dwelling. Sheep were baa-ing within stone outbuildings, also thatched, and a fat, pompous-looking grey rabbit was hopping around the yard on excellent terms with three dogs – who, strangely enough, did not remark our passing.
These Andean days tempt one to disregard all literary propriety and let loose a flood of superlatives: the highest, deepest, broadest, longest, narrowest, steepest, wildest, most precipitous, most rugged, most varied, most difficult, most silent, most barren, most isolated, most exhausting – and most beautiful. Undoubtedly today was the most superlative-provoking of all; at 8 p.m. I’m still ‘high’ on the glory of it. During our ten-hour walk we saw three people (‘most isolated’). At one point my nerve almost failed me on Juana’s behalf (‘most difficult’). And all the other ‘mosts’ may be applied, freely and literally, to various stages of the day’s progress.
Stage One took us up a long, shallow valley – an easy walk, except where the path dropped into mini-ravines with steep sides of loose boulders which taxed Juana’s surefootedness. We were not on the valley floor but above it, ascending steadily a series of mountains. We were hesitating at a junction when a man came trotting down-valley on a sturdy pony whose hoof-prints we followed towards a pass excitingly visible in the distance – a short, straight line on the horizon, between two gaunt, grey peaks.
When the sky cleared at 9 I put on my rain-laden shirt and spread my jeans across the load. On the far side of the wide valley we saw one stone shack with a solitary tree standing beside it and grey sheep grazing nearby – at first we mistook them for boulders. A small boy in an ankle-length poncho was herding four cows by our path; when we greeted him he shrank behind a boulder. Nearby some patches of grass had been burned to improve the grazing. Several strange Alpine cacti fascinated us, especially a deceptively velvety-looking grey-green cushion, perfectly round, speckled with minuscule pink flowers. For once I needn’t feel inferior about not being able to name flowers noticed en route; the classification of Andean flora is still incomplete and there is no field-guide. Today we also saw more bird-life than elsewhere: the Andean lapwing, the partridge-like tinamou and the caracara – a large black and white carrion eater, with orange legs and a red face, which in the good old days provided feathers for Inca headdresses. Without the invaluable Bradt ‘Backpack’ guide we couldn’t have identified any of these. Rachel is disappointed that we haven’t yet seen a condor but it seems these are now much commoner along the coast, where the pickings are easier.
The last half-mile to the pass was steep and my lungs told me we must be at about 12,000 feet. Then we were up, standing with thudding hearts looking at our first Andean snow-peaks: a remote, jagged line, white near the fierce summits. On our right, far, far below, a wide valley – all broken by chasms and hills – held a scattering of hovels and a few clumps of trees. Beyond that stretched a blue-hazed ocean of angular peaks, smooth ridges, humped shoulders, sheer escarpments. “Are we going through those?” asked Rachel. “Not exactly", I replied evasively, in truth not having much notion where we were going next. But I felt we should try to keep that valley on our right.
Our path now joined a rough jeep-track; the map didn’t mark it and we couldn’t imagine where it came from or went to. Then, as it hair-pinned down between great banks of five-foot high Andean lupins – like scraps of sky fallen on the pink cliffs – we found a clue: good-quality coal scattered among the track’s many stones. All around were signs of recent landslides (or an earthquake?). Thousands of tons of gigantic, sharp-edged hunks of mountain lay below the track, which suddenly ended on a wide ledge among small piles of coal and a few rusty wheel-barrows. From this abandoned seam we turned back to a faint path that descended into a broad, grassy bowl, all sunny and silent, before climbing a smooth green ridge. We were puzzled by smoke billowing from a summit near the mines, away on our left; its quantity and location seemed to rule out a campesinos’ ‘fertilising’ fire. Is there a baby volcano here?
This ridge proved to be the rim of a long deep valley which reminded me of Agustín de Zarate’s description of Inca strategy – ‘Their strategy was to allow the Spaniards to enter a deep, narrow gorge, seize the entrance and exit with a great mass of Indians, and then hurl down such a quantity of rocks and boulders from the hillsides that they killed them all, almost without coming to grips with them’. This valley would have been ideal for such a massacre. We scrutinised its far side through binoculars, but our path’s continuation was invisible. Yet we had no alternative but to descend to river-level, where we found three faint upward trails. The first petered out after fifty yards. The second had recently been cut by an impassable landslide. The third and faintest took us half-way up the mountain, and around its shoulder, before dying below a narrow ledge supporting a stone hovel – from which sprang three ferociously barking dogs who almost caused Juana to bolt over the precipice. We seemed to have arrived at the cul-de-sac to end all cul-de-sacs and were about to retreat, reluctantly, when an elderly man leaped off the ledge and beckoned us to follow him. Without showing the least curiosity about our origins or destination he helped to get Juana up a stone stairway, led us across the ledge-farmyard and pointed out the continuation of our path – here so narrow, vague and disintegrating, and overhanging such an abyss, that even Juana was soon unnerved. I then endured half an hour of tummy-tightening anxiety, the first since leaving Cajamarca. “I’m not surprised the conquistadores didn’t come this way”, said Rachel, peering straight into the most profound chasm we’ve yet seen. As she spoke a bit of path just behind us came loose and dribbled down towards the shadowy, scrub-smothered depths thousands of feet below. The tiny noises of sliding or bouncing stones seemed to tear at the smooth stillness. Glancing back, I noted that the path was now non-negotiable from Juana’s point of view. (It had been almost so before collapsing.) So if we came to another damaged section we’d be caught between the two … When we turned the next corner, after a lung-busting climb, our path was visible for miles ahead: now level, edging its way along the almost sheer brown slopes of two more mountains, not far below their perfectly sheer silver-grey peaks – colossal splinters of rock probing the dark blue sky. From here the canyon below seemed so far away one illogically gave up worrying about falling into it: it belonged to another world. Also, the path was a few inches wider here and, being level, one didn’t notice the altitude. During the next hour this Andean drama reached a crescendo. The eye could hardly take in those heights and depths and widths. I felt that tingling, reverent exultation that can also be the reaction to great music. One has to be a mountaineer to penetrate to the equivalent core of Himalayan majesty; humble trekkers can reach the inner Andean sanctum.
