Camp in Field beyond Huánuco. 2 November
This evening we’re camping beside a main road and suffering from culture shock. For two months we’ve been living in Paradise, taking for granted the absence of all those artificial materials, colours, shapes and sounds that form the background to modern life. When we saw two campesinos cycling to work this morning, not far from our site, their ancient machines seemed to me sinister heralds of High Technology. “Funny to have you going into a depression about bicycles!” said Rachel.
Huánuco (pop. 38,000) is described in the South American Handbook as ‘an attractive Andean town’ and one might find it so if one had just arrived from Lima or Trujillo. Arriving from nowhere (as it were), it seems a maelstrom of vulgar ugliness. Katie is now staying in Huanuco with an aunt and had invited us to call. We left Juana tethered to a papaya tree in the aunt’s tiny suburban backyard, eating Alf, and Katie escorted us to the Mercado where (as in the shops) many ordinary goods are not available and prices are high. But we found a litre bottle of local honey (130 soles) – something Rachel has been craving for weeks. Katie then gave us a guided tour of the 16th-century church of San Francisco and informed us that it was a thousand years old, which horrified the pedantic Rachel.
In a café overlooking a treeful Plaza we had coffee and excellent cheese sandwiches. But there was no milk for our coffee and I couldn’t buy any cheese, the food I miss most on trek. An elderly man at the next table, who looked as if he’d seen better days, blamed the present acute shortage of dairy produce on Agrarian Reform and was glared at by three young men at the table beyond who proved to be radical university students. Afterwards Katie told us that the elderly gentleman’s family had once owned the hacienda beside which we camped last night.
Beyond Huánuco a dreary tarred road took us past an ostentatious new university building. Although the tar had melted we were sorry when the road reverted to Peru-normal; then each passing vehicle left us dust-shrouded and choking. The traffic was comparatively heavy and we passed a truck and a Dodge van mashed together. Campesinos standing nearby told us that the three in the van had been killed and flies were seething on the freshly blooded ground. We must now present a Third World appearance; a smart car coming from Lima stopped to investigate us and the gracious lady in the front seat gave Rachel 100 soles before driving on. All afternoon the humidity was – literally draining.
In this grassy corner of a steep maize field we are hidden from the road by a cactus hedge. At dusk, as the daily downpour started, a score of chanting, drunken men passed by on the road carrying tall boards decorated with coloured baubles. This procession climbed to a casa above our site by another path, but two old men broke away and came past us, singing their own duet. Loaves of bread – baked in the shapes of men, animals, birds, trees, mountains – were attached to their board, revealing that they formed part of a wedding celebration. They warned us that if the rain continued we would be inundated by the wide irrigation channel nearby: a minor hazard I had already thought about. Then they gave us a man-shaped loaf, at least half-a-kilo of plain but delicious new-baked bread. I can still hear the Indian wedding music – monotonous by our standards, but poignant and strong.
Camp on Ledge above Rio Huallaga. 3 November
On this ‘highway’ (which in fact is only an all-weather dirt-track) the 20th century has not made its mark much beyond Huanuco. I’ve now sufficiently recovered my equilibrium to recognise that the traffic-flow, which yesterday seemed M4-ish, is more reminiscent of a third-class road in County Leitrim around midnight in January. Also, as Rachel shrewdly remarked this morning, “If you want to find out what Peru is like you can’t spend all your time where there aren’t any people”. This was said as I winced on the approach of the day’s first truck.
We woke to feel surplus water from that irrigation channel running under the tent floor and we were already sodden as we waded onto the road through a calf-deep flood. Here we are out of animal territory – the locals travel mostly by truck-bus – and little Alf is grown. On the outskirts of Ambo we asked a young woman where we could buy fodder; moments later she came hurrying after us with a bundle from her own cuy-fodder garden crop and would accept no payment.
Ambo is friendly, busy and undeveloped – the only town of any size on the sixty-three mile stretch of carretera between Huanuco and Cerro de Pasco. In the Mercado I bought hot-fresh buns, six fat tangy bananas and ten enormous juicy oranges; a cash economy has undeniable dietary advantages. As we squelched on, warm rain blurred our view of monotonous miles of cane-plantations. Then suddenly the sky cleared and within an hour all was dry beneath a savagely hot sun. Soon after we entered a sheer rocky gorge, thinly scrub-covered, where the road ran high above the excited young Huallaga and the sky ahead was filled with sharp summits.
As evening approached I went into another of my grazing tizzies. The climb from Huanuco to Cerro de Pasco is 7,450 feet, most of that in the last twenty miles, and no mula can be expected to keep climbing on an empty belly. When we came to this road-side ledge, some twenty yards by fifty, it seemed wisest to camp though Juana has only scattered low scrub to nibble; further on she might have nothing at all. Luckily she likes whatever this little bush may be, but the picket will have to be changed frequently. While I got the tent up Rachel climbed down a frightful precipice above the Huallaga to collect the only available firewood. Here the roar of the Rio is so loud that, as I write, it is almost drowning the sound of a passing truck.
Camp in Eating-House Backyard. 4 November
A depressing start when, close to our site, we passed the body of a fine roan pony who had fallen over the precipice far above; we could see the clump of grass that had tempted him and some was still in his mouth. The road was littered with new rock-falls and we kept to the rio edge. Not much further on was a patch of good wasteland grazing which would have made an ideal site. Maddening … One never knows where to stop for the best.
Rachel had squitters this morning (all that fruit!) and I insisted on her riding for an hour or so. In the village of San Rafael my heart lightened as I bought an enormous armful of Alf for 100 soles. San Rafael also has an eating-house and when I was tethering Juana to a verandah post I heard English voices, obviously associated with the Range Rover that not long before had overtaken us. It felt strange, after so long, to be able to speak ‘normally’ to someone other than Rachel. Carolyn and John Walton asked us to share their table, changed one of our American Express travellers cheques and invited us to spend Christmas with them at their tea-plantation in the montana beyond Cuzco.
