The Road to Zagora

by Richard Collins

  The worst thing about Lima is the grey sky. The city lies under thick, low, unbroken cloud for eight months of the year. The second to worst thing is the crime. And the city is grim and grimy and heavily polluted and not very friendly. It doesn’t have really fine architecture or museums. It does have the parks, gardens and beaches of Miraflores but we stayed in a very ordinary, dull area called Breña. Lima was just a way into what turned out to be the most beautiful country I have been to. And while it’s my least favourite city in the world we did have a few interesting moments there.

  Just down the street from Casa Ana we asked for a café and were taken into a room in an ordinary building where some women sat round a table making sandwiches. They gave us pork and omelette sandwiches with tea. Flic reported:

  a beautiful young man with high cheekbones and a wide smile tried out his English on us and we tried out our Spanish. We didn’t get very far. It turned out to be a co-operative which had a small shop and a statue and an ice-cream box and maybe other businesses. They were so friendly and interested in us. The young man asked us why were we in Lima? It was a hard question to answer.

  Then I had an idea of going to a suburban seaside destination called La Punta. A few taxi drivers refused to take us there but eventually one agreed. It was a pleasant enough middle-class area on the edge of a desperately poor and crime-ridden district called Callao. We wandered along the shore and took a ride out in a little wooden boat with an outboard motor. We passed among some very expensive yachts and saw pelicans on a breakwater. That was it. Then we tried to get back to Casa Ana. We couldn’t find a bus and when we asked a taxi driver he took us to a police station. A policeman then came on the bus with us into Callao where we should change busses to get to our destination. He was a very gentle, friendly guy and as we waited for our next bus he pointed out various rough-looking youths that came by and told us how dangerous they were. He seemed nervous. After a while the right bus pulled up we said goodbye to him. I imagined that he too might have asked the same question. Why were we there?

  We got out of Lima the next day riding on an immensely comfortable double decker bus in the upstairs seats above the driver. I’ve mentioned this bus journey before. It was awful and wonderful in parts. It took us an hour to get out of Lima and then we travelled up the coast, a huge bleak ocean on one side of us and a vast desert on the other. Meanwhile the Australian couple next to us bickered and various unpleasant movies were shown on a screen above our heads. We turned inland and the landscape became lumpy and green and then hilly and greener and then, to the soundtrack of foul swearing from the movie being shown, we travelled across immense plains between snow-covered mountains and eventually arrived in Huaraz.

  We stayed at Jo’s Place, Jo being an expatriate Englishman who married a local woman. I guess I had better quote from Flic’s journal on our first morning there:

  Now a beautiful sunny morning, 8.20. At 6.30 when we got up it was freezing. The mountains were silhouetted by the early morning sky and framed in the arched windows. This room is square and blue with black beams and shiny brown floor. It’s the highest room in the hotel and there’s a spiral staircase up from the kitchen area below. Hundreds of cockerels crowed in the dawn. I’ve got a hint of altitude headache and had very lucid dreams.

  The lock on our door doesn’t work well so we’ve had to climb in through the sliding window. We managed to stay up ’til 11pm making love and going on the balcony to smoke and talk. Richard feels very ill, backache from carrying his pack. He can’t sort out the sheets and blankets and I heard him crying in the night. I feel so sorry for him but I think he’s really brave doing all this. If we had stayed at home it would have been worse, we have had an exciting time already. I am covered in bruises from climbing in and out of the window.

  The town of Huaraz was almost entirely destroyed, with much loss of life, by an earthquake in 1970 and now consists of low, modern, ugly, brick and concrete buildings laid out in a grid pattern of dirty streets. But we were there for the surrounding mountains, the Cordillera Blanca. On our first morning Jo suggested a route for a short walk that would get us acclimatised to the altitude. But there’s one thing I have to tell you, he said. I have to say this. Sometimes people get robbed at gunpoint up there. They’re not bad guys, the robbers – once they gave someone some money back when he complained that he didn’t have enough for a beer. But I have to tell you...

  We set off through the streets of Huaraz towards the cemetery from which a path winds up onto the hill where there stands a huge, blue, concrete cross. The town wasn’t without interest; there were plenty of campesinos in town – the country people who are of native American blood and who speak Quechua (pronounced ketchwa) as their first language.

