Camp on Threshing-ground near Lacabamba. 23 September
Juana’s limp seemed better this morning but Rachel walked all day, just in case. Near our camp we came on another squalid miners’ settlement, even more depressing than yesterday’s, and not far from that was a long-established mining-town which stank of piss’n’shit. Everything looked decrepit and sleazy, including several newish eight-storey blocks of jerry-built flats. It was then 7.45 a.m. but few people were about and there was no food, drink or fodder to be had. It took us over an hour to get through this town, which is built in tiers on an unreasonably steep mountainside overlooking a gorge so deep we couldn’t see its floor. The road fell from one tight hair-pin bend to another in as remarkable a display of engineering genius as ever I’ve seen. When we paused to gaze up at it from the base of the mountain it literally did look like a corkscrew. A truck-bus arrived just then from Pampas but made no attempt to ascend the ‘main street’.
Our road wound level around the bulging mountain that here overhangs the gorge and we had to cross the remains of several gigantic recent landslides, before coming to the most recent – which had happened since the arrival of the Pampas truck-bus. Earth and pebbles were still streaming into the bottomless pit on our right and Juana was acutely unhappy about venturing onto this horrid slope of loose rubble. While she and Rachel rested I contrived to stamp out a level pathlet for her. (“Don’t lean against the cliff!” I yelled neurotically at Rachel.) Juana had crossed when four miners arrived with shovels to clear a way for the truck-bus’s return journey.
Soon after, we noticed (set plumb centre on a monolithic grassy mountain) what looked like the world’s most insanely inaccessible dwelling. From the shadowed depths of the gorge a thread of a path leads up to a minute stone hovel, seeming no bigger than a brick and semi-encircled by eucalyptus trees seeming no bigger than wall-flowers. Who lives there? An eccentric? An outcast? A hermit? Or merely a shepherd? The climb from river level to the front door must be no less than 3,000 feet.
At the end of that gorge we were looking up another, which was oddly familiar: we’d been looking down it when we first saw Pampas twenty-four hours earlier. The embowered town now seemed close but we didn’t arrive till 10.15 though we took every available redura up and down various mountains, stopping frequently to remove layers of clothing. By the time we reached Pampas we were dressed as though for mid-summer in Europe – yet sweating, and being savaged by the gnat equivalent of the hordes of Genghis Khan.
Pampas relaxes on the lower slopes of a cultivated mountain – an attractive little town of narrow cobbled streets winding between tiled, two-storeyed adobe houses with carved wooden balconies and overhanging eaves. No two houses are exactly alike yet each blends with the rest: soothing after the mass- (mess-) production of modern Europe. On our way to the Plaza, Rachel and Juana simultaneously noticed a bundle of Alf (six kilos) displayed outside a shop; to Juana’s excited delight we bought the lot. No external sign indicated that this house was a shop and empty shelves lined the dusky interior. In the large Plaza we sat on stone steps in the shade of a wooden arcade and happily watched Juana eating; it upsets us both when we know she’s being underfed. A friendly crowd gathered: schoolboys and a dozen young men – all mestizos. Most Peruvian children are outgoing and well-mannered – or rather, most mestizo Peruvian children. Nobody could describe the Indians, of any age, as ‘outgoing’. The majority of these Pampas children looked alarmingly undernourished yet all were clean and neatly dressed. One young man pointed to a shop across the Plaza where I might be able to buy food and drinks. It stocked only a few kilos of rice, sugar and noodles, four bottles of Fanta and one of beer. Crates of empty bottles were piled ceiling-high. I bought half a kilo of sugar and noodles, two Fantas and the beer. As we drank, many more amiably curious adults joined the throng and asked the usual questions. They seemed vague about the locations of Cajamarca and Cuzco; Trujillo was the city they were aware of as a ‘real’ place.
Yesterday afternoon my left boot again fell to bits and I decided I must be reshod. A charming ten-year-old boy led me up a steep street to the town cobbler, an elderly, taciturn man who makes boots for the campesinos; but he had none to fit me. He scowled contemptuously at my Mexican non-masterpieces, then set about doing complicated things with different sized nails. I sat unsteadily on a feeble home-made chair that had lost most of its cane bottom. The workshop was dark and Pampas has no electricity. When crowds blocked the doorway the cobbler fiercely whispered something that instantly dispelled them. He seemed to know what he was doing with my boot, but refused to accept payment.
Back in the Plaza, I asked if we could buy bread, or milk, or eggs. But no … A group of youths then held a muttered consultation before one of them led us to a minute eating-house. He looked at us anxiously when he had pointed it out and mumbled something about its being ‘very poor’; obviously he and his companions had been worried lest we might spurn the local restaurant. But our reaction must at once have reassured him. As there was nowhere to tether Juana our young friend held her while we wolfed brimming plates of mutton soup thick with noodles and potatoes, followed by heaped plates of rice, chips, raw onions and smoked fish. Rachel was fascinated by a vividly-coloured wall-chart of the human body that hung above our table and the mestizo-campesino proprietress explained that her son worked as servant for a doctor in Trujillo. As we were leaving, she warned us to beware of the local miners – “bad men who drink too much”.
From Pampas we climbed steadily between low cacti hedges enclosing pathetic fields of failed crops. This too is a drought-stricken area: which seems extraordinary to us, remembering all the rain we’ve endured on the nearby puna. Two-thirds of the way up this mountain our path vanished without trace on a grassy ledge. So down we went, to the nearest junction, and up again more steeply than ever for forty minutes. Juana insisted on several rest stops – the gradient was brutal – and this suited me as I was beginning to feel the effects of an unwontedly large meal at the fatal hour of noon. If moderation can’t be achieved, then it’s easier to walk through the Andes with too little rather than too much in one’s belly.
The descent from that summit, on a path of loose stones, was also trying for Juana. (Our own thigh-muscle brakes are no longer bothered by such tests.) When we had dropped to the cool, shadowed level of an unusually extensive eucalyptus wood we were overtaken by an elderly man and a beautiful young mestizo woman, both riding tiny, thin ponies wearing gay cloth pannier-bags. They stopped to offer 30,000 soles for Juana, which provoked Rachel to sudden gloom. “One day”, she said, “we’ll have to sell her!” “Don’t!” I begged. “That’s too far ahead to be grieved about now.”
A small pueblo was packed onto a ledge near the foot of the mountain. In the sunny cobbled Plaza the little whitewashed church was closed and there were only two visible inhabitants – an ancient, shrivelled grandad sitting on the ground by the church door with a pensive-looking toddler on his lap. He told us that a German priest visits occasionally and pointed across the deep wide gorge of the Rio Conchucos to another mountain where, half-way up, a few red roofs amidst eucalyptus green mark a pueblo. There the German lives, alone; he never sees another gringo and our informant thought we should visit him. The pueblo was scarcely two miles from where we stood, as the condor flies. But the trek to it would take at least two days, beginning with a return to Pampas. We decided the German hated meeting other gringoes.
