Beyond the Vapour Trail

by Brett Pierce

  CHAPTER 20

  Off the Inca Trail

  The plane approached so fast it hit the runway hard. Kristoff, the backpacker sitting beside me, shook his head. The air is so thin at this altitude that planes need higher speed to stay airborne, and we were hurtling down the runway until the reverse thrust kicked in and we began to slow down. We went back to our conversation. Since I had a spare day at the end of my project visits, he and I decided to tee up a trip to Machu Picchu together at the end of the week.

  From: Brett Pierce

  Sent: 30/03/2006 08:36 AM

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: Cuzco

  Hi.

  It’s been mostly hotels, but now I’ve arrived in Cuzco, and it seems like a magic town from a story. I’m not supposed to do anything this afternoon but rest and drink coca tea, because someone put Cuzco high in the mountains like it’s a castle in the sky. The roofs are tiled in a gentle orange, in a corrugated pattern - but they’re all a little crooked, handmade, arranged like a field ploughed by oxen. Some roofs peak evenly in the middle, others peak on one side. Everything is uneven. In town, many buildings have Incan stonework at the base, but it doesn’t stop in a straight line where they started the white rendering. The buildings are featured in blues or other colours around the windows. The streets are narrow and crooked, made of handmade bricks fitted together like a badly knitted jumper.

  You can feel the age of the place, and little Spanish touches like elaborately carved small balconies on the first floor. I’ve entered a storybook, but I haven’t yet read the first page. I’m just drinking coca tea and thinking of you.

  I hooked up with a Cherman barkparker, OK, German backpacker, named Kristoff, and we will probably hit Machu Picchu together on Friday. Tomorrow the project. If I keep typing, I put off checking my email to see if you’ve written to me. I might do that now. You’re sleeping. Shh. It’s not even 6 a.m. for you, and you’re so warm and soft in that bed. You wouldn’t even notice if I slid in and wrapped around you.

  OK, still no connectivity.

  The rugs, craftwork, jewellery & stuff here are exceptional. I could spend a $1000 without blinking. But then I’d blink later, I suppose.

  Thinking of you.

  me.

  High up in the mountains, just off the Inca trail, nests the small community of Lamay. Here the people scratched out their living in small maize plots on steep terraced hillsides like their Inca ancestors. But all was not good. When World Vision came, the community explained the stories of their life here in a series of paintings that told of poverty, malnutrition, alcoholism and social breakdown. As they planned for the future with our team, they made another set of paintings so that everyone in the community would understand what the plans were. By the time I arrived barely five years later, I witnessed some of the best development work I had ever seen.

  I met early with our project staff for a hot breakfast of multicoloured maizes and potatoes. Then when we arrived at the community meeting, the team sat back and let the community leaders do most of the talking, because this project had very much become the local people’s own story, their own work. It included permaculture, reforestation, homemade greenhouses and mixed organic farming. They had begun to grow herbal medicines for their own use that they also packaged and sold to generate income. Children’s malnutrition had already dropped from fifty-five per cent to twenty-five per cent. There were real improvements in education. The families had even begun to make toys from local materials to stimulate the minds of their preschool children. This was all part of the plan depicted in their paintings.

  A family I visited had drawn their own five-year plans, and they brought them out to show me, on big sheets of flipchart paper taped together. They had been living in a single-room house with Grandma and the guinea pigs, growing only maize. Now after only two years they had already achieved their five-year plan with the help of neighbours. They had multiple rooms, a greenhouse made with plastic sheeting, and separate housing for the guinea pigs – only Grandma refused to stop sleeping in the kitchen. Their garden was now full of nutritious vegetables and they were reforesting the edge of their property. They farmed fish, and worms to feed the fish. They had also copied the children’s life-cycle drawing from the community plan, and written in the names of their two sons, Junas and Junatan, to identify their psychosocial needs at different ages. They held up their plans beaming with pride, and then showed me another plan, much grander: their dreams for the year 2020.

