by Mark Dapin
He careered off up the volcano and slammed on the brakes a moustache hair’s distance from another vehicle, which he seemed to blame for the near collision – even though it was stationary, unattended and parallel parked in a designated car park – then declared he was going to show us some reptiles. Unable to find the gate, he broke into the reptile park by uprooting four fence posts and twisting back the barbed wire. A number of Costa Ricans followed us into the park, encouraged by his declaration that he was a guide, ducking under the barbed wire and tramping through mud instead of following the paved trail.
He then climbed into the tortoise enclosure, picked up the largest tortoise and pushed its head into its shell with his thumb. He held it up to my face, so I could examine it closely, then turned it upside down and put it on the ground to demonstrate its inability to move in this position. Passing ecotourists watched in horror.
There was a cage containing about a dozen caimans – sort of half-sized alligators. First he tossed rocks at them, then he reached into the cage, grabbed one by the tail and lifted it into the air. It jackknifed towards him and tried to bite his arm, but he threw it down before it could make contact.
‘No teeth,’ he told me, confidentially.
This was too much for a middle-aged American hiker, who asked in Spanish, ‘Do you work here?’
‘No,’ he said. Then, proudly, ‘I am a guide.’ Then, threateningly, ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Er . . . it’s just that you don’t seem very frightened of the animals.’
Emboldened by his reputation, Juan picked up a stick and started jabbing at a crocodile, which was bigger than a bed and looked like a giant, malevolent gherkin. He prodded it and stoned it and tried his best to get his hand through the wire so he could tap it on the nose, but the crocodile would not react.
Poison-arrow frogs are more or less the national animal of Costa Rica, and the reptile park’s frogs were kept in a secure house with only a small window through which their food was passed. Somehow Juan managed to clamber through this window and into the frog house, but despite all his efforts he could not find a frog. It was at this point I realised Juan was a dangerous lunatic – since the frogs really are poisonous – and also utterly, mindlessly, fearlessly drunk.
We returned to the four-wheel drive. He opened up the back to get out the oil, changed the oil, and drove off without closing the back. Hikers shouted and waved as we thundered past them with the boot flapping, but he treated them with studied disdain until he noticed his spare tyre rolling down the trail. He then reversed 100 metres down the volcano at the same speed he had driven up, reclaimed the tyre and roared off again, tearing up a blind corner and missing by a fingernail a vehicle coming the other way.
He led us on a forty-five-minute hike to the volcano’s cone, tripping and stumbling but generally setting a cracking pace, reached the point where we could view the eruption, made a bed for himself on the rocks and started hiccupping, occasionally pausing to identify himself as a guide to other tourists.
The eruptions were spectacular. Volcán Arenal shook, sparked and rumbled. It spat fire into the sky, as if it were trying to reach the heavens and pay back God for hiding it in cloud. The display seemed to sober Juan up. By the time we got back to the road, he was ready for another drink. I refused. He tried to convince me it was part of the tour, then resorted to the timeless international drinker’s gambit: ‘Oh, just one,’ he pleaded. ‘We are amigos.’
And half a crate of Imperial Beer later, we were.
I was happiest in places where Ralph could not get me. We flew to Quito, Ecuador, and from there to the Galápagos Islands, which are among the most remote places on earth. The Galápagos had not yet experienced evolution, let alone the men’s lifestyle magazine explosion. There was not even a newsagency in the capital.
Claire and I toured the islands on a large, eighteen-cabin, three-suite cruiser, the MV Tropic Sun. It was a fascinating and – in retrospect – very quiet period, a state for which the crew would quickly begin to feel nostalgic. Arnie boarded the boat three days later bellowing, ‘Tengo hombre!’ (‘I have a man!’)
What he meant was ‘Tengo hambre’ (‘I am hungry’) but Arnie was an innocent Benny Hill of the Spanish language, casually mangling his sentences with double entendres. I was delighted. He was a worse linguist than me.
Arnie was, of course, North American – but the bizarre thing was, he lived in Mexico. He roamed the Spanish-speaking world – in fact, the whole world – spreading confusion, and sewing the seeds of mutual misunderstanding where previously there was only peace and harmony.
