Lima, Tuesday 12 September
I sin in persecuting a young woman at the tourist information office close by the cathedral. She is three months into a job she enjoys. She is sweetly well meaning. She enquires of tourists their experiences of Peru and writes their polite replies in a large book. I speak of garbage and poverty: she doesn’t write in the book. I ask, although certain of the answer, whether she was educated at a state or private school. Private, of course. The neat tweed suit is sufficient evidence.
Ashamed at my wickedness, I seek to shrive my soul – evening Mass at San Pedro. The church is Hispanic American baroque and a delight. The congregation fear for the celebrant, a doddery nonagenarian mon-signor crowned with a pink cap. Has he died during the reading of the Epistle and Gospel or dozed off? Will he rise from his chair after the readings? Will he manage the steps to the altar? Whether he recalls the words of the service is immaterial. His voice is too weak and is buried within the coughs and shuffles of the congregation. This is Tuesday evening; I count over a hundred celebrants. Men are in the majority.
Lima, Wednesday 13 September
Francisco Pizzaro founded Lima in 1535. The university followed in 1551. I will recall the city for two beautiful patios and a grove of olive trees. Some of the trees are sufficiently holed and wizened to be survivors of the original planting by the Spanish founders of the city. The trees stand in a public park to the south of the city centre. The district is upmarket. The trees are surrounded by well-kept lawns. Private security guards are much in evidence. The poor are absent. A cab driver points to houses built by millionaires on privately expropriated corners of this public land – land reform for the super-rich. Their young speed on skateboards around a public fountain.
The sixteenth-century patios suffer a different arrogance. Imagine the temerity required to overshadow their beauty with the most mundane of late twentieth-century construction – such is the arrogance of architects and property developers.
I sat on my spectacles at the hotel on the road from Trujillo and Lima. Now I wear my spares. An optician makes me a new pair of bifocals in sprung frames. I order them in the morning. They are ready in the evening: thirty-seven dollars.
For dinner I eat tomalis (imagine a doughy sausage of cornflour stuffed with meat or whatever) and shellfish with rice. A six-year-old boy persecutes his mother at the next table: the usual games – unscrewing the salt and pepper pots and dumping the contents on the table-cloth; blowing the pepper at Mum; building towers of his food and then slapping the towers flat with his spoon so the food flies. A doting aunt finds the boy’s antics cute. Doting Dad at most shakes his head in gentle reproof. Poor Mum. She does her utmost to control the brat. Aunt’s and Dad’s opposition is too strong. A hitching rail is the answer. Tie the brat up outside. Rain? The brat gets a free wash.
To Nazca, Thursday 14 September
Four hundred and forty kilometres to Nazca, city of mystical lines. Nazca is famous for its lines. The lines are kilometres long and drawn on the arid desert plateau. Some of the lines form patterns. Others represent animals. How were they drawn? By whom? How were artists at ground level able to envisage work that modern man can only appreciate from the seat of an aeroplane?
Beings from outer space are the suspects – or the children of visitors from outer space. The drawings don’t impress me as sufficiently sophisticated to be the work of adults capable of crossing the universe.
I imagine a spacecraft breaking down. Dad is trying to fix the power supply. Mum is tut-tutting because the washing machine won’t work. The kids are getting in the way.
Dad says to the kids, ‘For Christ’s sake, piss off and amuse yourselves.’
‘There’s nothing to do.’ (No power – they can’t play computer games.)
‘Draw, for God’s sake.’
‘I’ve lost my pencil.’
‘Use a stick. Draw in the damn desert.’
Yes, I am aware that the lines are kilometres long. Imagine the aliens as giant daddy-long-legs.
I leave Lima at seven and am in Nazca at half past four. The journey is across desert or near-desert. I stop for lunch at one of those crossroads in the middle of nowhere where passengers pee and change buses and eat food that has been a playground for flies for the past week.
Three cars and a couple of pickups are parked outside a diner on the corner. No buses. This may be a good sign. I risk a steak and onions, rice. A cop joins me.
