Call of the Bell Bird

by Jennifer Kavanagh

  There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities.

  No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring or the rustle of insects’ wings.

  Words by Ted Perry, based on Chief Seattl’s speech to the President of the United States in 1854

  We were not at our best in cities. Before we left England I was pretty sure that when we got back I would want to move out of London. I was sick of noise and the pressure of everyday living. I certainly had no wish to spend time in South American cities which all the guide books agreed were simply springboards to the historic sights and the magnificence of the natural world of the Andes, the Amazon and the jungle.

  Stephen, however, had European expectations of cities: the art galleries and museums, the central cultural experiences, and wanted to stay in Lima, La Paz, Managua or San Jose. In each we argued, Stephen feeling that he was not seeing what he wanted; I desperate to get out to the world that I had come for. It was a pattern that was to recur throughout our trip. My need to get out into the natural world was a powerful instinct: to unite with that of God in all creation.

  In Peru, we travelled the well-worn tourist path from Lima to Nazca, to Arequipa to Cuzco and Machu Picchu, staying mostly with Servas hosts, and staying long enough in a hotel in Arequipa to settle a little, shopping in the market and cooking for ourselves.

  As we journeyed from one town to the next, we had our first taste of the delights of overland travel and the grandeur of the Andes. Decorated by intricate pre-Columbian terracing, and of a scale unknown to Europeans, they towered above and below us, as we scaled them by bus, up to a level of nearly 5,000 metres, chewing coca leaves to combat the effects of altitude. The local bus itself was full of life. One member of a family had been left behind, then caught up by taxi, only to find that his mother had gone back to find him. Another mother and daughter carefully processed up the aisle of the bus, carrying the layers of a wedding cake; vendors offered food up to the windows or came on board with biscuits, cake, luminous drinks, pens. These journeys of up to twelve hours were only spoilt by the paucity of pee breaks. We felt that Indians must have iron bladders. The stops, when they occurred, allowed only for desperation. On one occasion, we could look down from the road on the hamlet, and into the open lavatories, where women squatted beside buckets in open stalls. No doors, no roof, only the lowest of walls. I envied the Indian women their voluminous skirts.

  Strangely, it was on two organised “tours” in Peru – something we avoided all year – that we had two of our richest experiences of the natural world. The first was to visit the Colca Canyon. There were certainly tiresome elements in the trip that confirmed my prejudices, such as the overcostumed line-up of local people which posed for us in one village, or a folklorique evening best passed over: locals on display to tourists rather than an interaction aiming at some common understanding. But we did manage to abscond from an overpriced communal evening meal to find a local one, where a village band happened to be practising for its own pleasure.

  Machu Picchu

  The canyon itself was awesome. Twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the States, it is one of the few spots where condors can be seen close to, rising on the warm early morning thermals. There was a slight touch of photojournalistic rush at the sight, but in general a hushed constraint. Stephen and I walked ahead of the bus, each settling separately to some quiet contemplation of the scene: flowers and cacti, humming birds, and a red kestrel, as we picked our way back through a natural rockery of stones and plants.

  Chivay, where we stayed for those couple of days, was a splendid little Indian town, full of bustle; on the tourist trail but thoroughly self-possessed. As we wandered among the stalls selling mate tea with different herbs, and dishes of chicken, maize and rice, we were struck by the richness and dignity of local life. There’s an uneasy balance in the contact between people as wealthy as we are and those whose country we invade with diesel fumes and the dust thrown up by our four-wheel drives, but they need our custom, and on the whole the exchanges were friendly and dignified. The begging of some small children and the posing for cameras demeaned us all.

  Chivay was the first area where I felt in the right place, somewhere where a real connection might be possible. We both gloried in the landscape and the people, wished that we could remain to walk at length and embed ourselves a little.