The MV Tropic Sun was like a floating two-star hotel, with all the attendant plumbing and communication problems. The cabins were comfortable, if cramped, the food was ordinary, but the sailing was smooth and the sights were heartbreaking. Galápagos looked like the beginning of the world, with stark but spectacular landscapes of rock, sand and scrub. Wild animals were everywhere, most of them in various stages of lounging, basking and being trodden on. The journey was the highlight of nine months in Latin America, and one of the high points of my life.
If English were German there would be a word that meant the-pleasure-to-be-had-from-spotting-an-animal-that-is-unnoticed-by-a-fellow-wildlife-spotter-even-though-the-non-spotter-is-closer-to-the-beast-than-the-spotter. The first time we made a landing, I went snorkelling off a beautiful, deserted beach (actually, all the beaches in Galápagos were beautiful and deserted) and a sea lion came swimming with me. It was playful and friendly, jumping in and out of the clear blue water around me, twisting its sleek acrobatic body in the air, and ploughing through the ocean with its head above the waves.
So I was told. I did not notice the sea lion because, in the manner of snorkellers everywhere, I was looking downwards. When the people who had seen the sea lion realised I had not seen the sea lion, their delight was doubled, if not tripled – as was the size of the sea lion. When I found that even Claire shared this elation, I understood why humanity is doomed.
It was not until I became the only swimmer to spot a particularly magnificent manta ray that I tasted the strange sweetness of this dark, nameless pleasure. The ray teased me like a matador’s cape. It fluttered, I gave chase, it dived under me, I charged, it was behind me, then it was gone. It was a fantastic moment, and one which, tragically, Claire may never experience.
For that first part of the cruise, most of the other passengers were curiously uninspiring. We often shared the deck with Martin from the Channel Islands (‘That’s interesting’), who had spent the last seven years working in a golf shop (‘You must’ve sold a lot of golf clubs.’ ‘Why yes, I have.’) but after three days, our boat returned to Santa Cruz and picked up Arnie. Arnie did not have a man, he had a woman, Lisa. At dinner, he tried to explain to the waiter that Lisa was a vegetarian, by saying something like, ‘I am a cannibal, but my wife cheats no feet.’
Arnie’s every meal was marred by his inability to order. He was hampered by the Arnie-confounding fact that the Ecuadorian Spanish word for beefsteak is bistek, but beefsteak is often beefsteak of chicken or pig. When an unexpected dish arrived at his table, he mewed like a cat in a frying pan.
Our ship headed out further into the ocean, towards Española, out of reach of the smaller yachts. On the way, we stopped to walk among a colony of blue-footed boobies.
‘Haven’t they got such blue feet!’ bawled Lisa. Er, yes.
Noise levels aboard ship rose when Arnie realised that hot water was just a crazy dream. He thundered through the decks, shouting about all the dollars this trip had cost him. It soon became clear that Arnie had paid considerably more than anyone else. He had followed the advice in his guide book, and had travelled to the notoriously dangerous Guayaquil City to buy his ticket. He had had to spend two nights in one of the biggest dumps in South America, and still got ‘ripped off’ a couple of hundred dollars. Arnie blamed the ship’s captain, the guide and the waiters. He stopped just short of blaming the blue-footed
boobies. The staff gathered in corners, and whispered about him in Spanish.
Although Galápagos is on the equator (and Ecuador, in fact, means ‘equator’) the water was chilling. The first time I dived into open sea, my heart froze in my chest and my breath locked in my lungs. All I could see were thousands of jellyfish, floating towards my goggles like malevolent crème caramels.
The next day, our guide brought us to a marine cave, where, he warned, the water was even colder. Only Arnie took the plunge. ‘It’s freezing!’ he cried, grinning through chattering teeth. ‘And I can’t see anything! Why don’t you come in?’
Er, no.
The island of Española is the magical home of the waved albatross. We stopped by some rocks to watch young albatrosses practise flapping their wings, fluttering and floundering until they gained the strength to soar off on their maiden flight. Once they do take off, they roam the oceans for years, only returning home to breed. Incredibly – and for only the second time in the guide’s life – we are there for the moment when a bird catches a current and soars into the sky. It made me want to cry.
