by Joe Cawley
I pulled the relevant card from a plastic folder I was holding. ‘I have an appointment. Three o’clock, see?’
She stooped and peered at the card from a distance, then flicked her head in resignation. ‘Third door on the left, second floor.’
For a second I thought my appointment might actually come close to the one I’d imagined. Dr Ramirez’s room was small and dark. Its shelves were indeed lined with jars, but they contained inanimate objects like cotton pads, bandages and vacuum-wrapped needles, not oversized insects or pointy-toothed reptiles. The doc was wearing a white coat, though I suspected it was someone else’s, someone with a much bigger frame than that of the short and wiry Dr Ramirez.
Alas, the conversation went no further than a perfunctory Q & A on where I was going and for how long, and what medication I was currently on. He offered no opinions on, insights into or even interest in my forthcoming travels, and after receiving jabs in various fleshy parts of my anatomy, I was dismissed without ceremony.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The time had come. I would be meeting my author hero. It was a dead heat between the excitement of foreign travel and making friends with unarguably the best author on the planet.
On the appointed day, I met the other like-minded experience-seekers in Madrid airport and after brief introductions to thirty-one strangers and two guides, I looked around for Bill Bryson. I’d already decided that the best policy would be to forego star-struck shyness and instead stride in with a purposeful introduction. Except I couldn’t see him. Maybe he was joining us later. Maybe he was being pampered in the VIP lounge away from the riff-raff.
‘Where’s Bill Bryson?’ I asked one of our guides eventually.
‘Oh, he had to pull out at the last minute. Business in America. Sends his apologies and wishes you all well.’
Whaaaat? My heart sank. No Bill? I was devastated. All the build-up, all the thoughts of pal-ing up with a legend, sharing the journey, getting insights into his life and writerly secrets, gone in three short sentences.
I ambled aboard the twelve-hour flight to Lima with head and heart both heavy. My mood darkened to the point where only negativity remained. Fears of deep-vein thrombosis flashed through my mind as I remained folded into my personal two square feet of airspace for what seemed like a decade and a half. It was a decade and a half long enough to pull myself out of the disappointment and regain enthusiasm for what was going to be the trip of a lifetime. ‘No more sulking, Mr Cawley,’ I admonished myself.
Lima was not a very glamorous opener. There were bars across every window of our hotel, the toilets had locks that could have countered a prison break, and we were warned not to leave our accommodation unescorted, not to eat seafood or salad, and to avoid ice in our drinks. We were, of course, then served a welcome aperitif called Pisco Sour crammed with crushed ice, followed by a forbidden prawn cocktail with illegal salad garnish.
Cusco, the Inca capital and the starting point of the trek, would also take some getting used to. At 11,000 feet above sea level, it had character in abundance but was noticeably lacking in oxygen. So much so that something as exertive as scratching your head could cause a fit of breathlessness. We would spend two days in the city acclimatising to the thin air, and to Peruvian culture and customs.
Our stay in the city began with a memorable welcome. As the coach pulled up to drop us at our hotel, two identical women waved at us from a derelict plot facing our accommodation. Their ages were impossible to guess under the masses of red cloth and wrinkles. They bustled along the edge of the road, their voluminous claret skirts stirring dusty vapour trails behind. The waving continued, accompanied by toothless smiles, as they both crouched to watch us disembark from the coach. Peruvians, I decided, were nothing if not friendly. As slow streams of liquid trickled from beneath the folds of their frocks, I realised the real reason they were crouching. On the coach, hands that were waving, quickly dropped.
After dumping our luggage, we decided to explore the main Avenida del Sol thoroughfare, where crinkle-faced men waved bundles of notes at us, eager to exchange Peruvian soles for US dollars. Taxi drivers blared horns to attract our attention, pulling over to see if we wanted their services, and the rest of the traffic blared horns just because everyone else was. In the middle of every crossroads, white-helmeted policemen valiantly tried to impose some kind of order on the chaos, whistling and pointing indiscriminately as cars missed them by inches and shrouded them in swirls of blue and grey smoke.
