by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today
Modern Andean scholar John Hyslop has described how in some “Inka centers the entry and exit roads, and other major corridors, were planned divisions that separated groups of people with different status and function”—suggesting that in the Inca empire some must have lived, as we say, on the wrong side of the tracks. Other roads were used for pilgrimages; still others apparently “marked certain astronomical and calen-drical concepts,” as was true elsewhere in the Americas.
The Inca even thought differently than we do about where a road should go. The contemporary British explorer Hugh Thomson recently noted how “the Quechuan guides I’ve worked with always travel instinctively on the high side of any given valley, while the natural tendency of European or American mountain trekkers is to keep to the bottom if they can.” Having spent a lot of time retracing Inca paths and exploring old ruins, Thomson has concluded that Incan roads “are written with a different grammar to our own.” He describes a trip on which
I came across a magnificent decayed stairway high up in the Choquete-carpa valley. The stairway rose out of the grass ahead of us, seemingly out of nowhere, stone tread after stone tread, a full twelve feet wide, the width of a royal road … Even higher in the valley were some stone llama pens, built just below the pass at a chilling 13,700 feet: circular buildings, 13 feet in diameter, clustered tightly together to give protection against the wind. Above, a vertiginous stone stairway cut its way directly up towards the pass. No travellers now ever passed along that road—those few that came would use the modern mule track instead, which wound its course in a more sedate and European style over the other shoulder of the pass. We had found this alternate ancient way because we knew where to look.
In Cuzco today most antiquities date from Spanish colonial times—the cobblestone streets, for example, and the Plaza de Armas and the cathedral that graces it. But Inca walls and foundations abound, and walking from my hotel, on Choquechaca Street, to a pedestrian alley called Hatunrumiyoc Street, which leads to the plaza, I daily passed a celebrated wall, part of the palace of the sixth Inca, Inca Roca. Twice my height and long as a block, the smooth wall is made of large stones of irregular shape, all hewn together to fit like jigsaw pieces. The particular stone for which Hatunrumiyoc Street is named is several feet across and has twelve separate sides that mesh perfectly with the stones around it; the effort required to achieve the fit is mind-boggling.
Along the wall, leaning against it most days, were groups of Quechua-speaking women who hawked souvenirs to tourists. The juxtaposition of their trade with the ancient masonry was striking: in the thin air of Cuzco, the grandeur of a lost civilization lingers alongside the poverty of its descendants. When a vendor with beautiful waist-length braids, necklaces, and a funky velvet top hat demands payment for having her photo taken, you can understand why but are put in mind of the continuing indignity of the Indians, the evident absence of skills as sublime as those of the ancient stonemasons.
Pizarro and his conquistadors had several rationales for their horrific deeds. They were seeking to expand the dominion of King Carlos V of Spain. They were seeking converts to Christendom. And, as poor men from a dry corner of Spain called Extremadura (which means “very hard”), they were seeking wealth and power. Their looting of the Incan empire, their means of extracting its gold, is a tale widely known but one that deserves brief retelling.
Using the Inca roads leading to the mountains—these were several, and excellent—the Spaniards invaded Cuzco and later Cajamarca, where they captured the Incan emperor, Atahualpa. Instead of simply killing Atahualpa outright, they ransomed him, holding out the prospect of his eventual release as a means to summon gold and silver from all over the empire. The Incas used the metals not as currency but as decoration for shrines and public buildings. Except for a few decorative pieces to intrigue King Carlos V, Pizarro wanted it all in the form of bullion he could most efficiently export to Spain. So the same Inca craftsmen who had worked the metal into fine shapes were now compelled to melt it back down. The object, according to legend, was to fill a room in Cajamarca, where Atahualpa was being held hostage, up to the top, at which point his freedom would be won. The “ransom room” was finally filled but then the emperor, to the Spaniards’ everlasting infamy, was executed by garrote—strangling a person from behind with rope or wire.
Thus, the first great export of the New World to the Old was gold—taken by force, at a cost of Incan pride and identity. As Old World culture took root in the New World, the indigenous people changed, grew, suffered, threw off the colonial yoke, matured. Peru, over the next nearly five hundred years, became a democracy with a market economy.
