Incidents of Travel in Latin America

by Lars Holger Holm

  Although half a century has passed since the last eruption took place, the lava field has acquired very little vegetation. It thus fits the cliché description ‘like on another planet’ perfectly. The rock is as black as tar and still looks like it was delivered from the bowels of the Earth yesterday. But it’s not glowing any longer. On the contrary. I had to conclude I wasn’t really fully equipped for the task at hand, realising too late that my tennis shoes with soft rubber soles were at best condemned, at worst would be ripped to shreds leaving me barefoot in the midst of razor-sharp coagulated crests. A critical thing would be to keep my physical equilibrium no matter how craggy the petrified seas grew.

  It was a splendid day: pitch-black rock set against a radiant sun and a crystal-blue sky. I set out confidently over the lava and had surprisingly little problem reaching the volcanic cone, avoiding every temptation to fall and badly wound myself. Since I was approaching the volcano from the north, where the lava flow had been the most intense, the ascent had been slow but steady, so that finally climbing the actual cone and reach its ridges was a piece of cake. Once up there, after two hours of hiking from the village, I unexpectedly ran into jovial tourists dressed in Hawaiian shirts with cameras dangling over their bellies. It turned out that there was a paved road all the way to the backside of the volcano. There was even a parking lot, enabling tourist parties on organised excursions easy access to what I had hitherto considered one of the last vestiges of wilderness. That was an anticlimax, but I soon found my bearings, confident in the conviction that these day visitors would never come to experience the lava field in the way that I had. And that was true. After a descent into the bottom of the volcano, where the ground was still warm, I readied myself for the return trip. It went faster as it was largely downhill. As my point of orientation I kept the old church tower of the otherwise obliterated village of San Juan, and happily arrived there in one piece.

  This particular church has not become famous because of its architecture, although it too is worth noticing. Its lasting claim to fame is that only its roof and the upper part of its tower have remained above Earth; the rest is buried in lava. However, while the lava relentlessly moved on, the church walls resisted the pressure and didn’t cave in so that today one can actually descend into the interior of the church through its tower. Walking the floor of this abandoned temple is like treading a man-made piece of Heaven locked in a permanent embrace by Mother Earth. There are places in nature that do look like churches or temples, and there are churches, notably Gothic cathedrals, the columns and vaults of which look like stylised nature. But to see nature and human art combine in this unexpected and completely juxtaposed way is indeed a unique experience, suggesting a descent into Hell that inadvertently got stuck halfway. The angels and the saints were ready to accompany the Saviour on this ungrateful mission, but by a fluke of nature the Host and the wine still remain locked up in the sacristy awaiting Judgment Day, when Gabriel shall blow his horn, the earthly shackles fall from the walls and the entire church takes to the skies in a cloud of thunder and lightning!

  By mid-afternoon I was back in Angahuán. An Indian invited me to mount a taxi horse with my luggage and accompanied me back to the paved road. I could hardly have refused the offer since it would have made my pale face look even paler and my figure the laughing stock of the village. Unfortunately my horse took a wrong turn somewhere in the village and I was unable to turn him right by myself. The fierce-eyed Indian, spiritual grandson of the great Gitche Manitou himself, had to turn round in order to set my horse straight. It was a rather embarrassing moment and I promised myself to try to become more of a horseman in the future. Well, I’m still no cowboy, but if the horse is not too willful I nowadays usually end up having it my rather than his or her way.

  As the bus brushed past the pine forests, descending into more tropical vegetation and finally into Uruapán, my whole adventure around the Indian village and its volcano began to almost seem like a dream, albeit an exceptionally vivid one, because the images from that trip have left a tenacious afterglow on my mental screen and it sometimes still happens that I involuntarily gauge ‘blueness’ in general using my memory of the colour of the sky on that particular day as my reference.