In the sprawling mining-settlement of Huariaca we saw three llamas (our first) standing outside somebody’s hall-door, wearing brightly-coloured ear-ribbons to placate evil spirits and increase their fertility. For centuries this has been one of Peru’s main mining areas and the mountains are hideously lined and pitted and scarred.
Since emerging from the Higueras valley, we’ve noticed a changed attitude towards gringoes. People are more communicative, despite our linguistic limitations which require them to make patient efforts to understand and be understood. These carretera-conditioned folk regard us as possibly interesting representatives of an outside world they have heard of, even if their picture of it is somewhat distorted. When we paused in this little village, near some open mines, the locals insisted on our camping for the night in a wire-fenced muddy yard beside the eating-house. And two families invited us to supper, though they knew we had already eaten an early meal in the ‘restaurant’. (Both invitations were accepted, by Rachel and me separately.)
Tómas the Alf-vendor runs a tiny shop – almost bare-shelved, here as elsewhere – and while he was cutting Juana’s supper his sixteen-year-old daughter (the eldest of five) produced a tattered Geographical Encyclopaedia of the World in English – the first book we’ve seen for months. This pre-dated the dissolution of the British Empire but showed our home pueblo; half the village crowded in to gaze at that unimaginable dot beside el Rio Agua Negra.
It was dark and sleeting as we stumbled along a rough path, ankle-deep in mud, to our first dinner engagement. Mencia, a youngish Indian woman, operates the petrol pump and lives nearby in a tin-roofed wooden shack. We sat at an unsteady table, covered with an oil-cloth and illuminated by a guttering candle in a Nescafe tin. Plates of rice and delicious vegetable stew were solemnly set before us and eight silent spectators occupied benches around the shadowy walls, watching us eat. Their grave faces, just touched by candlelight, looked like so many copper masks in some corner of a museum. Cuys scuttled and squealed underfoot, being benignly surveyed by a sentimental over-fat black-and-white bitch called Lassie. (Most Peruvian bitches seem to bear this name and most pet lambs and kids are ‘Bambi’.) Noddle soup followed; the Indians, like the Tibetans, usually have soup after the main course. Then came cups of daisy tea made from bunches of dried flowers hanging above the wood-fuelled mud stove. This beverage is no doubt an acquired taste, which I feel no urge to acquire.
Back then to Tómas’s house, where we were served, in the shop, with a piled plate of boiled potatoes and big bowls of noodle and goat-meat soup. Here the family ate at the same time, in the inner room, and we were attended only by a diminutive grey kitten of obsessive friendliness, and with a deafening purr, who eventually crawled down my shirt-front and curled up in padded comfort.
As I write this my stomach feels agonisingly bloated; it’s not now used to one large meal in three days, never mind three large meals in one evening.
Camp on Puna beyond Cerro de Pasco. 5 November
Early this morning we passed through a dismal, stinking, litter-defaced mining settlement. Hundreds of horrid little grey huts, and dozens of even horrider blocks of flats, were crowded on the edge of a reeking red-brown river and overlooked by raped mountains. As usual in this region the walls were daubed with iAPRA! and various other political slogans. Peru’s mining settlements have always been centres of political unrest and would-be social reformers now try to use the powerful miners’ unions as levers.
Leaving the highway, we took an old mining road to Cerro de Pasco. This climbed between bare mountains into a puna valley desecrated by telegraph poles, mining company jeeps and barbed wire fences – all of which made the scattering of thatched stone cabins look oddly anachronistic. But we were cheered by the sight of five llamas bounding along the mountain just above us and then crossing the road in front of an astonished Juana, who has never before seen the like. These comical creatures have an extraordinary action, like certain jointed toys with limbs and necks that move in different directions simultaneously. Near Cerro we saw many herds grazing. Llamas follow their leader so slavishly that the driver of a large pack-train need control only one animal.
We were approaching Cerro de Pasco by its brand-new satellite town of San Juan de Pampa, to which we took a redura up an escarpment used as an urban dump. Several happy hairy pigs were gorging themselves on decayed refuse and a drooling imbecile youth was poking through the latest deposit with a stick. Here we are again above 13,000 feet yet the noon sun was hot and I fear we’ll always associate Cerro with the stench of that dump. From the top of the escarpment we could see the famous Junín pampa, one of the world’s greatest high-altitude plains, bounded on the farthest horizon by a faint line of snow-tipped peaks and with Lake Junin (thirty-six miles long) just discernible as a glint in the distance.
San Juan is well laid-out, its houses brightly painted, its streets wide and airy. But already a super-abundance of litter, and a burgeoning graffiti culture, have tinged it with slummishness. Before descending to Cerro we enjoyed an excellent lunch in a neat, clean, good-value restaurant run by two friendly women who asked if there were many mad people in Ireland or was it only us …
Squalor takes over completely in the old settlement (pop. 29,000, altitude 12,990 feet) where an open pit of truly Andean proportions dominates the town centre. Gold, silver, copper, zinc and lead are found in and around Cerro. Its fate was sealed in 1569 when Aari Capcha was herding his llamas and lit a fire against a rock – part of which melted, to become a silver ingot. Between 1630 and 1898, $565,000,000 worth of silver ore was exported from Cerro. Recently, in old mining galleries eighty feet below a main street, workers found a hidden treasure trove of gold Spanish doubloons. The highest coal mine in the world is twenty-six miles away at Goyllarisquisga. (End of statistics.)
Cerro’s attractions for the non-mineralogist seem limited. We escaped as quickly as we could – which wasn’t very quickly because the whole place is a muddy maze of pits, holes, caverns and what look like sewage-works but I suppose are exposed galleries. Rachel reproved me for using unseemly language as I hauled Juana out of the umpteenth water-logged trench; she argued that it would be odd if three and a half centuries of intensive mining hadn’t left a few marks on the place.