The rest of that descent took us to the head of a valley where it seemed one could touch the mountains on either side by standing with outstretched arms. We forded a trickle of a stream, then climbed onto a slope where our path levelled out amidst astonishingly fertile fields. It rounded two more mountains and passed through a still smaller pueblo (a ‘shamlet’ in Murphy jargon) where the substantial adobe houses looked well-kept and the natives were friendly. But they had no food for sale, though in this area intensive irrigation has conquered the drought. We were now at a junction of three valleys, where the Rio Conchucos bends sharply to flow from our wide valley into a gorge so awesome that we had to throw our heads back to see its edges, away up there against the sky. And behind us was the third valley, from which we had just emerged.
A mile before reaching it, we could see a long tree-trunk footbridge over the Rio Conchucos; so we began to soothe and flatter Juana in advance. Actually she took this challenge rather well, after an initial display of shock and horror. The tree-trunks were close together, and only about ten feet above the racing café-aulait river, and the afternoon was windless. Had this contraption been swaying, we might all have found it more difficult to negotiate. Rachel wanted to camp on the far side, in a eucalyptus grove by the water; I reminded her that one never camps at river-level – even during a drought. The drought has to end one day (or night). Also, the flat riverside fields were dotted with stagnant pools. So for the next hour we climbed steeply and at sunset reached this ideal site, an artificially levelled threshing-floor – the only level space for miles around – with ample (though not very sustaining) fodder for Juana and lots of firewood. By 6.30 lunch seemed many hours and climbs away and our noodles, simmered with a Knorr chicken cube, tasted like some fabulous Cordon Bleu invention. Unfamiliar trees cover the slopes directly above us and fill a nearby ravine, where a hidden stream is noisy; yet we have a spectacular view of the surrounding heights and depths.
We must be near Lacabamba, though since crossing the river we’ve met nobody. Now that we’re back in inhabited, cultivated regions, I’d expected to meet more fellow-travellers. Yet what would be the locals’ motives for travelling, when there are so few goods to be sold or exchanged? One’s judgement of distance alters here; I’ve given up thinking of miles or kilometres – instead I think of so many summits and valleys between Point A and Point B.
Occasionally this evening I have to stop writing to gaze at the massive dark majesty of the mountain just beyond the ravine – and then to look up at the sky, where fiery golden sparks burn in a coal-black infinity. One pities the travellers who stay always in hotels.
From what little we’ve seen of the mestizos of this area, they are exceptionally alert and friendly. What are their origins? Have they some of the blood of those tribesmen of the Conchucos area who, during the Second Inca Rebellion of 1537, rallied to the Inca general Illa Tupac? From these mountains that tonight are all around us, the Conchucos poured down by the thousand towards the new Spanish city of Trujillo, slaughtering all the Spaniards, or Spanish-supporting natives, they could capture en route. They then offered their victims to their tribal deity, Catequil. One gets the impression those tribes were more spirited and vigorous than the average Inca subjects. Pedro, de Cieza de Leon reported: ‘Among the Conchucos the natives are of medium stature. They and their women go clothed, with their ribands or insignia about their heads. It is said that the Indians of this province were warlike, and the Incas had trouble subduing them, although some of the Incas always tried to win the people over with kindly acts and friendly words. These Indians have killed Spaniards on several occasions, so many that the Marquis Don Francisco Pizarro sent Captain Francisco de Chavez out with a force of Spaniards, and the war they made on them was fierce and horrible, for certain of the Spaniards tell that a great number of the Indians were burned and impaled … The houses of these Indians are of stone with a thatch roof. Even though evil has had great power over them, I have never heard that they were guilty of the abominable sin of sodomy. To be sure, as happens everywhere there are bad among them; but if the practices of these are known, they are despised and looked down on as effeminate, and they treat them almost like women …’
The Incas were in agreement with Mr Ian Paisley on ‘the abominable vice’. When they found that sodomy – both private and ceremonial – was popular and accepted in certain areas, they set about liquidating whole families in their unsuccessful efforts to clean the place up.
Camp at Head of High Valley. 24 September
A late (8.45) start. At 5.30 I moved Juana to a patch of green grass, lest there might be no Alf at Lacabamba; this patch was so perilously placed that it would have been risky to leave her there unsupervised. It rained lightly last night and was still cloudy and humid when we began to climb through thick groves of trees with delicately scented rose-pink or violet blossoms. Our path sometimes became a rock-stairs and we were all sweat-drenched when we arrived in the deserted Plaza, which faithfully follows the Spanish pattern universally imposed on these Andean settlements. Soon we were noticed by a stocky, cheerful-looking young woman with a kindly-bossy manner who broke the news that here we could find no Alf, oats, noodles, tinned milk, eggs, tinned coffee, sugar, bread, rice or beer. “Chicha?” I asked wistfully, more out of habit than with great expectations. Butyes! – there was chicha! It surprised our friend that a gringo would drink it … She knocked on her neighbour’s door and after a few moments it was opened by an old, old woman in a black shawl (recalling the Irish ‘mountainy’ women of my childhood) who wonderingly but graciously invited us into her twilit and bare-shelved shop. She drew forward a low stool for Rachel and a rickety chair for me, then provided two litres of watery chicha fascinatingly diversified by scraps of floating vegetation. (“Better than insects”, commented Rachel, peering into my glass.)
During the next ten minutes, a heartwarmingly concerned crowd – of all ages – gathered outside the shop. The two local teachers entered; both spoke a little English. There are over 100 pupils in the primary school but it’s hard to teach them anything as no equipment is provided by the present government and parents have no cash to spare and are too far from anywhere to exchange potatoes and eggs for notebooks and pens. Soon others took courage and entered the shop; most of them looked pinched and underfed, everyone deplored the present State of the Nation, yet no one seemed personally depressed. But it’s misleading to use that phrase ‘State of the Nation’. To what extent can the Peruvians, even now, be considered a ‘nation’ in our European sense of the term? One gets no feeling of a link between these people and the Lima government, not even the link of resentment or hate or anger. Nor do they seem to relate their regional problems to those of the miners, or of the sugar and cotton workers on coastal haciendas – or of the migrants in urban barriadas, most of whom come from the sierra. Many of them don’t know, or care, who now leads their country. Political fatalism is endemic; whether ruled from Madrid or Lima, the Andean peoples have passively endured centuries of misgovernment. At present things are worse than usual, yet the positive indignation that would be evident in a democracy is absent. No channel exists for constructive antigovernment thinking and feeling. Even under ostensibly democratic administrations, no one believes that elections are fairly conducted or that ‘elected representatives’ are ever likely to put their country’s interest before personal gain. The exception we’ve heard of is Fernando Belaunde Terry; this morning several people referred to him as though he were a saint rather than a politician.
