We stayed the next night at a hostel in the bottom of the canyon. Flic recorded: the path of tomorrow rises above us like a terrible snake. It’s like going into labour or diving off a high cliff into the sea. Horrible fear. We have been watching people coming down, they took three hours so that means at least six hours up. Richard is terrified, he has gone to sleep which is his way of coping with unthinkable situations.
Part of the challenge of that path would be coping with the heat as the sun rose higher towards the middle of the day. And so we went to bed at eight that evening and got up at four, setting off in the dark at four thirty. There are, as a taxi driver told us on one of our first days in Huaraz, bastante perros en Peru. Plenty of dogs. They run wild much of the time and there are so many because Peruvians think it cruel to castrate the males. I have always been nervous around dogs and it was a problem for me at times. At five o’clock in the morning in the dark at the bottom of the canyon we were subject to a dog attack. They came at us suddenly, barking, wagging their tails and jumping up to be stroked. This, I have to say, is unusual behaviour for a Peruvian dog. Normally they ignore you altogether.
We came to the bottom of the path up the canyon side at five fifteen and set off carrying a few biscuits and some bananas and three bottles of water each. It wasn’t as steep as it looked from the other side and the path was wide and safe. What’s more we felt good. We were fit and, as I liked to say afterwards, we stormed it, arriving at Cabanaconde at ten in the morning. On the way up we had seen two more giant hummingbirds (Picaflores gigantes) and a condor, and witnessed the wonderful confusion that occurs when two groups of donkeys coming from different directions meet up on a narrow mountain trail.
In the afternoon we went for a walk out to the top of the canyon where we could look down on the route we had taken and the tiny villages we had passed through. As we were very short of cash we stayed in a more comfortable hotel (the only halfway posh one in Cabanaconde) where we could pay with our cards. Then in the morning we took the bus back to Arequipa.
We felt good. We had stormed up the side of the Colca Canyon and now, after nearly five weeks at or above ten thousand feet, we were more acclimatised to high altitude than ever in our travels. That’s why we couldn’t resist the challenge of El Misti, the snow-topped volcano that rises above Arequipa. At 5,822 metres the summit would be the highest we had been in the world.
On the second morning back in Arequipa we set off with a guide and another man to help carry camping stuff and drove and then walked up and up the slope of the volcano. We camped about two thirds of the way to the summit. I later wrote in my blog: When it got darker the city looked fabulous from so high above. Like looking down from an aeroplane but without the aeroplane and therefore very cold. For some reason we had to set out at two a.m. for the summit. It was steep in places, dark because the moon had gone down, cold, and I really couldn´t do it. We went quite a way but my legs wouldn´t work. Scary for a moment but we got back to ‘basecamp’ and rested and then the sun came up and it was rather beautiful and strange and I felt OK again. It was trying to exercise at two in the morning that was a mistake. It was an amazing place and it wasn’t too big a disappointment not making it to the top. We bit off more than we could chew.
But looking back it seems that El Misti was significant. It was the first time in our travels that I had been unable to meet a challenge. I’m not a competitive person but overcoming difficulties and getting to a big summit had been one way of denying our friend Mr Parkinson. This time he won. I wasn’t entirely happy about that.
U is for Urubamba (Peru)
We walked out of Urubamba one morning along a randomly chosen country road that led through beautiful countryside up into the mountains. As we climbed higher the land became poorer and signs of human activity became scarcer. We came to a road sign that read something like this: Corralbamba 1,562 km. Imagine that, a land so vast and empty that a country road leads hundreds of miles through the mountains before it arrives at the next settlement. What an extraordinary continent. And we had seen it from the aeroplane; huge areas of uninhabited and uninhabitable wilderness.
A little further down the road, not much more than a kilometre away, we came to the village of Corralbamba. We now know that in Spanish speaking countries the decimal point is replaced with a comma. And in some places they measure road distances with great accuracy, down to three decimal places. Well, I never...
