Trujillo was founded by Pizarro, who apparently left there a few ruthless descendants. When we returned to the square from a browse around the quiet town we found that it hadn’t been so quiet around La Tortuga. Scores of uniformed youths from an elite academy were climbing on top, prying open the windows, and making liberal use of their pocket-knives to carve their names on La Tortuga’s wooden stem. I was disgusted. Helen was rabid. With Dinah’s assistance she pinned one of the culprits against the side of the jeep.
“But”—he shrugged innocently—“it’s our custom.” With that weak excuse for vandalism he ducked away.
“Modern barbarians,” Helen whimpered, running her fingers over the deep gouges in the smooth surface she had so painstakingly sandpapered. In ten countries La Tortuga’s only scars had been acquired in travel, which was to be expected, but in Trujillo the precedent was set. Thereafter the jeep became public property, to be adorned with names, phone numbers, and lovers’ hearts, using anything available for the inscription—bottle caps, broken glass, wire or, rarely, the more conventional pencil or pen.
Lima was covered by a low-hanging overcast that symbolized our gloomy prospects. While other tourists chattered of bargains in Peruvian silver, or worried about smuggling out of Peru their forbidden vicuna rugs, or pondered how they could carry a case of pisco on their sixty-pound airline luggage allowance, we were faced with the pressing problem of peddling an outboard motor, the desperate need of acquiring a new Libreta, and the mundane matter of mattress hunting. What a way to see sophisticated Lima, City of the Kings, one-time capital of Spanish South America and cultural mecca of the Pacific.
Near the center of town, off the Plaza San Martin, we checked into a pension, once a fashionable private residence. With high ceiling ornately trimmed with baroque designs in plaster, our room was big enough to hold a ball. The landlady was inordinately proud of the new modern conveniences, a beautifully tiled bathroom with sparkling fixtures of purple, pink, and black. But the plumber who installed them got his pipes crossed. Water draining from the sink filled the tub, and when the commode was flushed there was an echoing gurgle from the bidet.
Lima, near Callao, the starting point for Kon-Tiki, was alert for anything new in the way of aquatic conveyances. Spotting La Tortuga in front of the pension, a newspaperman requested a photo of her afloat. Later that day La Tortuga filled the front page of the afternoon paper along with news of church burnings in Buenos Aires by Peronistas, the followers of Argentina’s dictator Juan Perón. But there was no room for headlines and a photo caption too. Under the picture of La Tortuga and crew, in bold type it read,
PERONISTAS IN ACTION.
With that announcement to Lima society the small white envelope among our mail came as a great surprise, an invitation to dinner from Ambassador and Mrs. Ellis O. Briggs. At the bottom was written, “Dinah is invited.” Two days later, with complete nonchalance, Dinah entered the black limousine that brought us to the large residence on Avenida Arequipa.
Ambassador and Mrs. Briggs received the three of us graciously and informally in the library. Dinah said “Thank you, no,” to the martinis and “Yes, please,” to the appetizers, tiny cheese cornucopias. A Lord Calvert gentleman in a green tweed suit, Ambassador Briggs smiled amiably at Dinah, who immediately recognized in him an indulgent friend. Lying at his feet on the thick pile rug, she watched with persuasive eyes, an optimist to the last bite.
What could have been a cheerless Spanish colonial mansion was instead a warm and friendly home reflecting the personalities of Ambassador and Mrs. Briggs, and the air of cordiality pervaded the sunlit dining room. White-gloved mozos poured wine into crystal goblets and served black mushroom soup, delicate white fish, dainty hot breads, filet mignon, and spears of buttered asparagus. From the adjoining alcove Dinah sniffed appreciatively. To our embarrassment she reverted to the customs of her feudal ancestors and took her place beneath the table. Despite our stern reproofs there she stayed, knowing we couldn’t gracefully disrupt the congenial atmosphere with more severe forms of discipline.
After dinner the conversation turned to the southern end of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, an area the Ambassador knew well. Over a liqueur in the library he spoke of the terrific winds, the barren treeless plains, the gigantic sheep estancias on this island mass of land across the Strait of Magellan.
