A far cry from the North Wall of the Eiger in winter, it was difficult to believe that just six weeks earlier I had been sitting in my sleeping bag in a sub-zero temperature in the snow cave on the Death Bivouac. This was when I had first heard about Sangay. It was on the evening radio call, when Pete Gillman said, almost as an afterthought,
‘Oh, by the way, John Anstey says, “Do you want to go and climb an active volcano in Ecuador? You’d be the photographer.” ’
I didn’t even think. ‘Sounds terrific. Yes, I would.’
It was largely a question of out of the fridge on to the hot plate – but apart from the fact that anywhere warm seemed attractive, this could also be my big break – another job with the Telegraph magazine.
The following six weeks passed in preparation for my next assignment whilst sitting it out in hospital, recovering from frostbite. I spent much of the time as a guinea-pig for a new method of treatment called hyperbaric oxygen, which entailed hours spent lying in a cylinder filled with two atmospheres of oxygen. You had to wear a special anti-static tunic, and were not allowed to take in with you even a book; apparently, in oxygen so pure and concentrated, even the slightest static electricity could have caused a fire that would have sent you up in a puff of smoke. As a result, I just lay there for hour upon hour, trying out patience as a potential guru – a role in which I failed miserably.
But at last I escaped and now, on the 16th May, a mere ten days after getting out of hospital, I was jogging through the jungles of Ecuador, bound for our volcano, when the mule in front came to a sudden halt and my own cannoned into it. Long ago I had resigned myself to the fact that I had no control over the beast – it went where it chose. Our way was barred by a fallen trunk, and one of the muleteers jumped into the mud, in an attempt to manhandle the mules over the barrier. Glancing back at Sebastian Snow, my companion on this adventure, I saw that his proofed anorak looked like blotting paper and a trickle of water, which was running down from the tip of his nose, passed his slightly pendulous lower lip. He looked peculiarly helpless, largely because his glasses were completely misted up and he was unable to see where he was going. He presented a very different picture from that of the dark-suited, smooth, old-Etonian to whom I had been introduced by John Anstey in London. This trip had been Sebastian’s idea. One of a fast disappearing breed of gentlemen explorers, he had started his own career of adventure after leaving Eton by answering an advertisement in The Times to join an expedition to survey the true source of the Amazon. While wandering alone in the shadow of the Andes he had conceived the idea of following the Amazon all the way down to the sea, something that no one had ever done in its entirety. What made the adventure so attractive was the total lack of planning, combined with the sparseness of his knowledge of the problems involved and his relative lack of funds. Hiring a faithful Indian – Sancho Panza to his Quixote – he embarked upon a series of horrendous, yet slightly bizarre adventures in his journey to the Atlantic. This trip developed in him a taste for South American jungles, causing him to return time and time again to probe and explore, always in the manner of the Victorian amateur. By the time I met him, he had made another river trip, this time a north-to-south continental crossing up the Orinoco from the Caribbean, across the Casiquare link, a geographical phenomenon which joins the Orinoco to the Amazon, and then down one of the Amazon tributaries to link up with the River Plate and finish at Buenos Aires. He had made two attempts at this venture, the first ending in sickness, before eventually he completed his journey.
When I had met him over lunch in Quaglino’s in early April, it was difficult to believe that he could possibly be a hardy jungle explorer: he was undoubtedly eccentric, probably neurotic and enjoyed making extravagant, and at times outrageous, statements, simply to watch the effects on his audience.
This was one of the first things I was to discover about the difference between going climbing with chosen companions, and carrying out a journalistic assignment. In the case of the latter, you go with whom your employer selects, and it is up to you to make the best of it. There was obviously going to be no shortage of adventure on this mission. Our objective was Sangay, a very remote volcano on the eastern edge of the Andes, overlooking the Amazon Basin. It was also high, 17,496 feet, and very active, with a reputation for having had as many as 400 eruptions in the course of a single day. As an objective, this was one of the factors which had endeared it to both Sebastian and John Anstey, since Anstey wanted to be sure of having truly spectacular photographs, and it promised to satisfy Sebastians unquenchable thirst for action which, at times, I felt was akin to a fanciful form of death wish.