Within hours, we met the infamous street kids of Cusco. At the Plaza de Armas, the historical centre of the city, a small boy approached, clutching a wad of postcards that bore faded, near-identical images of the square in which we stood.
‘Meester, you buy?’
A threadbare poncho covered an even more threadbare shirt that had probably once been white. From beneath a fringe of ruffled black hair, tired eyes looked up, pleading with me to look.
‘Five for one sol. Please, meester. Look, all different.’
There was absolutely no way I could refuse. I decided I would fire the cards off to Nan, who I knew would play them to her advantage in further games of Pensioner Top Trumps. I picked five and gave the boy a one-sol coin (worth about twenty pence at the time).
‘Gracias,’ he said, expressionless, before moving on to Ian, a computer worker from Scotland.
Within seconds, two more boys and a girl approached. They had the same pleading eyes, upturned palms and insistent whines. ‘Pleeeaaaase!’ they chorused in singsong tones. ‘Why you not give me money? Why? Why?’
We gave them a coin each, but, like expert Tenerife timeshare salesmen, they moved in for the upsell. ‘One more sol, meester. Please, meester. One more for me.’
We were beginning to get the picture now as we could see the next batch of six- and seven-year-olds lining up for the attack.
Back at the hotel, I braced myself for a traditional feast of guinea pig. I’d vowed to try it and thanked the waiter as he placed the scrawny leg on my plate. Earlier that day we’d seen fifteen of the critters in a pen at a village we were taken to – alive and relatively cute. This one was neither. The little claw gripped onto a potato in a last desperate attempt not to be eaten. What little meat I managed to scrape from its puny limb was a bit like rabbit with attitude. I flashed polite smiles of appreciation at our host, but I couldn’t say it was a meal I’d want to repeat.
Finally, it was time for the trek itself: forty-five kilometres over four days, supported by fourteen local porters (chasqui), who would carry the tents, cooking utensils, camp essentials and our overnight bags. Many of our porters worked the fields and this income was an essential supplement during the visitor season. Nonetheless, we all felt a little awkward, seeing them hunched and shivering inside identical red- and yellow-embroidered ponchos as they waited for us at the ‘Kilometre 82’ start point, the sun yet to throw its warmth from beyond the distant snow-capped peaks. There was no way we could have done the trek without them: the terrain was challenging to say the least, and the altitude made everything that much harder.
We set off slowly, climbing and descending and climbing again, following the white rush of mountain rivers, creaking across rope bridges, slogging up unfeasibly muddy inclines, dodging low-hanging vines and tramping through dense jungle tangles. Small rabbit-like rodents (viscachas) played amongst the rocks, and hummingbirds hovered just long enough for lens caps to be removed.
On the lower slopes we came across occasional tiny settlements of three or four ramshackle wood and mud huts. We stopped at one. Smoke swirled from the doorway and, inside, the amber glow from a dying fire illuminated the face of a young boy sitting cross-legged and making the most of the heat. We stared at each other for a moment, both curious.
A larger hut served as a corner shop. The principal stock was alcohol, supplied in the form of beer bottles and cartons of Black Cat red wine. Alongside these were clear plastic bags of leaves, individual sheets of tin foil and a large sta
ck of microwave stews. A blanket of dust covered the latter and would surely remain there unless future plans for the village included a supply of electricity.
The clear plastic bags were more in demand. They contained cocaine. Well, not strictly cocaine, but the raw leaves from which cocaine is extracted. Unlike in Tenerife, where most drug deals are done with an element of discretion, in Cusco we had all been openly encouraged to buy a popcorn-bag of loose coca leaves from street vendors for about sixty pence and, for a further twenty pence, a pebble of lime ash. This combination would help counter the effects of high altitude.
Two of our group declined to buy or use the raw drugs, and unfortunately both would suffer as a consequence. Sue, a born-again Christian, refused the coca leaves on religious grounds, and she was the first to fall victim to altitude sickness. A sudden urgent shout of ‘Doctor!’ passed along our line of walkers a few hours into day one, and we pressed our backs to the bushes to allow him to pass. He and our guide sat her up and managed to revive her with water.
