The Road to Zagora

by Richard Collins

  After breakfast today we set out to walk or cadge a lift to Kuélap again. We walked a little then a lorry came and gave us a lift. The cab was full so we were told to climb up a ladder on the side. Richard went first and jumped down inside the lorry and stood up so he could see. I went up and sat on some planks of wood above the driver’s cab. It was a brilliant way to travel, head out in the air, landscape falling away below. I had to duck for branches occasionally. Got to Kuélap rather elated.

  At first we were the only people there. It’s quite overgrown and mysterious with so much hanging grey lichen and big red bromeliads. We watched lizards and sky and landscape. Then a bunch of Peruvians came and made a lot of noise and took photos of each other and then took photos of us.

  And I photographed them high on the edge of the fortress, the modern day People of the Clouds, silhouetted against a stormy sky. They were having more fun than their ancestors in Leylebamba, wore brightly coloured clothes, and weren’t fleshless at all. Far from it.

  Just as we were leaving the site we came across a tourist group who had just arrived in a minibus. I recognised one of them and called out his name, Kevin. He didn’t want to talk to us much. He had clearly got over the loss of one girlfriend and was in animated conversation with a new potential conquest. I wished him luck.

  Kuélap is sometimes talked of as the Machu Pichu of the north. Although it’s not so impressive it is in a similarly astounding hilltop setting. But walking and hitching along a quiet country lane and being alone there in the quiet of the morning is a much happier and rewarding experience than being part of the tourist mass at Machu Pichu. And Maria is an unspoilt village with a meaning in the landscape and a community connected to the land itself. It was a good place to be at the end of our visit to Peru.

  A few days later we were on the border of Ecuador at a remote place called La Bolsa. We reached it in a beaten-up shared taxi driving down a dirt road through lush steamy tropical forest and farmland. Across the river, on the Ecuadorian side, the track was rougher and wound up a very steep slope through the trees. La Bolsa wasn’t even a village, just a few buildings and a couple of cafés. There was no traffic unless you counted the two cows wandering back and forth. We crossed a smart new concrete bridge and got our passports stamped in a little office. They didn’t have a computer on which to log our arrival so a couple of weeks later we had difficulty leaving the country on account of not having officially arrived. We sat in the shade outside a café for three hours waiting for transport to the nearest town. It wasn’t completely uneventful; every now and then a flying ant would fall to the dusty ground and get pecked up by a chicken.

  Transport, when it arrived, turned out to be a ranchero, a truck with seats fitted onto the back, open sided but with a canvas awning to keep off the sun. It was a fine way to travel. Our first few hours in Ecuador were spent driving along an exceedingly poor dirt road cut into steep slopes of something that looked more like mud than rock. We could see that it must be very prone to landslides and that choosing that route at that time of year, the beginning of the rainy season, was taking a chance. It really was a road less travelled.

  When we arrived at the bus station outside Zumba, our first Ecuadorian town, a man offered me something to eat out of a plastic container. I had a few of what looked like currants but which were crunchy and salty. They seemed nice until I looked more closely at them. They were flying ants, without their wings and fried but ants all the same. I didn’t feel like eating any more.

  Ecuador didn’t make such a great impression on me after Peru. The landscapes are less dramatic, the people less colourful. I’m not going to say much about Vilcabamba, the weird place where people enjoy great longevity. I blogged: weird because there are a lot of middle-aged Americans who have moved into the area and weirder because of the sacred healing mystic nonsense people who are here in great numbers. The locals seem disgruntled but some of them are friendly. We walked along a dried up river bed looking at birds and fantastic butterflies and were interrupted in our nature studies by a young man called Charles Darwin; he showed us his I.D. to prove it. We have already met a Victor Hugo here so we weren´t too surprised. He asked us for twenty dollars but was very polite when we refused.