A sack of barley-straw was brought for Juana by a beaming, wrinkled little man in a patched poncho who steadfastly refused cash but was at last persuaded to accept a packet of cigarettes. Our shawled hostess then asked if we were hungry. I thought it tactful emphatically to say “No!” though my supper of noodles felt very remote. But Rachel equally emphatically said “Yes!” and was given two cups of milk and a brown bun. The food shortage is becoming critical; I had no idea it would be so hard to find the basics. Now I regret not having bought a kilo of noodles at Pampas, but seeing only a few kilos in that shop I didn’t want to be greedy. Had we pleaded for supplies in Lacabamba, I’m sure someone would have rallied with something. But then they would have had to go even hungrier, for our sakes, which isn’t good enough. Had they had anything to spare, they would certainly have offered it; they were deeply worried about our welfare when we left them.
The tough climb out of Lacabamba soon had us sweating hard. By noon the little pueblo – its red roofs widely scattered among green groves – looked like a wooden Toytown I had as a child. Our path was then rounding a colossal rocky bulge (a sort of mountain hernia) and it seemed one could drop stones onto the diminutive roofs. The teachers had told us how to find the way at this point but somehow I missed the junction they had so carefully described. For half an hour we rambled to and fro across a plateau divided by dry stone walls into small, parched fields. Here the dirge-like rustle of dead maize sounded loud and we grieved over the unrewarded labour that had gone into the cultivation of these crops. Eventually we plunged into a narrow green valley and began a gruelling climb through thorny scrub onto another plateau, higher and more rugged. From here a shadowy path, overhanging a sensational abyss, led to a distant craggy summit. I rejoiced, but not so Rachel. “That’s only for goats!” she snorted. We climbed through vicious thickets of spiked cacti and poisonous thorn-bushes which one didn’t dare dodge because that crumbling path left no room for manoeuvring. Then the gradient became even more severe, amidst a wide, forbidding wilderness of large dark boulders. Finally the going got so rough that I went on alone to investigate, just as the puna wind drove an opaque sheet of sleet in our direction. Tiresomely, Rachel was right again. It would have been impossible to get Juana over the top; I found the climb difficult enough and if she missed her footing the drop would be onto a disarray of boulders a thousand feet below.
From this summit I could see another faint path which we tried next. On the way down to the valley floor we sheltered from a hailstorm in an enchanting grotto just high enough for Juana to enter and with a natural stone ‘bench’ along one wall. This conveniently placed cave is evidently much used by local shepherds.
After an hour’s climb, our new path entered a narrow rock corridor where a saucepan stuck, ripping off one of the pannier-bag straps. (An elementary misjudgement on my part; having had only two litres of weak chicha since supper-time yesterday I was beginning to wilt.) Here we were looking up another long, broad valley, magnificently blocked at its head by a sheer grey-black mountain wall which seemed to take up half the sky. “I hope you don’t imagine our path goes over that!” said Rachel. I didn’t; but possibly the path might find a way out to one side of the wall. However, when it became a maze of pathlets on the boggy valley floor I realised that we weren’t going to get to Conchucos, or anywhere else that might have food, before nightfall. Even for Juana the prospects were poor; this region has recently been drastically over-grazed. Making for the head of the valley, we crossed and recrossed a network of streams. I went ahead, testing the ground for dangerous bogginess. High on the mountain to our left goats and sheep were being tended by children whose shouts rang uncannily clear in the thin air though we could see them only through binoculars. With every moment we felt colder, wetter, hungrier, tireder – and higher. Then suddenly we were on a wide, clear track leading to tolerably good grazing just below a mass of loose black broken rock at the base of the mountain wall. Here I again left Rachel and Juana and climbed hopefully towards the southern summit; but the path petered out on a wide ledge where new grass was growing through burnt cacti. At one time it went over the top; now an almost Inca-perfect wall has been built to block it, probably because earthquake damage left it too dangerous for use.
I looked down at Rachel, sitting on a rock inscribing her latest poem in her notebook with Juana grazing beside her. It’s a relief that my fellow-traveller has become a poet; literary endeavour occupies her en route in a silence blessed for me. During our trips in Coorg, Baltistan and Northern Ireland, when she was aged five, six and seven respectively, she was far more dependent on Mamma for entertainment. Now she and Juana looked mere dots; the climb I’d done since leaving them would take one half-way up any Irish mountain, yet here it’s an afterthought at the end of the day. The scale of this landscape makes it much harder to find one’s way; e.g., what seems from a distance a ‘slight depression’ turns out to be a deep valley. I shouted to Rachel “No go!” and asked her to begin unloading: it was 6.15 and would soon be dark. Before descending I gazed down the valley towards a blue-green ocean of sky – which curiously seemed to be far below me – where a few thin streamers of carmine cloud floated just above a long ridge of purple cloud and beneath a flotilla of pale gold cloudlets. Already our valley was dusky, which made this sunset seem like something on a cinema screen.
A Scotch mist enveloped us as we rushed the tent up and we were just tucked away when the next downpour started. Rachel had the last tin of sardines for supper and while writing this I’ve eaten a whole slab of mint-cake, which in an odd way restores one’s energy without satisfying one’s hunger. The rain has stopped now, the stars are dazzling and it’s very cold – I’ve just been out to change the picket. We must be at about 13,000 feet.
Conchucos. 25 September
At 6. 1 5 there was much ice on tent and gear. Poor Rachel looked rather wan: she was obviously hungry and cold, yet uttered not a word of complaint. Her account of the Road to Conchucos is more graphic than mine:
‘Juana doesn’t seem to be a bit lame today even though we had such a rough day yesterday. We went steeply down a slippery slope and at the bottom it took ages to make Juana go across the little stream. There a hummingbird suddenly whizzed out of nowhere and hovered for a second in front of Mummy’s nose. He was bright emerald green and had a long beak, like all hummingbirds. The hummingbird must suck the nectar from the beautiful bright sometimes blue and sometimes pink cacti flowers. I would not have thought hummingbirds could live so high up for we must be about thirteen thousand now.*
‘After we had crossed the stream again we started hunting around for a track going up. We followed lots of goat tracks untill we came to quite a main looking one that we hoped went somewhere. We came to a rock with wet slippery moss on it and Juana slipped and went down on her knees. I was quite scared while she was floundering up because there was a drop that could be dangerous on one side, but we managed perfectly. We came to a little flat spot that was quite grasy and there was a really lovely view. I would say that you could see for about a hundred miles as the crow flies. Way over on the horizon you could see the pointy cone shaped mountain that we passed quite closely on the way from Cajabamba to Huamachuco. I walked for a while because it was getting chilly. We started to go down steeply and there were lots of little jumps for poor Juana. We can see a big pueblo a bit bigger than Pampas that must be Conchucos. It is about four miles away. There is a lovely smell of thyme in the air. There are lots of thyme bushes dotted all over the hillside. We went down a steep nasty piece of earthquake damage. At the bottom I mounted but had to dismount soon again for another rift. There were the lovely ball shaped flowering cactuses and another nasty type rather like spear cactuses except that they weren’t so long and a lot slimmer, of a redish greenish colour. I kept getting stung as I bashed about, it was most unpleasant I can assure you. I think Juana hated it too.