The most urgent problem confronting us in Lima was that of acquiring a new Libreta de Pasos por Aduana. Without that magical passport to motoring we would never reach Tierra del Fuego. At the Automobile Club of Peru, the assistant manager, Señorita Mariluz Injoque, a slim attractive brunette, listened with interest to our winded account.
“And so,” I concluded dismally, “now La Tortuga’s wheels are more deeply bogged in red tape than in any marsh we’ve encountered.”
Calling the manager, Señor Ricardo Palma, she sympathetically related our difficulties, adding, “I hope we can help these people. The story of their journey could do much to promote interest in the Pan American Highway.”
Then followed an interview with the president of the auto club, Señor Eduardo Dibos, a dedicated man who had spent much of his life in actively boosting road construction and nurturing the ideal of Inter-American travel. Several days later we were issued a Libreta, valid for all of the remaining countries on our route. With it was a friendly admonition—normally the Libreta is issued only in the country where the motorist is a resident. It was a great concession, one for which we are extremely grateful.
With headache number one relieved things were looking up. But sight-seeing was still limited to mattress factories, outboard motor dealers, and whatever lay between. We were having little success on either score. Our air mattresses were flatter than yesterday’s soufflé, the imported ones in the stores were thirty-five U.S. dollars apiece, and sponge rubber was sold by the troy ounce. We saw a good bit of Lima that was never included in a guided tour searching for someone to make straw pads, from the old Rimac section across the river where secondhand mattresses were renovated to an ultra-ultra place where the manufacturer disdainfully replied, “We make nothing but king-size.” Back in the room I was gluing patches on the patches of our old ones when Helen burst in with the startling news that she had sold the outboard motor. I forgot about mattresses. After two weeks of trying the Colombian method of friends, the Ecuadorian system of introductory letters, and the more familiar means of conducting business—the classified sections of the newspapers—I had given up on the motor and was resigned to carrying it to Tierra del Fuego. But my enterprising wife discovered there was still another way of doing business in Latin America—by luck, charm, and a dog. In one breathless sentence she explained:
“Dinah stopped to sniff in front of a bicycle shop and I saw bicycle motors in the window and there was a friendly young man behind the counter and since I had nothing to lose I asked if they bought outboard motors and he said ‘Yes’ but Papa said ‘No’ so the young man escorted me to another shop where the man behind the counter said ‘No’ but a customer smiled and said ‘Yes.’”
Except in Mexico our itinerary in all the countries thus far had been dictated by the Pan American Highway—there was only one route. But from Lima we had a choice. The most direct was the official route of the Highway along the coast of Peru and then across the copper and nitrate desert of Chile to Santiago, the capital. But this route bypassed what to us was the most interesting aspect of Peru, the land of the Incas, the Altiplano, and Cuzco, center of the flourishing Incan culture until the Spaniards despoiled it in the 1530’s. Accordingly, we discussed with the auto club an alternate. We decided to head east from Lima over the highest motor road in the world and then along Peru’s Central Highway to Cuzco and Lake Titicaca, across Bolivia and the northern part of Argentina. From there our route would take us back across the Andes to Santiago, Chile, through the pass where Aconcagua thrusts its snowy crown higher than any other mountain in the Western Hemisphere and the Christ of the Andes spreads his arms
in benediction. From Santiago we planned to travel south to South America’s Switzerland, across fifty miles of lakes to enter Argentina again, through desolate Patagonia, across the Strait of Magellan to Tierra del Fuego and Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost town at the tip of the continent. From Ushuaia, where the trip would actually end, we planned to head north to Buenos Aires and catch a freighter home from there.
