by Ted Simon
In South America the Spanish language is called 'Castillano' and the two most important words in Castillano say it with a brevity greater even than the Anglo-Saxon.
No hay. There isn't any.
'Beer?' I asked.
No hay cerveza.
'Steak?'
No hay.
'What do you have?' Huevos con arroz.
'Can I have some butter with the eggs, please.' Mantequilla no hay.
'Alright, bring me a Coca Cola and coffee.'
The waiter brought a Pepsi (which I like even less) and two jugs. One jug contained hot water. The other jug, a small glass one, seemed to have an inch of soya sauce in the bottom.
'Where is the coffee?'
The waiter pointed scornfully at the black sauce. Aqui est
It was liquid coffee essence, something I hadn't seen since Hitler blockaded the British Isles. I imagined it was pumped out of the ground in times of national emergency.
I had not had a cup of real coffee since Argentina, but at least there had been powdered coffee. Usually the tin was brought to the table in the futile pretence that it was genuine Nescafe. In smart places they had little wickerwork baskets made specially to cradle the Nescafe as though it were a precious wine.
In Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador arid even most of Colombia, real coffee no hay. But in Ayacucho we sank to a new low.
I fell into conversation with an American real estate operator who had decided to holiday through the American economic recession. He was quite human until I asked what he did. Then he flew into a frenzy of phrases about 'golf course communities and high density situations facilitating magnificent view orientation possibilities.' In the spartan circumstances of Ayacucho the unreality of real estate was extreme.
Bruno and Antoine found me there later listening to speculations on the view orientation facilitation situation in late 1975 in the Florida area. They brought more news from the land of No Hay. We were in a fuel starvation situation. Ayacucho had run out of petrol.
In the morning we hung about the gas stations, hoping for a miracle, and shortly before lunch we were granted one. A tanker got through. With it came the news that the usual route to Huancayo was washed out by the flooded river Mantaro. The other route was long and circuitous, and would take at least two days.
Twenty-five miles beyond Ayacucho I took a nail through my rear tyre. There were two holes in the tube and I spent an hour and a half repairing them with great care, because once again I was stuck with unreliable patches and no spare tube. A truck packed with Indian passengers passed by. I heard the usual shouts of 'gringo' accompanied by mocking remarks in the Indian language. As I stood up a clod of wet mud splattered against my shirt and fell into the open wallet at my waist. It did not seem funny at the time.
The Peruvian Indians, on the whole, looked very apathetic and ground down by their toil and dreary poverty. The colour and vitality of their weaving always seemed in direct contradiction to their lives as though the
inspiration for it had died centuries before and the fingers were simply reproducing it by some freak genetic mutation. Sometimes the apathy gave way to resentment, directed mainly at Gringos. Though it was the Spaniards who had set their heels on the necks of the Indians long ago, the 'Yanqui' was the enemy now. All European travellers took the brunt of it.
Bruno and Antoine had been cooking while I worked, and I ate something with them quickly. We were at a very high altitude and hoped to get a good deal lower before stopping. When I took the bike off the stand, the tyre collapsed again. I tried my last resort, an aerosol puncture repair canister carried for emergencies. It felt like an emergency.
I pumped in the latex foam, and we set off. Within fifteen minutes the tyre was flat again. Life could be like that; one damn thing after another. I pumped it up and rode another fifteen minutes. So we went on for two hours; thirteen minutes of riding, six minutes of pumping, with me rushing ahead full tilt in the darkness trying to keep up a decent average speed.
The air felt appreciably warmer when we came to Pilpichaca and a small roadside cafe, and we stayed there enjoying the company of the owners and their children, but we were still at fourteen thousand feet and I had a chill night in the tent.
In the morning the others went on ahead while I stuffed a nineteen-inch front wheel tube into my eighteen-inch rear tyre; the obvious solution to my problem. Then I set off to catch them.