  Throughout our time in Peru I was itching to get to the Amazon and the jungle. I feel a gravitational pull towards grandeur and wilderness, nature at its most elemental. We found that to get to the Amazon proper at Manaus, we would have to fly back via Lima at great expense, and Stephen did not in any case like the idea of several days’ journey by boat on open deck – in his mind mosquitoes loomed large. So, feeling sore and with a bad grace, I settled for our second “tour”: three days in the jungle near Puerto Maldonado on the Madre Dios, one of the tributaries of the Amazon. Sleep did not figure much at this point in our journey: the overnight buses, the early starts, 5.30 a.m. to catch our plane to Puerto Maldonado, 5.30 for our first day in the jungle and an effortful 4.30 to catch the plane back.

  But in between were two days of the most profound experience. For the first time the image and the experience matched. The jungle, like the desert and the mountains, lives up to the expectation. And my courage was stretched. On a 15 km hike through the jungle, my fear at walking over swamp, on a walkway just one or two planks wide with rotting handrails, was transformed after two kilometres from a tentative balancing act into upright strolling. The climb up 95 rackety steps into a tree platform to look down on to jungle that clutched my stomach in advance, and to some extent on the way up, turned on the way down into the surefootedness of my youth.

  There was a strong sense of the closeness of local people to the land and its fruits. Our guide pointed out the use that local people made of every plant – for building houses, as tools, for medicinal use or to eat. We were warned not to lean on or touch the “justice tree”. There is a symbiotic relationship between the tree and the lines of ants that on close inspection could be seen crawling up the bark. One sting would be extremely painful; a few would mean death. In the past, wrongdoers had been tied up to these trees, and left to die.

  What impressions! The howling monkeys sounding like the wind rushing through trees before dawn, the caymans or alligators sunning themselves on the banks or submerged, just the red of their eyes visible in the torch beams from the boat at night; the Madre Dios herself, wide, viscous, fast-flowing through Bolivia into the Amazon.

  There was no hot water but welcome tropical heat. No electricity except in the bar and restaurant; but candles, a lantern for each bungalow, the covered walkway lit by oil lamps. Our fears of a package were unfounded: only three other guests, nothing luxurious, little feeling of being managed or packaged. Certainly no mollycoddling.

  At last came a day of connections. Life on the trip so far had felt disjointed, agreeable but without substantial meaning. Like pieces of a jigsaw with not only the rest missing but not even the possibility of a jigsaw in sight. Then something happens and all falls into place. Thus, we went one day to our first Quaker Meeting in South America, and my first evangelical one.

  There are different kinds of Quakers in the world, and none knows much about the other, though each claims to be the authentic kind. When William Penn and others went out to the United States in the seventeenth century, and founded Quakerism over there, there was a compulsion, as with other radicals, to keep going West. As they went, they built new churches and were influenced by the evangelical nature of those around them. Gradually, Western American Quakerism became evangelical, programmed and pastor-led, and a great split occurred in the early nineteenth century. The evangelical branch spread to Africa and Latin America, leading to a situation in the present day of very different strands of Quakerism in different parts of the world.

  We knew that in South America we were going to encounter Quakers of the programmed evangelical persuasion but, as Friends from the country
in which Quakerism was born, we were keen to show solidarity. And the Friends church in Arequipa, Peru, certainly gave us a warm welcome. Almost entirely Indian, the congregation of about two hundred expressed their faith in three hours of singing, clapping and preaching. It was a million miles from our own largely silent practice, but a moving occasion as they greeted the first foreign Quakers to have visited them.

  The connection came from the presence of a pair of US Quaker missionaries. It’s a strange concept for contemporary liberal Friends, although there were in fact British Quaker missionaries into the mid-twentieth century. Ken and Tanya, it turned out, were only in Arequipa by chance. They actually lived with their home-schooled daughter some miles away in Puno and after 13 years were about to go back to the States. Unlike the pastors of other evangelical churches, they had groomed their successors. It was time to leave the leadership of the church in the hands of local people, and they had come to Arequipa to say goodbye. They told us that they were planning to spend a day visiting Quakers in outlying Indian pueblos, and invited us to join them. Although I am uncomfortable with the missionary intent, it was a kind offer, and we felt privileged to be asked.