As we were turning the shoulder of the third mountain, leaving the canyon behind, our path became so hesitant that we paused for another binocular survey of distant possibilities. The scene below us was of total topographical disorder: an immense expanse packed with broken mountains, half-hidden valleys, ridges that suddenly became peaks, unpredictable gorges, flattish ledges, ravines into which the nearest mountainside had recently spewed ten thousand boulders. The whole looked as though some giant had been modelling a mountain range but got bored half-way through and impatiently pushed his materials aside. To the southeast rose a spectacular escarpment, soaring high above everything else within view and strangely symmetrical – like damaged pillars from some ruined Greek temple, all tidily stacked together.
Descending, we marvelled to see minute shreds of cultivation on near-vertical slopes. There was even one small field of shimmering barley, looking incongruously domestic – almost demure – amidst the surrounding violence of nature. In this area the past year’s rainfall has been adequate, though not normal. Soon our path spiralled up yet another precipice, then wandered across gently undulating green pastureland. A large potato patch surrounded the first house we had passed since receiving guidance several hours earlier. Another stone dwelling was conspicuous ahead, on a grassy ledge directly below a long wall of jagged cliff; to its left, ending the ledge, a detached mini-mountain looked like a magnified grey-green plum-pudding. Our path led us onto this ledge, which is bisected by a swift stream, and Juana drank while we considered the cliff-wall. It is on the far side of a bridgeless ravine and we could see no alternative path off the ledge apart from the one we’d come on. “Here endeth the track for this day”, observed Rachel. It was only 4 p.m. but we’d covered some twenty miles of rough stuff and Rachel had walked at least half that; more and more, Juana is becoming a pack-mule. If the campesinos didn’t object to gringoes in their garden, this was an ideal site: grazing for Juana, water for all, resiliant turfon which to sleep. No firewood so no hot supper, but you can’t have everything …
I was about to approach la casa when a middle-aged woman appeared at the door, twenty yards away. She stared, then came towards us looking puzzled but friendly. She is more Spanish than Indian looking, with fine features and lively, intelligent eyes: not the sort of person I’d expected to encounter here. She couldn’t be persuaded that we are self-sufficient and only wanted permission to put up our tent and graze our mule; obviously she’s never before heard of a ‘carpa’. We must sleep on their verandah, she insisted, as her husband (Carlos) and daughter – equally surprising – arrived. They all pointed to swollen black clouds gathering above the ‘pillared’ escarpment and said it will get very cold tonight because we are at 11,400 feet: and anyway the ground is no place to sleep. Carlos firmly led Juana to a slightly higher ledge of beaten earth, surrounded by buildings, and pointed to our ‘bedroom’ – a spacious verandah, some six feet by twenty, outside a storeroomcum-bedroom where a married son sleeps with his wife and small baby. When Juana was back on the grass, Carlos shouted to his fourteen-year-old son (the youngest of six children) to give her chopped barley straw and oats. Even from our distance, we could sense her delighted astonishment. For us, too, this has been an astonishing evening. We’re not used to such outgoingness in the Andes – though it has its limitations, which interest me. We’ve been lavishly entertained on the verandah, yet not invited into the family dwelling. Why?
When Carlos asked if we needed food I said no but suggested a little hot water for coffee. This request soon produced a large saucepan of boiling milk which enabled each of us to have three big mugs of café con léche with our buns: an unprecedented treat. By then it was very cold and raining slightly and thunder was roaring from peak to peak. When the eldest boy, aged twenty-six, arrived home from Huamachuco driving three laden donkeys (one with foal at foot) I wondered how he’d got his animals across the broken path. Answer: he’d mended it. This monthly journey takes him twenty-four hours – what a trip to the nearest town! He quickly unloaded the donkeys, piled sacks in a corner of the verandah and without a moment’s pause was away on the next task: driving two of the donkeys to fetch enormous sacks of newly-lifted potatoes from the foot of the steep green slope below the ledge – a 1,000 foot drop, at least. Every day, this family of nine has potatoes and cows’ milk for the two main meals (morning and evening) – again like Irish peasants not so long ago. The surplus potato crop is exchanged for noodles, kerosene, salt, sugar, matches, clothes, household needs. It does one good to be among adequately fed Andean citizens who don’t need to chew coca. Comparing this mestizo family – mentally alert, not shy of gringoes, well-mannered, well-built, well-dressed, well-organised – comparing them with the average Indian family one again glimpses that shadow of doom over the native campesinos. After all, Carlos & Co., living on this ledge, could hardly be described as enjoying any unfair advantages over Indian farmers.
As the sky cleared, towards sunset, we climbed the little ‘plum-pudding’ mountain and watched the family going about its evening ritual. On the steep mountainside nearest the house, Mother was milking five small reddish cows which she’d just fetched from their pasture very far below the ledge. Before milking, their near and off legs were tied together, and then their forelegs were tied to their horns – a complicated procedure. “Why don’t they build a milking-stall?” wondered Rachel. But somehow it’s impossible to imagine anything ever changing on this ledge. Daughter-in-law collected the milk in two small churns and looked like a maiden in an eighteenth-century engraving as she moved across the mountain with a churn balanced on each shoulder and wide skirts swaying. Further off, the youngest son was herding twenty-eight sheep and several new-born lambs across a near-vertical brown scrub slope to their stone pen within the yard complex. And meanwhile Aunty (who is one short of the shilling but rather sweet) was competently and affectionately shooing hens and cocks and turkey-hens and cocks into their respective houses where they roost on wooden beams beneath thick puna-grass thatch. Another son had vanished behind the house; he soon re-appeared driving a small jet-black sow and four jet-black piglets – all giddy and vociferous as they rushed around the yard trying to avoid incarceration. Then the eldest son also re-appeared, rising out of the depths with his two potato-laden donkeys, plus three ponies who had been grazing on the potato stalks. These were tethered near Juana, with a dog tied nearby for the night to give warning should a puma threaten. The three donkeys share a stable; Carlos told us they can’t safely be left out all night in these temperatures.
We descended from our hill as the last of the chilly, greenish light drained away behind chunky black summits. Mother was helping Aunty to feed the poultry while the boys were chopping enough wood to cook the supper. The greatest local supply problem is fuel: each branch – each twig – is precious. It all comes from that wooded ravine we’ll be tackling in the morning; without those low trees and fast-growing scrub the two families who now live so comfortably here couldn’t survive. But of course there is nothing to spare for space heating so everyone goes to bed after supper.