‘At last we got out of the beastly mess onto a quite respectable looking path going up parralel to the village, almost. It went up steeply for awhile and then all of a sudden Mummy began to have suspicions about wether the path went to the village at all, suspicions I had had all along. So Mummy left Juana and I resting and went on up to investigate. In a few minutes I heard her shouting, “Wrong track, it just goes out onto the puna” all what I had expected. When Mummy got back we sat down and wondered what to do. After looking at the opposite hill for a while Mummy said that we should go back untill we came to a little track that branched off our track and went down steeply. So that is what we did. I think Juana was enjoying today apart from the steep rough part. I feel a hundred persent now. It wasn’t very long before we started to go down. Then we came to a place where the earthquake had torn up the track. From a little way off it looked impossible for Juana but close up it was very simple as long as I dismounted. Juana went over it like a lamb. Conchucos looks temptingly close now but we still have the fear of not being able to get to it today because of a block that we couldn’t get Juana over. Soon we came to a landslide that Mummy thought we couldn’t get her over but we decided to try and Mummy got her over. Then we came to a very big rocky landslide that Juana just wouldn’t go over. While Mummy was trying to get her to turn round her stick slipped out of my hand and went sailing down a landslide slope.
Mummy needed the stick to go down the steep path so I had to go sailing down after it in a mini landslide which was most painful indeed. When I had got the stick I had to get back up the slidy slope. It was very hard work and Mummy was in an exceedingly impatient mood but at last I reashed the top.
‘Meanwhile Mummy had seen another little track going down to the road which she thought was better. I led Juana and Mummy went behind with the stick. Juana didn’t need much persuation but if she had known what was coming I am sure she would have. There is a horrid little cactus on these slopes. They are always oval with long stabby things. These diabolical things have got the disgusting habit of breaking off the body so the minute you brush against a prickle the whole section comes off and sticks onto you very firmly. They really hurt when you pull them out and often leave the tip of the prickle behind. Juana got two on her hocks, one after the other. I got one on my leg and Mummy got one on her hand. The path got worse and worse until at last it disappeared and we were left sliding down a landslide slope in the midst of lots of little stones rushing along. I got Juana over to Mummy and I went behind her with the stick. With great difficulty we got off the slope and managed to stay on two feet just to the end. There we had a little rest before I mounted and we continued on to the village. On the way we saw a bloated donkey lying dead on the road. The vultures hadn’t got her. How glad I was at last to get somewhere where I was sure there would be food. Remember our friends in Lacabamba had said there were thieves here but I wouldn’t have cared how many thieves their were if there was food. Whatever the people said, I think it is a very pretty place, at least in looks. Just as we were going into the village we saw a group of men sitting by a stream. They told us a great many pleasing things. There was a hotel, Alf, and drink and food. Mummy looked delighted. One of them asked if Juana was my pony. Imagine thinking a mule was a pony. We went and had on my part three Inca-colas and twelve nice savoury biscuits which to me was blizz. Mummy had two big beers and eight biscuits. We got eight small tins offish for the puna. There was no bread and no coffee. One of the men who had told us the good things came into the shop and asked all the usual questions. Then we went to look for the hotel and a coral for Juana who is limping again. We found the hotel which was really a posada. The nice woman had room for us and for Juana around a cornor. It was a very nice room with three beds in it. The walls were nicely white-washed and there were lovely pictures of different parts of Peru pasted on. We unloaded Juana and I gave her a quick grooming, then the woman showed us where she was to go. It was a secluded little kind of yard. There was a nice white pony tied to a tree eating straw. We tied Juana to a stump and she was given a fair amount of straw. The nice woman would accept no payment for it. She said we would be able to get Alf later on. When we had seen Juana organised we went out to look for some food for ourselves. We found an eating house but they didn’t serve main meals untill seven. We had coffee and delicious buns. It was very cheap. Then we went out for a dander and a look at the pueblo.’
Conchucos stands at a junction of three valleys, where a tributary of the Rio Conchucos joins the main stream. All these little pueblos seem very quiet; here the loudest noise is of water racing and gurgling through three-foot-wide channels that flow by the side of most streets – channels in which people wash dishes, clothes, meat, fleeces, vegetables and children, and from which they collect water in buckets for human consumption.
The same. 26 September
A relaxing day, during which the emphasis was on eating. After a blissful breakfast of innumerable fried eggs, buns and mugs of coffee with tinned milk, we set off up the tributary valley with towels and sponge-bags and found an ideal pool of deep, clear, icy water, semi-private below huge boulders. But alas! this valley harbours the most vicious Peruvian insect we’ve yet met: a minute black fly whose bite causes enormous Instant Blisters. And today’s bites were past reckoning …, My left hand and wrist were attacked with particular ferocity and this evening are grossly swollen and extraordinarily painful.
Conchucos has an unusually large and bare Plaza, a vast, oblong expanse of cobbles with no shrubs, seats or statues. The south side is dominated by a biggish church startlingly painted red, green, gold, purple – not unlike a Tibetan temple. Quite a contrast to the white-washed or pale brown adobe facades of the dwellings surrounding the Plaza. No priest regularly visits Conchucos but four Peruvian nuns open the church at 5 every afternoon and from within play jazz records, hideously relayed on amplifiers all over the town. This is supposed to attract the young to Christianity. At 6 p.m. a nun leads the rosary over the amplifier but neither the young nor the old pays the slightest attention. Inside, the church smells mouldy and the otherwise bare walls are decorated with valiant attempts to fan the embers of local faith – hand-drawn charts and diagrams, ingeniously relating biblical texts to the daily life and work of the campesinos. A dark-skinned crucified Christ hangs over the unused – but pathetically flower-bedecked – altar. Another, smaller crucified Christ, in a locked glass case, wears a jewel-encrusted kilt stiff with gold thread. The nuns twittered with excitement on hearing that we come from Ireland – to them a Garden of Eden, pullulating with priests, where everybody goes to Mass every Sunday and empty churches are unknown.
On the eastern side of the Plaza an imposing wrought-iron gate, under a fine stone archway, opens into a spacious yard where the eating-house is a solid lean-to. The restaurant-cum-kitchen is cramped but congenial with a wood-burning mud-stove warm and bright at one end. People sit around three little tables on wooden benches that wobble because of the bumpy mud floor. Whole pigs’ livers, and bloody hunks of mutton, hang just above the tables – and hungry campesinos, who have walked who knows how far, carefully choose exactly what they can afford. The washing-up is done in the channel outside the gate.