I understand why I have contact with so many police. Police are accustomed to asking questions. They aren’t shy. They see this old guy on a Mexican-registered bike. They say, hey, did you really ride from Mexico? Where are you from? Where are you going? How old are you? Are you married? How many kids do you have? What does your wife say, you being away so long? What job do you have? How much do you earn? What does this trip cost?
Non-cops are more fearful of being intrusive. They gather in the background, listen.
This cop is young. He earns 300 dollars a month. Enough to live on? Barely. He and I sit in the sun and drink orange juice and chat. The chat is interrupted by the cop rising to blow his whistle each time a bus passes. Why? Because blowing a whistle goes with the job.
Nazca, Friday 15 September
I have struck lucky in Nazca. I am staying at the Hostal Via Morburg. I have a small room with twin beds. The beds are comfortable and the wiring to the electric water heater on the shower appears vaguely safe. A small swimming pool with clean water occupies much of one patio. Better yet are the staff, one of whom has a daughter. The daughter is six. Last night she elected me her novio. Today I am Grandfather. Is this an upgrade or a downgrade? I am also a fearless explorer in partnership with the hotel administrator.
The Nazca lines attract tourists. Tourists tramp over the desert. Their footprints wreck the lines. Now the lines are protected territory. Fly over them in a small bumpy plane or watch them on video. Walking is forbidden.
Tour companies are in despair. What else can they show their prey? They search desperately for new lines, lines that are legally accessible.
The administrator of the Hostal Via Morburg is invited by a tour agency to sample their new tour. She invites me to join the freebie. First we visit a gold mine. The actual mine is three-quarters of the way up a shale precipice and inaccessible. The tour company has blasted a tunnel at the bottom of the precipice. This fake mine is our target. The tunnel is man-height and four metres long. The manageress is more practised at pretending interest. I prefer talking to one of the miners.
The miner earns 580 dollars a month. He lives in a shack on site and works five and a half days a week. He climbs the cliff to the mine. A tunnel 350 metres long leads to the workface. The miner has golden socks. The socks are the closest he’ll get to personal wealth. The mine owner is North American. I am not being snide at the expense of the US. I am reporting fact.
Our guide stops on the return from the mine to show us his latest discovery. We are in a valley of boulders, shale and bare rock.
‘Look,’ he says, pointing at a chunk of mountainside. ‘You can see a drawing of the sun and its rays.’
Our guide’s partner in the tour agency points in a different direction, although with equal enthusiasm. ‘There, look, see the drawing of a cuy? See? That’s the tail.’ Cuy is guinea-pig.
I am polite. I look. I see rock. The rock has the commonplace marks any rock face has.
The hotel administrator attempts loyalty to Nazca. Unfortunately she catches my eye. We get the giggles.
Nazca, Saturday 16 September
All the staff at the Hostal Via Morburg are female. They describe Juan Carlos as ‘a Toby’. A Toby is a good-looking young man, amiable, lots of charm and perhaps a little too easy.
I will remember Juan Carlos with fondness as a merely moderately dangerous maniac. He speeds down desert tracks at a hundred kilometres an hour in an oversized blue dune buggy. He attacks dunes with the buggy. Most times he reaches the top. For serious sport, he rides a board down the dunes. These are not dunes as normal people imagine dunes. Juan Carlos’ favourite is 1700 metres high. I need to put that in words lest readers believe they are reading a typo: one thousand, seven hundred metres. This is a dune taller than the highest mountain in Great Britain. Juan Carlos rides down this dune on a one-metre-twenty board. The sand is soft. My youngest son Jed rides down non-sand mountains on a board with wheels. He and Juan Carlos are soul brothers – or suffer from a similar mental illness.
I buggy-ride with Juan Carlos early this morning. He has an Italian couple as passengers, Barbara and Eduardo, honeymooners. Both speak good English. They are novices at sandboarding. They try out on a small dune, the equivalent of a blue run. They have a ball. So do I – although I don’t board. The desert is spectacular and being driven by Juan Carlos has the adrenalin flowing.