  In an unusual step, right at the start, the community here chose to revive traditional Incan law to operate alongside the development plans. It was a form of social cohesion to arrest the social decline they had been experiencing. One of their paintings, in Quechua, summarised it as: Ama Sua, Ama Llulla, Ama Quella. Don’t steal, don’t lie, and don’t be lazy.

  One of the very first things the community leaders did was to visit those who had been brewing alcohol. ‘You will stop brewing alcohol now. Or you can leave the community.’ They all stopped brewing, because belonging means everything. The leaders visited families affected by drunkenness or domestic violence, and informed them this behaviour was no longer tolerated. The people embraced this step and their lives were better for it. Dressed in the impossibly vivid colours of the Andes, the people were proud of the changes they were making, and children began to thrive. The community knew they were thriving because they monitored each child’s progress using pictures for health, nutrition and education status.

  My reports from this visit soon had many of our best development thinkers around the world going there to witness and write up the changes.

  On the Friday, Kristoff and I took the train that slowly and painstakingly climbs the steep hill out of Cuzco and then rhythmically follows the wild Río Urubamba to Machu Picchu. As soon as we arrived we were like kids running around to try to experience everything at once. That’s when I discovered that Kristoff was actually part mountain goat. I mean, anyone who wears a wrist watch on one arm and an altimeter on the other is a different breed, made for hill climbing and yodelling. He seemed sane until he started hopping up and down hills, and he had already nearly killed me by midmorning. Then the mist cleared above us and we both looked up and saw, way up, high up, that there was more! Another sudden appearance on a hilltop – a miniature Machu Picchu atop a high peak. It’s called Huayna Picchu. We had a vague memory that someone in Cuzco had mentioned this to us, but as far as we were concerned, we had just discovered it ourselves. We had to go. Yes, we quickly signed our names at the gate and noted the health warnings, for instance about pregnancy (I was OK there) and heart conditions, and then Kristoff began to leap up the steep path like a jolly goat herder.

  ‘Ah … You go ahead. I’m going to need to take my time.’

  This proved to be an understatement. I can walk all day, but climbing hills requires a different set of muscles and the altitude was killing me. Asthma shut down my lung function. I even began to wonder if I could make it. I looked optimistically at those coming down. Is it far? ‘No, no está muy lejos. No, not far to go now,’ said anyone I asked, with a lovely smile. Until I met an Englishwoman, probably in her sixties, who paused, and asked if I really wanted to know.

  ‘Yes. But break it to me gently.’

  ‘You’re not even halfway,’ she said. ‘But just take your time.’

  I thought, Well, if she can do it … In the end I was climbing not much more than ten metres and stopping, panting for breath. What had happened to the fitness of my youth? It was so steep that I remember looking down and thinking, Well, if I have a heart attack, they won’t bother carrying me down, they’ll just tip me over the edge. But I thought, If I don’t finish now, I’ll probably never do this. Before I reached the top Kristoff was on his way down, a spring in his step like Pepé Le Pew.

  But make it I did. Huayna Picchu has a low rock formation that you have to climb under to enter. It must have been a brilliant defence against attacks, because you virtually c
rawl out the other side, your head or hands appearing first. Thus you enter a neighbourhood suspended in the sky, of stone temples, terraces and dwellings. Sleepwalking genes would have died out in the families of the priests who lived up here. There were some definite wrong steps you could make during half-asleep midnight bathroom breaks. Finally I pulled myself to the highest rock and stood atop the mountain, feeling like Rocky in the movie. OK, I admit it’s not really that big a climb, probably forty minutes, but with my lungs, at that altitude, I was Sylvester Stallone standing there.

  I found Kristoff on my return, and we spent the whole day avoiding tour guides and experiencing the place on our own terms. My favourite photo of the day was not the great vista, but tightly focused on tiny blue flowers growing out of a crack in the stones, with Macchu Picchu spread out behind it, softly blurred in the background.