As eating has been our chief occupation here, we’ve got to know the restaurant owners pretty well. Grandad is courteous and quiet-voiced, with long sensitive hands and an open mobile face – sometimes sad and thoughtful, sometimes merry as he tries to cheer up those customers who are finding the burdens of life too heavy. His own burdens are heavy enough because his eldest son migrated to Lima seven years ago and bigamously remarried there, leaving Grandad to cope with daughter-in-law and four small children. The eldest, Pilar, is now fourteen – a cheerful lass with a broad Indian face, though Grandad looks very Spanish. Rachel envies Pilar because she owns an ebullient half-grown lamb, called Dado, whom she sometimes carries in a striped blanket on her back, as though he were a baby, and sometimes releases onto the restaurant floor where he skips around baaing demandingly and pucking customers’ knees in quest of a finger dipped in coffee which he sucks ecstatically. Pilar’s mother works at the stove from dawn to dusk, chopping wood when she isn’t cooking, and she’s such a loving person that she severely upbraided me for dragging a starving nine-year-old across the icy puna day after day. “But I enjoy it!” protested Rachel loyally. (And truthfully – I think!)
Our posada hostess, Rosa, is a lively young woman who yesterday afternoon, when she heard on the grapevine that we had been too late for lunch at the eating-house, invited us into her own living-room and gave us each a cup of coffee, a boiled egg and a little plate of plain biscuits. Her ten-year-old son is also envied by Rachel; he has a pet cock – fully grown and magnificently plumaged – which he carries around in his arms, caressing it gently and murmuring sweet nothings in its attentive ear.
This ‘hotel’ was opened two years ago when a weekly truck-bus-service from Lima began and it seemed possible that tourists might find Conchucos. So far they haven’t. The large, two-storeyed, brightly blue-washed structure was built by Rosa’s menfolk, with the assistance of eighteen relatives and friends. Our room opens directly onto the pavement and has a tethering hook outside the door. The floor is of beaten earth and the two unglazed windows are heavily barred. As I write this – by very dim electric light, which goes off at intervals for ten or fifteen minutes – half the adolescent population of the town seems to be crowding around the door and windows. They are a noisy lot and Rachel wants to get to sleep so I am now going to hang space-blankets as curtains.
Camp on High Puna. 27 September
As we left Conchucos at 8.30 everyone waved good-bye and wished us luck; even the schoolboys on their comically sloping soccer pitch stopped a game to cheer. Two hours later we were back on the puna where we still are. All day we met only two young men, driving a pottery-laden pony around the shore of a wide black lake shadowed by a sheer grey rock-peak. Here we picnicked off buns and sardines while admiring a pair of glorious Andean duck: the male scarlet with a blue bill and black head and tail, the female rust-coloured.
Having scrambled down a treacherous slate stairs that taxed even Juana’s agility we were again climbing, to higher and still higher expanses of sunny, wind-swept, green-gold puna. We saw several tinamous, and shrill Andean lapwings, and splendid Andean geese with white heads and bodies and black wings. At 2 we passed today’s only dwelling, a thatched stone but such as one might have seen on that same spot 4,000 years ago. Three ponies were grazing nearby and two dogs, sitting by the door, barked half-heartedly: but no one appeared. As there was neither cultivation nor any sign of flocks, we assumed this to be a latter-day tambo; the pony-man was doubtless asleep within. Travelling was much easier for the Inca troops than it is for the half-starved Andean peasants of today. Pedro de Cieza de Leon recorded: ‘Every four leagues there were lodgings and storehouses abundantly supplied with everything to be found in these regions. Even in the uninhabited areas and deserts there had to be these lodgings and storehouses, and the representatives or stewards who lived in the capital of the provinces took great care to see that the natives kept these inns or lodgings (tambos) well supplied … And all the roads in this Conchucos region were very well tended, and where the mountains were too rough, they built them on the hillsides, with terraces and flagged stairways, and so strong that they endure and will endure as they are for many ages’. Probably that slate stairs near the lake was a relic of one such road.
Soon after 5, a sharp ascent took us onto the very summit of a flat-topped rock mountain that had been conspicuous across the puna since 1.30. My lungs told me that this was our highest point yet in the Andes and the map suggested we were not far off 16,500 feet. We stood, all three panting, and gazed across a turmoil of ravines and valleys at Rosco Grande and Rosco Chico – aloof, chunky snow peaks apparently on a level with our summit. We were tempted to rest here, savouring our equality with those gleaming princes of the puna, but we dared not. That final climb had sweat-drenched us and at such a height, in the cold evening wind, hypothermia could strike.
The terrain ahead appeared to be all shadowy chasm, looming cliffs and rock-ringed lakes. By the path grew what looked like two-foot miniature pine trees – delicate Japanese intruders on this rugged scene. Some way off rose a perfectly oval, grassy summit, symmetrical and slim – “Like a giant’s tombstone!” exclaimed Rachel. Eventually we found ourselves at the base of this ‘tombstone’ where we rejoiced to see a long stretch of soft, juicy, green grass – super-de-luxe grazing, beyond the dreams of Juana’s avarice. This site overlooks a 2,000 foot gorge but its sides are comparatively gentle; if we roll over the edge we certainly won’t be killed though we might have some difficulty not rolling to the bottom. The tombstone so effectively shielded us from the evening gale that we were able to sup outside. At these altitudes the skyscape is no less overaweing than the landscape; and when they combine, as this evening, the slow-motion ballet of sunset clouds around high peaks leaves me almost (but not quite) too excited to eat my sardines. I’m still lying out on the grass and Rosco Grande and Rosco Chico are glimmering in the distance, their snows quietly radiant by starlight.
Sihaus. 28 September
At dawn a misty rain-cum-fine hail was hissing on the tent. Unzipping, the view was as from a boat: we seemed to be floating on a slowly shifting grey ocean. The gorge below us and the shallow valley immediately ahead were both cloud-filled: only Juana and the tombstone remained visible.
When we set off at 8.45 the mist was still thick and the air painfully cold. We lost our descending path on the edge of a sinister green-black marsh, then found it (we hoped) when the cloud partially lifted. Soon after we passed an Arthur Rackham lake: dark and still and somehow spellbound, in the half-moon embrace of a silver-black cliff.
Then our path became precipitous between bare rock-walls that seemed as though they might at any moment lean together and turn us into fossils. By early afternoon we were down to stream-level and in boggy trouble: Juana hates bogs. We could only solve the problem by walking in the stream for a mile or so, thus avoiding the unpredictable marshy patches on both banks. (How will my boots react to that?) Beyond this hazard, non-puna vegetation rioted in the gorge on our left. Here were meticulously built Inca stairs, and walls of smooth slippery wet rock down which poor Juana slid miserably but without protest. By now she seems to have accepted that life with the Murphys is a Fate Worse Than Death about which nothing can be done. It frustrates us that she spurns sugar, which is relatively plentiful; we can reward her more heroic endeavours only with cuddles and sweet words.