  I’m not going to say much about Riobamba, where we stayed in: a small hostal with rooms set around a courtyard garden. Last night, as the light faded, we became less aware of the dozen or so gold painted concrete statues and other paraphernalia as our attention focused on the illuminated father Christmases and snowmen, the lights suspended in the trees, the hundreds of little red and green moving lights, like glow-worms, projected somehow onto the vegetation, and the elevator music coming from speakers hidden in the trees. Someone came in and I found myself saying ‘buenos noches, feliz navidad’. Good evening, Happy Christmas.

  I’m really not going to say much about the day trip we made from Riobamba with an adventure tour company. We were taken up the side of the volcano called Chimborazo in a van with bikes on the back. After a short walk to a refuge at high altitude we were kitted up with waterproof jackets and trousers, balaclavas, cycle helmets, knee pads and elbow pads. Then we set off for what should have been a rather wonderful ride down something between six and seven thousand feet on dirt tracks and then metalled roads. The bikes had the brakes set up differently from at home with the back brake (essential for going downhill on a loose surface) on the right, which was almost impossible for me to use. I had to be picked up by the van and driven back. The weather was rough too with rain, hail, sleet and snow. We picked Flic up further down the hill.

  And I’m not going to say much about travelling in a lechero, a milk truck: just a truck with three large plastic barrels in the back and all the other available space filled with standing passengers. Every now and then we stopped and someone would pass up a plastic bottle or bucket of fresh milk and it would be poured through a strainer into one of the barrels.

  I will say a few words about our stay in Baños. First I’ll quote Flic:

  Baños is a small holiday kind of town. It’s cheerful and has two plazas and a church with big paintings of disasters like an eruption of the volcano above the town and people fleeing, a flood and fire. A small picture of the virgin is in every picture. Some tradition. Around the church are stalls selling religious souvenirs and plastic inflatable ducks and rubber rings as there are many pools here filled with hot water from the volcano. We walked with our backpacks looking for somewhere nice to stay in. We found a hotel with my name on, El Eden.

  Baños is surrounded by high hills and a volcano so as you walk around your eyes are drawn to the tops of the hills and you walk very upright, head held high.

  We walked to a bridge over a canyon that led to a road winding up away from the town, trying to get a good view of the volcano. It had been active last April but is quiet now. The last time it erupted was in 2006 and the town had to be evacuated.

  Flic and I followed a signpost to a mirador, or viewpoint, and walked along a track until we came to a large house with a sign outside reading soda bar. The building was fairly new, four storeys high, and had a concrete ramp zigzagging up the outside to the top floor. We made our way up the ramp past pots of geraniums and were met on the third storey by a friendly black labrador and on the fourth storey by a man in a wheelchair. He introduced himself as Alfonso and invited us in. The top floor of the house was one big open plan space with a kitchen hidden in the corner, a bar in front, one or two chairs and tables and the rest of the area filled by the curious junk that you might find in an attic. There were windows and sliding doors onto the balcony which ran the width of the building.

  Alfonso was a genial smartly dressed man in early middle age. He wheeled himself across the room and opened the door for us all to go onto the balcony. We looked out across the slopes of the valley covered in verdant farmland and orchards and dotted with eucalyptus trees. Below us we could see the gorge that held a broad fast-flowing river, the bridge that crossed it, the small to
wn beyond, and above the town the volcano, Tungurahua, the upper slopes of which were covered in snow. Alfonzo got us some fizzy drinks and told us a little about himself. He had been in an accident twenty years ago at work and since then had played a part in the town council, promoting disabled access among other things. He showed us framed certificates and newspaper cuttings that congratulated him on his achievements. From time to time his dog bumped against us affectionately. Then Alfonso took us down the ramps and showed us the accommodation available, for the place was a guesthouse too. We decided to move up here from the town the next day. It turned out to be a good decision.