All evening Father did little but stroll around supervising his work-force; he has the air of a country squire rather than a peasant smallholder. While the meal was being cooked he and his sons stood on the verandah talking with us by moonlight, wrapped tightly in their ponchos. There are three other teenage children at school in Trujillo: two boys and, astonishingly, a girl. Money made by Mother on the Huamachuco poncho trade pays the fees. As in Mexico, isolated families ambitious for their young have to forego the joys of parenthood and their children’s help around the farm. But it must be unusual to find such ambitions as near to the middle of nowhere as you could get. This family is virtually self-sufficient. A spacious stone building at one end of the yard holds an ancient loom on which Mother weaves all the family’s ponchos and skirts and blankets, from the wool of their own sheep. It’s interesting how much of the Indian life-style has been adopted by these mestizos: most noticeably in the women’s hair-dos, clothing and baby-care.
At supper-time Carlos provided us with two low ‘nursery’ chairs and a diminutive table which he placed in the most sheltered corner of the verandah. Then he himself made three trips to serve us, carefully carrying plates across the wide, neat yard where there isn’t a stray feather or dung-pellet to be seen. That was a meal to remember, eaten by the brilliant light of an icy full moon with mountains looming everywhere along the horizon, like fabulous monsters that might suddenly move in the strange colourless light. And indeed they might move, literally, here. Carlos warned us that earth-tremors are frequent and we mustn’t be alarmed if the verandah shudders during the night. The ghastly 1970 earthquake, which killed tens of thousands on the other side of the Cordillera Blanca, also did some damage in this area.
We were given plates piled high with small, delicious potatoes boiled in earthy skins, accompanied by a saucer of extremely hot chilli sauce and a dish of scrambled turkey eggs with chopped chives, followed by brimming plates of noodle soup. Seeing me peeling my spuds with a bone-handled camping knife, drawn from a leather sheath on my belt, Carlos’s eyes glazed over with a childish sort of covetousness. When he later asked if it was for sale I presented it to him and his face lit up: it’s nice to be able to give so much pleasure so easily. Before saying good-night he inspected our flea-bags, laid out on the earthen floor with space-blankets wrapped around them. He then produced a thick ‘double-bed’ straw mat woven by his wife – such as the campesinos sleep on, curled up in their ponchos. What between hot food and soft floors, we’d go decadent if we stayed here long.
My linguistic feebleness has been seriously frustrating me this evening; I’d have liked to discuss Carlos’s philosophy but could only gather that he despises urban (i.e., Huamachuco!) life and considers himself lucky to be able to live well on his remote ledge, with his happy, healthy, co-operative family. I wondered at one point if he could be a drop-out, but no. He was born on this ledge and hopes to die on it.
Camp in High Valley between Summits. 18 September
We discovered during the night that Carlos’s five large dogs, with whom we were sharing the verandah, do not love each other. Several times their bickering woke us and when it developed into something more serious they twice rolled over us in a snarling mass. Eventually one of them – the largest and most pacific – took refuge from the on-going fray by curling up between Rachel’s and my sleeping-bags. His hyper-active fleas were soon eagerly exploring foreign bodies and relishing gringo blood. (They continue to do so this evening as I write.) When the dogs were not being canicidal, Grandson (aged eight months) was yelling inconsolably just on the other side of the door outside which we lay. When Mamma failed to quieten him, she put on a wedding gift ‘trannie’ to drown his yells; so we had Peruvian jazz (better than most) till 1.30 a.m.
By 7.40 we were off, into a crisp, clear, joyous morning, after a ‘treat’ breakfast of very sweet café con léche and buns (the latter now beginning to taste elderly). Carlos accepted 100 soles for Juana’s fodder, after only a token protest, but would accept nothing for human fodder. Daughter-in-law, accompanied by her three-year-old son, led us to the edge of the ravine and pointed out the path which can only be described as unreasonable. Our flea-merchant friend rushed ahead, down the precipice, and Daughter-in-law said cheerfully: “He will show you!” Then she firmly turned back, having wished us all sorts of blessings and good luck – which I reckoned we’d be needing at once. Juana now put on a classic and totally understandable display of mulishness. She stood with legs braced, ears flattened and eyes rolling expressively towards the depths of the ravine where a torrent foamed noisily between cottage-sized boulders. I had to lead her down, applying a judicious mixture of wheedling and abuse, depending on how appalling our immediate situation was when she chose to be bolshie. “Actually she’s not being bolshie”, said Rachel, who was slithering along behind. “She’s just being sensible. This isn’t a mule track.” I remained ever-ready to spreadeagle myself against the cliff-face should she stumble, or suddenly decide to leap ahead. But we arrived at the bottom together and intact (at least physically: our nerves may have been a little frayed). Surprisingly, Juana made no fuss about fording the torrent by an unsteady stone causeway some eighteen inches beneath the water. We feared then that she might try to rush up the overgrown path opposite, as is her wont, but this slope curbed even her urge to get to the top as quickly as possible. Here, almost certainly, we were on an Inca road – a path which disdained effete zig-zags and retained many stretches of stone steps, to Juana’s dismay. But she gallantly jumped, where necessary, and was not deterred even by dense, overhanging vegetation pulling at the load.
I was pleasantly surprised by my own condition today: no breathlessness, even on that climb. Evidently adjustment proceeds apace. It takes a month or so to complete, this being the time needed for the manufacture of the required increase in one’s red blood cells. Two-thirds of the way up we had a breather on a broad ledge from which we could see human specks moving about Carlos’s yard. Here a shepherd’s stone hut, reminiscent of early Irish ‘beehive’ houses, stood in the middle of a night-pen with high stone walls. A flock of brown and white sheep, no bigger than fortnight-old Irish lambs, was being tended by a young mestizo campesino woman (our friends’ neighbour) and her small son. We were again climbing steeply when she came bounding after us, shouting that we were on the wrong path. I’d seen no other, but she led us towards the crest of the mountain along a faint goat-trail. Before turning back she sent the flea-merchant home, to Rachel’s grievous disappointment. He’d been ingratiating himself with us en route and obviously longing to get on the Murphy bandwagon.