  We saw women, both young and old, dressed in colourful, knee-length skirts over colourful layers of petticoats over leggings, with more brightly coloured layers above. They wore a sort of trilby hat but with an extended crown, like a stove-pipe, set at a jaunty angle. And they wore a piece of cloth strapped around them so that it hung over one shoulder; it looked decorative but no, one young woman carried a baby in it. And then, further down the street an older woman had no baby but a gas cylinder on her back. These campesinas were extraordinary looking but not good looking. Not to us at least, with their squat sturdy bodies under extraordinary clothes. But the younger ones walked with their heads held high; they knew they looked good.

  The campesinos were noticeable but actually a minority. Most people there were dressed in ordinary dull clothes. And everybody was short and stocky and had thick black hair. We must have looked strange to them but no-one interacted with us; they were a reserved people.

  I never did get my bearings in Huaraz and I certainly didn’t that first morning. We zigzagged back and forth when the streets didn’t go in our direction. The sun came out from between the clouds after a while but had climbed so steeply that it didn’t give much indication of north and south (close to the equator in September the sun doesn’t incline either way but goes straight overhead). When we came to an intersection of wider streets we could see the hills around. They were steep but not high and were covered in grey-brown parched grasslands with patches of pine forest. Only in one direction could we see snow covered peaks. And in the opposite direction we could see the big cross on the hill that we intended to climb. It wasn’t getting any closer.

  I didn’t feel well and I was limping badly, my right leg dragging as I walked. It was also beginning to get very hot. And, unsurprisingly, the thought of setting out towards the possibility of robbery at gunpoint didn’t help. We took maybe an hour to walk across town and then I had had enough. We struggled back, getting very lost on the way.

  The next day we set out early and took a taxi across town, thinking we would be on the hill before the robbers had got out of bed. I wrote in my blog: Fabulous walk this morning. Up to the big cross above the town and then on to high pastures where we saw great views of the mountains with snowy wastes and glaciers. Closer to us some wildlife we’d never seen before including a black humming bird and some big grasshoppers that changed colour when they moved onto different vegetation. On our way down we met a man with five cows, a few sheep, a couple of donkeys (as well as the one he was riding) and a big smile. We dropped in on the market in town that sells cow’s hooves and pig’s heads and various unidentifiable animal parts as well as guinea pigs both live and dead (skinned) among other things.

  I chose not to describe the aborted trip of the day before. But here’s a little more of Huaraz from the blog: We go on day trips (and longer trips) to the mountains but we are staying in town. It’s a fascinating place. I saw a man cycling down our road with a basket of freshly harvested green barley and wild flowers in front of him this morning. And just now we saw women selling bundles of something like clover and an old lady in traditional dress (very colourful, weird hat, etc) carrying green barley on her back. It must be donkey fodder. Flic wanted to buy vegetables to cook for this evening but
the stuff sold on the street is unrecognisable – great long hard bean pods, for example. And we realise that we can’t work out what is being sold to feed humans and what is for animals. Yes, it’s nice and different here. Many women in traditional dress. More street dogs than you can imagine. One or two people doing their washing in the river. Marching bands and fireworks all the time. And a strange lunch.

  We went into a sort of café across the road, walked through to the covered space at the back and found a cock-fighting ring. The young waiter enthusiastically invited us to tonight’s fights, starting at six o’clock. We really couldn’t understand the menu or the waiter but I ordered a plate of rice with plantains and fried eggs and a plate of spicy raw fish on beans. Flic had a harder time ordering. After much deliberation she agreed with what the waiter suggested – and had a good helping of ‘nothing for me I’m not hungry thank-you’. It took some time for us to realise.

  One of our walks took us up to a very high pasture where we were accompanied by a dog for a while and then met an old woman who wanted to talk with us. She was dressed in purples and red but with a sort of man’s style almost-cowboy hat. She seemed cheerful but looked poor enough to have slept in her clothes. All bar two of her front teeth were missing. Her limited Spanish included much repetition of regalame, which I took to mean give me a present. We gave her a cheese sandwich which she ate straight away and enthusiastically. Our impression of Peru was that people weren’t too badly off except at the margins, which in this case meant at high altitude.