Steve, a marathon runner and undoubtedly the fittest amongst us, was the other trekker who didn’t want to use the coca leaves, being a clean-health obsessive. To the surprise and alarm of all of us, he too fell prey to altitude sickness. As we approached the 13,780-foot summit of the uninvitingly named Woman’s Pass on day two, Steve collapsed unconscious. A radio call was put out to the porters, who had already moved on to the next stop to prepare lunch. Within the hour, three chasquis had run back along the trail to take it in turns carrying Steve over their shoulders down to a lower altitude.
The rest of us continued, unable to cover more than a hundred paces at a time before light-headedness and the need to take in more oxygen forced us to rest. It seemed that my ‘altitude training’ with Joy in Tenerife had been no use at all.
The higher we climbed, the bleaker the scenery became. Instead of the chirrup of insects and the rustle of leaves, laboured footsteps on gravel and rock, gasps for breath and the pounding of my own heartbeat provided the soundtrack.
I was quite happy to turn to whatever substance was available whenever I felt the excruciating headaches taking hold. I’d duly dip into a pocket and wrap four or five leaves around a tiny scraping of lime ash to make a small parcel. This was then lodged between cheek and gums to allow the lime ash to react with one of the fourteen elements in the coca leaf, producing a chemical buzz and a numbing of the mouth. It tasted of very strong tea and was definitely effective in alleviating headaches or nausea. After half an hour or so, the leaves would break up, leaving speckles of green between your teeth. This became part of the ‘trek look’, along with a two- or three-day stubble, baggy eyes, and hair styled by Mother Nature.
Despite our battles with the altitude and the challenges that came with trekking and camping, there were many moments of perfection, particularly at night-time when dozens of tiny candle flames would dance throughout our field of tents. Lying head to head with a group who only days before had been complete strangers, we would share beer and rum and watch shooting stars in the diamond-encrusted charcoal sky, then fall asleep listening to the musical clicking of crickets, the howling of distant wolves and the gentle flow of nearby mountain streams.
Within a day’s hike of Machu Picchu itself, we entered the Amazon rainforest proper. Sunshine sparkled on a cluster of small lakes extending like stepping stones to the vivid green canopy beyond. The trail grew narrower and more tangled, the green more intense. We wove through hand-cut stone corridors and tunnels of vines. In the distance, a rumbling announced the imminent arrival of a tropical storm. Within minutes it came roaring down. The trail became a treacherous, muddy slide. The hammering rain was funnelled directly onto us as we passed under patches of leafy spread. I cursed myself for having invested only £2.50 in a flimsy raincoat at a Cusco market stall.
We awoke from our final, soggy, overnight camp at 4am for the two-hour trudge through the darkness to reach Intipunku, Gateway of the Sun, the awe-inspiring viewpoint over the sacred city of the Incas. Against a backdrop of towering mountains cloaked in dark-green velvet, we watched the sun slowly drag the shadowed veil from Machu Picchu.
The vivid dawn reflected my current mood: I had left behind the familiar and rediscovered the technicolour excitement of the unknown, of new beginnings. It was the same feeling I’d had on that flight to a new life in Tenerife on June 1st, 1991.
But was my life really that dull that I had to constantly seek change, something better? And would that entail a never-ending cycle of searching for ever greener pastures, of never quite reaching contentment? Was non-stop novelty really the only thing that would provide deep satisfaction in my life? The ghost of discontent had haunted my dad. He was always on the move, travelling, seeking new business challenges in new territories, with or without his family. It was a ghost that eventually caused him to take his own life. I needed to be careful.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Several weeks after my return, I was still buzzing with it all – the travelling, Peru itself, and the excitement of having spent time in a totally alien jungle environment. Perhaps even more worthy of celebration was the fact that I still had all limbs intact, had no green slime oozing from open wounds and was free of any disfiguring mould clinging stubbornly to my person.