The last lap was easy. We had left the cliff-face and its vegetation far below and were on gradually-sloping, brown-green puna at about 13,500 feet. Standing on the crest in warm sunshine, we faced an invigorating wind and noted the virtual disappearance of our path. The configuration of the landscape allowed an illusion of being on top of the world; there were no higher mountains nearby, only vast widths of puna bright beneath an infinite blue arc. One felt a sense of achievement none the less satisfying for being rather absurd. The clarity of the light gave a magical distinctness to every distant boulder and clump of spiky ichu grass. The quality of the silence was holy and healing. The purity of the air made one tingle with energy, as though one ran on electricity. Somehow that place and time induced an elated awareness offreedom. Everything that might tie one to the superficial and superfluous had been shed like a snake’s skin and nothing mattered but the immediate moment.
Rachel said: “If we can’t find a path, where are we going to get food? Those buns are nearly gone. And anyway they’re stale. And they were never very filling.”
Within an hour the only path we could find had led us astray by plunging down, then swinging north along a sheer grey mountainside littered (as was the path) with huge lumps of shattered rock. We stopped to ‘binoc’ the situation and could just discern, across the valley on our left, a broad track climbing south towards the ‘pillared’ summit. But how to reach it? We retraced our steps, looking in vain for a way down. Gloom was setting in when a couple approached us, driving two burros, and pointed out a path so faint our untrained eyes would never have detected it. This was even worse than the earlier cliff-face descent; many boulders seemed loose, as though recently deposited and poised to go rolling again with little or no encouragement. And the load, despite rigorous girth-tightening, began to shift before we were half-way down.
For a few miles our new track was bliss to walk on: a soft green carpet curving around the rim of a circular wooded valley with sheep grazing between the trees; at intervals the faint notes of a bamboo pipe rose on the wind. Then the surface became rougher and for three hours we were climbing steadily through golden sunshine, while charcoal grey clouds piled themselves around the summit above.
The base of that escarpment – a great black fortress, rising straight from the track – must have been close to 16,000 feet. In three directions we were overlooking hundreds of miles of convulsed Andean splendour – a sort of madness of mountains, possessing the earth to the farthest horizons. “Everywhere is below us!” exclaimed Rachel. Moments later a cruel puna wind was driving sleet into our faces and making my dust-bin-sack rain-cape look rather silly. But this squall was brief.
An hour later we turned a corner and were on the brink of a chasm that stopped the heart – a long, narrow, shadowed abyss immeasurable by the eye and almost frightening in its extremity. Beyond it, facing us, was an unbelievable vastness of sheer black rock-wall – a mountain (I suppose one must call it) miles long, straight as though Inca-built, with rags of grey cloud shifting langourously along its jagged crest.
“Where do we go from here?” asked Rachel sternly. And now the Intrepid Traveller’s poor navigational powers were relentlessly exposed by her daughter, whose diary best describes the sequence of bumblings: – ‘I think this is the best day we have had yet, though every day seems to get better and better. Up close to the top of one of the mountains we came to a junction. Mummy insisted on taking the upper one even though it seemed a lot less used than the other one. I was sure that there was another junction that we couldn’t see and that the lower road was the right one. The stones along this road, which are mostly little pieces of marble, have got lots of different colours in them. When we had gone on for about half an hour the road started to get very dilapidated. There were lots ofquite big cracks that must have been made by the 1970 earthquake and nobody had bothered to repair them. Round a few more corners we came to what I had expected, a dead end. Mummy was still persistint about this track being the right one. But we discovered it was a miners road that had been disused, propably because the mining holes had been made dangerous by the earthquake. The clouds had cleared away and the sun was blazing down. We had a sit down in the beauty and majesticness of the great mountains while we thought about what to do next. Mummy wanted to go up the mountain on a little miners track because she pretened that she thought it was a short cut but I had the strong feeling it was just because she wanted to climb up to the top. I refused firmly, and I am sure if Juana could have talked she would have thoroughly agreed with me. So we took the lower trail which was very exciting and soon we could see a little group of miners houses that had obviously been distroyed by the earthquake. It was a very sad sight. All the roofs had fallen in and most of the walls had collapsed. A little further on we came to a disused but big mine hole with lots and lots of lovely crunchy iron ore around it. I wanted to pick it up to see how it felt but Mummy wouldn’t let me. We got very confused on which road to take. The only one going in the right direction looked as though it was just a track to a disused mine and it stopped at a very old building that had been wrecked by the earthquake too. Mummy left me at the foot of the hill and went to explore a track. If I was to follow her she would whistle. I sat on the rock and let our very good Juana graze. At last Mummy whistled but half way up the hill Juana went firmly on strike. After I had pulled for a long time and Juana still wouldn’t come I whistled to Mummy as we were supossed to in an emergency. Mummy came and dragged Juana up the hill to her little track which suddenly died out in the middle of nowhere. It had started to rain heavily so I put on the cape again which was almost useless with all its ripping and tearing. Juana was being obstinate so Mummy had to use all her strength to pull her along. The country was very desolate. We were walking through lots of big stones. At last we found a track which we followed.’
Alas! this track also died out, quite soon, while we were still in the middle of nowhere, with low, torn cloud hurrying past the nearby summits, adding mystery to their grandeur. The immediate scene was of peaks sharp or shoulders rounded – of slopes gradual, grassy and boulder-strewn, or precipitous, barren and grey – all swept by an icy wind that stung our faces with a mixture of hail and rain. For a moment I considered this aesthetically pleasing but practically unpromising panorama. It seemed wisest to go to the top of the next mountain, a gradual climb through high clumps of puna grass from which Juana plucked mouthfuls as I led her upwards. Rachel followed, trying to keep her disintegrating cape together and wondering (she later told me) why she had to have a lunatic mother who enjoys prancing to the tops of mountains in violent hail-storms … Actually I didn’t much enjoy that bit of today. I don’t mind not knowing where a path is going, but in such terrain it’s more soothing to be on some path, however indeterminate. At the summit our view was blocked by another mountain – no surprise. From the top of the second mountain I could discern, about 500 feet below, a path crossing a long, low ridge. While waiting for Rachel I sheltered behind a solitary boulder, massive as a two-storeyed villa. Rachel was unimpressed by this new path, which clearly went to nowhere of any consequence – certainly nowhere with a food shop.