Now foreigners had to pay for her gold. (On a back street in Cuzco, I paid $70 for a wedding band in white gold to replace one I had lost. The gold came from Hueypetue, a mining area I would soon pass by.) But what the world really wanted from Peru at the beginning of the twenty-first century was her wood.
I carried a phone number from Antonio Ponce: another friend of his, another office on the industrial side of town, another truck idling out back.
My new driver was Braulio Quispe. He was handsome, compact, curly-haired, about thirty years old, and filled with energy. His truck was compact and energy-packed as well: like most of those that plied the east side of the sierra, it was a Volvo fuel tanker, loaded with diesel and emblazoned with the words INFLAMABLE and PELIGRO (DANGER!) on the sides. The big metal tank was flat on top and there was a little metal fence around it that in effect turned it into a giant pickup truck with a very high bed. On his return trip to Cuzco from the jungle, with the tank empty (its diesel transferred to tanks in Puerto Maldonado, where it would power other trucks, and electrical generators), that bed would be stacked high with mahogany boards. On the outbound trip, however, as I would soon discover, it would be filled with about two dozen human beings. Braulio, in other words, would be driving a highly explosive bus.
To fly from Cuzco east to the jungle town of Puerto Maldonado, in the Amazon basin, takes less than half an hour. But to drive the tortuous mountain route takes about twenty-four hours, if you’re lucky. A normally difficult situation is made worse by the rainy season (December-April), which we were in: the route, which is mostly unpaved, turns to mud. Trickles become torrents. The month before, a mudslide had closed the route for two weeks. More than a hundred vehicles had been backed up on either side at the time, most of them trucks, which were the road’s main traffic. But they weren’t the only ones to suffer: within a few days of a road closure, shops in Puerto Maldonado are empty of most produce and dairy products; after a week, filling stations tend to close. The unreliable road is the jungle residents’ lifeline.
There are other routes from the rain forest over the mountains to the coast, and some are shorter, but this one, through Cuzco, is the most heavily traveled; the town has the longest, tightest integration with the forest. Most of the “pioneers” working to settle the rain forest, for example, are poor Indians from the sierra; Quechua is commonly heard in jungle work camps. It is hard to imagine two more opposite climates more closely linked: Cuzco with its thin air and desertlike aridity, the jungle with its heat and mop-your-forehead humidity. But there they are. The road goes up and down so often that it makes sense to think of it as part elevator.
Before we could descend, we had to head sideways for a while. We pulled over at Oropesa, a humble roadside settlement a few miles out of Cuzco. A woman emerged from a low wooden house, smiling and holding out a small pile of folded clothes for Braulio: it was his wife. His kids came out, too, and I watched from the cab as he hugged a toddler but not a teenage daughter. He gave his wife some money but didn’t hug her either; I could see it was not the custom. His round-trips to Puerto Maldonado and back, Braulio told me, usually took about eight days, so his family was accustomed to his absences.
The town where we stopped next, Urcos, is described by Prescott as being “about six leagues from the capital”—eighteen miles. Conquistadors sometimes were c
ompetitive with one another, and in 1537, rivalries played out here: Diego de Almagro, a challenger to the Pizarro brothers who had already claimed Chile for the crown, mustered some five hundred soldiers in Urcos and launched an attack on the Pizarro army that had taken Cuzco. He succeeded in displacing them and in capturing two of the three Pizarro brothers, Hernando and Gonzalo, but his ascendance was short-lived. The next year the Pizarros retook Cuzco. They captured Almagro and condemned him to death. Almagro begged for his life. To this Hernando Pizarro coldly replied that “he was surprised to see Almagro demean himself in a manner so unbecoming a brave cavalier; that his fate was no worse than had befallen many a soldier before him.” Almagro was garroted in prison, then publicly decapitated.
The plaza in front of the Urcos cathedral was crowded on the afternoon we arrived; there was a funeral procession, and pallbearers of a simple casket made their way up the church steps, tears streaming down their faces. As Braulio’s truck pulled up near them, however, a significant number of people I had mistaken for mourners began to swarm up its sides: Braulio and most other truckers made significant extra money by carrying passengers.