I secretly hoped it would follow Arnie around the world, bringing him bad luck.
After two nights in the dining room, I started to feel guilty about disliking Arnie. He was not a bad bloke. It turned out he spent two years in Morocco, speaking spectacularly bad Arabic to bewildered Bedouins.
I felt privileged to be in Galápagos, and very relaxed. Eventually, Arnie relaxed, too. On the last day of the trip, he announced he had decided to stay on board an extra three days. If English were German, there would be a word for the expression on the faces of the crew.
In Galápagos in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin found clues that helped him formulate his theory of evolution. On my final evening aboard the MV Tropic Sun, gazing up at the stars on a clear Pacific night, I had a revelation of my own. I realised just how insignificant the stars were compared to me. There I was, a nationally known journalist, editor and screenwriter, in the prime of my career – and there were the stars, miserable relics of suns long gone; tinkly, pointless memorabilia of irrelevant worlds millions of kilometres away. Unlike publicity-seeking Darwin, however, I decided to keep my theory to myself.
Peru follows Ecuador as sure as night follows day, as sure as that difficult second album follows that scorching debut album, as sure as sub-editors will cut out all your best jokes. Ralph tracked me down in Lima, but we fled to remote areas for safety.
There were not many jobs in rural Peru, where unemployment ran at about fifty per cent. One of the few surviving occupations was standing-inthe-middle-of-nowhere-wearing-a-big-hat-and-no-teeth-and-holding-a-llama-on-a-leash. It was a skill chiefly practised by old ladies, who gathered with their animals in picturesque but out of the way spots, hoping for tourists to pay to photograph them. Overlooking the so-called Cruz del Condor (condors’ crossing) between the isolated villages of Chivay and Cabanaconde, a band of these women waited by the roadside.
I had been hoping to see a condor. In every restaurant and bar in Peru, diners and drinkers are subjected to half-hourly renditions of El Condor Pasa, but nowhere does a condor actually pass you. I now suspect the song to be apocryphal.
Another Peruvian job was guiding-foreigners-up-hills-to-sacred-places-where-they-drop-their-trousers. At the height of the rainy season, we set off on a four-day trek to the lost city of Machu Picchu. Lost cities are lost for a reason. Nobody ever mislaid Paris, Rome or Sydney. Like most lost things, they go missing because someone put them somewhere stupid in the first place. The Incas deliberately built Machu Picchu in the middle of a barely accessible mountain range so as to make pilgrims feel satisfactorily holy about the discomfort they suffered to reach their goal. By the end of the first day, I felt more pious than the Pope.
Half the trekkers were Aussies; the rest were tall, big-toothed, happy Europeans, who were only slightly less irritating than genital herpes. The Aussie walkers could have doubled as the National Trekking Team. There was a triathlete lawyer from Melbourne, a swimming coach from Sydney and a Queensland surfie who had just finished his Army Reserve service. All we needed was a nun playing the guitar and a kid with cancer and we would have had the complete cast of a disaster movie. I had been on the road for six months, hardly drinking, compulsively performing crunches, and carrying my pack like a paratrooper. I felt as if I could have joined the SAS.
The air grew thinner as we climbed higher. With every upward step my body grew heavier, largely because Claire kept unloading more of her luggage onto me, even though I already had a full backpack (or Bergen, as we call them in the SAS). It started to drizzle. The guide pointed out the ruins of Llaqtapata on the ridge below. They were magnificent, awe-inspiring and completely invisible through the mist.
Claire and I were the last to reach camp, which had been set up by our tiny Peruvian porters, who had started out long after us but arrived long before, despite carrying 50 kilograms each and not wearing shoes. The head porter asked if I wanted help with my bag, even though I was coping easily. Idiot.
In our small, cold tent, Claire told me she thought she had the flu. This is why we do not let women into the SAS.
It rained in the night. By morning, the ground was brown and muddy, the sky was black and threatening, and Claire was pink and sniffling. We climbed and climbed. It rained and rained. The track grew narrower and steeper. The head porter offered to have someone take my bag over the highest pass. I gave him the nod. I might need my strength in case I was attacked by alpacas. It was classical SAS thinking.