Beyond the ridge we descended gradually through tangles of scrub scattered with wondrous flowers, mosses and lichens. By 4.30 we had reached the floor of a slightly sloping, vividly green valley where we drank quarts from a crystal-clear torrent: a treat for Rachel, who is revolted by pill-water. The rain had stopped but already the air was fiercely cold; here we are at about 15,000 feet. From above, this valley floor had looked a tempting site; in fact it is a bog.
We climbed again, steeply, seeing no trace of cultivation or habitation and no possible site. By 5.45 we were ascending into a cloud that was beckoning the dusk. Then a stretch of grass-land appeared just below the path. We scrambled down, praying that it wasn’t another bog. Fifteen minutes later the tent was up and we were huddled within, devouring buns and squidgey sardines that looked extraordinarily like guano droppings. (Peruvian tinned sardines do not come intact and oiled.) Even had it been dry we couldn’t have made a fire; there isn’t a particle of fuel for miles around. This site is almost a bog; whenever we move the ground beneath makes rather rude sucking noises. As we munched we stared out at a limited twilit scene. The isolated sharp peaks on either side of us, and not much above, were obscured by a waterfall of rain and we could see only a small area of open brown moorland sloping up from our site.
Suddenly we heard thundering hooves and down this brown slope two lively ponies came galloping, followed by a mestizo campesino woman in long, wide, scarlet skirts, black shawl and Panama hat. Evidently this is the ponies’ regular pasture and they charged Juana with squeals of rage. She retaliated by rearing up, trying to bite, kicking out. When one pony scored a most palpable hit Juana skidded, was checked by the picket, rolled on her back – and as she scrambled up was kicked again. Rachel burst into tears of alarm and sympathy and then a huge black dog – a sort of Andean mutation of the Hound of the Baskervilles – came racing towards the tent showing his fangs and barking hysterically. Luckily neither Rachel nor I has any real fear of dogs and our reactions usually deflate even the most apparently ferocious of the species. This creature was followed by his owner who peered at us suspiciously through the thickening dusk. She cut short my efforts to explain in pidgin Spanish what two female gringoes were doing lying on a bog in a cloudburst at nightfall on uninhabited puna. And then she made it abundantly plain that we and our mule – particularly our mule – were unwelcome intruders. This I perfectly understand; here there’s no grass to spare for touring mules. My first reaction was to pay for our grazing, then I realised that in these circumstances it might be unwise to display money before morning. When I had conveyed that we couldn’t move on, even if we wished to, she called her monstrous hound to heel and drove her ponies away; one is a mare in foal and Juana had given quite an impressive display of equine Karate. In the morning we’ll look for her casa and give her a present.
I was half-way through this entry and it was pitch dark and still raining hard when squelching footsteps approached. Two men called – “Amigos! Olé!” Their tone was less amiable than their words and I unzipped the tent reluctantly and shone my torch on (I assume) our adversary’s husband and grown-up son – two hard-faced, harsh-voiced mestizos who spoke so rapidly that we couldn’t understand a syllable. But we got the unmistakable message that they didn’t at all care for our type. The Prefect’s letter was indicated. They were squatting on the ground outside the tent, their ponchos spread around them like mini-tents, and Son read the letter aloud, haltingly and frowningly. But it worked. They stood up, handed it back, growled, “Buenos Noches!” and disappeared into the blackness. Their house must be near, though invisible. I like the way we are addressed as ‘Gringa’ and ‘Gringita’ (as though these were titles) by the campesinos – and others. Rachel is now asleep and the rain continues, violently, as I write. But in here we are dry and warm, unlike poor Juana. I feel apprehensive about her tonight. Has she been injured? Will she lift her picket, despite the mini-boulder Rachel and I placed on it? Will those hard-faced campesinos come back to steal her? Perhaps illogically, I wouldn’t have this worry if they were Indians.
Camp in High Valley between Ranges. 19 September
Our first really grim day, after a grim night. I slept fitfully till about midnight when the rain stopped. Then out to rug Juana and change the picket, which took time because of the difficulty of coping single-handed with the essential mini-boulder. Back in bed, after that exposure, I was too cold to sleep and lay thinking longingly of our breakfast emergency rations. (The bun and sardine supply has at last run out.) But it wasn’t hard to resist that temptation as the pannier-bags were outside. Meanwhile Rachel was rolling restlessly around, talking in her sleep and sounding very unhappy – unprecedented …
As we struck camp dense cloud remained almost within reach overhead. Rachel said she wasn’t hungry so I decided to conserve supplies and skip breakfast. More rain was likely and to keep my dry clothes dry I put on soaking jeans, bush-shirt, socks, boots – all crackling with ice as there’s no room for wet clothes in a tiny tent. That was a demoralising exercise. (Rachel has spare dry clothes.) My agonisingly cold hands were half-useless when it came to loading and Juana was in a forgivably vile mood. Despite Rachel’s heroic attempts to control her I couldn’t get the crupper on and was afraid to persist lest a better aimed kick than usual might seriously disable me. Leaving it off seemed the lesser of two risks.
Then I noticed that Rachel was looking pale, by her standards; normally she looks like a technicoloured advertisement for the Outdoor Life. She admitted to feeling not herself and this evening has written in her diary:- ‘When I woke up I was feeling a little queer. As there was nowhere to tie Juana while we were saddling and loading her I had to hold her. She seemed to be in a very bad mood. Suddenly after holding her when she was being specially bad I felt all horried and sick and dizzy. It was a really undiscribeably horrid feeling. Mummy said it was soroche, or altitude sickness and that I had got it because Mummy had been sparing Juana yesterday going up all the hills. When I mounted and we started off we found that Juana was quite baddly lame. We could see no swelling on her leg, it was her near-fore, so we thought that it must be something to do with her hoof. The minute we got onto the big road it started to go up, not steeply but it was still going up which made my soroche even worse. Everywhere was cloud, you could only see about ten feet ahead then everything became a swirling mist, which I am sure if you hadn’t been perfectly miserable and depressed, the feeling soroche gives you, would have been nice but it only added to my misery. We went round and round and up and up. When we stopped going up we remained on the level untill at last we came down to a valley where my soroche got better and Mummy was sure there would be a little pueblo or at least a house. There was nothing.’