Another peculiarity of Urubamba was the frequent occurrence of a type of sign that we couldn’t understand. Outside some houses there would be a big bamboo stick, maybe eight or ten foot long, with a piece of red plastic bag tied to the end. We tried to guess what it meant: vote Gonzales maybe; or no rubbish to collect this week. Eventually we asked someone who spoke enough English for us to understand. It signified a place where chicha, maize beer, had recently been brewed and was available. A couple of times we were passing by people sitting outside in their gardens and invited in to drink some. It tasted OK.
22
The Sky Was Working Overtime
After Arequipa we went to stay for a while around Lake Titicaca. It’s so big that in some places you can’t see across to the opposite shore and we found ourselves referring to it as the sea though it lies 12,500 feet above sea level. There are some very touristy spots around the lake but it’s easy to avoid them and spend time in less visited areas. It’s one of the most beautiful places that I have ever been to.
This is how I prepare myself to write this chapter about Lake Titicaca:
I read Flic’s diary. At this time she was writing in a little exercise book that she could pull out of her bag at any idle moment and so some of it is in the present tense – we’re on a boat heading for Llachon. We’re the only foreigners and everyone else is Peruvian and women are dressed in thick felt skirts, patterned blouses and cardigans and shawls. We bought some lunch, a small plastic bag with two boiled eggs and two small baked potatoes, warm. All the adults are chewing coca leafs and the men wear brightly coloured hats – we could make a map of the world in breakfasts.
I do some remembering, about the hats for instance – I remember them changing their broad-brimmed felt hats for gorros (Peruvian wool hats) when we got out on the water. I remember cold two-hat mornings around Titicaca when the men would wear a gorro under their big hat.
Then I look in Flic’s sketchbook. There’s a pen and ink drawing of El Capitan (Angelino, he was called) and his mate in the back of the boat. El Capitan has his head down and his hand in a bag of coca leaves while the mate looks ahead with a hand on the tiller. There’s another drawing looking into the small cabin where the locals are all hunched down on the floor looking unhappy; they really don’t like being out on the water. The colours are written in and were painted later on.
Then there are my photos. I see that I took one of an old steamer with a red funnel that was out of commission and permanently moored at the dockside. Another photo shows just the glossy calm water of the lake reflecting a blue and white striped sky and a distant shore just a dark smudge on the horizon.
There are Flic’s photos and she’s not as shy as I am of photographing people when they will allow it. There’s a photo of the captain and mate showing their handsome broad faces and thick lips – quite different from the people in other parts of Peru. There’s a picture of me with a woman in the background covering her face as though in superstitious fear of the camera.
I do some more remembering. I remember cruising out along a sort of canal between very tall reeds before we reached open water. And the husband and wife teams out fishing in small boats, the men handling the nets, the women... at the helm as I remember, but was there an outboard motor or just oars?
I use the internet to look at other people’s photos but I can’t see outboard motors. I do see the decorative reed boats made just for tourists and the tourists themselves and then more tourists and I’m aware that we did well to miss some of that.
And then there’s YouTube
, perhaps I can see people’s holiday videos. But first I come across a documentary in Spanish. There’s a young man on the back of a boat talking to camera and the water behind him is an implausible blue, just as I remember it. Now a cut to him getting off the boat at a rough stone jetty that looks like... and yes, it is the exact place we went ashore on the Llachon Peninsula. He stumbles a bit over the boulders and then strides up the stone jetty, not carrying backpacks as we were. He looks around and the camera pans and it’s just how it was then, the water, the clear light, the eucalyptus trees and the cultivated fields on the slopes by the shore. And I’m pretty much there for a moment myself and I feel strange, I’m smiling but my eyes are watering too. To find myself back in such a place again...
I read my blog, a piece dated Thursday, 13 October 2011: We keep calling it the sea. It is 100 miles long, 60(?) wide, profoundly beautiful, and it has a silly name – Lake Titicaca. We avoided the most touristy bits by going straight to a quiet, roadless (at the end) peninsula. We stayed three days. In the mornings and evenings it reminded us of the west of Scotland; in the middle of the day when the sun was hot and the sea (lake) was blue it looked like the Mediterranean in spring. As beautiful as either place but different – different from anywhere we’ve ever been. The sky was working overtime.