Not far beyond Cerro, Juana saw her first train; she’s had a mind-broadening day. We camped early in a slight hollow, where she can enjoy an all-night ichu banquet, and while writing our diaries lay outside the tent in warm sunshine. Dozens of llamas were grazing on a low hill to the east. A spinning woman herded them away when the western sky, above a long cinnamon ridge, briefly became a glory of pink and gold and grey-blue cloudlets.
Camp on Junin Pampa. 6 November
Today began with an amber, green and crimson dawn which we watched from our flea-bags while eating bread and bananas.
On the crest of the next ridge we were directly overlooking the Junín pampas, here defaced by metal telegraph poles, tin-roofed mining settlements, railway lines and electricity pylons (my bête noire in any country: here offensive beyond words).
At a bar-restaurant in a soulless settlement we brunched off coffee and fried eggs. Five night-shift miners were footless drunk, inarticulately garrulous and vaguely amorous; when the proprietor apologised for their behaviour I assured him that if I were a Peruvian miner I too would get drunk as often as possible.
During the afternoon pylons and settlements were left behind and we could appreciate the snow-streaked mountains in the far, far distance; unreal peaks, like a five-year-old’s drawing of ‘mountains’ – so needle-sharp and remote one couldn’t quite believe in them. Behind us rain-clouds were massing over Cerro de Pasco. Soon they were also massing ahead of us – and to the west, where those silver peaks seemed even more fantastic when half-shrouded in blackness. Then came thunder and lightning: strange, flat cracks of thunder, for there was nothing to cause an echo on the weird flat immensity of this plain. And still the sun continued to shine on us, while the dark sky all around was dancing with livid zig-zags. Then suddenly a violent wind drove the clouds towards us and within moments the temperatures had dropped many degrees. Hastily we camped, fighting the gale for control of the tent; we had just secured it when the downpour started. Poor Juana! Here she has nothing but wretched clumps of coarse scrub, fit only for a camel. This is not puna, but a bleak, grey, stony wasteland such as one associates with the Gobi Desert.
Camp near Lake Junín. 7 November
After the deluge, last night became a thing of beauty, all star-bright silence and peace. A night when the endlessness of the universe – which seems so near, looking up – puts all human concerns in perspective and to worry about anything would be absurd. Nor was it any colder than a mid-winter frosty night at home. I should know, having been out three times to change the picket.
Today we covered only twelve miles because of Juana’s malnutrition. By 8 we had reached good grazing near the lake, where she breakfasted while we watched a variety of unidentifiable birds feeding on the wide marsh between water and shore. The lake was still invisible and remained disappointingly so all day, hidden by high reeds.
In a non-mining red-tiled pueblo we met a kind young woman leading by the hand her all-dressed-up daughter whose fifth birthday this is. Taking pity on our fodder crisis she led us down long streets to a casa behind a high mud wall where, after much eloquent pleading, she persuaded an exceedingly grumpy old man to sell us 100 soles worth of dried oats – a colossal bundle. These were a novelty to Juana, who at first pushed them around the footpath disdainfully. “She doesn’t deserve to be well fed!” exclaimed Rachel in exasperation. However, Her Faddiness eventually decided to make the best of it and while we brunched she munched.
We were on the edge of the pampa all afternoon, where it merges into vividly green mountains on which dry stone walls mark the fields and the isolated thatched stone dwellings have half-doors. Beside most village houses stretch long corral walls and on some, as in India, dung was drying. But nowadays, in this treeless area, the majority cook on kerosene stoves, or bottled gas stoves if they can afford them.
For Juana now it’s either a feast or a famine: last night nothing, tonight both excellent grass and dried oats. And irregular feeding is not suited to the equine digestive system. We plan to have a rest-day tomorrow in the little pueblo of Junin, staying for two nights in a hotel if the fodder-supply is adequate.
Camp near edge of Junín Pampa. 8 November
We were distracted while striking camp by a flaming dawn – all orange and scarlet – a divine conflagration. One could only drop everything and look. Here the sky seems so close one feels almost translated to heaven at such moments.
By noon we were in Junin, a charming pueblo, both visually and humanly – fine colonial buildings, streets neat and clean, people warmly welcoming. But alas! nobody could produce fodder. Our first concern was to send an ‘All Well’ telegram to the British Embassy in Lima, as we had promised to do at the first opportunity. (We passed through Cerro de Pasco on a Sunday.) Junin’s little used post-office was down a side street and the telegram cost 12 soles for twelve words, whereas a letter would have cost 16 soles. The post-master explained that as most campesinos can’t write they use post-office clerks as scribes, dictating telegrams to relatives in the cities. This fascinated me. In the Middle East and India, where most people have always been illiterate, the village scribe is an immemorial institution. For millenia the Arabic and Hindu cultures have been highly literate and so letter-writing has been taken for granted by the peasantry. But pre-Conquest Peru had no written language and the notion of communicating through letters remains strange to this day.
We left Junín sadly, glancing over our shoulders at a menacing cloud build-up. We had been assured that we would soon reach good grazing but as we crossed the barren plain – not a sheep or a goat or a llama in sight – we wondered …
When the blizzard started at 2.30 Rachel agreed that we shouldn’t complain because the wind was behind us. As she put on her waterproof poncho I covered the load with our cape and wrapped myself in a space-blanket. Then for two and a half hours we plodded on through swirling soft snow that restricted visibility to about fifty yards. It wasn’t intolerably cold but soon our feet were numb. And poor Juana, with head down and ears back, was misery personified. At last Rachel began to crack up; for the first time she complained, of cold feet. I knew the agony she was enduring – you might say we were both in the same boot – but as the sky was lightening slightly I urged her to keep going in the hope that soon we could set up a dry camp. Then the snow became rain/sleet and soon there was a lull, though the clouds remained low and unbroken. We rushed the tent up and were just putting down the last peg when the sleet started again.