  Our day with them the following week was mind-expanding. We had arrived the previous night in Puno, a pretty frontier town on the shores of Lake Titicaca which, at

  3,827 metres (12,500 feet), is the highest lake in the world. Ken and Tanya picked us up from our hotel at 8.30 a.m. and drove about sixty kilometres to an extraordinary Aymaran Indian community on the Alto Plano. Extraordinary because the houses were concrete rather than adobe – the original ones had been destroyed in the floods of 1985 – and because of the density of the population – apparently the most densely populated rural community in the world. Having been to Bangladesh, it was hard to believe.

  Reuben, a quiet, humble man, is a Quaker pastor and a former clerk of Yearly Meeting. He took us to see a building on an island in the middle of the reed bed edges of Lake Titicaca near his home, which serves as a centre for meetings in the community. We reached it by boat, punted by Reuben: a magical journey through the reeds, with coots, an ibis and other birds wheeling round us.

  We went back to their concrete hut for lunch. It was cooked but not eaten by his wife Victoria who had been breastfeeding their eleven-month daughter when we arrived. It was a huge meal of mainly root vegetables, dry and hard to eat without a drink, which is not served until afterwards. Ken then preached and prayed for some time, then all present said a little in Spanish before embracing each other in a warm farewell – the two couples had come to know each other well after 13 years.

  Visiting an Aymaran pueblo

  In the car Ken described the subtle and complex interactions between Christianity and Aymaran beliefs and superstitions. He had made a ten-year study of Aymaran customs; in common with most ancient peoples, they live close to the land and retain a connection with the power of the natural world that we have lost. As we drove, Ken pointed out a mountain top which he called “the highest altar in the world”. Human sacrifice to the devil is still practised there to bring financial luck, as it is in the mines to the god of the underworld. The victim is often a girl brought from elsewhere who has no idea what is happening.

  At a neighbouring house we were awaited in some distress by an old man and his family. They had asked Ken to come and pray with them to stem the tide of ill luck they had experienced, including a lightning strike. They had, it seemed, already called in the local shaman and the Catholic priest to bless them. The women wept, asking forgiveness of each other and blessings from us. I asked them to bless me too: I was already uneasy at the imbalance between gringo and Indian. Ken was deferred to throughout as “Pastor” and we all sat on benches while the Indians sat on the ground. When we prayed, Stephen and I got off the bench to sit at their level.

  The world awakes and is filled with light to worship thee, O Creator of man.

  The lofty sky sweeps away her clouds in homage to thee, the Maker of the world.

  The king of stars, Our Father, the sun, submits to thee his power and might.

  The winds lift up the tops of the trees and wave each branch in tribute to thee.

  From the shadowy woods the birds sing out to render praise to the Ruler of all.

  The flowers show forth in brilliant array their vivid colours and pungent perfumes.

  In the depths of the lake, in the watery world, the fish proclaim their joy of thee.

  The dashing stream in bursting song exhausts in thee, O Creator of man.

  The cliffs are dressed in glowing green, and the canyon walls with flowers gleam.

  The serpents come from their forest abode to pay their obedience due.

  The wary vicuña and shy viscacha [chinchilla] come down from the heights and are tame before thee. At the dawn of day my heart sings praise to thee, my Father and Creator of man

  Translation by Jesus Lara of an ancient poem, in La Poesia Quechua y Aymara (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1947) pp. 159–60

  Over the border to Bolivia. Lake Titicaca was rough that day, and we were held up for four hours before being allowed to cross in life jackets handed out by members of the Bolivian navy. We had all got off our bus to board a small boat, and were astonished to see the buses being loaded on to rafts and being shipped across the lake. The sight of buses bobbing across the water was quite surreal.

  Travelling along the highway some ten miles out of La Paz. A barren mountain landscape, no trees or grass, a small stream far below, very few cars on the road. From the bus we see a well kept dog on the roadside, looking up eagerly at our approach, left pathetically behind as we pass. A few minutes further on, another running out into the road behind us, a sad little figure receding into the distance. And another and another, every two hundred metres or so, spread out over an area of several miles: motley dogs, some terriers, some collies, mostly mongrels in varying degrees of dilapidation. Left without food on a bare mountainside by owners unwilling or unable to keep them. Left to die.