The road ran alongside a lake, with snow caps in the distance. The views everywhere were quite extraordinary, and would have been unforgettable had there not been so much of them. The dirt road, though, was variable and difficult, some loose and slippery, some wet, some stony and ridged, and many sudden surprises on bends. On one of them, sure enough, I slid gently off into a muddy hole. It took me a long time to work the bike out, with everything unpacked and spread around me. Normally I might have been more stoical about it, but a lorry was parked within shouting distance, and the driver saw me struggling. I called to him but he ignored me, and it was plain he wanted me to stew in my juice. My mood became bitter as I reflected on Indian behaviour and I spent a good deal of the day immersed in unworthy hatred of them.
Finally, though, the glorious landscapes round Huncavelica lifted me out of this depression. I lay for a while among rocks of bizarre and brilliant colours, sculpted by wind into the shapes of mythical creatures, and felt some sort of benign force enter me from the hillsides. It was a very long and exhausting ride to Huancayo, with mile after mile and hour after hour of sharp descents. My arms and knees ached with the effort of holding my body back in the saddle, the brakes and gears fought to hold the bike at a reasonable speed on the stony surfaces, but I was feeling strong and capable again and arrived before night happy and full of the splendours of the Andes.
It was too late to find Bruno and Antoine, who had had an address to find outside the town. I went instead to the Tourist Hotel, a rather grand place, thinking I had earned the luxury. It was a mountain resort hotel for a clientele of comfortable means seeking relief from Lima. The restaurant was roomy and correct, with the right napery and settings, and a menu in French. A middle-aged English couple entered, each with a bull mastiff on a leash. Their tweedy clothes and manner advertised their nationality before they had even spoken and I waited breathlessly for confirmation. The man glanced round the room, looked questioningly at his consort, and uttered two words straight from the trenches of the First World War.
'Same hole?' he asked. It would be hard to imagine a more eloquent phrase, provided you knew the code.
Bruno, Antoine and I joined together again for the last descent to Lima. It began at a final high peak and there, at Morococha, under a shower of grimy sleet, I saw what must be the highest ecological disaster area in the world. The worst Welsh mining town could not have competed even in its heyday. Pitiful rows of slum cottages, squalid railway yards, factories belching acrid smoke, vast slag heaps oozing lurid and poisonous wastes into stagnant pools where ragged children splashed barefoot, and all among unmelted drifts of yellow snow and bitter cold. The road was broken up and treacherous, and the image of that place stayed with me as a supreme symbol of the way men's lives can be degraded in the midst of such rich natural beauty. To create so much filth at fourteen thousand feet is a quite diabolical achievement.
The Lucas people received me very well in Lima, and pampered me with hospitality, while Bruno went off to stay with some French embassy people. I pulled on overalls and buried myself in minor repairs, and then wandered rather aimlessly about the city.
For once my own private introductions failed me. One friend of friends said on the telephone that unfortunately she could not speak to me since she was at lunch. Others used their hospitality as a defensive weapon, in a way like saying: 'We've let you sit in our splendid home, we've given you all you can eat and drink, so you have no further claim on us. Goodbye.' It was not consciously intended, but there was so much jealous pride in these Lima socialites that natural feeling could
find no place. Small wonder that I found them insular and snobbish, and felt a wave of sympathy for the Indians after all, who had to bear the brunt of all this arrogance.
Bruno lost his passenger Antoine at Lima, and went on alone in the 4L. We agreed to stay together. During the four weeks we had
spent in the mountains we seemed to have reached an almost perfect understanding. I no longer felt the same fear of losing contact with the people around us. With such distinctly different vehicles we spent most of the time travelling alone, and we had already demonstrated several times that neither one was prepared to fuss about the other. We were ready to take our chances, each of us in his own way, and we came together to cook, or camp together, to buy food or sometimes to halve the cost of a hotel room, and of course to talk. It was not the same as travelling alone, but I had to admit that the dour indifference of the people I had encountered so far made me glad of company. I found the people wearisome to contemplate. Travelling with Bruno was like a holiday.
And we were going to travel along the Pacific coast.