As I was writing this Rachel drifted back from the edge of sleep to say drowsily – “Do you know what you’re like? You’re like those Spartan mothers who left babies out all night on mountains to see if they were worth rearing!”
Camp amidst Cactus beside Stream. 9 November
The fodder crisis forced us to rise early, despite the intense cold. But our hands were so numb-clumsy that we didn’t get off until 6.15, still wearing all our night-clothes and with the tent – an unpackable sheet of ice – draped over the load. A rough level track (in theory motorable, though we’ve seen no vehicle all day) took us around the snowy shoulder of a long mountain, with the edge of the Junin pampa on our left. As the sun rose, a herd of llamas was released from a Co-op corral on the gentle slope above and went bounding uncoordinatedly towards their grazing-ground. Soon we were off the mountain, following a llama-path redura across an apparently endless expanse of springy turf. The deep blue sky was cloudless, the silence profound, the air crystal: a line of sharp peaks to the north seemed quite close, yet according to the map was seventy miles away. Suddenly I wanted to turn somersaults – a recurring temptation, sometimes given in to, when the beauty of a landscape goes to my head. No doubt a psychiatrist would prescribe therapy for such behaviour on the part of a woman approaching her forty-seventh birthday. But here this temptation has to be resisted because so much vital equipment is carried in my bush-shirt pockets.
Eventually Juana found some breakfast – a patch of ichu grass not cropped by llamas – and a few miles further on we came, without any warning, to the edge of the plateau. Beneath us lay an immense circular valley, its newly-ploughed sides red-brown below grey rock escarpments, its floor holding a large, scattered, red-roofed pueblo with many green fields between the houses. Even from a distance, there was an air of tranquillity and prosperity about San Pedro de Cacas. The Andes contain so many separate, self-sufficient little worlds – from mountain to mountain and valley to valley and pueblo to pueblo there are dramatic contrasts in the atmospheres created by the locals: welcoming or indifferent, hostile or helpful, sullen or cheerful.
San Pedro is cheerful – and looks it. The sturdy two-storeyed houses around the main Plaza have humourously carved wooden balconies and are painted blue, green, white, yellow, pink. The unusual little church has two vaguely Norman towers: one shocking pink, the other lupin-blue. Although these grieviously offended Rachel’s austere taste I thought they added to the pueblo’s air of spontaneous gaiety. The further south we move, the better maintained are the churches.
Juana munched green oats while we relished stale bread and slightly ‘off bottled olives, washed down by several cups of cafe con leche – a rare treat, milk being so scarce in the sierra. We had found San Pedro’s thatched, white-washed cafe by chance: no sign indicates its function and it contains only two small tables. The owner, Martin, is an engineering student on compulsory vacation from San Marcos University, now closed because of political unrest in Lima. Although a devout Catholic, he would support the Communist Party if they seemed likely to overthrow the army junta. But this, he feels, is impossible; the Party in Peru is so disunited that few take it seriously. Like too many of his generation, he is impatiently contemptuous of Peru and longs to emigrate. (Yet he would probably have taken massive umbrage had we gringoes criticised his country.) It upsets me to find, among the more intelligent young whose talents are desperately needed here, this compulsive longing to escape … Not that one can blame the individuals concerned; they are merely reacting to centuries of corrupt leadership. Inevitably they feel trapped in a country without a future – for them. And the more they are told about Peru’s natural wealth and potential for ‘greatness’ – a favourite theme of political leaders – the more restive and resentful they become. Martin had quite a lot to say about the Monroe Doctrine. He concluded, “Latin America’s riches have never been exploited for Latin America. So why should we stay at home and work harder to make the gringoes richer?”
Beyond San Pedro the rocky gorge of the infant Rio Palca led us to the head of a narrow green valley. This is an area of friable rock where the mountains’ broken crests look like primitive weapons stacked against the sky. On our way down we passed dozens of mysterious-looking caves, grottoes and caverns. By noon this twisting valley had widened and become lavishly fertile. For the first time we were in market-garden country, surrounded by acres of beans, carrots, peas, turnips, spinach, lettuces, onions, carnations, gladioli and roses. These orderly humdrum plots seem incongruous at the feet of mountains whose sheer slopes are all smooth grey rock, allowing nothing to take root. Above the river we saw, for the second time since leaving Cajamarca, traces of ancient terracing; and some of the terraces had been inexpertly restored.
One of the Incas’ main achievements was to increase the area of arable land throughout the sierra by terracing and irrigation, but post-Conquest their entire agricultural system collapsed. This was partly owing to that tragic depopulation which has been so feelingly described by John Hemming. ‘Disease was important, but was not the main cause of the sharp decline during the first forty years of Spanish rule. That decline resulted more from profound cultural shock and chaotic administration. Since the death of Huayna-Capac the people of Peru had lived through a numbing series of catastrophes. Their calm, rigidly organised society was shattered in quick succession by a ferocious civil war, a bewildering conquest by foreigners totally alien in race and outlook, two mighty attempts at resistance, and a devastating series of civil wars among the invaders … In such turbulent times, many natives grew so deeply demoralised that they lost the will to live. This is still a serious threat to primitive peoples who witness the collapse of their way of life … A group of aged Inca officials interrogated in the 1570s described this pathetic condition. “The Indians, seeing themselves dispossessed and robbed … allow themselves to die, and do not apply themselves to anything as they did in Inca times.” This same demoralisation led to a sharp decline in the birth-rate, a phenomenon accelerated by population movement and the disruption of the Inca marriage system.’