In our venture, Sebastian was to be the jungle expert and writer, I the mountain guide and photographer. After only a week in Sebastian’s company all my reservations about him vanished, leaving an easy relationship of mutual mockery, which hid a real affection. His affectations of neuroses, eccentricity and dyed-in-the-wool conservatism were little more than a shell concealing a whimsical sense of humour and a special organisational ability perfectly geared to the elaborate etiquette and principle of mañana (leave everything until tomorrow, in the absolute confidence that tomorrow will never arrive), which dominates all dealings in South America.
We had flown out to Quito via New York, Miami, and Bogota weighed down with 400 lb of excess baggage, which included a high altitude tent, ropes, climbing boots, and a special Boots first-aid kit. The trip had started on the right footing when I, having succeeded in leaving the ice-axes in Miami Airport, with equal facility convinced Sebastian that it was his fault. Cables had criss-crossed, and eventually the missing axes had caught up with us. In Quito I had been even more impressed by my companion. He had a wealth of important contacts and our expedition had been organised in the course of a few days, mainly over endless cocktails and dinner parties. All the necessary permits, local food and other impedimenta materialised with an almost magical quality. Sebastian even succeeded in enlisting the help of a local climber, one Jorge Larrea, who worked in a bank and had climbed Chimborazzo with him some years before. He was to interpret and generally act as diplomat.
Without Jorge’s services (neither of us spoke Spanish), as bargainer, and remembering all the things which both Sebastian and I invariably forgot, I do not think we should ever have come within a hundred miles of Sangay.
The volcano had had several previous ascents, and had claimed at least one life, but all of these had been from the west, where the volcano abuts on to the high grasslands of the Andean plateau. The approach from that direction is relatively straightforward; three days’ march from the road-head over grass-clad foothills. This did not sound adventurous enough, so I hit upon the idea of tackling the volcano from the east – from the Amazon Basin. The nearest civilisation was the small town of Macas, on the banks of the Rio Upano, a tributary of the Amazon. It had an airstrip and although we could have flown in from Quito in a matter of hours, this, once again, would have destroyed the adventure. Why not go overland? – we should see so much more of the country and as a result get that much better story material.
And that was why we were jogging along on the backs of mules, through a tropical downpour in the middle of a seemingly pathless jungle, somewhere between the towns of Cuenca and Macas. Up to this point, the trip had been a magical kaleidoscope of colours, smells and zany experiences, ranging from the dinner parties in Quito, in modern apartments which might have belonged to the wealthy in any country in the world, to the earthy reality of our present situation.
Our journey started in Quito, its narrow streets filled with motor cars, neon signs, patient, inscrutable, poncho-clad Indians – a perfect Spanish colonial city, on which the trappings of modernity hung like fragile cobwebs ready to be brushed away. It is a city of churches with ornate cupolas and baroque columns, their interiors filled with gold and precious stones, a tribute to the rape and pillage of the Inca civilisation.
And then – the first stage of our Odyssey, the bus ride to Cuenc
a. Sebastian, still clad in dark suit and wearing his Old Etonian tie like a banner, presented a sharp contrast to myself, already scruffy in T-shirt and jeans. He was squeezed between me and a splendidly fat Indian lady nursing a small pig, surrounded by a cacophony of sound, of talk, of clucking hens, of the honk of the horn and the rattle of the engine. We were in the bus for twenty-three bone-shaking hours, as it bumped over paved roads, round hair-pin bends marked with little white crosses to commemorate the victims of accidents.
Cuenca was another old Spanish colonial town in Southern Ecuador, with less of the trappings of modernity than Quito. There was colour everywhere, with women washing clothes on the banks of the river, spreading a veritable coat of many colours over the grass to dry. The Indian market poured forth its noise, bustle and smells, guinea-pigs, fowl, turkeys, vegetables, cones of grain like dormant volcanoes, and people – women in wide sweeping flannel skirts of tangerine, purple and blue; heads shaded with panama hats; faces brown and impassive. I just wandered, absorbed, excited, stimulated by the challenge of transferring the atmosphere from reality to film. I’m not a natural tourist, have never enjoyed seeing a place or museum with the visit as an end-product in itself. But this was different. I was here with a purpose – to get a photographic record – and it was this very intention – the fact that I wanted to reproduce the pictures which were pressing on me, that made the impressions all the more important.