There would be fish, more fish than we had ever seen. Everybody told us. You had only to tie a safety pin to a piece of string and you would catch one. And crabs! The biggest, meatiest crabs, in abundance. Lobsters!
Delicious, fresh, cheap. And oysters! The oysters, they said, were as big as dinner plates. They were extraordinary, juicy, full of flavour and each one as nourishing as a steak.
There would be hundreds of miles of empty beach, where it never, ever rained, and we were going to roll gently along the coast, sleeping out, living off the sea, saving money and having a fantastic time.
It took us too long to find our way out of Lima, and on to the Pan-American Highway. We had thought it best to get as far from the capital as possible on the first day, before looking for a beach, but at dusk we had only managed a hundred miles and, what was worse, we were on a part of the road that circled away from the coast. There were dirt roads leading off to the sea, and we took one hoping we might still find a beach in time, but we seemed to be crossing an artificial wasteland or army training ground. It was criss-crossed with tracks, and signposts with names and numbers that told us nothing, and in the gathering dark we saw headlights sweeping over great distances; and heard the rumbling of engines. We went as far as we could, but found no beach. Finding two solid signposts near each other, we hitched our hammocks between the roof rack of the 4L and the signposts, fed ourselves and went to sleep. During the night, several big trucks ground slowly past, thrashing their gears, and in the morning we saw we were in a great field of natural salt deposits. In fact we had come within a few hundred yards of the sea, and we scrambled over a bluff and down to the water. There was no real beach, but a lot of rocks tumbling into the ocean, and a few patches of sand. All over the rocks we saw crabs, big red and black crabs, but how were we to catch them? We had no net, or bait. We had not even bought a fishing line yet. It seemed, though, that if we were stealthy enough in coming over a rock we might catch one with a suitable weapon before it had realized its danger.
Bruno had something closely resembling a spear, and for a while we scrambled over the rocks, lashing at the crabs and missing them by a hair's breadth, but always missing. I could see Bruno was getting furious. He hated to be beaten by a crab. It was pretty obvious to both of us by this time that these were not the great, fat, juicy eating crabs we had been promised, but it had become a desperate sport. Bruno rushed off to the van and came back with a wild look and a tiny nickel-plated revolver in his hand. It was time for me to get out of the way.
Looking more like a crab himself he crept over the rocks, and fired several times, but without success. Finally he managed to corner a big one in a cleft. We both looked and saw this insolent monster sitting there, pointing at us with its eyes and munching slowly and steadily. It was point blank range. Bruno fired again and again, and the crab went on munching until the magazine was exhausted. Then the crab turned away
contemptuously and vanished. It had not been trapped at all, merely unconcerned.
That day we travelled two hundred miles, almost to Chimbote, but passed no town big enough to sell fishing equipment. However, we did find a beach. It stretched off straight to the horizon, at low tide, with a thick blanket of sea weed defining the high tide mark. The smell of it was invigorating beyond belief, a special quality, I always thought, of the Pacific. A little grass hut with a chimney stood alone and deserted on the beach, but there was otherwise no sign that the beach was known to man. We found driftwood and made a fire but, failing fish, we dined on eggs, rice and onions, tasty but prosaic.
In the morning we found that the van was stuck in the sand. As we worked to extricate it with shovel, ropes and brushwood, a girl appeared unexpectedly from behind a low ridge of sandstone. She looked rather dusty, and her sleeveless black top did not quite register with her bra. She asked for a lift to Chimbote, saying that a man had dumped her there when she refused to do it.
Bruno took her in the van, and she showed us where to buy fishing lines, hooks and sinkers. Some boys sold us a handful of big grey grubs they were digging up on the beach, and we set off to find fish.
Our first efforts were not a success. At Puerto Mori we had to pay a toll just to get on the beach, and caught nothing. The following day, beyond Trujillo, we were unlucky again. There were only pebble beaches. Both of us constantly snagged our lines, and I lost mine altogether. However, this time we had thoughtfully provided against failure by buying a big fish at the market. It weighed a kilo and a half, and was like a mullet. Grilled it was wonderful and we gorged ourselves into a stupor. I at least was getting used to the idea that fishing was one thing, and eating fish another, but the taste spurred us on.