The unremitting communal work of clearance, terracing and irrigation requires considerable man-power, highly organised. And it was not to be expected that the traditional mit’a duties could be performed during those fatal decades of confusion, epidemics, fear and despair which followed the arrival of the Spaniards. Nor, over the past 400 years, has there been any motive, from the Indians’ point of view, to pick up the pieces. The damage done by the Conquest to their way of life – and their psyche – was irreparable. The Catholic Church could not replace the relatively simple religions they had evolved to suit their own needs. Nor did the setting up of an independent Peruvian nation bring them any relief or hope. And the many humanitarian projects dreamed up by do-gooding foreigners to raise their standard of living and entice them into our cash economy have made little impact on people who do not want to be as we are. One is led to the heart-breaking conclusion that the Andean Indians have reached the end of the evolutionary road and are a race without a future, apart from a minority of exceptional individuals. In 16th-century Peru the Spaniards in effect (though not deliberately) committed genocide. In North America the English and French did the same thing deliberately, and so more obviously and efficiently. Some people are infuriated by historical ‘ifs’ but I have a weakness for them. If the British rather than the Spaniards had conquered Peru, would they have recognised the value – to themselves – of the Incas’ extraordinary organisational abilities and contrived to exploit the country’s wealth without wrecking its social structure? Or would they have been even more ruthless than the Spaniards, regarding the Andean Indians as vermin to be exterminated? Or was the Inca Empire so inflexible in its isolation, and so dependent on the unquestioning obedience of contented millions, that it would have disintegrated in the wake of any outside interference, however willing the invader might have been to compromise? That is probably the case.
Alf is also grown in this valley and as we waited for a bundle to be cut we watched fields being harrowed with the reluctant assistance of a donkey or small pony. One man dragged the animal along by the halter: another followed behind, bent double as he lent his outstretched hands on a flat board through which long nails had been hammered. I’ve seldom seen such an ineffectual improvisation. In Baltistan something similar is used, but there bullocks are trained to draw the harrow willingly and children sit on the board to provide the necessary weight. Other fields were being prepared for replanting by more traditional methods, the men working as a team to turn over the soil with digging-sticks that seem unchanged since Inca times, while their womenfolk followed behind breaking up the clods with stones bound by creepers to two-foot poles. One sees more modern implements on sale at most markets, so presumably some campesinos actually prefer their own familiar labour-increasing devices on which no cash need be spent.
When we passed through the attractive little pueblo of Acobamba, huddled between eucalyptus-covered slopes, it was gruellingly hot; we had been descending all day. Three friendly mestizo youths accompanied us for a few miles down the ever-widening valley and diagnosed that Juana badly needs carrots. Rachel was scandalised when they provided these by casually pulling a bunch from a field we happened to be passing. “We must pay the farmer!” she whispered frantically. But when I offered soles our friends laughingly rejected them. Alas! Juana equally emphatically rejected the carrots: life would be much simpler if she weren’t so choosey. Happily this valley has fields of Alf around every other corner, so tonight she can eat her fill.
Because of intensive cultivation it was hard to find a site. But at dusk we came to this patch of wasteland, scattered with horse-dung, between the track and a swift stream. It is perilously cramped – only about fifteen yards by five, with giant, razor-sharp cacti growing all around the tent and barely enough room for Juana to lie down. As Rachel searched for firewood (surprisingly scarce here) she met a young campesino woman and her two schoolgirl sisters, who were weeding a bean-field. Then distant laughter indicated that Rachel was happily practising her Castilian. As she remarked yesterday, “Speaking bad Spanish is the best way to make friends. If you speak none or too much it’s not so barrier-breaking”. One little girl brought me an armful of dry leaves and twigs and within moments had our fire going. Her older sister soon followed, with a gift of broad beans which so delighted Rachel that against my advice she ate them raw. As I wrote that last sentence the girls reappeared by moonlight to present us with a skirt full of potatoes. Unfortunately the embers are now too low to bake them and we have no spare firewood.
Camp on very steep, very stony Mountain Ledge. 10 November
An hour after setting off we came to another little pueblo, Pomachaca; the map shows that this is among the more densely populated regions of the sierra. As we descended an empty cobbled street in the residential suburbs, one of the old heavy wooden double-doors swung open and we were observed by an elderly woman with fine-boned Spanish features, clad in 1920S widow’s weeds. She watched our approach, standing beneath her handsome stone archway, then stepped forward and graciously invited us to desayuno.
Within the tidy patio-cum-corral, firewood was stacked high against one wall, sheaves of straw against another. Rabbits hopped and cuys scuttled within their separate runs and a small enthusiastic mongrel bestowed affection all over the place. When Juana had been given a sheaf of paja we were invited to sit on a wooden bench on the verandah, screened from the patio by grass lattice-work. Soon an Indian servant appeared, bearing on a tarnished silver tray very chipped enamel mugs of very weak coffee and a few brittle hunks of the stalest bread I have ever eaten anywhere. I could tell from Rachel’s expression that good manners were costing her dear; unlike her Ma, she is easily nauseated by foods that are past their prime.
Meanwhile several neighbours had joined the party: all elderly ladies, grave of visage and soberly clad. Most Peruvians are vague about Ireland – though they regard it as an important country, because mainly Roman Catholic – and we were asked many questions. But there was no reference to the Northern Ireland tragedy, of which few people here are aware. (How many British or Irish people are aware of Peru’s political violence problems?) Eventually our hostess’s son Manuel, aged thirty-ish, came hurrying in with a few fresh biscuits wrapped in newspaper. Mercifully even Rachel realised that this was an occasion for restraint and did not swallow the lot on sight.
Manuel asked to be shown our route on the map and when his grandmother, aged eighty-six, heard that we had passed through Junin, she summoned her servant to fetch a rusty lawyer’s deed-box containing family treasures. This was unlocked with a key taken from the recesses of her skirts and, after much rummaging through yellowed letters and newspaper clippings, she produced a blurred brown photograph of an Irish priest who in 1921 had worked in Junin. Fr McMahon was his name – it was written on the back – and perhaps we had heard of him? He was a famous man and had baptised Carmel, her daughter (our hostess) and three of her six sons. Everyone politely concealed their disappointment when I confessed that we had not heard of Fr McMahon.