  We had arrived in Bolivia with no plans except to make contact with local Friends, particularly Jerry, a missionary friend of Ken and Tanya’s who had indicated that he might have some work for us. We met him and his family at La Paz Friends church on Mother’s Day, an important festival in that part of the world. Again the service lasted for three-hours, a little boy in front of us helping us find the place in the Spanish/Aymara hymn book. As a theologian, Jerry was uneasy at the blurred distinctions between Quakers here and other evangelical churches, and frank in his admission that they had been good at evangelism but not at establishing Quakerism. He had not been able to find any work for us, but said that there was a Friends school in Coroico. We had already heard that Coroico was an attractive town and – most importantly, low enough to be warmer than La Paz, which, at over 3,600 metres (12,000 feet) is the highest capital in the world, and extremely cold at night. Unprepared for the temperature, I had caught a cold, and had to invest in an embroidered Bolivian jacket to keep warm in the evenings. Even so we found ourselves going to bed at about 8 p.m. just to get warm in our unheated hotel.

  One day, walking along the street in La Paz, I felt myself splashed from above. I thought at first it was bird dropping or water from a gutter, then found it was some unpleasant-smelling sticky substance that someone had thrown on me. As Stephen and I stopped to dab it off, two passers by stopped to help, proffering handkerchiefs. It was an unpleasant experience, and I was grateful for their solicitude. It was not till I saw one of them feeling in Stephen’s bag that I realised it might be something else. Stephen felt one of them feeling in his pocket and whisked me away, saying, “Yes, thank you, thank you, we’ll be fine now.” Apparently it’s a known scam; we had escaped lightly.

  We were warned everywhere we went of theft and mugging, and heard terrible stories from some of the young travellers we met. We carried very little money on us, keeping our moneybelts and other valuables locked in our cases when we were not on the move. We had
, in any case, very little that was valuable with us, on the basis that we did not want to be worried about losing things. I had brought no jewellery and had not, though I was tempted, updated my very basic camera. Several times in South America we were stopped by passers by, telling us that a knapsack was undone and even once, in Rio, that the street we were on was not safe for foreigners. We left at once. We took care, and were not robbed in Latin America, or indeed at all until India. We did, however, lose things all the time, leaving hat or shampoo in a hotel bedroom or sunglasses on a bus. I think I got through four pairs in the year. Letting go.

  The hotel in La Paz was was situated in the middle of a giant market, spread all over this and neighbouring streets. Fruit, vegetables, piles and sacks of nuts and flour, hardware, fish and flowers. Patient Aymaran women with lined faces, large and voluminous in their many layered clothing: billowing skirts, shawls and blankets, sitting, like their Quechua sisters in Peru, from early morning till after dark with their wares; then struggling on to our collectivos (shared taxis) with brilliant red stripey bundles, sometimes containing a baby, slung over their shoulders. The men were barely evident – perhaps because, not in costume, they blended into the background.

  We ate in local cafes where the food was much the same as that which in Peru is called the “menu”; here, in Bolivia, it was known as the almuerzo (lunch) or cena (dinner). It was usually soup with a piece of meat and potato in a vegetable broth, followed by rice and potato with either fish or meat and some times a little (unsafe) salad. For about 50p it was perfectly satisfying. We never drank the water or ate unpeeled fruit or raw vegetables. A sad deprivation, but worth it in terms of our health.

  We had not realised that altitude could make such a difference, and had become devotees of coca to deal with its effects. Though legal in South America, where coca tea is a common local drink, as the basis of cocaine it is illegal in most of the rest of the world and the Americans are trying to get it banned in South America too. In Puno an interesting Italian woman doctor was running a café in a Franciscan mission; her passion was campaigning for the retention of coca. Few people seemed to smoke in South America, and it will be interesting to see how many people take it up if coca is banned. Certainly the advertising of the cigarette companies was very visible.