We are back in town by midday. I have promised to watch my local grandchild dance at the Nazca primary school fête.
Nazca, Sunday 17 September
I ought to leave for Cuzco. My plans are frustrated by an electricity cut that will continue until late afternoon. The ATMs are down. I have no money.
I have been cooking for the past few days. I pretend that I am cooking for the staff at the Hostal Via Morburg. I am cooking for myself. Friday I bought live crab in the market and prepared a sauce: olive oil, onion, tomato, celery, garlic, red peppers, root ginger, chilli, fresh coriander. Yesterday I cooked prawns. Today I am using the remains of the prawns to flavour a pasta sauce. Two young sophisticates from the capital arrived late last night: Victor is first cousin to Juan Carlos. His novia, Carmen, is a dancer in a modern dance group. Sunday lunch of prawn pasta makes up for the lack of water (the pump is electric).
Replete, we commit ourselves to Juan Carlos and his buggy. We race down a dry river. Carmen is dismissive of the parched countryside. Then we hit the dunes. The dunes transform Carmen into a fanatic. Drop her three-quarters of the way up a dune with a 300-metre slide ahead – dissatisfied, she clambers the extra hundred metres to the summit. My youngest son, the mountain boarder, would do the same. I have watched him. Every metre of altitude counts, every extra degree of gradient.
While the kids play, I sit on a dune crest and watch the breeze obliterate our footsteps. The view is superb and extraordinary. The temperature is perfect. No flies, no mosquitoes. Nazca deserves more than the standard one-night stop on the tourist trail.
This evening we go to the cockfights. The small sand arena is ringed by banks of concrete benching. The fights are brief and unattractive. The birds wear long curved spurs on their legs. The handlers blow in the birds’ faces (does garlic breath make the birds more combative?) and hold them aloft while punters shout bets at bookies. The birds are released. They eye each other with suspicion. Often they need further encouragement from their handlers – more garlic breath. Finally there is a flurry of wings as each bird attempts to gain height from which to strike down at its opponent’s head. Cheers greet a few specks of blood. A bird collapses. The handler attempts resuscitation. The bell goes for the second round. A further brief flapping of feathers and the loser lies dead in the sand.
The audience is more interesting. The benches are full: grandads, mums and dads, teens, babes scarcely out of arms. The faces fascinate me. And the postures. They are so familiar: the bad-tempered minor official; the four men over-drinking beer from bottles; the teenage girl, a novice smoker, attempting to appear sophisticated as she puffs inexpertly on a cigarette.
An overweight mother makes a second dash to the caféteria. First she gives her five-year-old son a good shaking and plonks him on the tier behind us: ‘Move from there and I’ll murder you.’
The faces may be darker, but otherwise they are no different from any European crowd.
I recall the baseball game in Dallas. There I felt myself on unknown territory. I discovered no clues by which to assess what or who people were. Uniformity was the rule, faces equally groomed, equally bland, jeans or khaki drill obligatory. Here there is so much more individuality and character on display.
Escape from Nazca, Tuesday 19 September
None of the staff at the hostal has seen the Nazca lines (few locals can spare fifty dollars for the flight). I have seen innumerable photographs and read the theories and fictions and have wondered at the obsessiveness of archaeologists. I cooked for the staff and raced up and down dunes with Juan Carlos, Victor and Carmen. They treated me as a friend, made me feel at home. I had a ball – no need for lines. I thank them and I thank the people of Nazca – what joy to argue prices in the market, eat ghastly chemical-pink cake at the school fête, wander the streets at night without fear of assault. Now I head for Cuzco. My guidebook warns of frequent rapes and strangle muggings, and muggings by cab drivers, and pickpockets and con artists.
The road from Nazca twists up through dry mountains, a climb of over 3000 metres. I find a neat clean café at the top. Vases of brilliant wild flowers enliven the counter. The owner is in his sixties. He has lived here all his life. In his youth the hills were green. Farmers kept dairy cattle. Little rain has fallen over the past twenty years. The cattle have gone. Global warming.