Children and adolescents are more vulnerable to soroche than adults, but at least this was only AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) – not cerebral oedema or pulmonary oedema, which are killers. Rachel’s symptoms were nausea, weakness, severe headache and acute depression – no disorientation, hallucinations or coughing. But I felt stricken to see tears welling in the eyes of my gallant companion, who so uncomplainingly endures every sort of discomfort. Just once she said pathetically, “I only want to lie down”. When I explained that this was impossible, because the sole cure is more oxygen, she rode on in stoical silence with large, soroche-depression tears occasionally rolling down her cheeks.
From a practical point of view, Juana’s state was more worrying. Soroche is less serious, long-term, than a lame mule. At first it seemed a helpful coincidence that the two indispositions had come together, rest being the cure for both. But after an hour or so Rachel became utterly wretched about Juana’s limp and had to be forcibly restrained from dismounting and trying to walk, despite her own weakness.
As we moved off at 7.30 we looked unsuccessfully for the campesinos’ casa. Dense grey cloud was swirling around the turrets of black rock just above us, yet gazing down over yesterday’s route we could see clear blue sky and the sun shining brilliantly on the awesome terrain we’d covered – framed by the mountain “V” of our site valley. That was a vision I shall never forget. It inspired an odd feeling of having been through some initiation ceremony and now belonging to the Andes. Perhaps the altitude is responsible for such crazy thoughts …
Our path climbed gradually across rough moorland; then, on a steep stony slope, the sole of my left boot came loose. What Rachel has somewhat flatteringly described as ‘the big road’ is another miners’ track which could take a motor vehicle, though all day we’ve seen no trace of humanity. On the moor we had passed a small, perfectly circular black lake. Now, looking down from the track, we could see numerous other tarns reflecting the distant blue sky and looking like a scattering of diamonds on the yellow-brown bog.
An hour later the wind tore holes in the clouds to give us many glimpses of cataclysmic heights and depths. There was a marvellously melodramatic beauty about those cloud formations and movements, as different layers drifted among or stood poised over different peaks and ridges, the wind sometimes briskly shifting them to reveal vistas of blue and golden valleys far below – or still higher and wilder ranges in the near distance, some snowy. Again I marked the difference between Himalayan and Andean trekking. In the Himalayas one usually treks between the mountains, worshipping the unattainable. In the Andes one treks between, around and over them (as often as not over, in this area), which is wonderfully gratifying to the mountaineer manqué! Also there is here an incomparable sense of space as the smooth puna sweeps from mountain to mountain for many miles, like a great expanse of golden velvet suspended between rock peaks black or red or grey – and of every conceivable (and inconceivable) distorted shape.
Our track continued level around mountain after mountain; usually we saw the next corner a quarter of a mile away as the condor flies, across a profound chasm, yet it was always three or four miles away as the Murphys walk. (Many of those chasms contained bubbling green or rust-red mineral springs.) Then a gigantic snow-dusted mountain wall appeared beyond what we assumed to be a deep (and therefore therapeutic) valley. But when the descending track revealed this valley it proved to be quite shallow. However, we must now be down to about 13,000 feet.
At 2.30 we set up camp on spongy ground – with excellent grazing for Juana – as fat black clouds gathered to the north and the wind on the puna grew colder. This is a strangely melodic wind; as it strums through tall clumps of stiff grass it makes weird and beautiful music – the signature tune of the high Andes.
Miners’ Settlement in High Valley. 20 September
Both patients were much improved this morning though neither was fully recovered. Rachel slept well, probably less because of the lower altitude than because she’s acclimatising quickly. After a savagely cold night the ground was all ice-crunchy when we rose at 5.50 to dress by the first light of dawn and the last light of a waning moon. At this sort of altitude I must never again leave my boots outside; they were frozen so stiff it was almost impossible to force my feet into them. We couldn’t have a breakfast drink because our water was frozen solid. And the tent was so iced I couldn’t get it into its bag; instead I folded it on top of one pannier, reckoning it wouldn’t soon thaw. But alas! it did, to the detriment of The King’s Peace.
Another mistake to avoid at this height is getting up too early. I was struggling with the load at 6.30, almost sobbing because of the agony of freezing hands, when the sun rose above the flat-topped mountain. Instantly there was warmth and everything began to thaw. Small wonder the Incas were sun-worshippers. Twentieth-century man may know exactly why that yellow dwarf star warms our planet but it stillfeels like magic when, within moments, pain is eased and life simplified. I was aware of a spontaneous reaction of gratitude and reverence as I glanced towards ‘Inti’, a red-gold globe swiftly rising (the movement perceptible) above that massive bastion of black rock.
By 6.45 we were away, chewing our breakfast (of Kendal mint-cake) on the hoof. Juana wasn’t limping but Rachel insisted on walking to spare her. I rashly chose to use two reduras, which meant that when we rejoined the track near the top of a high ridge we didn’t know which way to turn. Having sorted that one out (an expense of energy in a waste of reduras), we walked for three hours around a series of mountains as dramatic and exhilarating as yesterday’s – and a great deal more enjoyable because Rachel, despite our rapid regaining of height, remained soroche-free.
Soon after 11, mankind impinged; we saw a solitary horseman riding along the skyline of a distant ridge. A curiously moving sight, amidst this infinity of desolation. Then we met an ancient man and moronic youth driving two heavily-laden burros; they looked at us with something approaching terror and were incapable of explaining where they were coming from. Round the next bend three coca-chewing campesinos were resting on rocks, their unloaded burros grazing nearby, and they indicated that we’d soon reach a miners’ settlement. “Where do all these people live?” wondered Rachel. “It’s only six people”, I pointed out.
A few mountains later, we passed four deserted, tin-roofed miners’ shacks standing starkly on the puna; disused workings scarred the slopes above. Soon after we began to feel we were getting into a built-up area: a row of a dozen similar shacks stood by the track-side. Most were completely derelict, a few were in a lamentable state of disrepair yet occupied by apathetic men, women and children who stared at us like zombies, seeming hardly to see us. What do these people live on? There were no cultivated patches, or animals, around their shacks. And anyway why are they there?