The sky was working overtime because the light was startlingly clear and there were banks of cloud and storms chasing across the water and impressive sunrises and sunsets and the vast open space over the lake and between far distant Andean mountain tops in Peru on one side and Bolivia on the other.
Perhaps we took an hour to cross the water from Puno to the end of the peninsula that was marked Llachon on my little map. The water was calm but the dozen or so local people on the boat crouched down on the floor of the cabin, some with heads covered, others obviously asleep, one or two reaching into small bags and taking out coca leaves to chew. For island people they were surprisingly scared of seafaring. When we pulled up by the jetty at the end of a peninsula they all stayed on the boat and it chugged away leaving us completely alone. We walked up a grassy path to a grassy track running between low stone walls. There was no-one around at all and there was absolute quiet. No machines or cars or planes overhead. We understood that we would find some simple accommodation in a small farmhouse or suchlike but we didn’t know where. I felt dysfunctional and rough so I had a little sleep on a stone slab in the shade of a tree. Flic wrote in her diary for a while and made a sketch of the clouds over the lake. When I woke up we pottered about and found a young German woman sitting behind a rock reading a novel. She had caught the ferry from the nearby island of Amantani where she was staying but didn’t know anything about places to stay here.
We set off along the track. We were passing through farmland of tilled fields and pastures sloping down to the... to the sea I want to say, because at this time of day in the heat and bright sunshine it felt like we were on a Greek island. We met no-one. The silence and emptiness felt strange enough to remind us of John Fowles’ The Magus. We walked along and things very gradually picked up. The path was less grass and more dried up mud as if people had actually walked there. We came across simple rough-built houses. Flic walked down into the yard of one house and found a young woman to speak to but just got a blank look in return. We walked on getting hotter and mildly concerned.
Then two women came towards us dressed as if for a wedding or for a tourist’s photo. They understood Flic’s request for somewhere to stay and took us back to a simple and charming house we had passed. There was an outhouse built of stone, mud, reeds and timber that had been converted into a simple bedroom and we waited while they made up two beds. Then the more communicative and younger of the women slipped away and we didn’t know if we should ask for food or if it would be provided. Everything around us was rustic and beautiful to the point of idyllic but I felt uneasy. I was hungry and I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from.
Reader, don’t worry; lunch did come, and in the evening supper came too. Both were cooked not on a stove but for some reason over an open fire in the barn attached to the house. The young man who brought us our food smelt strongly of woodsmoke and we could see the shadows and the light of leaping flames in the evening. The place was, as Flic put it, rustico, with rain dripping on my bed in the night.
The next day we breakfasted on egg, potato and an orange root, lumpy and veined and tasting like salsify and hot water with coco leaves and sugar, Flic wrote. The family didn’t interact with us much and didn’t expect us to stay a second night. I did manage to find out from the man of the house that we had just spent the night in Santa Maria and hadn’t arrived yet in Llachon, as we thought – that was further down the track.
The morning was cold and cloudy, much better for walking with our rucksacks and so we set off. The hour’s walk was quiet and Flic recorded only: I saw a dog chasing a hare across a field below us by the lake. He ran so fast he did a somersault. Then later a hare ran past us on the track. We’ve been watching a yellow-bellied snake-necked woodpecker. Watched a humming bird – dull and brown with long thin beak, as it flew towards us it had an emerald breast. We didn’t see any vehicles but the track widened out and we did see tyre marks.
At Llachon we came across a guesthouse with simple accommodation and a restaurant. There was a crowd of German tourists outside being subjected to a tourist experience; locals in hi-vis traditional clothes were dressing them up for a photo session and trying to sell them souvenirs. I was mildly horrified but Flic didn’t seem to mind. Of course it brought to an end my sense of being in a remote place of unspoilt beauty but the Germans, it must be said, were having a lot of fun and the locals were making some much needed cash. After an hour or so they had all gone; the tourists walked down to the lake shore and left on a small boat and the locals packed up their gear and walked off. We checked in at the guest house (for want of a better word, it was too primitive to call a hotel) and were the only foreigners around once again.