This group also expressed a disquieting contempt (not too strong a word) for Peru and were full of admiration for Western Europe and North America. I felt quite embarrassed by what seemed to be an acute national inferiority complex. Then afterwards I wondered if it was that, or something more personal and complicated, to do with the humiliating decline of their own families in a Peru that since Independence has been governed – more often than not – by unscrupulous scoundrels. When our hostess took me into the house it seemed the very epitome of decayed gentility. The only touch of freshness and colour was provided by three vases of gladioli arranged in front of a large statue of the Virgin Mary in an alcove in the hallway. Manuel followed us around – a spiritless, lost-looking, pale creature who bore an uncanny resemblance to the mildewed portrait of his great-great-grandfather in the dining-room. This ancestor had owned a vast hacienda between Pomachaca and Acobamba – where we noticed all those unusually fertile fields, now in the control of a Co-op. But during his lifetime, according to Manuel, the family fortunes declined because he spent too much time in Lima and his mayordomo deceived him. A sadly commonplace story in Peru. As we were preparing to leave – bridling Juana and tightening the girth – Manuel said with sudden vehemence, “The Spaniards should have gone a hundred years sooner. When they left, Peru was already too rotten to rise as a nation”. Then he heaved a sack of paja (a present for Juana) behind the load and expertly flicked and twisted our rope to hold it in place. The family retains a few hectares of land nearby, on which Manuel works himself, side by side with the descendants of those campesinos who once were virtually owned by his forefathers.
That interlude had a faint flavour of The Bridge of San Luis Rey; timelessness tinges the whole Peruvian ambience. In the pueblos, however, it is not the reassuring timelessness of remote places but rather a sense of stagnation, or of weariness with a present that somehow hasn’t really arrived … I’ve put all that badly; writing conditions tonight are less than ideal and anyway it’s not an easy atmosphere to convey.
From Pomachaca our track continued its gradual descent, passing countless fields of farm crops, vegetables and flowers. In every Mercado flower-sellers are conspicuous because the devout regularly buy fresh bouquets to honour their favourite saints in the parish church or to decorate domestic shrines.
In the busy, straggling town of Hualhuash women Alf-sellers were sitting on the pavement outside the Mercada and as I negotiated for 100 soles worth the hungry Juana escaped from Rachel and almost trampled a baby to death. This wasn’t Juana’s fault; campesino mothers have a habit of leaving their infants – looking exactly like rolled-up blankets – strewn about on the pavements.
The six level miles to Tarma, on a tarred road wreathed in petrol fumes under a savage noon sun, were more exhausting than a sixteen-mile climb on the puna. This is a built-up area; new casas abound, fast motor-traffic flashes by, and on the outskirts of Tarma – a town of some 30,000 inhabitants, at 9,100 feet –we even saw four advertisement hoardings. To avoid the main street, where Juana was bothered by melting tar, we turned into a side-street and walked parallel to a noisome canal full of litter, rotting vegetables and bloated animal corpses – rabbits, rats, dogs, cats. Not nice …
We were determined to avoid the Tarma-Jauja motor-road and by good luck appealed for guidance to a kind elderly man whose home hamlet is on the old route between the towns. He led us up a grassy track which he insisted was the Camino Real, pointing to its width, and to the smooth stone slabs beneath the turf, as proof of his claim. Soon after we had left him, our track joined a dusty-white dirt-road that could be seen for miles ahead, running level through a village before vanishing around the shoulder of the massive mountain on which we stood. Scrutinising the barren way ahead, through binoculars, we realised that Juana would have no grazing tonight. So we set about securing a load of the Alf that grew on terraced ledges below the road. Its owner proved to be a cheerful, handsome, middle-aged Indian woman who sent three small nephews leaping down the terraces with bill-hooks to cut the second-tallest crop: different ledges were at different stages of development. The tallest, which was flowering, would be unsuitable mule-feed though it’s said to be best for cattle.
It takes time to cut r 100 soles worth so we loosened the girth, gave Juana a paja snack and sat on the edge of the precipice gazing down the valley to Tarma in its furnace-like hollow, now far below. The opposite slopes of smooth-crested mountains were a rich red, streaked and patched with the green of eucalyptus plantations and, below them, with the light green of Alf and the darker green of potatoes. Down the length of the valley, three large cemetaries were visible on the lower slopes – none near a village. These conspicuous rectangles had high mud walls, arches roofed with cacti over their gateways and rows of white-washed ‘blocks of flats’ for coffins.