Once the space on top of the fuel tank had filled with riders, Braulio told those hanging on the sides to get off—he was full. A dozen people reluctantly climbed down. That still left about twenty more people on the fuel truck than when we started; Braulio seemed content. Still, it didn’t take a worrywart to look up past the giant letters warning INFLAMABLE to all those dark heads, some with alpaca-fur knit hats on (it was getting cold) to think that, hmm, maybe this wasn’t the perfect marriage of automotive technology and function.
We lumbered out of Urcos, soon left behind the pavement—and encountered the police. It was drizzling now in the twilight, and two police officers got up from under a plastic sheet to demand Braulio’s papers.
“What’s up?” I asked him from the cab, where I had continued to sit—gratefully, for the people in back were about to get soaked.
“It’s illegal to have those passengers,” he noted, pulling out one of the banknotes secured over his visor with a rubber band. He tucked the money into his documents folder. When he returned to his seat, the money was gone, and we were off. Braulio wasn’t angry; this was just a cost of doing business. I have seen the scene repeated scores of times: the poorly paid policeman, the relatively prosperous trucker, the safety violation that should not be allowed to stand, and yet… how else were all these people going to get over the mountains? In the absence of public transportation and living wages for police officers, this kind of transaction constitutes traffic law enforcement in much of the world.
As the rain picked up, the road quickly turned bad. Ten minutes past the police stop, where the route crossed a small gulch, part of the road had washed out in a torrent of water and we had to wait behind three other trucks. Deliberately, if not hastily, various people were dragging assorted tree trunks, limbs, and rocks to the site, first aid for the road. Braulio took the opportunity to unfurl a tarpaulin his passengers could pull over the back of the truck, to keep themselves dry. He also invited a young mother, Natali, and her toddler son, Carlos, to move into the cab with us.
Passengers climb onto the top of Braulio’s fully loaded fuel truck, outside Cuzco, for a ride down into the rain forest.
To the clicking of windshield wipers, Braulio interviewed his pretty passenger. She was from Puerto Maldonado, she said, but only going as far as a high mountain town en route “to attend to my business.” Braulio, flirtatious, worked hard to find out what that business was, but the young woman was reticent. It dawned on me that bringing her into the cabin might not have been a purely altruistic move on his part.
I noticed that the first truck on the far side of the washout was loaded with thick boards, and asked Braulio why a couple of them couldn’t be thrown across the breach. He looked at me as though I were as naïve as little Carlos, and explained why that would never happen: “Es caoba.” It’s mahogany. I crossed over and took a closer look: the boards were dark brown, thick, coarsely sawn, no two the same shape. Most had a number or letter—it was hard to tell what it was—sketched on the end in pink or yellow chalk. The wood was headed from the jungle up to Cuzco, and from there to, well, maybe Park Avenue. So we meet again, I thought.
Braulio guides his fuel truck down the Andes and into the Amazon basin while passenger Natali and her son, Carlos, take a nap.
Finally the road was shored up enough for a single vehicle to pass. Accelerating slowly while shifting through several gears, Braulio crossed the breach. Given the bumpy dirt road and its numerous curves, almost the entire trip down into the Amazon basin would be driven at under twenty-five miles per hour. The atmosphere was misty, mysterious; the landscape varied from a few humid valleys with pasture, fruit trees, and boulders to the more usual dry mountainsides interrupted by the occasional rushing stream. In the fading light we saw stone terraces planted with potatoes, farmers eking a living out of terrain that seemed hostile to the idea.
Only when it became truly impossible to drive without the headlights did Braulio turn them on. More than three-quarters of the vehicles we passed were trucks similar to his—cisternas, as the flat-topped tankers were called. The rest were an assortment of four-by-fours, a motorcycle or two, and the occasional donkey-drawn cart. As we rounded one treacherous curve, the headlights lit up a bus that had slid halfway onto the shoulder; its many passengers were outside, busy coaxing it back onto the road. This, explained Braulio, not slowing to see whether he could help, was the weekly bus from Puerto Maldonado to Cuzco. One could understand why trucks were more popular, and useful, among travelers.