The afternoon was spend descending a long, winding, cultivated valley: often our path dived into rocky river-gullies, or climbed steeply to cross untidy outcrops of mountain. Even on its highest slopes, this was the most fertile Andean valley we’ve seen. In one settlement two billy-goats were ‘jousting’, their whole performance (much of it on their hind-legs) curiously ritualistic and dignified. The clashing of those formidable horns echoed across the valley and at last a bent old woman came hobbling out of a hovel to shriek at them and stone them. As they separated, she suddenly noticed us – and hastily crossed herself!
Later we met much traffic and our impression was of surly, rather decadent folk – all mestizos. An impression this town does nothing to contradict … The old people look utterly wretched, their faces dehumanised by decades of hunger, exertion, cold and oppression. Many of the young look no less miserable – and sly with it, or just plain bad-tempered.
Approaching Sihuas, the track ran for a mile or more through a stately plantation of giant eucalyptus. The placid Rio Sihuas flowed nearby and beyond it, on a level grassy bank, small boys were playing pitch and toss in the gentle evening light. Monotony is not a problem in the sierra; within hours one moves from an extremity of desolate isolation to tranquil domesticity.
Sihuas – sandwiched between high mountains on the banks of its Rio – is our biggest town by far since Huamachuco. It is devastatingly earthquake-ravaged; thousands were killed in the 1970 disaster and much of the older part of the town has now been abandoned. People feel safer on higher ground away from the river. (Nobody seems to know exactly how many were killed; in nearby Yungay, the death toll was over 20,000.) Our hotel was partially rebuilt after the ‘quake; it’s an oddly unwelcoming place, where we sense covert hostility. The restaurant is a long, high-ceilinged, mud-floored, crudely built structure with wide unglazed windows, a tin roof and rows of tiny tin tables and chairs. We were so hungry we ate two suppers; a) excellent potato and mutton soup, followed by boiled potatoes with chilli sauce and scraps of roast guinea-pig; b) chips with fried egg and chopped goat-meat. It was raining hard as we ate, sitting in a freezing draught between gaping windows. “We’d be better off in our tent”, observed Rachel, “except for the food.” But Sihuas offers an abundance of Alf and Juana is now happily corralled, with four tethered ponies, in the back-yard. Happy the region where hotels need corrals, not car-parks!
Camp on Mountain-ledge beyond Sicsibamba. 29 September
When we left Sihuas at 10, with four kilos of Alf tied to the load, the sky was overcast and the air cool: perfect walking weather. Scores of yelling (sometimes jeering) children followed us to the edge of the town where we found a new, gradually descending carretera – a dry-weather motor-road to the selva. Today its muddy surface bore no tyre marks. Here an almost-dry river-bed took up the whole floor of a yellowish-brown valley bearing many earthquake scars. No vegetation grew on the fissured cliffs, which at intervals were still collapsing onto the track. No fields or dwellings were visible until we came to a small wooden shack by the roadside. From this, as we passed, Ramon emerged – a neatly-dressed, diminutive young man with uncommonly dark skin, a trim black moustache, very bad teeth, Indian features and a smattering of English. He shyly appointed himself our guide and led us down to the river-bed, through the Rio by an approved ford and into a narrow, vividly green side-valley filled with the noise of a leaping, gleaming, foaming torrent. Twice we had to ford this tributary, getting soaked to the waist. Lest we might be swept away, I hung on to Juana’s neck and Rachel hung on to a stirrup; it would have been too risky to ride across, so unstable were the rocks underfoot. After the second fording we were on a fearsome Inca path, overhung by thorny scrub, which went straight up from about 8,500 feet to 11,400 – the sort of climb Juana, being a Peruvian, likes to tackle briskly. One of her abrupt upward rushes almost knocked poor Rachel over a precipice, so Ramon smilingly took the leading-rope and he and Juana disappeared, moving companionably at the same unnatural pace. Even trying to keep up with them (not that we tried very hard) totally exhausted Rachel and me. By gringo standards we’ve both acclimatised well but we don’t have the Indians’ physiological adaptations; their lungs and hearts, in conspicuous barrel chests, are not at all like ours.
From the top we descended, on a golden-brown mountain, to the outskirts of Sicsibamba – a small, scattered red-tiled pueblo built on different ledges of a steep spur, with many cultivated fields above and below it. Here Ramon pointed to a group of adobe hovels on a ridge above us – and without even an ‘Adios!’ sprinted out of our lives. Then I felt again the sadness of the gap between us and the Indians. Ramon, having moved into the mestizo-dominated world of teaching, had been more forthcoming than most. But in any other country I know, our encounter would have led to an invitation to visit his home and meet his family. Are most Indians hyper-self-conscious about their poverty? Or do they simply regard social intercourse with gringoes as impossible and/or undesirable?
All morning it had been April weather: alternate hot sun and drenching showers. We were visibly steaming as we wandered along a rough street where Rachel’s food-orientated eye discerned what seemed to be an eating-house, some thirty feet below street level. Four urban-type men were sitting at a rickety wooden table in a farm-yard, drinking home-made spirits while awaiting a late lunch. Noticing the gringoes, they yelled cheerful “Oles!” and beckoned us. Soon Juana had been tethered amidst pigs, hens, dogs, goats, turkeys and guinea-pigs – all swarming around the yard seeking what they might devour but apparently on excellent terms with each other. When presented with her luncheon Alf, which it had greatly inconvenienced me to transport thus far, our mulita bonito spurned it. “Not fresh enough for Her Highness”, deduced Rachel; which was probably true, though I saw it being cut at dawn this morning. The proprietress – a handsome, charming mestizo campesino – then detected her pigs trying to steal our Alf and rushed to rescue it; but I said the pigs could have it. In exchange, we were given a free lunch of excellent soup to which one added barley-mash according to taste from a big dish in the centre of the table, followed by potatoes with rich gravy and a tiny leg of roast guinea-pig. (At home I’m both a vegetarian and a devotee of guinea-pigs; walking through the Andes, such sensibilities become atrophied. Here one would eat one’s grandmother, even if she weren’t very well cooked.)
From their own supply our urban friends stood us two cokes and two cervezas; they were studying the prospects for Agrarian Reform in the Sihuas area and had come well-stocked from Lima. One was a negro, black as coal, who must have been six-foot-four in his socks and, beside the tiny Peruvians, looked like the representative of some Superhuman Master-race. He and his three mestizo colleagues seemed a good deal more interested in the two daughters of the house than in Agrarian Reform. These strikingly beautiful lassies each wore two brilliant flounced skirts, all minutely hand-embroidered, and tight llama-wool bodices. They flirted boldly – almost brazenly – with the four men and their mother seemed to approve. (The visitors may of course be regarded as possible future husbands, or at least worthwhile ‘protectors’.) One wonders how useful a report on Agrarian Reform in the high sierra could be produced by a coastal negro, two Limaborn civil servants and one young army officer from Trujillo.