Soon we were joined by the Alf-owner’s son, a striking-looking young man with coppery skin, an aquiline nose, straight, shoulder-length hair, long narrow eyes and a melancholy expression. The fluency of his English astonished us until he explained that he had lived for a year with a Canadian family in Lima. Then he entered San Marcos University, to read modern languages and history, but after two terms found himself dangerously involved in politics with no prospect of achieving anything but threats to his own future – even to his life. “I don’t want to be a revolutionary”, he explained, “I only want to reform things quietly. And for that I could get no support. So I came home.” He nodded towards ‘home’, a cluster of solid dwellings and stables on a wide ledge half-way down the mountain-side. He continued, “It is more important than going to demos in Lima if I can help to educate the local campesinos. I am pure Indian. I have no Spanish blood – I hope! And the Indians need education. Not only book-learning, but the sort of education that will give them the confidence to look other Peruvians straight in the eye and claim justice. Not any sort of special favours or concessions – only justice, which they have never had.” He pointed down the valley at the remote flat roofs of Tarma. “See that town of Tarma? Do you know that exactly 440 years ago, in 1538, Captain Alonso Mercadillo and his Spanish troops spent seven months in Tarma, when they were supposed to be subduing the Inca’s army at Huanuco, and they robbed and looted and raped and enslaved, and tortured the Inca chiefs to make them give up their silver and gold … And a few years later Pizarro gave all the Indians of Tarma and Junin to his treasurer, Riquelme! He gave them, as though they were llamas, and said their owner had only to convert them, quickly, to Christianity, and then he could use them on farms and down mines. Afterwards the Spaniards argued that anyway the Incas had owned those people, so they were never free. That is a dirty half-truth. They were never free like European people: they and the Incas knew nothing about that kind of freedom and didn’t want it. But they were well housed and clothed and free from hunger and insecurity. They were content and not abused and they understood Inca law and religion: it made sense to them the way European laws and Christianity never could. You have heard talk of a united Peru, with all the citizens equal and working together for the good of the nation? That is nonsense. It can never happen. There is no room in Peru for two races whose minds have never met after 450 years of sharing the same country. Either the Indians take over or they go even further under as the others ‘exploit’ the land with new technology. I know in my brain we must go under. But still with my heart I want to bring the campesinos into the modern world and help them to survive there – because they are my own people. My mother thinks I should have stayed at university. I am clever, I speak good English and French, if I don’t bother about the campesinos I can get on. But get on to where? In Peru if you get on you must ignore – forget about – those who can’t get on. Then I wouldn’t be happy. Yet in a way my mother is right and I’m wasting my time. Most campesinos aren’t interested in being educated to live in the modern world. They want only to live well in their own world. They don’t really want to be part of a cash economy – their minds and spirits don’t work that way. Perhaps they would only be happy if Peru could go back to 1520 and remain undiscovered! My professor in Lima said, ‘History has left them stranded’. Probably he is right. And this is very sad.” Abruptly our eloquent companion stood up, as his three little cousins scrambled onto the road with their loads of Alf. I asked him then for his name and address, feeling that I would like to keep in touch with him. He stared down at me impassively for a moment, before shaking his head. “No – I’m cutting off now from the outside world. I can only help my own by going back into their world – not just visiting it, while half my mind stays elsewhere. Tou may think stupid. But it is the only way, like going into a monastery to contemplate. So we will not keep in touch, unless sometimes you think of me and wish me good luck.”
Having written as I did last night, it felt strange to hear my own feelings so exactly echoed this afternoon by that remarkable young man. Although dressed like any other modestly prosperous campesino in this fertile valley, and living in a simple home, our friend had what can only be described as ‘an Inca aura’ – partly owing to his unusual appearance, but also because of a certain air of authority that had nothing to do with his position in society. Put on paper, his words may seem ambiguous; they might be no more than the vapourings of an unbalanced young man who sees himself as the Messiah of the campesinos. But he didn’t sound like that. Something utterly genuine, and not unduly idealistic, came through as he spoke. Rachel afterwards observed that it would be nice to meet even one Peruvian who was full of hope for the future. But then – could such a person be taken seriously? Why does one feel that there is less hope for Peru as a whole (not just the Indians) than for Pakistan and India, which have far greater material/ social problems? Is it because they have fewer spiritual problems?
This campsite is sensationally uncomfortable, yet so beautiful one doesn’t really mind. It is on a very steep slope which is also very dusty, very stony and very thorny. At first sight it seemed quite impossible, if only because of the law of gravity. But in extremis most things are possible and we briskly set about clearing a tent-sized space of stones sharp enough to puncture the floor and thorny bits of dead cacti. Eventually I got the tent up (and rainproof, I hope) while Rachel was collecting a meagre supply of poor quality fuel. Many blunt stones remain beneath it, embedded in the hard soil, but these won’t worry us because the floor is carpeted with 1) Juana’s poncho, 2) Juana’s two sacks, 3) Juana’s waterproof cape, 4) our space-blankets, 5) Rachel’s waterproof poncho, 6) Rachel’s woollen poncho, 7) Rachel’s saddle-blanket. We live in luxury. Because of the fuel-shortage – not even enough boiling water to melt soup-cubes – I recklessly opened our precious tin of milk: a shocking extravagance, at 65 soles, but it does make Nescafe that much less soul-destroying.
Our main frustration at present is that bottle of honey bought in Huanuco to console Rachel on the fireless puna. As soon as we came within shouting distance of the puna it congealed and has remained inaccessible ever since. (Why put honey in a narrow-necked bottle? I don’t know – ask the campesinos!) We always sleep with it between us, optimistically telling each other it must one night thaw. Rachel somewhat incestuously – not to say perversely – refers to it as ‘Our little son’. By now we have almost given up hoping for nourishment from it, but it is acquiring some of the solacing properties of a teddy-bear: a thing you cuddle while falling asleep.
It is a cloudless evening and as we set up camp the contrasting colours of our world were almost intolerably beautiful. Below, the soft green of a lush valley floor; above, the gentle blue of a late sky; on our side of the valley, vast pale grey precipices sweeping up and up; on the far side, barren slopes glowing a fiery red-gold as the sun set. Those opposite mountains have been dramatically split (by earthquakes?) and their deep ravines, oddly devoid of water or vegetation, are studded with weirdly-eroded, free-standing, high red rocks. And when I say high, I mean cathedral high …
We ate our supper of raw potatoes, sardines and oranges as the moon rose – quenching all but the brightest stars – to create another sort of beauty. A scene: of subdued brilliance, of mysterious radiance – the mountains all shimmering silver, velvet blackness in the valley. Why does moonlight seem to deepen the night silence? When Rachel had retired, I sat looking and listening: and there was nothing to hear. Even Juana had stopped munching.
I don’t feel too sorry for our mula tonight, despite a total lack of grazing; she has vast amounts of both Alf and paja. We were interested to see how she moved from one pile to another; I’d have thought she’d far prefer the fresh Alf and finish it first, but not so. She spent about ten minutes on each pile and, before leaving it, marked the verge with droppings or a squirt of urine. Now my only worry on her behalf is the impossibility of her lying down on this gradient. Normally she relaxes frequently during the night, for brief periods – always as close to the tent as she can get, which we find rather touching.