  Yet another ascension

  Peru. After a full day spent observing the legendary Machu Picchu from all possible angles — in atmospheric conditions ranging from early morning drizzle to mysterious mists slowly dissipating in sunshine, like a dream-woman undoing clouds of gauzy cotton in front of her admirers — I had reached a state of satiation. But then there was Wayna Picchu. In practically all panoramic photos of Machu Picchu, Wayna Picchu makes up the impressive hump-like mountain in the background. Buying a separate ticket allows you to gain access to its summit. It takes about an hour to get up there from the base of the mountain, but with hindsight I admit that it was well worth the effort.

  There were literally people from all walks of life on the trail. One of the more conspicuous characters was a moustached Brazilian gentleman in his 70s dressed in sports clothes that seemed to have been manufactured roughly in the same era as the man himself. An elegant cane offered extra support to his body. Notwithstanding, he was surprisingly fit — a modicum of agility being an absolute prerequisite to even attempt the steep ascension — and in due course made it to the top. The ascent really is a mixture of walking and half-climbing stairs or stair like natural structures, and is not to be recommended for people with a heart condition. About two thirds up the way I began to feel quite tired and turned round to a Chilean young man who had been trailing in my footsteps over the last twenty minutes: ‘Now’, I said, ‘a bunch of those coca leaves would have come in handy, don’t you think?’ Whereupon he smilingly produced a plastic bag from his backpack and handed it over to me. It was the stuff.

  For those of you who have never tried to chew coca leaves it might be useful to learn that they turn quite bitter when masticated for any length of time. But this inconvenience must be compared with the positive effect that it has on your stamina: coca leaves actually do the job! Having been at the brink of exhaustion with one third of the way still to go, the ingested substance revitalised my life spirits and fortified my legs. I wasn’t even that much tired as we eventually reached the top.

  There is no better place to assess the singular and enigmatic location of Machu Picchu than from its adjacent high cliff: Wayna Picchu. There is nothing to suggest that the ceremonial centre of Machu Picchu was in a practical location in terms of communications or even administrative power. It even seems to have been erected in a response to a threat primarily perceived as spiritual rather than physical. Otherwise it would hard to explain why, in spite of having being constructed in the early 15th century AD, it was abandoned well before any members of the Inca people got wind of the Spanish Crusades in the Americas. In short, both the Incas who built and those who eventually abandoned the temple site were equally unaware of the real nature of the impending threat to their empire. However, it seems as though the Inca elite had begun to suspect their days in the sun to be numbered all the same, half a century before Columbus even set sails on his first voyage to the West Indies. According to some theorists on the subject, the whole purpose of erecting the astronomical observatories, as well as the temples to the gods, at Machu Picchu, was to slow down the cosmic clock itself in order to give an a priori doomed civilisation a little more time to prepare itself for the unavoidable.

  The Incas, as opposed to for example the Mayas, have left no written records behind. Most of these theories are therefore at best informed speculation based on circumstantial evidence. But since it’s indisputable that the Spanish never found Machu Picchu — and believe me: they would have gone looking for it at the faintest rumour of treasures buried on the premises — it’s permissible to assume that not even the descendants of the sacerdotal elite responsible for its abandonment had any idea of the existence of this site, constructed at a time th
at qualifies as an industrial stone age by today’s historical criteria. This to me suggests not only an exodus of priests and their assistants. In accordance with the strict hierarchy associated with all pre-Columbian religiosity, mass sacrifices and/or collective suicidal acts cannot be ruled out with any degree of certainty. Surely epidemic disease could have achieved the same result, and perhaps even more efficiently, but there is as little evidence for the one thing as for the other. Other calamities, such as earthquakes and sudden climate changes, are less likely to have produced a permanent abandonment of a site which has visibly remained intact, albeit hidden under layers of earth, since more than five hundred years.