A mile further on we came to a junction. Our track continued level, visible for eight or ten miles ahead, winding around mountains as is its wont. Another track, equally big (or small) branched off to the left and wriggled steeply down into a huddle of brown mountains. We scrutinised its dusty surface, which bore many marks of human and animal traffic. The level continuation bore no such marks, so we deduced the miners’ settlement must be down – a judgement confirmed when we overtook a group of campesinos. These were all mestizos, apart from one young man of very low stature but strikingly distinguished ‘Inca’ features who was leading a no less diminutive and comically shaggy pony laden with potatoes. Another young man was being led by a bloody-minded ram, magnificently horned. This animal’s antics on the end of a long rope were causing general amusement; he seemed intent on taking his owner over a precipice in a sort of suicide pact. A small, intense-looking elderly woman and her son were driving three burros carrying empty sacks; two good-looking youngish men were riding ponies scarcely bigger than the burros; a small boy, heavily laden, was leading his almost-blind grandfather by the hand. Again we remarked that most campesinos – especially men – wear neat, clean clothes, however primitive the hovels from which they emerge. Our appearance on the scene provoked no questions, just the usual exclamations of admiration for Juana. Later today our host here informed us that few Indians live between Huamachuco and Chavin, an area never effectively conquered by the Incas.
The track dropped into a long, narrow, uncultivated valley between grey-brown mountains, their rock-summits jagged against a violently blue sky. Then we fancied we heard distant thunder: but it was the growl of mining machinery. From the next bend we were overlooking a few score tin-roofed hovels, surrounded by the incongruous technology of a copper-mine, all squeezed onto wide ledges where the valley ends as the mountains converge. Looking beyond the settlement, at the opposite precipitous slope, we saw an unbelievable road snaking upwards as though its destination were Heaven; our companions informed us this is a motor-road for transporting the ore. It goes to Trujillo, and on that journey trucks average 8 mph. As we descended towards a SHOP I allowed myself to realise how hungry I was and saliva gushed.
Despite the altitude (11,700 feet) this whole settlement reeks of no sanitation. School had just ended and all ninety-eight pupils silently followed us – at a little distance, looking apprehensive as well as curious – while we wandered along narrow lanes of humpy beaten earth, seeking THE SHOP. It was down three steep steps from the ‘street’ and at first we could see nothing; the children were filling the doorway and pressing close to the tiny window. The shopkeeper – a mestizo miner’s wife, young and sad-faced and gentle – explained that we were her first gringo customers and was heart-breakingly apologetic about her stock. She had only sugar and noodles for sale. Rachel’s keen eye then discerned a solitary slab of chocolate, but on being opened it disintegrated. Nor was there any cerveza, only rum and coke. Rachel had two cokes; I had two treble-rums and the effect was sensational on a totally empty stomach. I tentatively wondered about torch-batteries …? A large box was taken from a top shelf but when opened it contained only one unrecognisable mangled lump. Those batteries, like the chocolate, were the victims of age and damp. Miners on £5.28 a week don’t buy such things. As we drank, Senora disappeared for a moment and returned with her daughter. Our eyes had then become used to the gloom and we were quite overwhelmed by the beauty of this toddler, a Dresden ornament sitting on the edge of the counter gravely regarding us with lustrous brown eyes. Her mother responded to our reaction by suddenly looking happy.
Back on the street, the children surged around – bolder now, having had time to establish our humanity. Then a weedy young man appeared and introduced himself as one of the three teachers (here three to ninety-eight seems impressive). He comes from Huamachuco – which to us now seems a million miles away! – and asked if we wished to buy some bread. After school he’s a bread-merchant and from a plastic sack in the corner of his cramped bedsitter he sold us twenty antique buns (teeth-breakingly stale) for ten soles each – four times the Huamachuco price, which is fair enough. Then he lost interest in the gringoes and we ambled on, each gnawing a bun, in search of a site on the unpromising, near-vertical slopes around the settlement.
As we passed a saw-mill, where eucalyptus trunks were being cut to suitable lengths for pit propping, someone shouted “Ole!” We turned to see a squat, astonished-looking man wearing an orange pit-helmet and an air of authority. He beckoned, and as we approached him his broad brown face broke into the most charming smile. He is Luis de Leon, the mine manager – one of the kindest characters we’ve met in Peru, with a deliciously subtle sense of humour.
Our sudden change of fortune has quite overwhelmed Rachel: from lying soroche-stricken on the icy puna, not knowing where the next meal is coming from, to lying on a soft mattress between snowy sheets beneath thick blankets, with electric light (albeit very dim) to read by, and with a full belly and the certainty that three hot meals are assured for tomorrow. The loo and bathroom leading off our bedroom are slightly irrelevant as there is no running water here and never has been. Clearly this is a declining mine. Our wooden chalet is one of a row of twelve built on the edge of a precipice for clerical staff; only four are now occupied. And many of the little shacks that line the squalid laneways are also empty.
Juana, having stuffed herself with puna grass on the slope below our suite, was stabled at sunset with a bale of barley-straw. Then Luis and his three senior colleagues escorted us to the group of bungalows where they live with their families. In the largest a long dining-cum-recreation-room is furnished with a ping-pong table and chess and draughts sets. Magazine pictures of nude women decorate the walls and a tar-barrel serves as wood-stove. The settlement’s policeman also lives here and was sitting beside me at supper, talking in rather an odd way about drug-smuggling from the selva. I had the impression he hoped I might be a customer. He and Luis are obviously not soul-mates; it must be difficult to ‘manage’ awkward relationships in a community as limited and isolated as this.
Never have I enjoyed a meal so much: potato, noodle and crubeen soup, with a crubeen each to be sucked; enormous helpings of rice and fried potatoes with moderately hot chilli sauce and very tough hunks of beef; blissful lemon tea. The surrounding mountains support only a few burros, ponies and sheep – no cows or goats, so dairy products are never on the menu. Fruit and vegetables are also rare, apart from potatoes and eating-apples.
The same. 21 September
A restfully uneventful day, apart from three big meals which seemed to us like Major Events. For breakfast: Nescafe, two huge slices of thick fried bread and a soup-plate of that exotic concoction we had at Cajabamba, made of fine maize porridge, chocolate and a gingery root. For lunch: same as supper last evening. For supper: beef soup, rice mixed with chips, fried tomatoes, onions and chopped stringy goat-meat, an apple and lemon tea. Our ‘humps’ have been sufficiently restored to keep us going for the next week.