Before leaving Lima I serviced the jeep and installed a high-altitude jet in the carburetor. La Tortuga had never been higher than twelve thousand feet and I wasn’t sure how she would perform at altitudes where the Air Force recommends oxygen for its pilots. At first the ascent was gradual, winding through the valley of the Rimac River, but then as the road climbed higher and higher walls of rock rose in sheer cliffs. At Infiemillo, or Little Hell, bridges hung suspended from the maws of tunnels, and three times the road crisscrossed back on itself in one awesome canyon. Wheezing and panting, the 60-horsepower motor moved La Tortuga’s five-thousand-pound bulk slower and slower. Repeatedly I advanced the distributor and dropped to lower gears. At the crest, 15,665 feet above sea level, the jeep gave a relieved little cough, and we stopped to let her cool. A few snowflakes touched our faces, then melted to join the rivers flowing to both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
For much of the next six hundred miles to Cuzco we traveled above ten thousand feet, across the Altiplano, where tumbled masses of rock punctuated the somber rolling plains. Shying at our approach, shaggy wild ponies and even wilder vicuña fled over the clumps of wiry grass. In places remnants of the Incan road system were still visible, a system that had carried Incan armies from Cuzco north to Quito and as far south as the center of Argentina. After more than five hundred years short stretches of Incan road looked better than parts of the Pan American Highway, but what amused me more was that the ancient foot couriers traveled faster than we did. Running in short relays, the chasquis carried to their Incan lords news, fresh fish, and delicacies from the far reaches of the empire, covering as much as a hundred and fifty miles in a day. Our daily average through this rugged terrain was less than a hundred miles.
One reason we made little progress was La Tortuga’s lack of power at high altitudes. But equally retarding was the llama. Intrigued by this distant cousin to the camel, we couldn’t pass one by without stopping. Ornamented with necklace of bright wool and ear brands of streaming colored ribbon, she haughtily returned our stare. Supposedly a beast of burden, she carried her tiny bundles with condescension, moving with mincing steps, her tail prissy, like a bustle on her generously rounded rear. Vanity, thy name is llama.
When we arrived in Huancayo, the Sunday-morning market was already buzzing with activity. The highway ran through the main street, which was blocked off for Indian commerce, and every foot for ten blocks was filled with little stalls of red-and-white striped canopies. Parking the jeep in a side street, we joined the throng, but somewhere in the shuffle I lost Helen. When I found her twenty minutes later she was breathless again. I sensed some new portentous development.
“Now calm down, take a deep breath, and tell me. What’s all the excitement?”
“I found someone to make some mattresses for us. He said he could finish them today.”
That was good news. We couldn’t travel any more that day anyway since traffic over the one-way road for a hundred and fifty miles south of Huancayo alternated in direction every other day. The day for our direction was Monday. Together we went to make final arrangements. For the equivalent of ten U.S. dollars the Indian craftsman would make two pads to fit the jeep. He showed us the materials, arresting pink ticking for the cover and a gray-black vegetable fiber for the stuffing. The fiber had the resiliency of damp spaghetti, but it was softer than the hard boards we were almost accustomed to.
The market in Huancayo was unique in one respect. It was surprisingly sedate. Especially the hat bazaar, where Helen, unconcerned at being out of vogue in her faded culottes, was just as interested in the Dache creations of Huancayo as were two fashionable barefoot Indian misses. Dressed in full skirts of sunflower yellow and scarlet, aqua satin blouses, bibbed and tucked, they were as intent on their selection as any lady on Fifth Avenue. And similarly, with hundreds of hats to choose from, they couldn’t make up their minds. Renoir types with taffeta ribbons, shallow-crown derbies, pale gold sailors of straw, they tried them all, very particular about the fit, which was a bit ludicrous since it was obvious the hats had no fit at all. And finally, like any lady on Fifth Avenue, they left without having bought one.
After a night of squirming the appropriate hollows into our new mattresses we left at dawn to cover the hundred and fifty miles to Ayacucho before dusk. The road was one way with good reason. A precarious shelf scratched from the side of a deep gorge, it twisted high above the Mantaro River, a milky turquoise froth in a cleft of multicolored rock. Plummeting to green valleys, straining wearily to where eagles circle, La Tortuga crept toward Cuzco, through Ayacucho, Andahuaylas, Abancay, towns spaced along the Central Highway as evenly as the hostels of the ancient Incas.