  On the way home on the train we revelled in the experience, and a young Italian couple sitting facing us shared our jubilance. ‘Was it what you expected? Were you just a little disappointed?’ ‘No.’ We are the generation that has experienced more change and seen more of the world than any generation before us. And it was still more than we had expected it to be. Thank God, I thought, that I’m not jaded with experience.

  I returned to looking out at the snow-capped mountains in the distance, and the Río Urubamba running beside the train with its water churning so powerfully it would drown anyone like they were a sock in a washing machine.

  CHAPTER 21

  To Be a Real Country

  We drove through the Ethiopian countryside, with fields of teff waving in the breeze, looking more like grass than a cereal crop. The driver was full of stories and homespun philosophy. So when he mentioned Ethiopian beer I decided to give him something to consider, a twisted version of a Frank Zappa truism.

  ‘It’s good to hear that Ethiopia has its own beer. Because, to be a real country, you have to have three things.’ I paused for effect. ‘A flag, a beer, and a football team.’

  The driver smiled and nodded. He liked that. We probably drove for ten minutes in silence before he responded.

  ‘To be a real town,’ he said, ‘You also need three things.’

  And he also paused for effect.

  ‘OK – what are they?’

  ‘A dog. A shop … and a mad person.’

  Now I have lived in some very small towns. I couldn’t think of one in which these three things weren’t true.

  Eventually we arrived in Asosa, the small town sitting on red dust that serves as capital for the Benishangul-Gumuz Region in the far west of Ethiopia. It’s not far from the border with Sudan. Just outside our hotel an old man in a tattered army uniform was marching up and down with a faded flag, oblivious to all in his own little parade. The driver indicated to him.

  ‘You see? This one is a real town.’

  CHAPTER 22

  The Edge of the Amazonian Rainforest

  A chance conversation before I arrived in Ecuador opened up an opportunity. Felipe, a colleague, invited me to spend the weekend at his farm, which was somewhere ‘on the edge of the Amazon rainforest’.

  Somewhere … It’s strange the way conversations sometimes become the ideas that then shape our experiences, our lives. It makes me wonder how many opportunities in life are hidden just under the surface, like undiscovered gems, until a conversation unearths them. A thousand, thousand somewheres and somethings and ideas and perspectives and moments buried, waiting for a meandering conversation to spark connections.

  We drove north from Quito for several hours, passed through the city of Ibarra, and then eventually veered off the highway into that pattern of increasingly smaller roads and more isolated towns. The last stop was a very little town. We grabbed some last-minute essential supplies, which of course included cervezas (beers) and foods from a local store which was painted in two shades of orangeish-pink. The paint almost matched the colouring of the intact but skinned pig which was hanging by the front door from a piece of rope tied to its snout. We then drove off onto whatever you call something less than a back road, until we reached a very narrow and undulating swing rope bridge, swaying gently over a rather raging little stream. I realised that if the flimsy-looking bridge broke it was high enough to break all our bones so that the torrent could finish us off. To fit the vehicle onto the bridge we first had to pull the side mirrors in. Snap, snap. The bridge swayed as we crossed. The winding track on the other side eventually led to an even smaller village, where chickens constituted the main traffic. There we picked up Katy, a teenager who did occasional housekeeping for Felipe, her little sisters gazing up shyly at us through their dark eyes as we left. We drove on until it seemed the road couldn’t get any smaller. Eventually it couldn’t. It just ended.

  As a child I used to wonder where the roads ended. It’s here.

  So we grabbed our gear, left the vehicle there and hiked, mostly uphill along a narrow valley between two steep ranges, jumping rocks to cross fast-trickling rivulets, or across rickety handmade bridges over the bigger streams. All the water seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere, but not us. We just kept a steady, meandering pace. It felt like someone was slowly turning the volume up as the birds and insects punctuated the background soundtrack of running water. Colourful butterflies speckled the green landscape like animated hundreds and thousands, and the intense humidity crowded in on me as I began to suck in air. This trek was testing my fitness. The farm eventually appeared. The farm he said was ‘somewhere’ was now here, in this specific place. Every journey has its inevitable destination, even when you think it will never end. An unimportant crooked old gate on the right let us into a field. A track then crisscrossed up the side of yet another steep hill. And there, atop, was a cosy wooden building set on posts, with big windows and a lazy-looking verandah. Did I mention the slope was steep? I could feel that last strain in my legs carrying the gear up the hill, and I was hoping it would be worth it.