The following night we found a beach close to a fishing village and saw crates of the fish being brought ashore. We had no difficulty buying one, but still we could catch nothing. Absolutely determined to win some kind of free booty from the sea I turned my greedy eyes on the small crabs that were dashing about all over the beach.
'If we got enough of them,' I said, 'maybe they would make a soup.'
I saw the same mad glint kindle in Bruno's eye.
'Allons-y', he shouted. In the dark, with a hurricane lamp, we rounded up dozens of the miserable, dazed creatures. The result of all this slaughter was quite inedible. Full of shame we swept up the litter of pathetic limbs strewn around us, and buried it. The collective unconscious of the crab world was not slow to revenge itself though. The next day I stepped into the water and felt a most excruciating crunch on my foot from an enormous pincer. For an hour I suffered intense pain and thought I would probably die.
We decided then that it was time to try for some of the other delights of the Pacific.
'At Chiclayo’ said Bruno, 'is the Tourist Hotel, where we will eat oysters and lobsters. It will be wonderful. I have been told about it. Oysters and lobsters with cold white wine. Prepare yourself.'
I had to admit the hotel looked promising. The entrance was grand, the waiters wore starched white coats. There were table cloths and, wonder of wonders, white bread rolls.
'Waiter,' I said, as one approached with a menu, 'we want oysters, oysters as big as this plate.'
'No hay,' he said.
'In that case,' said Bruno grandly, 'we will have lobster.'
'No hay,' said the waiter, and offered us prawns in batter.
We looked at the menu. We knew it was no good, but could not bear to admit that the feast was cancelled. The prawns were very expensive. Almost certainly they were frozen, but we ordered them.
'And a bottle of white wine,' said Bruno.
'No hay vino,' said the waiter snootily. 'It is forbidden to sell vino during the revolution.'
That was how we first heard about the revolution. We stared at each other in amazement. It was a serious matter. The police in Lima and Callao had staged a coup. Many had been killed. The tanks were out in the streets and the fate of the country was in the balan
ce. So far the government had managed to survive. There were rumours of chaos and bloodshed in Lima, but the only noticeable effect in Chiclayo was that you could not get wine with your prawns.
Anyway the prawns were no good. They were fried in bread dough, and the chef had forgotten to put in the prawns.
We left poorer but little wiser. At the next traffic light a dozy Peruvian driver ran into me from behind, ripping off one of my panniers, denting the oil tank and throwing me to the ground. It was that kind of day. I made a tremendous row about it and the crowd came over gradually to my side. Reluctantly the driver peeled off a hundred sole note, gave it to me, and rushed away. I tied my broken box together and took my hundred soles into a wine shop where I got a bottle from a man who had seen too many revolutions. So something good came of that day, though it was not over yet, by any means.
We rode on to Paita which surprised me by being a really graceful town of old and elegant wood frame buildings. Unhappily the hotel was the grubbiest of all the buildings, and far too expensive, so we had a chicken dinner and decided to sleep out again. I remembered the telegraph poles
lined up along the road on our way into town and we drove out to sling our hammocks between a suitable pole and opposite ends of the van.
As I was dozing off a faint creaking sound disturbed me, but before I had time even to identify it, the pole came crashing down. My head was towards the pole, and Bruno was asleep with his head at the van end of the hammock. In the moonlight I saw the pole fall directly on to Bruno and the porcelain insulation strike his head. I was so horrified imagining the weight of the pole behind that sharp glassy knob that I did not even notice that I had fallen to the ground.
For a second or two he was deathly still as I struggled up in alarm from the tangle of bedding. Then he woke. He said he had felt nothing. Astonished but relieved I began to consider what the police in Paita might think if they found their communications cut during a revolution, and we decided to leave the site rapidly. Pausing only to pull on our trousers and bundle all our loose things into the van we rushed off for another five miles. Then the bike blew a fuse and stopped, without warning, for the first time on the entire journey.