We pulled into a village called Ccatca for dinner. There was one place to eat on the town square, and one thing to order: chicken broth, with bread. It took the restaurant a while to serve the passengers, and while we waited I wandered around town a bit. Two blocks off the square was a tiny shop with a high ceiling, and hanging from it one dim bulb; toward the back was a small display of candy and chips, maybe five different items for sale. At first I didn’t notice the old Indian woman seated at the counter, some four feet away—she was so still. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw some motion: she was gnawing on something, like a bone. I said good evening to her, paid for a candy bar and bag of chips, turned to go, then paused. The bone had a strange shape.
“Excuse me,” I said. “But what were you eating?”
She opened her hand a bit sheepishly to reveal the small skull—it was leftovers. “Cuy,” she said. Guinea pig.
The rain picked up. Outside of town, Braulio paused, and at first I couldn’t see why. Then I noticed that the road ahead of us was now part of a stream. Braulio turned off the engine. There was no apparent washout, no missing bridge; it was simply too deep. We would wait.
We dozed. Around two a.m., a Range Rover came up even with us, paused, and then successfully forded the stream, which was lower now. Another truck followed, and Braulio got us back under way. We continued on through the night, pausing occasionally to remove the odd boulder or branch that had fallen in our way. I could feel us getting higher but by now my body had acclimated; I did not feel ill. I was a bit concerned, however, when dawn saw us at a summit of 15,000 feet, with snow all around, on a road so narrow that if two trucks met the lower one would have to back up to a wide spot and let the higher one pass. The idea of backing up on what amounted to a curvy, narrow ledge, particularly now that I could see the huge drops below, was nerve-racking. Along with these breathtaking landscapes of sheer-drop terror, we passed through occasional woods, and even pasture with alpacas grazing. On a second barren summit, at 15,585 feet, Braulio parked the truck and added two big candles to the four already burning in the tiny roadside chapel to Nuestro Señor de Huanca. He knelt, said a prayer, and got back on the road.*
From then on, it was all downhill, with every turn seeming to bring a little more warmth, a little more humidity, plants and trees we hadn’t seen before. The view was stil
l limited until one particular turn revealed the sudden vista, one of those spectacular places through which you come to understand the shape of the planet: the wrinkled green mountainsides spread out before us, dissolving suddenly in the vast, smooth green sameness of the Amazon basin, a flatness that stretches two thousand miles to the sea. Interrupting the mountainside below were little brown threads, glimpses of the same road we were on, a thread that writhed back and forth like an earthworm held by the tail.
Into the spectacle we descended. We stopped for a breakfast in Echapampa, at a small, smoky place filled with rough wooden tables and benches and run by four women with long, black, braided pigtails. A fireplace flickered in the back of the room. They were serving lamb broth with chuño, a kind of potato. I saw a movement at my feet and recoiled, but it was just a guinea pig. In fact, they were everywhere, nibbling up the table scraps that one day they would become. Little Carlos, delighted, set off after them.
Lunch was five hours and scores of switchbacks further down, in a large, airy hall in the town of Quincemil (“Fifteen Thousand”). Braulio informed me that the generously proportioned, stately woman who served our chicken stew and potatoes was his mother: this was the town where he had been born. He was the fifth of eight children. He’d been driving the road over the mountains and back since he was fourteen, hundreds of times, “even a thousand;” he didn’t know. It didn’t get boring because the road was always different, he said—one or another bridge out or a new bridge built, some kind of holdup, an accident, passengers to meet. The world of the drivers, though, he acknowledged, was fairly limited: “everybody on this road knows each other,” he said, and indeed I’d seen him gesture with more or less enthusiasm at many, many passing trucks.
We’d passed through a town where every shop had a new metal address plate, giving a number and the street name, Avenida Transoceánica. It was a political stunt, said Braulio. “They think if they say it enough times, maybe it will happen. I don’t know. I don’t think so. They’ve been talking about it too many years.”