  Of course the aura of mystery surrounding this Andean sanctuary only contributes to intensifying the adventure of visiting it, and as I sat on what seemed to me the top of the world, looking down like a bird of prey on a rocky plateau dotted with ancient stone monuments, surrounded by the river Urabámba and by a near-perfect circle of higher ridges, the cry of the wilderness and the silent paw of the jaguar were not far away. As a perfect illustration to my state of mind a condor took flight from the promontory. It was, truth be told, a young condor, still only spanning a metre between its wingtips, but it was a condor alright, and I think the reader will excuse me if at this moment I seize the opportunity to conjure from the depths of his imagination all the associations — musical, verbal, pictorial, emotional, philosophical and existential — connected with the emblematic song of the High Andes: ‘El condor pasa’.

  The Andes are breathtaking both literally and figuratively. It takes some time getting used to walk the streets of Cusco at 3,500 metres above sea level, and to mount some of its steeper gradients presents quite a challenge. I remember initially having to take siestas every other afternoon from sheer altitude fatigue. The average altitude of the archaeological site of Machu Picchu, on the other hand, is only about 2,400 metres, but its spectacular location makes it seem suspended midway between Heaven and Earth. There are no paved roads leading to the village of Aguascalientes that serves as a base camp for visitors, only a railway track.

  At the time of my visit to Cusco an international consortium was responsible for the maintenance of the line. It made sure that tourists didn’t get away with paying local prices for transportation through the Sacred Valley of the Incas, today also known as the Urabámba Valley. Although normally priced trains leave regularly for the various stations along the river Vilcanota, tourists were not allowed to use them. By all means the ‘rules’ nailed to an inner wall of the Cusco railway station stipulated that only foreigners who could show proof of a permit of residence were allowed to share these trains with the Peruvians. For the benefit of the tourists, on the other hand, there was one expensive train with panoramic windows allowing the passengers to admire the mountainsides as the train advances through the narrow glens between them.

  I opted for the only budget alternative available: the Backpacker Train. It was fine enough but not cheap either. Even though it perhaps didn’t allow me to see the full extent of the mountain peaks around us, it had normal windows offering a traditional view. Besides leaving Cusco by train was a rare experience no matter which type of train one would take. It’s something similar to being sluiced through the locks of a canal, with the train going in zig-zag back and forth for a good three quarters of an hour before it reaches the rim of the caldera in which the town is located. Only from there does it begin to roll forward.17

  The journey takes one past the city suburbs, the ensemble of which makes a rather gloomy impression because of the abundance of naked concrete blocks, hollow red brick, cement, barbed wire and rebars. I have never been to Bolivia, so I can’t make the comparison but, among the countries I have visited in Latin America, Ecuador and Peru undoubtedly has the highest instance of what even an unprejudiced Westerner would call half- or even unfinished buildings. In addition, the climate at close to 4,000 metres above the sea is not always that inviting; evenings and nights can be both moist and cold. Nothing for me, so I happily embraced the fact that the train was gradually descending into Aguascalientes, an approximately two hour ride from the ancient Inca capital. One image, and it wasn’t one of nature this time, particularly engraved itself in my mind from that trip. It was a young man standing somewhere along the railway track looking at the train as it slowly passed by. In a sense he looked like every other Indian boy in this country, except for his eyes which were sad to the point of mute despair. Whether or not I had simply caught him in a pensive mood, I can’t tell, but his eyes have followed me ever since and represent to me the human sorrow that makes up the darker of the two masks in the mundane theatre. One of countless human destinies on this planet, as it appeared to one passenger, sitting inside a train, a snapshot in time, for sure, but also one of irrevocable time...

  There is a good reason why Aguascalientes is called Aguascalientes: it does have hot springs! I was lucky to find myself a nicely secluded hotel at the top of the village straight above Rio Aguas Calientes, at the beginning of the slender road that runs parallel with it up to the thermal baths. The river is a silvery ribbon woven into a majestic mountainside, and it’s in splendid view from the pools of the thermal station. The pools have sandy bottoms and the warm waters carries scents from Vulcan’s smithy. There is, or was at least when I was there, a full bar adjacent to the pools and all I needed to do — the staff said so themselves — to order a drink was to whistle, and the waiter would appear at poolside kindly taking my order for a gin and tonic.