My ‘study’ is being predictably mobile tonight. Juana’s thick leather saddle-pad serves as a desk and I lean my left elbow on my rolled-up jeans and bush-shirt. (Before writing I always change into my ‘pyjama’ husky-suit.) Normally this is a comfortable arrangement but here my desk and I have been inexorably slipping towards the edge of the precipice so, between paragraphs, I have to wriggle back to square one, pausing en route to remove cacti spikes from my limbs. And the torch – equally sensitive to the law of gravity – often falls offits stand of a saucepan balanced on a water-bottle and is in any case made much less effective by the bright moonlight. There must be easier ways of writing books …
Rachel pointed out this evening that so far we have almost kept pace with Pizarro and his men on their historic march from Cajamarca to Cuzco; which of course is a coincidence – we’re not ‘racing’ them. The conquistadores left Cajamarca on 11 August 1533 and reached Tarma on 10 October; we left Cajamarca on 9 September and have reached Tarma on 10 November. Like ourselves, the Spaniards paused in Tarma only long enough to feed their horses; the town is so closely encircled by mountains that they feared an ambush where horsemen would be at a disadvantage. Pizarro’s secretary, Pedro Sancho, graphically described that night on an exposed mountainside near Tarma: ‘The men remained continuously on the alert, with the horses saddled and the men themselves unfed. They had no meal whatsoever, for they had no firewood and no water. They had not brought their tents with them and could not shelter themselves, so they were all dying of cold – for it rained heavily early in the night and then snowed. The armour and clothing they were wearing were all soaked’. It’s odd that in 1533 there was snow in early October in this area. And odder still that they didn’t carry water with them from the valley; by then they must have known that it isn’t always available on the heights. We may think this not an ideal site, but at least we’re warm, dry and fed. And tomorrow morning we won’t see the corpses of over 4,000 Indians, killed in one of the battles of the Inca civil war – which was the sight that awaited the conquistadores on October. On which of these moonlit mountains did they camp? Possibly on this one, if our guide out of Tarma was correct and we are now on an Inca road.
Camp on Grassy Bank of Stream. 11 November
We slept well, in defiance of gravity, and were back on the dirt-road by 6.15. For an hour and a half it hair-pinned up that arid mountain, then suddenly fertility was restored as we arrived on an immense ledge. We rejoiced to see fields of Alf around Huanchal, an attractive and friendly village. The one-tabled ‘cafe’ – also a bare-shelved shop – could offer only hot water, with which we made our own coffee while Juana breakfasted. I was glad to see the end of that tin of milk, which I had been gingerly carrying in my shirt pocket.
Then we were climbing again, towards the puna. There was much activity on the mountainsides: ploughing, harrowing, fertilising, potato planting. Teams of men wielded their digging-sticks rhythmically, singing as they worked. Lines of burros carried guano up narrow paths to high terraced fields. Groups of women chanted sweetly and plaintively as they put down the seed potatoes, their skirts tucked up to knee-level. Long after the track had taken us abruptly onto the puna, we could still hear those ancient incantations floating faintly through the thin pure air.
Today’s pass was marked by a solitary stone farmhouse. Outside a young Indian woman sat spinning in the sun, surrounded by a quiverful of tiny filthy children. She ignored our greeting. For hours no other dwelling appeared, yet we passed many flocks of puna-coloured sheep, visible only when moving, and a few small herds of fine cattle. At noon we stopped for lunch where the grass grew long and nourishing. As usual Juana rolled vigorously when the load came off; then to our astonishment she remained lying down while grazing, an eccentricity no doubt prompted by her unrestful night. While eating we marvelled at an improbable mile-long ridge, on the far side of the track, composed of symmetrical layers of silver rock and green turf, like an elaborate sandwich cake – perhaps one made for the New York Irish on St Patrick’s Day. The Andes are full of surprises. Then we lay back on the soft warm grass and I gazed into the sky and went drifting away on an ocean of content. One remembers those moments, when just being alive seems a matter for the most profound gratitude to whomever or whatever is responsible.
Even now we are sometimes deceived by the scale of these landscapes. At 3.30, from the edge of the puna, we were looking directly down on the village of Tingo Paccha. To the east rose a convulsion of snow-crowned mountains. To the south, seen at the far end of a cleft in a massive rock-wall – as though through a kaleidoscope – eucalyptus plantations marked the pueblo of Acollo Marco. Those trees then seemed so close that we felt confident of reaching them by sunset and dining on baked potatoes. But that was not to be. It took us an hour to reach Tingo Paccha, using a precipitous redura through ploughland, and another hour to get off a wide grassy ledge swarming with donkeys, ponies, oxen, cows, sheep, pigs and poultry. From the many scattered hovels dogs of every shape, size, colour and texture came racing towards us barking hysterically – yet simultaneously wagging their tails. (Few Peruvian dogs are genuinely dangerous.) At 5.45 we were still in that narrow cleft, between rusty-red cliffs, walking not far above a frenziedly frothing tributary of the Rio Montaro. When we emerged into slanting sunlight, via a dicey tree-trunk bridge of which our mula was rightly suspicious, Acollo Marco was still several miles away and there was no accessible grazing to be seen. (At Tingo Paccha we had been able to buy only a poncho-full of chopped straw; no Alf is grown there.) But soon a semi-circle of soft green grass, some fifty yards long, appeared just below the track on the bank of the curving tributary.
We saw an inexplicable phenomenon as the sun set behind a towering cliff of sheer brown rock. No clouds were visible, yet broad colourless rays of light – in fan-formation – came streaming brilliantly up into the pale blue sky, almost to the meridian. This display lasted for over ten minutes and the effect was uncanny: very beautiful but also slightly frightening. My reaction helped me to understand the alarm felt by primitive peoples during eclipses, or the passage of comets.
As we ate buns and sardines a few clouds gathered and rain sprinkled. But now, as I write, the moon is free again and smooth rocks gleam silver in the bed of the swiftly singing river.