The road crosses a dark bristly fell of tufted grass. I can see for miles. I wonder why vicuña graze beside the road. Do they enjoy traffic?
Puquio is 160 kilometres from Nazca. Mid-afternoon and I am exhausted. Perhaps the altitude saps my will – or am I weakened by feeling alone and unprotected by friendships? I ride up a dirt street in search of a hotel. This is market day or all days are market days. Small dark people bundled in sweaters and wool jackets overflow the pavement. Men and women wear brown felt hats. Doorways overflow with used clothes.
The one hotel is on a street being laid with drains in a deep ditch alongside the pavement. The pavement is too narrow for the Honda and I park in the patio at the hotel owner’s house. She directs me to the Estancia restaurant. If Peru has an arms industry, it could build tanks out of the beef. I chomp and read the newspaper. Pillaging of the military and police pension fund occupies the first four pages.
An electrical engineer sits at the next table. He has three sons. The eldest is also an engineer; the second is an architect; the third is studying computer science at university. My companion is a great reader and a student of current affairs. He asks my nationality and says, ‘Your Tony Blair is a tremendous liar.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘And now Bush makes torture legal. How do you feel?’
Few people I meet on this journey differentiate between the US and Britain. Blair has implicated us totally. How do I feel? I feel deeply sullied.
My daughter Anya complains that I accuse all Americans of torture. I accuse all Americans of complicity in torture. The US is a democracy: every citizen is responsible for the actions of the government. We Brits are accomplices. This is Blair’s doing and the doing of our Parliament. We have been made accomplices to so much evil and to such stupidity. Yes, I feel sullied, but also enraged that one man should lead my nation down such a filth-strewn road.
Road to Cuzco, Wednesday 20 September
The road flows over high fells. I can see for miles. Way in the distance a lone truck creeps over a crest. A tarn to the left of the road reflects the deep blue of the sky. Small groups of vicuña graze the tufted grass. A couple of shaggy ponies watch from a rise. Snow covers a soft ridge between black rock peaks. A herdswoman chivvies a flock of alpaca. Riding here is easy. Free to muse, I dwell on yesterday’s conversation with the engineer. I wrote yesterday in anger. Anger has been inescapable on much of this journey. I have been riding through the United States’ backyard, a backyard that the US has been tilling for the past 200 years. Successive administrations have suborned governments, supported the vilest of dictators, trained military for whom murder and torture are the norm. Bush supports torture as necessary. Where does US society stand? Behind their president? Behind that great TV hero of 24, an all-American hero to whom torturing prisoners is a noble act of self-sacrifice? This is the good guy. No wonder the US military is confused. No wonder Latin Americans are sickened by the US’s claim to hold the moral high ground. I long to see Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney strapped to boards and half-drowned in water tanks – the same treatment meted out to their prisoners. Blair I would dunk in a witch’s chair.
The Altiplano ends. The road winds and backtracks down a steep mountain face. The drop is dizzying. I quake when forced by a truck to the outside of a curve. The road follows a river gorge. The gorge funnels a headwind and I crouch low over the gas tank. Tiny patches of tilled soil edge the water – ‘fields’ would be a misnomer. A woman shares the shade of a fruit tree with two sheep. She returns my wave. The gorge narrows to nothing and the road climbs. The Honda is valiant. Up we go, up and up. We hit the top and wow! The majestic sweep of the high Andes is spread across the horizon. The view of snow-capped peaks is magnificent. Surprise is total. The road drops again and follows another river. A hundred kilometres to Cuzco. Exhausted, I pull into a roadside inn.
I take a room with a bath. The hotel has flies. The flies bite. Each bite raises a purple bruise with a minute drop of blood dead in the centre. The bites itch. The beef at dinner is a further candidate for the Peruvian arms industry. I am out of cardiac medication. I can’t sleep. I lie awake and itch and obsess over the state of my heart.