  I remained in Aguascalientes for a couple of days, during which I visited the baths every day, relaxing and pondering my memories of the great and mysterious temple ruins at Machu Picchu — believe me, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter that the monuments are perhaps the most famous and most visited by tourists in all of America. The place truly is magnificent, although its architecture, in spite of the legendary precision of the building block’s lapidary joints, on close inspection comes across as more rudimentary than that of Pre-Columbian civilisations elsewhere, notably the ones of Central America. Its magnificence resides in its cosmic significance and impact. It’s a speechless poem on the universe written in mute stone, testifying to the curious subtlety and artistic fancy of the very last generations of Peru’s ruling elite.

  For the discerning tourist, not satisfied by merely going back home with an overloaded camera telling himself and others: ‘Been there, done it’, there are many other remarkable sites to visit in El Valle Sagrado. For example, a twenty-minute taxi ride from the town of Urabámba in the Valley had brought me to the Inca’s ‘greenhouse.’ It consists of some fifteen to twenty terraces propped up with stone walls, mainly concentrically and conically arranged in a big hole in the ground. Even though the difference in elevation is not so important as to allow banana and pineapple to thrive immediately below coffee, cacao, orange, and corn plantations, the temperature and light variations from top to bottom is considerable. This helps to explain how this funnel-like horticultural structure could serve as an experimental ground for the Incas to investigate optimal growing and harvesting conditions for their various crops.

  As I made my way out of the 150-metre deep cone and reached the vast high plateau above it, leveling at around 3,500 metres’ altitude, I met a group of Indians in traditional attire who offered me to partake in their lunch. Sitting there with some rather exotic food stuffs in my mouth, my gaze wandered across the panorama. Yes, the sky was a deep blue and the colours reflected in the thin air amazingly bright and vivid. However, over the far-off horizon I could see high cotton-like cumulus clouds gather. Or so I thought. At closer inspection these clouds revealed themselves as the massive Cordillera de Vilcanota, the peaks of which reached yet another 3,000 metres above my vantage point. Witnessing the silent snow covered peaks at this altitude, and at this unfathomable distance, is arguably one of the most serene visual impressions I have ever had, condensing to diamond clarity my memory of thi
s ancient land, resounding of ancestral voices as humans walk hand-in-hand with the giants of the Earth and the gods of Heaven.

  The village of Pisac further to the east of the Valley has a sprawling marketplace occupying its central square. This market is a veritable phoenix, rising every morning out of last evening’s ashes. Incredibly, neither the myriad stands nor their merchandise remain anywhere to be seen during evening and night hours. But by the break of dawn a race of short but unbelievably sturdy people, like ants carrying five times their own body weight, has silently and efficiently dragged every item back in place. As I woke up from my sleep in one of the hotels around the plaza, it was bright morning and the market in full swing. Opening the shutter was like opening the sluices of a dam, the light instantly flooding the room, enveloping the iron lattice of the French balcony in glittering mosaics. Like so many other commercial gatherings with indigenous Peruvians, this market too is a folkloric fiesta galore sparkling of colour and bustling with life. Notwithstanding, my most important goal this morning was to reach the Inca ruins dominating the village and its surroundings from the hill above it.

  The ascension turned out to be a very pleasant one hour walk along a scenic tributary to Rio Vilcanota, accompanied by my own vocal improvisations over Schubert’s Happy Trout. The ruins themselves at the top of the hill are surprisingly well-preserved and easily stand comparison with those of Machu Picchu. But here the tourists are considerably fewer in numbers. If I remember correctly there was no official surveillance, no ticket booth and consequently no entrance fee to be paid — if there was one it surely was quite modest. From these ruins — and to have oneself photographed in the entrance to the Sun Temple is just a must — a fair stretch of the Sacred Valley can be seen meandering its way towards exotic sounding municipalities such as Urabámba, Moccopata and Ollantaytambo, giving the spectator an idea of the Inca trail and communication systems once connecting the villages of the Valley with the immense Amazonian jungle beyond the snow covered cordillera.