  It was. Beyond the end of roads, the last farmhouse squatted on its stilts like a dog sitting up waiting to be fed. La Guanábana, it was called. His place was set right against the edge of the Amazonian rainforest, which stretched an unimaginable distance beyond us back over mountain after mountain. It spreads across the rest of Ecuador, parts of Colombia and thence continues into the vastness of Brazil. Below us the skinny valley crawled along on its stomach between the slopes. A narrow strip of just a few farms had been carved into these slopes on the edge of the Amazon’s impenetrable forest. On his ‘farm’ Felipe ran a few slightly flighty cattle and grew coffee and bananas, but mostly this land was being allowed to grow back to forest, as a buffer against further encroachment by slash-and-burn farming. And for Felipe it made a perfectly brilliant weekend getaway. My God, this was certainly getting away. No traffic, no phone, no connectivity, no power, no city glow. Just … nature.

  I was disconnected. Unplugged. Uncontactable. No signal. Nature dwarfed us. And that felt so good, so reassuring.

  The cervezas were dropped into a tank of water to cool. I was tempted to do the same. Then – the rain came. Bucketing down. The sounds of rain, dripping and pouring and running water, water running off everything: house, roof, trees, slopes, forming new rivulets and runs down the hillsides. We took to the slow, hypnotically gentle swing of hammocks on the balcony to wait it out. The rain stopped when it was ready. No hurry here. The sun dropped, the black fell. Thump. No twilight. The stars punched through. Lamps were lit. Someone turned the volume knob up even further on the night sounds and the rainforest simply resonated with noise.

  Adan, a man of maybe sixty, lived here and looked after the place for Felipe. He had been working in Felipe’s family since Felipe was a boy, and they connected with that ease of long familiarity. We played dominos in the semi-dark. Now, I had played dominos a few times as a child, but we’d mostly used them for knocking over other dominos. That night I discovered the strategy of those who knew the game. Cold cervezas, maiz tostado (toasted maize, hot and well s
alted, of course), local unpasteurised cheeses from the village. And I think some more cervezas and dominos. Sleep. Waking in the middle of the night to the sounds of life in the inky blackness, but with an overall impression of the deepest silence inside myself. A silence where everything ceased.

  Early in the morning I took a walk up the hill. Walking in this rainforest – well, actually even more than ten metres from the house – required a stout pair of gumboots. With any step your feet could sink either to the ankle or knee-deep, as you retrieved each foot to glish and glush your way along. It was early, and I wanted to get into the forest, to be in the Amazon jungle. As I climbed the hill behind the house, the valley below was submerged in a sea of opaque fog, which wound its way along the twisted valley. But as I climbed, before my eyes that fog lake slowly began to come alive, unfolding and lifting. It became clouds and mists that crawled out from the valley, dragging their bellies across the tops of the hills as they slid past, leaving a silvery trail across the trees. One crawled over the top of me, blotting out the sky temporarily. As I climbed they slipped over the hills and were soon gone. I could feel the altitude in my lungs, and the house became a dot on the hillside below me and then it also disappeared from view. For a while then, I lost myself inside the massive rainforest and found a myriad of little things. Odd-shaped snails coursing their way smoothly over anything in their path. A strange round wasp nest suspended from a tree, about the size of a soccer ball, with the paper-like surface torn in places to reveal a honeycomb of tunnels crawling with life. Tiny flowers and strange mosses and other plants caught my eye. Birds with unfamiliar calls, birds that seemed a little self-conscious with awareness of a stranger’s presence.

  When I got back they were trying to shift a broken tractor. We moved it uphill slightly to get it under shelter through brute force. Good physical exercise. It was an odd reversal of roles for tractor and human.