  We hung out in Baños for a few days. Downstream of the town the gorge deepened and there were a number of impressive waterfalls. We rented bikes and cycled down the busy main road, the famous Route de la Cascades. The bikes were terrible and we ended up stopping a camioneta, a pick-up taxi, to transport us back to town where we managed to get our money back. We decided to tour the waterfalls in true tourist style in something called a chiva, an open-sided truck like a ranchero but with flashing lights and disco music to help us enjoy the natural beauty of our surroundings. We were the only gringos on board as Baños is a big-time resort for Ecuadorans. It was our first experience of South American style tourism, Peru being a less affluent country where people are too busy earning a living to indulge in such things. Everyone on board the chiva had a great time except us. The music was really loud, really awful and it was to me a torture. We did stop and cross the gorge on a little cable car and then later walk down for a close look at a waterfall. But then it was on the truck again in the now fading light and all the way back to town in our very own version of disco hell.

  Flic tried out the thermal baths in the town and found herself to be the only pale person in an early morning crowd of brown people. The waters are supposed to be curative and there were a number of sick and disabled people among the bathers. She also shopped for presents as this was one of our final stops before Quito and the flights home. But the real high point of our stay was not a tourist experience but a natural phenomenon that we really hadn’t anticipated.

  While we were in Ecuador we experienced proper mountain weather, none of that wall-to-wall sunshine stuff but big towering clouds and heavy showers and rainbows and intermittent bright sun lighting up the hillsides. And so when we heard a rumbling sound one evening we imagined it to be thunder. Its real cause was outside of our experience and beyond our imagination. But I did make a little joke when we turned off the light go to sleep that evening in our room-with-a-view at Alfonso’s. I said wake me up if the volcano starts erupting.

  At four in the morning on November the twenty-eighth, 2011, I woke Flic up. I was as excited and happy as I had ever been. Reader, the Earth moved. I was woken by a tremendous roaring sound and the windows were shaking. I leapt out of bed and rushed across the room to look out. It was very dark outside, being well before dawn and a moonless night. Across the valley, above the town, Tungurahua was erupting. Red hot lava was flowing down the slopes of the volcano and huge red hot rocks were flying through the air. We watched individual boulders and counted the seconds before they hit the ground. Some were airborne nine or ten seconds. Is that possible? It’s what I remember. These rocks were travelling up hundreds of feet and we could see them from... I don’t know, five miles away? They were the size of houses? No, maybe not but possibly the size of a car or lorry and each weighing several tons. Those are the sort of forces we’re talking about.

  We dressed and went outside to watch, sitting against the wall for about an hour before it began to get light. All the time we waited to hear the sound of sirens and fully expected to see the flow of traffic as the town was evacuated. The mountain would go quiet and then we would hear another great rumble, more lava would flow, more rocks would fly. It was, as they say, compulsive viewing. A marvellous experience.

  It was less dramatic in the light of the day. We couldn’t see the red glow of the molten rock but we could see smoke and steam coming off it, a plume of smoke coming out of the mouth of the volcano, and the black marks where the lava had crossed and swept away the snow. The town was quiet. This was, apparently, a minor eruption and no threat to life or livelihood. It was exciting enough for us. In the afternoon we got a lift up the hill behind Alfonso’s and had a great view of the volcano. In the evening we sat outside and watched the show again.

  A day later we left Baños and went by bus to Quito, the handsome crime-ridden city that I described earlier. We were there a few days before saying good bye to South America and setting off for home.

  Flying across the Atlantic in the night was a strange thing. We were suspended in a thin tube of warm air in a cold empty sky above a cold empty sea, between continents, between time zones, out of this world. I had the opportunity to think of this as I was unable to sleep. Everybody else had their eyes shut and were deep in their dreams. I decided to set my watch to UK time; after all we were going east, rushing to meet the dawn. And so it was that I found myself a day ahead of my companions. They were sound asleep on Friday and I was wide awake on Saturday. South America had been difficult for me. I was pleased to be going home.