Mining is one of the three main pillars of the Peruvian economy and has been an important feature of Andean life since long before the Spaniards came. This little community, under Luis’s benevolent dictatorship, is probably luckier than most. It certainly isn’t ravaged by disease, violence, drunkenness and homosexuality, as so many of the larger settlements have been in the past – and still are, in some areas. Keeping families together helps a lot. At present a pall of depression and poverty hangs over this place but its difficulties are part of the national crisis, rather than occupational hazards.
Camp in Mining Area near Pampas (we think!). 22 September
Several plates of steaming maize porridge counteracted this morning’s grey raw cold and we left our friends at 8.15 feeling pampered and grateful. The pass above the mine is over 14,200 feet so Rachel walked. Occasionally we paused to look back at the settlement; when last we saw it, still directly below us, Rachel said, “It looks like a Lego town!”
This has been our Day of Lakes and we saw the first pair on that climb, each about a mile across and close together – yet one orange-red and the other inky black. On the pass the sun was brilliant and ahead stretched a sublime prospect like the aftermath of some cosmic quarrel. Soon we were looking down on another pair of lakes – shimmering and blue-black (one round, one oblong), set in an amphitheatre of mountains with smooth brown crests. On those mountains I was somewhat unnerved by Juana’s obstinately keeping to the outer edge of the track, though the drops could almost be measured in light years. Here we saw several eagles, and many hawks and small song-birds.
Then came an extraordinary visual phenomenon. From an immense height we were looking straight down a long, narrow, grey gorge. And at its end, four or five miles away, we could see through our binoculars a section of another world – a golden sunlit landscape, dotted with eucalyptus groves and fertile fields. In the middle of the picture was a little red-roofed pueblo on a gentle slope: the first town or village we’ve seen since leaving Huamachuco. “Are we going there?” asked Rachel eagerly, thinking of her next hot meal. “Who knows?” I replied. “We certainly don’t seem to be” – and I pointed to the next section of our track, curving decisively away from the pueblo before climbing high to the snow-line. Yet the map suggests that this little town is Pampas. If so we should reach it tomorrow, having done a horseshoe circuit.
Up and up and up, stopping at 1.45 for a picnic of the teacher’s stale buns, flavoured with kerosene. We must then have been at about 15,000 feet yet the sun felt hot as we sat on a mossy rock, sheltered from the breeze. On three sides mountains enclosed us and above their gaunt peaks round white clouds sailed high. The bare golden-brown puna was strewn with massive silver boulders and behind us Juana was picnicking off tough grass and sweet herbs. Her happy munching, and the grinding of our own teeth as we wrestled with those buns, were the only sounds. And one fancied that here there never had been any other sound – and never would be …
Again up and up and up, round and round and round; at one point we could see three matching blue lakes below us, one far above another, on ‘steps’ of the mountains. Then came a vast area of shattered rock, where thousands of tons of dislocated mountain lay above and below the track. There was something atavistically frightening about this evidence of Nature’s instability. Looking up at the fractured peaks, now only hundreds of feet above us, one could see from where, exactly, a particular cathedral-sized chunk had fallen. As we approached the pass a whole line of new rock-peaks came into view, one retaining a dazzling sweep of snow just below the summit. And on reaching the pass we saw just below us a long, wide, vividly green valley, its far side curving up to merge into a wall of grey-black mountains riven by brilliant, pure, flawless glaciers. On the valley floor glowed a round jade lake, surrounded by several jade lakelets – like chips off the original jewel. Not far away two other lakes – black and glossy – stretched to the base of the mountain wall. And every colour had that extraordinary throbbing vitality peculiar to these heights. “This is a special place”, said Rachel.
We longed to camp there, but couldn’t for lack of fodder. Slowly we walked along the rim of that valley, gazing down at a few thatched stone cabins and sheep pastures scattered between the lakes. Rachel said: “It’s sad to think they probably don’t appreciate where they live, their lives are so hard.” Here the mountain-wall beyond the valley was a mighty triangle of naked rock, too smooth to have retained any snow. Ahead we could see our path disappearing into a jumble of boulders the size of skyscrapers. We paused to look back, reverently, at that wondrous valley. Then we entered a narrow, descending corridor, walled by rugged brown rocks, which led to another world.
An hour later we were in a longer, deeper valley, full of the soft gold light of late afternoon – a valley that ran between smooth-crested mountains and seemed gentle and warm after the beautiful cold harshness of the pass. Soon we could again hear mining rumbles and a lake like an inland sea slowly became visible on our left. Across the water rose a conical snow-draped summit. Now we were overlooking hundreds of wretched tin hovels (tin walls as well as roofs). This was a far bigger and newer mine than Luis’s, with much more complex and intrusive equipment which hideously disfigured the landscape. The few inhabitants we glimpsed looked sullen, hungry and dispirited. Having established that neither food nor fodder was available we hurried through this dismal place.
Then Juana suddenly went lame again and Rachel dismounted as the track continued to drop. In its upper reaches this valley is an arid wilderness; lower down, the river that flows from the lake, and which we had to ford three times, is used to irrigate scattered fields. At 6.15, as I was worrying about darkness falling before we found a site, this level strip of stony ground appeared on the right of the road at the base of a towering cliff. There is no grass here but luckily Juana relishes the available bushes, to one of which she is tethered because the ground is too hard for the picket. (The tent looks so insecure it may not stay up all night.) Those bushes have also made a fire possible and the teacher’s buns are much more manageable eaten with soup and coffee. After supper Rachel played her fideog and we sat and talked by firelight and starlight, watching ghost-like clouds drifting palely around the nearby summits.
Stoveless trekking in the Andes spares the mule but tantalises the human. Fires are never possible when most needed – at 15,000 feet or so, after marching for hours through an icy downpour. Yet the pleasures of a camp-fire, as compared to the dreary utilitarianism of a stove, are well worth waiting for. Apart from the creature comfort of hot food, the beauty of an evening fire – orange-red flickering flames, pinky-red trembling embers, blue smoke plumes wavering into a black, gold-spattered sky – is the perfect ending to a day such as this has been.
Our descent from the jade valley was so continuous and steep we must now be down to about 11,000 feet. A jeep has just passed, jolting slowly towards the mine; here we are back on the fringe of the motorised world. But the map indicates that between Pampas and Chavin we’ll be able to evade motorable tracks almost everywhere.