Cuzco, Thursday 21 September
A short ride takes me up to Cuzco – and a pharmacy where I fail to fill my prescriptions. The fault is mine. I take medication on trust. The pharmacist requires purpose: ‘What are they for?’
‘My heart.’
‘Yes, but what do they do?’
‘Keep me alive.’
I book into a Dutch-owned hostal, the Marani on Carmen Alto. Profits go to the Hope Foundation, a worthy cause. The Honda rests in an ample and pleasant patio. The street is narrow and cobbled. All streets are narrow and cobbled. Most are steep. Many have steps. Every doorway opens to a restaurant, a tour agency or an internet connection. Prices are high. I see foreigners everywhere. Down on the Plaza de Armas, the Cross Keys is a Brit-owned pub. I peek into a room packed with young foreigners competing in their mystical experiences of the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu. The Rat Hole is a bikers’ bar with a visitors’ book for passing bikers; the owner is a biker from Arizona.
Step outside and you require a fly whisk to dispatch the swarming hustlers. Antigua, Guatemala, has competition.
The cathedral is superb. A canvas is being relined in a side chapel. Restoration is undertaken by a department of the School of Belles Artes. Study is free – unlike in Ecuador. Peru has endless art in need of restoration and many trained restorers. Funds to pay the restorers are in short supply. I talk with the head of restoration. We talk of the artistic explosion that accompanied the Conquest. Indigenous artists were given the tools and were freed from constraint. They leapt from lugging boulders to creating the Rosario chapel. Their work will be marvelled at as long as this planet survives. In 1569 came the Inquisition. Thinking outside the box was again prohibited. Both Spain and Hispanic America atrophied.
Out of Cuzco, Friday 22 September
In Cuzco I am income, two-legged livestock. I will learn nothing of Peru. I am not enjoying myself. On arrival at the Hostal Marani the Dutch manager asked me to tell her in the morning whether I wished to stay a further day. I tell her this morning. She tells me the hotel is fully booked. I have my excuse. Thirty minutes and I am packed and on the road to Puno.
Road and rail share a wide river valley. At first there are fields. The road climbs and I am back on the Altiplano. The clarity of light is extraordinary, the deep blue of the sky and feel of unlimited space. I stop at a plush roadhouse to use the lavatory. A Belgian coach party enjoys a buffet lunch. The tour group gathers round the Honda. We shake hands. They wish me happy travelling.
The road is straight, the surface excellent. The Honda cruises at eighty kilometres an hour. I inhale fresh chill air and revel in the intense beauty. The mountains are dark rock. A wedge of snow appears. The herds are mostly alpaca. I can differentiate them from llamas. I enquire of a herdswoman. The alpaca are shorter and have bulkier coats. The herdswoman’s home is an adobe hovel. This is the truth of the Altiplano: poor soil, little food, nights of vicious cold, appalling accommodation. Many hovels stand empty. The people have fled. The squatter towns of Puno, Cuzco and Lima tempt with the possibility of a marginally better existence.
I have failed to get a handle on Peru. I am disturbed by the contrast between extreme poverty and dirt and the fact that Peru is a tourist Mecca. Inca worship is in fashion. I am out of fashion. I see 1000 years without change, without discovery. I look at Inca stonework and wonder how many slaves were killed and maimed on the construction site. Shifting a thirty-ton boulder up a mountain rather than using cut blocks is neither mystical nor meritorious. The drystone walls of Mediterranean olive terraces have stood for more than 2000 years. Inca terraces have already tumbled. I take on trust an expert’s opinion as to the era of a ceramic or scrap of woven cloth; my interest is minimal.