Having said that, Fugly had developed a new habit of excitedly licking one particular spot on my right ankle, punctuated with the occasional sinking in of teeth, of course. It was as though she was gustatorily invested in my adventure through whatever I had inadvertently been branded with on my lower leg.
Above all, I wanted to share my adventure. And then share some more. If Tenerife bus rides had sparked an interest in writing about local travel opportunities, Peru had opened my mind to becoming a globe-trotting travel writer. How hard could it be?
To save having to find other features to fill the gaps between advertorials and ads, Bridget, the editor at Island Connections, allowed me to ramble on about my South American experience in many more editions than it deserved. Eventually she slipped into the conversation something along the lines of, ‘Perhaps we should wind up the Peru story now.’ By that stage I’d already decided that travel writing was what I wanted to do.
When an advertisement on one of the adventure websites I was regularly stalking offered the chance to attend a half-day seminar on how to become a travel writer, I saw this as an open door to a new career. The fact that it was being held in London, some 2,000 miles away, didn’t deter me. We still had plenty of money left in the bank from the sale of the Smugglers and I couldn’t think of a better way to spend it than investing in my chosen calling.
Joy met the news about my plans with all the calm and conviction of a mother listening to her seven-year-old announce he was going to be an astronaut. ‘Great.’ She nodded without looking up. ‘You’d be good at that.’
We’d both done a series of manual jobs since selling the bar, but Joy was in no hurry to commit to anything long-term. She had been scarred by the demands that bar ownership had made of us both and understandably was happy to remain detached from the rest of the world for as long as possible. It wasn’t laziness by any means. If there’s one thing Joy isn’t, it’s lazy. She was brought up knowing that long, regular hours for a decent wage are a fact of life. Her mother, Faith, held down three jobs at once to make ends meet while bringing up five children in a working-class town, and her annual holidays had usually involved working behind the Smugglers bar or washing up in the kitchen. Joy’s father had also been a non-complaining grafter, toiling at two full-time jobs to keep the Bolton bailiffs far from their door.
But after a seven-days-a-week, seven-year career in the hospitality industry, Joy was still cherishing her freedom almost as if she were a prisoner newly released from a stretch in jail. Freedom for her meant not being at the beck and call of others. Freedom for me meant not being confined or committed to a life of predictability. I wanted to wake up not knowing what the day might bring or where I might be next month
or the month after that. I guess I craved a certain amount of instability.
Travel writing seemed like the perfect fit for someone like me, a quiet talker who preferred to express emotion on the page. I was needy, desirous of praise, acceptance and confirmation of my worth. Needs that may have stemmed from not having had my dad around for much of my upbringing due to similar weaknesses in himself, weaknesses that caused him to put career before family. He’d been brought up alone by my nan, his dad having been killed in World War II when he was only five.
I was aware that my feelings of self-worth and belonging had been slipping since the Smugglers. Becoming a writer and roaming the world would be the perfect antidote. Especially if somebody else was footing the bill.
Six weeks later I took my place in a lecture hall in London along with fifty or so other Bill Bryson wannabees. Though I wasn’t quite so enamoured with the author by now, following his absence in Peru. With pens poised above notepads, we waited eagerly for the golden nuggets that would secure us all the best job in the world and everything that came with it – free travel around the globe and our name in lights. Well… print, at least.
It was sure to be a long and arduous struggle; all the articles and books that I’d already consumed made that clear. The seminar itself repeated much of what I had gleaned to date, namely that it was perhaps the hardest niche of any journalism to break into, that you had to find your own voice, and that you needed to show you’d read the publication; in other words, you shouldn’t pitch a destination piece to the inflight magazine of an airline that didn’t fly there, or suggest an article on an extreme adventure to Saga, a publication for those more interested in pension plans and cemetery plots than adrenaline hits. But there were also some useful new titbits that I manically scrawled in my notebook, in particular that the easiest way in if you were new to a magazine was to pitch an idea for one of the regular features such as ‘Forty-Eight Hours in [Wherever]’ or ‘The Ten Best [Whatever] in [Wherever]’.