Nowadays our plans are largely determined by the fodder situation. At 3.15 it was raining again and a dark cloud-lid pressed on Sicsibamba. Had Alf or oats been available we would have spent the night there; as only chopped dried cactus was on offer we pressed on. (Dried cactus is said to be a highly nutritious mule-food but the pernickety Juana won’t even sample it.) We were followed by the entire juvenile population which had been in delighted attendance on us ever since our arrival. These high-spirited youngsters shouted encouragement as we struggled through their pueblo’s muddy complex of steep alleyways. It seemed wise to ignore their advice, since each direction contradicted the one before it, and we might never have found the Pomabamba track but for the army officer who, feeling uneasy about our welfare, had hurried after us. He set us on a treacherously muddy path, overhanging a fearsome drop, and suggested that Rachel might be safer walking. This was our first Andean encounter with the peculiarly unpleasant hazard of slippy mud.
The grazing on this ledge is only moderately good. And it’s too wet for a fire, though there’s lots of wood lying around beneath nearby scrub. It’s damp-chilly now, but not really cold; here we can’t be much above 9,000 feet, if our American Geographical Society map is to be believed. But is it? The army officer, having looked at it, sneered. It’s dated 1941, which perhaps partly explains why we get lost so often.
Camp on Mountain-ledge overlooking Pomabamba. 30 September
A cloudless morning, warm by 7, with the wide, rainwashed world below our ledge all sparkling and green. As we packed up we were watched intently, for about ten minutes, by two barefooted, expressionless mestizos (aged thirty-ish) who stood silently only a few yards away, their frayed ponchos wrapped tightly around them. Our greetings brought no response and it is extraordinarily disconcerting to be studied as though one were an object rather than a person.
Half an hour later we joined a carretera but during the next seven hours saw only one honda and one mini-truck, both near Pomabamba. We had climbed steeply from our ledge to the carretera and could see it winding for miles across bare brown puna to an 11,000 foot pass. In one dip, we were startled to see our barefooted friends standing outside a derelict shack, looking towards us; evidently they had used some hidden redura. For the first time on this trek, I felt a twinge of apprehension. Meagre as our possessions are, by First World standards, to those two they must have seemed like fabled treasures of the Occident: padded flea-bags, husky suits, space-blankets, a tent, binoculars – not to mention our mula bonito … And the four of us had the puna to ourselves; no dwellings, or shepherds, or horsemen were visible. As we drew level, one man stepped forward and abruptly asked for money. We stopped, and I explained that we had none – that’s why we were sleeping out on the mountain – we couldn’t go to a hotel without money – we were hoping to get some from a friend in Pomabamba … Both faces remained unnervingly impassive, but they must have believed me for they said no more. My story was plausible; we could hardly be mistaken for rich tourists, with our weather-blackened skins, sweat-stiffened hair, filthy clothes and disintegrating boots. Bidding them a cheerful “Adios!”, we continued at our normal pace. After a moment they began to follow us, so closely that we could hear their muttered arguing. “They’re probably deciding where to throw our bodies”, said Rachel with a macabre grin – the child reads far too many thrillers. I felt more relieved than I would admit when, at the pass, they turned west.
Soon we too found a redura and rounded mountain after mountain, steadily losing height. By 2.30 we were approaching the T-junction meeting of two valleys and could see ahead a wild chaos of peaks and spurs, with waterfalls flashing down creeper-draped cliffs and frothy torrents racing between jumbles of barn-sized boulders. Here the carretera had to turn due north, and creep along the base of a rock-wall richly emblazoned with flowering shrubs. We were almost at the head of the Pomabamba valley when at last we could cross the infant Rio Pomabamba (here a very noisy infant, in a steep-sided cradle of black rock) and again turn south towards the pueblo.
This new valley soon became domesticated, with intensively cultivated slopes beyond the Rio. The carretera remained high above the widening valley floor and we were looking down, as we walked, on a microcosm of campesino life. Red-roofed adobe farmsteads were scattered on either side of the river, very far below. Men and oxen were struggling to plough near-vertical fields which looked as though they might at any moment slip off the mountain. A couple were flaying a sheep that hung from the eaves of their home. Women were spinning while tending their flocks. Toddlers were playing with kids and lambs, cuddling them and tumbling with them on the green turf. Older children were chivvying a turkey flock away from the river’s edge. Girls were fetching water in battered kerosene tins. Youths were unloading burros just back from the market. Pairs of old grannies were weaving poncho-cloth. Sleek horses were grazing on lush pasture. About this pastoral pageant – observed from a thousand feet up, so that one felt ridiculously like a spy – there was an aura of permanence, order, peace, security.
If Atahualpa had come back to accompany us, he would have noticed few changes in that valley. And what has Progress – our brand of Progress – to offer such people? Medical care, improved seeds, AI for the cattle, sanitation, literacy, birth control … But then a troubling thought: how can we give our goods without destroying their goods? Probably we cannot. Everywhere peasant communities have their own particular and precious integrity. And it seems to be virtually impossible merely to modify such cultures, so that the peasants can enjoy the ‘suitable’ benefits of modern civilisation while retaining what we deem valuable in their own culture. We can’t say: “Keep on weaving – that’s good! But you mustn’t take your water from the river – that’s bad!” As soon as Progress impinges, a community’s special integrity goes; and do we think enough about its intangible value before we go marching in to smash it? Our simple faith in hygiene and literacy and contraceptives and ‘the profit motive’ perhaps blinds us to the more subtle benefits, for the average peasant, of his traditional culture. Its structure and pattern and rhythm provide a framework within which the individual (who usually doesn’t think of himself as an individual in our sense) can find contentment. How will things be fifty years hence in the Pomabamba valley? If Rachel’s daughter were to ride then along that mountain, what would she see? Not, I fear, what we saw this afternoon. We are lucky. We can still just reach the fringes of the past, by leaning far out over that chasm created in human history by the earthquake of Progress. And this is important, if we are to remain whole and real human beings. We couldn’t live permanently like the campesinos – and wouldn’t want to. But it’s essential to remember that for tens of thousands of years, and until comparatively recently, that is how everyone lived. And the time may come when the survival of our species will require some of us to revert …
Spreading eucalyptus plantations heralded Pomabamba, a pleasant little pueblo of straight Spanish streets and welcoming people. There was no fodder available, but we were told of good grazing on the high path to Piscobamba. So after an excellent though hurried meal, in a clean, friendly eating-house, we crossed the Rio again at 5.15 and climbed very steeply to this acre-wide ledge from which we are directly overlooking Pomabamba. As I write, its scattering of tiny, twinkling lights are like a constellation fallen into the black depths of the valley.