From Cuenca we took a taxi to the village of Gualaceo, one more step away from our familiar Western way of life – but only a step. We stayed at a hosteleria run by an enigmatic German – ‘Martin Bormann without a shadow of a doubt,’ Sebastian assured me. The hotel was at tourist standard, but the village itself could hardly have changed in the last 200 years – ever since the Conquistadors overran the country.
After Gualaceo the escalation into wilderness moved faster. A jeep over a muddy road to the road-head, an hour’s bargaining with a group of dissolute, villainous-looking muleteers whose breaths stank of Aqua Diente, the local fire-water, and then we were on narrow paths, an up-and-down trip through banana plantations past small huts and through scrub, to the village of Limon, a collection of clapboard houses on either side of a dusty trail, that could have come straight out of any Western film. Sebastian had, by now, shed his dark suit, and he rode into town with the nonchalance of any gun-toting cowpoke. We looked up the best saloon in town and found it at least moderately clean. It had bare-board rooms upstairs, and on the ground floor an open saloon with a miniature billiards table which seemed to provide the sole local pastime, and a fly-blown bar. We certainly had little chance of living it up on our Daily Telegraph expense accounts. Supper consisted of a few lumps of tough meat, mixed into a mash of overcooked rice, washed down with the local wine. Our muleteers had insisted on being paid the previous evening, and evidently, having enjoyed an all-night debauch, were even more drunk than they had been when we had hired them. Jorge, therefore, sacked them and then succeeded in finding a quiet, dour-looking Indian, who looked altogether more reliable.
Whilst planning our trip, no one in Quito had been very certain whether there was a road, or even a path, to Macas – no sane person would ever dream of going overland when there was a perfectly good plane service. Even at Cuenca, it had been impossible to get any reliable information, and in many ways this was the charm of our experience. That night we stopped at our first jivaria – home of a jungle Indian. The Indians whom we had met so far came, had originated, from the plateau. They had been exposed and in bondage to the original Spanish invader for nearly 400 years, and their lives, dress and customs were influenced accordingly. The Indians of the forest had had less direct contact and their lives had not changed much in the last thousand years. We came across the jivaria in the late evening, at a time when I was beginning to wonder just where we should spend the night. It was a single building, in a small clearing in the forest, with a high, steep-angled roof of thatch. The walls were merely vertical bamboo poles, close enough together to stop an intruder or a large animal, but sufficiently wide apart to allow the chickens and small pigs owned by the family to run in and out freely. There were no windows, and the doorway was simply a gap, barely wide enough to squeeze through. Inside, there was just the one big compartment, softly lit through the gaps between the bamboo walls. From the two supporting timbers of the roof hung the worldly possessions of the family – an old gun that looked as if it would be a greater danger to the man who fired it than to the object of his aim, a few pots and, somehow out of place, a transistor radio. The man of the house wore a tattered shirt and trousers and his wife was clad in a grubby long frock that trailed in the dust and mud – standard wear for all Indians at this time, imposed by the prudery of the local mission. The children, and there were six of them, ran about stark naked, showing off distended bellies and pathetically thin little legs and arms.
Yet there was a quiet dignity in their hospitality; we were strangers in the forest, and we were welcome. I am not sure whether they expected anything from us, but there seemed to be no bargaining. They even offered us some of their evening meal – a bowl of yucca – a root vegetable which seemed a cross between a potato and a parsnip, and less tasty than either!
Next day it was raining, with the torrential deluge that I have already described. In its own way it held a greater fascination than any experience on the Eiger and, in some ways, was even more frightening: I thought I understood mountains but felt lost and ill at ease in the mystery of the forest.