By now, Claire was walking with a stick. I hung back to protect her. A second group from the same trekking company started off half an hour behind us. By midday, the youngest of them – a sporty private school boy – had overtaken us. He was followed by his dad, and a couple of unfit-looking English girls. It was an athletic humiliation on a par with being outrun by a power walker or out-kickboxed by a 45-kilogram girl (both of which have happened to me).
There was a miraculous break in the rain when we reached the sacred ruins of Runkuracay. The surfie and the swimmer dropped their daks and mooned for their holiday snaps, and the old gods took their revenge with a storm. It rained so heavily that we were, in effect, climbing up a small waterfall. I had water on the knee, brain, forehead, eyebrows, eyelids, eyelashes, nose, ears, cheeks, lips and chin. I slipped and fell into a kind of vertical lake. It is impossible to describe how wet this made me.
Our knowledgeable but defeated guide was reduced to pointing at a thick haze of rain clouds and saying, ‘Below us lie the beautiful ruins of Phuyupatamarca. In better weather conditions, you would be able to see them.’
We camped for the night in a cesspool of bogs and mudflats. Somebody missed the hole in the toilet tent, where turds swam around freely like fat, brown fish. It seemed as if life could not get any worse, so it did. When we woke up the next morning, the rest of the group had left without us. We huddled in our tent, without food or fire. We would soon have to eat each other. Luckily, the head porter realised we were missing, and came back for us. It was another day, another hill. As I slid and slipped up it, my right knee suddenly buckled. It felt as though the patella had slipped out of place. I asked the head porter for the stick he had offered me forty-eight hours earlier.
He urged me to keep climbing, as there was a thirty-minute break at the peak. Claire, soaked and full of flu, had to slow down to keep pace with me. The second group passed us. First came the boy and his dad, then the English girls, then – incredibly – the English girls’ parents. When we reached the peak, the break was over. The others were packing up to leave. Tears welled up in my eyes, lost in the dank, dripping crag that was now my face. I could not think of a time when I was more unhappy, apart from the day before.
It stopped raining just as we reached the youth hostel at Winay Wayna, the only modern building along the 82-kilometre hike. Inside the packed restaurant bar, hundreds of saturated, miserable ordinary people and a few insanely
smiling, big-toothed Europeans were fighting for beer.
On the final day, we got up long before dawn, because some hippy idiots wanted to see the sun rise over Machu Picchu. The weather was fine. I would have enjoyed the descent into the temple complex had I not had a bad knee and a sick girlfriend, and if it had not been 4 am.
Machu Picchu is magnificent at daybreak. The ruined temples, abandoned by the Incas after the Spanish conquest of Peru, are among the most impressive sights in South America. However, you do not have to go on a three-day pilgrimage to see them. There is a train from a station close to Cuzco that does the trip in two and a half hours. There were more people waiting for the train home than there were seats on the train, but I would have killed a man with my bare hands – or, more likely, my walking stick – before I got left on the platform. We crowded onto the first carriages, along with a flock of locals and their chickens. The old locomotive choked into life, but as we pulled out of the station, the train shuddered and jerked and the back two carriages derailed. This was Peru, so they simply unhooked the carriages and carried on. I hoped the track was littered with happy, strapping Teutonic hikers, and I hoped they were stuck there forever.
A third Peruvian occupation is flying-tourists-in-circles-to-look-at-something-but-nobody-knows-what-it-is. The Nazca lines – a series of gigantic drawings in the sand of animals and men – are visible only from the air, which has led some people (including my brother) to conclude they are a message to alien spacecraft pilots. We flew over the lines in a tiny three-seater Cessna. Our pilot was part-man, part-barbecued sausage. When he caught me staring at the twisted burns that covered seventy per cent of his body, he said he had suffered ‘mechanical-pump failure’ in another Cessna, and barely survived a 3000-metre plunge into the Amazon jungle. As we took off, I quipped, ‘You have checked the mechanical pump, haven’t you?’ I suspect it was not the first time he had been asked.