  X is for Xania (Greece)

  Xania, or Chania, as it is more often spelled, is a pretty harbour town on the north coast of Crete. I was there in 1976 having set out for Lapland and taken a wrong turning. I remember sitting in a bar with a Canadian friend, a young woman called Carla, on a stormy summer day, listening to old Beatles songs and watching the waves come into the harbour, break against the wall and flow across the street towards us. Sometimes the foamy water would come right up into the bar and we would lift our feet to let it pass under our chairs.

  I was there again with Flic in 1990. She was seven months pregnant and we toured the island on bicycles that we had brought with us on the plane. Coming down a long steep hill into Chania, or it might have been Rethymnon, we hit a patch of mud brought onto the road by builder’s trucks. Flic braked and skidded and ended up on her back on the tarmac. She and the lump that was to become Kit, our first born, weren’t injured.

  In 1997 the now four of us, Flic, Kit, Peter and myself, had a very short holiday in Crete and stayed in Chania. It may have been there that I started to go the wrong way around a roundabout and stopped the car (which we had hired), got out and walked off a little way to de-stress before carrying on.

  These are unreliable memories of unreliable memories and are totally untrustworthy. My guess is that memories are turned into stories and are drafted, edited and fictionalised within moments of an event happening. When they are re-remembered they are changed again. There must be so many things that shape our personal fictions: a particular understanding of human nature; a world view complete with religious belief or its absence; a narative of a relationship; wishful thinking; a tendency towards denial. Most of all there is the need to tell a good story.

  25

  The World Turned Upside Down

  This is the chapter I have been looking forward to, the one I so much want to write. It’s about our visit to the Middle East; to Jordan, Israel, Palestine and a tiny bit of Egypt. Nowhere in these countries did we see anything like the beauty of the Himalayas or the Andes or the Mediterranean or, for that matter, Wales. But we were engaged and stimulated in a different way. There are big issues here; things to weigh up and think about before you even set foot in the area. It was in Israel in particular that we had our preconceptions – prejudices I should say – challenged and somewhat overturned. We came away with more questions rather than with answers. Questions like this: why do good people do bad things?

  Towards the end of 2012 Hamas were firing rockets from Gaza into suburban Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with the possibility of killing civilian Israelis. Israel was likely to respond with brutal punishment attacks and the violence would probably escalate. Meanwhile in Syria, to the north, a bloody civil war was carrying on with tens of thousands of people killed and tens of thousands fleeing to neighbou
ring countries. In Egypt the so called Arab Spring had led to the overthrow of a despotic regime and its replacement with one less popular; lawlessness and chaos continued. In Jordan there were street protests which had included an attack on a police station. We had already bought air tickets and planned a rough itinerary for a trip around this part of the world. We could have changed our minds but we decided to go. We started off with the least troubled country, the one officially known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

  We flew to Aman airport on November 19th, 2012, and went by taxi not to the capital city itself, which I didn’t fancy, but to nearby Madaba, a smallish town, ordinary enough for me to think of it as the Walton-on-Thames of the Middle East. We arrived at a tacky cheap hotel in the early evening and went up onto the roof. From there we could see the big church opposite the hotel with the cross on its roof outlined in electric lights and down the street a little way the floodlit domes and minarets of a mosque. Madaba has a mix of Orthodox Christians and Muslims living side by side very comfortably and the town is proud of its reputation for tolerance.

  In the morning we were on the roof again watching the town come to life. Madaba did look ordinary but there is always something special about waking in a new place and not knowing what to expect. We noted that many women here wore headscarves but other than that were in Western clothes and I remember thinking that they were more outgoing than I expected. I think that says something about my preconceptions. And when we walked around the town we came across a shoe shop with red leather thigh-high boots in the window and another shop selling Christmas dresses with extraordinary short skirts. So much for the sexual repression that we imagined dominated Muslim countries. We also saw two armed policemen greet each other with a handshake followed by kisses on both cheeks. I’m not sure what that tells you but they don’t do it at home.