Three days later we reached Macas, a dusty, lost outpost of Western man, dominated by a huge clapboard church and criss-crossed with power lines for an electricity supply not yet connected to a generator. It boasted a few tired little saloons which were still to be modernised for the ubiquitous tourist.
We were a mere thirty-five miles from Sangay, could see it from the top of a bluff, which also performed the duty of a cemetery, high above the river Upano. At first sight, the volcano seemed unreal, like a Japanese painting, its symmetrical cone silhouetted against a copper sky, and a gentle plume of smoke drifting from its summit.
It was the last view of our objective that we were to have for seven days, for we were now in the rainy season and most days the skies wept and Sangay was hidden from view. We could take our mules no further and Sebastian, the fixer of the expedition, produced an introduction to the only European in Macas. He was a German baron, who promised to do his best to help with porters, and to find a guide for our trip.
‘But it might be difficult,’ he warned us. ‘Everyone here is frightened of the volcano, and no one has ever been on its slopes.’
Apart from anything else, the inhabitants of Macas were settlers from the Andean plateau, agricultural pioneers trying to hack away the wilderness of the Amazon Basin. Most of them were ex-soldiers who had been given a plot of land in lieu of a gratuity, and had little more experience of virgin jungle than we ourselves. We had almost given up all hope of finding a guide to take us to the base of the volcano, when a small wiry old man, clad in a faded bush shirt, shorts and a pair of old gym-shoes, presented himself at our hotel. Through Jorge, he assured us that he knew the route as if it were his own back-garden. Eight years before he had guided an Austrian botanist up the Rio Volcan, a tributary of the Upano that flowed down from the base of Sangay. We were to set out the following day at dawn, and eventually left at three in the afternoon – a mere eight hours late which, by Macas standards, was the epitome of punctuality.
Altogether, we had six porters; they were well-built, cheerful lads. Like the Sherpas of Nepal they used a head-band for carrying their loads. One factor that worried me was that they were clad for the hot jungles around Macas, and I could not help wondering how they would fare once we reached the base of the volcano and started to gain altitude.
The approach had a spice of sleepy adventure to it, and this gained piquancy as we got closer to the mountain. Don Albino, our guide and mentor, assured us it would take only three days to reac
h the base of the volcano. We planned our provisioning accordingly. At first the way led along a footpath on the banks of the River Upano, through a hotch-potch of maize and banana plantations, virgin jungle and entanglements of undergrowth where the exhausted soil had allowed the jungle to encroach once again. Every now and then a Jivaro house would rear from rich vegetation and each night we stayed at one of them, always meeting with the same standard of dignified, slightly withdrawn, hospitality.
Then, after three days, we reached the last jivaria. Our porters were becoming nervous, and Don Albino was visibly losing confidence. He muttered about it being a long time since he had walked into the Rio Volcan; that the way had changed; of the unspeakable dangers that might lurk waiting for us. At last, he admitted frankly that he could not possibly guide us any further and we should have to find a local guide. He duly produced a Jivaro, whom he assured us had regularly been to the base of the volcano, and we set out on the last leg of our journey. We were now in real rain forest that had never been cleared and had the sepulchral look and gloom of a cathedral – but it was quite easy to walk through, there being little undergrowth. It also held an indefinable menace – the feeling that it stretched for ever, into the wild confines of the Amazon Basin. We followed our guide, whispering like so many tourists in the crypt of St Paul’s, for two hours, walking through the forest until we came out once more into the open on the wide shingle beds that flanked either bank of the Upano River. We were just short of the tributary of the Rio Volcan, which flowed down into the Upano, at its confluence, over a series of shingle banks formed from black lava dust between high cliffs of gravel.
The sky was a leaden grey, and it had begun to rain as we trailed up the side of the river. Our porters looked singularly uncertain and unhappy in this strange environment. The rain already had a cool bite to it, and the porters’ claims to be able to make themselves shelters from the boughs of trees began to ring somewhat hollow. They seemed to be just as helpless as any city dwellers confronted by the wilderness. We ended up by rigging a bivouac tent between a couple of trees for them, while the three of us retired to our two-man tent.
The Next Horizon Page 24