The land all around sloped down to the lake but just here there was a step in the hillside so that the guest house sat on a little flat area above a small cliff. Below us was a sandy beach and a small harbour with a stone jetty. By now the day had brightened, the sun was out and the water was as blue as could possibly be. We asked the proprietor, Valentino, about the canoes that we had heard were available here. He took us down to a shed by the water and there, inside, were a number of shiny new yellow kayaks complete with paddles, spraydecks and lifejackets. They seemed to belong to some foreign adventure sport outfit with which he had connections.
I am, at heart, a paddle-my-own-canoe kind of guy (and Flic is a paddle-her-own-canoe kind of woman) but these were two person boats. We took a chance and set off together along the coast, headed towards the place where we had been dropped off the day before. It was a fine thing to be out on the water
but it was very slow going. In that huge landscape we didn’t seem to make much progress and it was very tiring. I had never found canoeing that hard before and I couldn’t think of why it should be so. Only now do I realise that we were at 12,500 feet where all exercise is hard. We were rather used to the idea that water accumulates at low levels and it didn’t occur to us that we were doing was, in fact, high-altitude kayaking.
We stayed at Valentino’s for couple of nights and did some walking around the area. We were on a peninsula long enough and narrow enough to give us the sense of being on an island. When we walked to the tops of the low hills we could see across the lake to the mountains above the wild Bolivian shore fifty miles away to the east, across a shorter stretch of water to the Peruvian city of Puno with its buildings climbing up the hills to the west, and to the nearby pyramidal shaped island of Amantani to the south. The land around us dropped down with slightly terraced irregular shaped fields, mostly in that fallow condition between one harvest and the next rainy season’s new crops, until it met the lakeshore with its beaches and rocky outcrops. We saw strange succulent wild plants
with flame coloured flowers and blue-green iridescent bodied flies on the drystone walls. We passed an old woman driving a mixed herd/flock of cows, calves and sheep out to graze.
At one point an old couple coming towards us on the path nudged each other and smiled at the sight of the strangely-dressed gringos. The woman couldn’t contain herself and laughed out loud. Later a younger man looked at me and commented in Spanish as we passed: pantalones cortos, he said. It was hot enough here for me to wear shorts for the first time since we had arrived in Peru and they were the cause of the hilarity. I didn’t wear them again.
One afternoon we walked northwards along the track that soon turned into a red dirt road and we saw no less than three motorised vehicles: a lorry, a minibus and a motorbike. The fields were flatter, larger and on richer soil and one or two farmers were wealthy enough to be driving tractors. It gave us a sense of how simple and poor the lives of those at the far end of the peninsula were, their prospects limited by the steepness of the land and its inaccessibility.
It’s over to Flic for the next part of our time on Titicaca: had doughnuts and jam for breakfast and asked the señora about a boat to Amantani. She made a phone call on her mobile and at 7.15 a small wooden boat with a motor turned up at the quayside. The lake was very calm but later it got choppy and the boat slapped down on the waves. It was fun sat at the front watching the shoreline. It only took an hour.
At Amantani local women came to greet us and we followed one up a steep slope to her house where she settled us in a room. Her husband, Victoriano, took us along a path behind their house past his land some of which was furrowed diagonally. He pointed the way to the plaza. We stopped there for a tea, taking two chairs out to sit in the sun rather than indoors which is the norm here. After tea the señora from the café pointed the path out up the hill leading to archaeological sites, Pachamama and Pachapata. The island is cone shaped. A man called Gabriel walked up with us and we found out about his life. He is forty and has two girls and a boy but his wife died last year. He carried a pickaxe on his shoulder and was going up to break up the soil on his land. We left him to work while we walked to the top. It’s so stony here and between each patch of land there are high stone walls, often just one layer thick so you can see the sky through them. Beyond Pachamama were big cliffs and rocks descending to the lake.
The Road to Zagora Page 19