It was so windy when we arrived here that Rachel had to help me control the tent, before turning to her usual evening task of collecting firewood; but the wind dropped as the sun set. We were then joined by Luis (aged ten) and Carlos (aged seven) who live in a nearby isolated shack. They are an enchanting pair, their curiosity and excitement beautifully tempered by courtesy and sensitivity. The local fuel is poor and our fire was a problem. So they rushed off, returned with armfuls of aromatic grass, stuffed it between my stones, expertly wielded their panama hats – and within five minutes our coffee water was boiling. They were very concerned lest Juana might be stolen while we slept and advised me to put the picket down inside the tent!
Pomabamba. 1 October
I woke at dawn to see Luis advancing across the ledge, bent double under a load of maize straw. Carlos soon followed, accompanied by their mother (aged twenty-six!) who firmly refused payment for the straw but accepted three Irish stamps with solemn gratitude. A daughter died between Luis and Carlos and she has three younger daughters. She assumed Rachel to be my grand-daughter and was tongue-tied with embarrassed pity when I explained that she was my only child. All three squatted on the ground and watched – rivetted by the whole process – while we packed up. I could quite understand their fascination; to me this seems a daily miracle of fitting a quart into a pint pot. When one surveys the camp in all its glory – tent up, bags unrolled, food, clothes, books, maps, saucepans, notebooks and tack strewn everywhere – it seems incredible that within thirty minutes Juana will be trotting off carrying what then seems a negligible load.
For three hours we climbed steeply, traversing not a yard of level ground. During one rest pause, Rachel spotted a two-inch stick insect, thin and angular, his brown and green colouring perfectly matching the striped leaves of his perch. When we looked carefully, we detected several more in that area. This climb was a real lung-buster but the reward was proportionate to the effort – an incomparable view of the Cordillera Blanca when suddenly, after many ‘false summits’, we reached the ultimate puna and were facing the highest mountain range in Peru. Across a wide, shallow valley rose the snow-burdened mightiness of a long line of serrated summits, the two highest peaks just below 20,000 feet. All morning we had met no one and here on this immense sloping plateau – sun-warmed and snow-cooled, vividly green beneath a strongly blue sky – I had the illusion of having actually left the inhabited world, as though we were now on another planet. Behind us, the vastness beyond the Pomabamba valley – which had so awed us during the climb – was hidden by that long rock-wall through which our path had just found a way.
We brunched here, before climbing still higher on boulder-stairways which inspired Juana to circus-trick nimbleness. Now we were weaving our way through – and could literally touch – those tremendous crags, which saner mortals see only from a great distance as ‘the mountain tops’. By noon I was suffering from such acute summit euphoria that I’d quite forgotten we had a destination.
Half an hour later we were startled to find ourselves again looking down, from a new angle, on the red roofs of Pomabamba. Yet we didn’t at once lose hope: many Andean tracks are forced to be eccentric. Only when we could see this path continuing to descend, and heading north, did we pause to consider our alternatives: a return to Pomabamba and a fresh start tomorrow (“On the carretera”, suggested Rachel), or a return to an unpromising previously considered thread-path. We both voted for the thread-path, only to lose the main track twenty minutes later, on the plateau … (It’s misleading to refer to it as a ‘main track’; at intervals it vanished completely for half a mile or so.) For the first time we were truly lost – unable to find a way forward or backward – though not alarmingly lost, with Pomabamba so close. Yet it can be quite difficult hereabouts to get off a mountain, as we’d learned on the way to Conchucos. “This is a dotty day!” exclaimed Rachel. And it was soon to become dottier.
We eventually found another distinct path, curving around grassy shoulders, but it dwindled to nothing on a long ledge where we passed the day’s first dwelling – an empty stone cabin in a potato patch. From there Pomabamba was invisible, nor did we glimpse it for the next forty-five minutes while we were slithering down a slope of crumbly red-brown earth to a level path broken by deep gullies which required Juana to do some stylish jumping. Traversing a partially cultivated mountain, we saw below us a circular valley in which women were shepherding and men ploughing. When we shouted a plea for directions they pointed to a faint diagonal path crossing the steep upper slopes of their valley. That restored Pomabamba to view, but now rather further away; despite all our efforts, we’d been inexorably pushed north by the intractability of the terrain.
This path vanished on a rock-strewn slope above a sheer precipice. Rachel went ahead to recce and reported that by moving onto the next mountain we’d come to a gradient with which Juana might be able to cope. So we cautiously advanced, at every step feeling the loose earth shift beneath feet and hooves.
My first reaction to Rachel’s route was that she must be feeling suicidal, matricidal and mulicidal. But here one gets used to attempting the apparently impossible. After only a momentary hesitation, we embarked on the most taxing manoeuvre of this trek. Juana was the problem. I led her and one false move of hers would have knocked me into eternity. (From that starting point, there was no other possible destination.) At the most crucial stage, when it seemed that neither Juana nor myself could ever again move up, down or across, Rachel called cheerfully, “I wish the camera hadn’t jammed! You both look so silly!” “If that’s how you feel, hurry on down and lead her yourself!” I yelled back savagely – before lengthening the rope and leaping across a mini-ravine onto a mound of earth that collapsed as I landed on it. Which was fortunate, for I slipped into a giant cactus just in time to get out of the way of Juana, who had too quickly jumped after me. Normally I don’t enjoy cacti embraces, but this was preferable to not being caught … (It was a poisonous horror and tonight my throbbing scratches are turning black in a most interesting way.) As we continued our acrobatic descent, even the insouciant Rachel became slightly alarmed about the fate of her mulita and her mamma (probably in that order). But we suffered only one casualty when a thorn bush, with branches like steel wire, tore Rachel’s mug off a pannier; we paused to listen to it rattling briskly to the bottom of the cliff. I don’t know how long our ordeal lasted: perhaps thirty or forty minutes, though it felt like a day. Safe at last in a precipitous stubble-field, we looked up at that most brutal of mountains and Rachel said, “Juana should get the VC!”
For the next hour we remained pathless, gradually working our way down and south across ploughland, stubble and wasteland. Then came an unexpected concrete irrigation channel which Juana resolutely refused to jump, though it was narrower than some of the gullies she had leaped over on the mountain. “She doesn’t like concrete”, said Rachel approvingly. We had to follow the channel to a footbridge from where a rocky path wound down for an hour between neat casas and shady groves. Here we bought six kilos of Alf and decided on a rest-day in Pomabamba tomorrow. I must have myself reshod; during our VC descent my left boot fell apart with an air of finality. When we again crossed the bridge over the Rio Pomabamba, on our way to the hotel, we completed a crazy circle begun exactly twenty-four hours earlier.