Pisac, near Cuzco, was off the main route. Like nearly every other village, it slept six days out of seven and began to stir early for the Sunday morning market. The winding dirt trail was queued with Indians; some of the more prosperous used burros or llamas to carry their produce, but for the most part the beast of burden was the Indian himself. A few miles from Pisac we came upon an Indian carrying nothing but a silver-capped staff. Sitting jauntily on his head was a red hat, like a felt-covered salad bowl. He was wearing the usual bright striped poncho, and his black knee-length pants, cut up a few inches on each side, were reminiscent of the dress of the Indians of Chichicastenango, Guatemala. We recognized him as a tribal chieftain and asked if he would like to ride with us to Pisac. We didn’t speak Quechua and he didn’t speak Spanish, but our gestures toward him and then to the jeep conveyed the idea. He nodded, smiling beneath the long straggly hairs that hung from his upper lip, and very gingerly climbed in. Dinah could have been more hospitable, and if we had known how long the sour smell of stale chicha would cling to the inside of the jeep we might have been less so. As La Tortuga bounced down the steep descent to Pisac, our guest sat stiffly erect in the seat, clutching his staff of office and trying vainly to maintain his jiggling hat and his dignity at the same time.
Unlike Huancayo, there were no individual stalls at the Pisac market. In the square near the ruins of an old church the vendors sat at random on the ground and spread their wares before them. One of the busiest sections was the pharmacy, where fifty or more little cloth sacks, rolled halfway down, revealed herbs of all classes, powdered glass, and bits of hide and cloth. To the side were bulging bags of dried llama fetuses. For the hypochondriacs among the old lady doctor’s patients there were primitive placebos—pink and blue sugar candy in heart and diamond shapes.
We left Pisac late that afternoon. Just eight miles from Cuzco, with the ominous crack of rending steel, the wheels locked, and we were thrown against the windshield. Dazed, I crawled beneath the jeep and removed the cover of the rear differential. What was left of the gears was piled in a mound of metal chunks. I removed what pieces I could and disconnected the rear drive. Using front-wheel power, we limped into Cuzco.
I was baffled. There had been no warning whine to indicate a misadjustment, there was plenty of lubricant, and the differential wasn’t hot. There was no obvious reason for it to fail. With dismay I realized there could be only one answer. Metal fatigue. With five thousand miles left to go, faithful La Tortuga was wearing out.
True to form, we arrived on a holiday, this time on the eve of a three-day holiday. There would be no repairing of La Tortuga until the festivities were over. Cuzco, city of the Incas, of pageantry, and of the most unmelodious bells in the world, was celebrating the Day of La Merced, patron saint of the Army.
We became accustomed to the hourly tolling of the giant bells, and they didn’t bother us much during the day—that is, if you consider th
e day as commencing at 5:00 A.M. But on the Day of La Merced they began ringing at midnight, each boy trying to ring his bell louder and faster than his partner. The resultant dissonance made a boiler factory sound like a symphony.
From our second-story room opposite the church we had a grandstand view. The Army marched in full regalia, its band adding to the din, followed by hundreds of demurely veiled young girls, and the city fathers, stiff shirts, tails, white gloves, furry cocked hats, and all. Ceremoniously gathering in front of the cathedral, they silently filed inside through the watching crowd of awe-struck Indians. Voices were raised briefly in singing, and to the thunder of drums the priests filed out, the archbishop robed in white, his assistants holding the corners of his brocaded cape to display its dazzling gold lining. And then, borne by thirty men, appeared the life-sized Virgin of La Merced, resplendent in a glittering gown selected for the occasion from her extensive wardrobe. Dramatically the procession began its methodical pace through the streets, followed by the same city fathers, young girls, soldiers, and black-draped figures of the well-to-do. Solemnly—with popping firecrackers strewn by altar boys—the cavalcade continued around the square. The image on its weighty pedestal tipped precariously as the bearers crouched to avoid sagging power lines. But once they didn’t crouch quite far enough—with a crackle of sparks and a wisp of smoke a short circuit consumed the Virgin’s tinsel halo.
20,000 Miles South Page 20