I catch my first glimpse of the immense inland sea, Lake Titicaca. Sun sets as I ride the final kilometres into Puno. The drop in temperature is instant. I could weep icicles. A fiesta grips the city centre. The road to my chosen hotel is blocked. A cop suggests the Gran Puno Inn. A young concierge runs to open the locked glass doors and laughs as he slides on the polished floor. Twenty-five dollars is beyond my budget. The manager settles for twenty dollars, to include a buffet breakfast. He and the concierge lift the Honda over the curb and into the lobby. My room is on the fourth floor, no elevator. The stairs are steep. I fear for my unmedicated heart. The concierge offers me coca leaves infused in hot water.
The room is spacious. So is the bathroom. The shower runs hot. The bath towels are thick and vast. The bath mat is a miraculous extra, as are an electric radiator and cable TV. I hope for the Ryder Cup. No luck.
Puno, Saturday 23 September
Puno is great for hats. Most common are chocolate soup plates bearing one of those round loaves that bulge above the baking tin. I admire a pink bowler with silk ribbon edging the underside of the brim. Another favourite is a mini-black bowler with a tassel worn at a jaunty angle by a plump lady in her fifties. She is dressed in black. White petticoats fluff up her skirt. A shy thin woman wears a yellow hat of plastic straw sprinkled with glitter. A teenage boy favours a red wool cloche. Then there is the man in the grey fedora who, hands in pockets, poses as an Italian Mafioso. An elderly grey Stetson talks to two junior baseball caps.
Backpackers favour a design on white wool, the top drawn to a point, a tuft on the crest and earflaps – apparently more indigenous than the hats worn by the indigenous.
Strangest is a wide-brim golden pentagon; blue lines mark the segments. Can it be a hat or is it a lampshade out for a walk? The owner is a severe schoolmistressy woman near retirement.
I walk down to the harbour. The first two steamships to sail the lake were imported from Britain. They were shipped as Ikea flat-packs and assembled on the lakeshore. The assemblers were competent. The first, the Yavari, was launched on Christmas Day 1870 and is still afloat. The Ollanta is more modern and sailed commercially from 1926 into the 1970s.
Puno, Sunday 24 September
Sunday is excellent for people-watching. I choose a table at a café on the harbour wharf. Cultural colonialism hits randomly. A young indigenous woman angles her head and flashes a smile at her father. She wants something. The flirtation is pure Hollywood. A tall, exceptionally dark-skinned young man is unique among his Puno contemporaries in wearing hip-hop.
I count eighteen restaurants on Puno’s pedestrian street. All but Rica’s Café are geared to tourists. Look in through any window – there we sit, we, the rich (by Peruvian standards). The restaurants employ hustlers. The altitude is above 3000 metres and the hustlers wrap up in ankle-length overcoats and matching mufflers in charcoal-grey wool. The colour is an unfortunate choice. One thinks of professional mourners at a funeral.
To Bolivia, Monday 25 September
The writer of my guidebook warns of corrupt practices at the Bolivian frontier with Peru. The writer mentions motorcyclists as victims. I am a motorcyclist. The road follows the lakeshore. I see thirty or more men seated on benches at the rear of an adobe house. The men are similarly dressed in black suits and black fedoras. They are silent and solemn. This must be a wake. They should take lessons from the Irish.
The road climbs behind a hill. Concrete steps mount the hill. Each step represents a Station of the Cross. Two tall radio masts dominate the hilltop. The shrine is insignificant.
I pause and look back across a bay. The water reflects the deep blue of the sky. A thousand mirrors gleam on the far shore – tin roofs catching the sunlight.
I note two rough-coated white donkeys on a pale beach.
And I worry. Ten kilometres to the frontier. Here comes the victim.
Peruvian immigration takes all of two minutes. Customs is a problem. Our friendly and helpful customs officer from the frontier with Ecuador completed the exit rather than the entry part of the Honda’s transit permit.
‘A tall man, talks a lot,’ suggests the present officer as he scans the signature.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘A very amiable man.’
‘Very amiable,’ agrees his fellow official. ‘Amiable is all he is. I’ve served with him.’
I wait while he writes an explanation of the error on pink paper. I add my signature. He affixes the report to the transit permit. We shake hands. I am out of Peru.