  Another day walk took us up to 15,000 ft and the much visited Laguna 69 where a sliver of a waterfall fell over rocks into a pale blue glacial meltwater lake. The young couple walking up the path behind us were speaking Hebrew but it included words that I recognised. I stopped and turned to the guy. Did you just say ‘Walton on Thames’, I asked – not the question you would expect to ask of a young Israeli walking high in the Andes. But yes, some of his family lived in suburban Surrey where I was brought up.

  The centrepiece of our stay in Huaraz was the Santa Cruz trek, a four day walk in the mountains that involved camping and a lot of preparation. Jo’s Place, as you might imagine, was set up for backpacking, mountain-walking visitors and he introduced us to a young woman who could help us prepare for the trek. Lena was around twenty years old, outgoing, knowledgeable and a great help to us. She didn’t speak Quechua and wasn’t so squat and solid looking as the locals but was of some native South American background. I thought she looked Nepalese and was also, I’ve got to say it, moderately gorgeous. She arranged for an arriero, a donkey driver, to come with us and carry our equipment. On the day before we set off she spent a lot of time helping Flic to prepare:

  Had an amazing morning shopping at the mercado, 60 bread rolls. The market half indoors and half outdoors. Villagers come to town to sell: bags of live guinea pigs, sacks of hens and ducks all alive, eggs cheese parsley potatoes corn, avocados, strawberries, roast pigs and calves and fruit. It was good fun going with Lena and coming back in a motocarro with all our supplies. I bought some roast piglet and small potatoes and salad to have for lunch.

  After lunch Lena and I put the tent up and got things ready – pans, sleeping bags, mats, mugs, plates etc. Richard couldn’t help with anything, he is feeling so ill today. He keeps going to sleep and hoping to feel better then he wakes up but not improving. He’s worrying but he does feel OK sometimes so let’s hope it’s the next four days.

  The next morning we set off at six to travel by taxi to Cashapampa where Lena would introduce us to our arriero and we would begin the trek. On the way she pointed out a place called Yungay, where, in the 1970 earthquake, 20,000 people were killed when a landslide of rock, snow and ice destroyed the town. Only ninety-two people escaped death – they were at the cemetery on a hill above the town when it happened.

  The taxi ride took three hours, much of it on very rough dirt tracks, and we stopped halfway to get some breakfast. It was our first of many morning drinks of a sort of liquid porridge called quinoa, properly pronounced kinwa. After driving up and up on rougher and rougher tracks we stopped at the house of the man who was to be our arriero, Pedro. He was, as Flic said, an amazingly nice man. Smiley red brown face, big hat, lovely dog. He spoke no English so we had to use our feeble Spanish. Fortunately Flic was talking to his wife, not to him, when she said estoy caliente, which means I feel horny, not I am hot, as she intended.

  Pedro was sixty-one years old and had nine children. He lived in a handsome adobe house on a small-holding surrounded by pastures and trees with a mountain stream flowing by. It looked like a healthy lifestyle in beautiful surroundings. And Pedro had about him a calm wisdom you would expect from someone in such a place. I wrote in my blog that he was one of the nicest men I have ever met – very kind, gentle and helpful. He was aware of my difficulties and quite simply took it upon himself to do everything he could to help. He would be ahead of us on the trail with his two donkeys and companionable dog and would set up camp and prepare food in advance of our arrival. He did much more than we asked of him and did it as if it was a noble calling; with not a hint of subservience but with a lot of kindness.

  From my blog: I can’t begin to describe the strange vegetation, the lakes and glaciers, the waterfalls, the high peaks, snowfields, and the very special people we met along the way. I think the truth is that I couldn’t describe much of the landscape because we couldn’t see it very well for the mist and low clouds and rain that got in our way. But I can describe two of the people. We met Pascal and Christa in a valley bottom campsite in the rain. Our cooker wasn’t working and Pedro had to borrow the use of theirs. Besides that he was a friend of their arriero, Amador.

  Pascal and Christa were from Switzerland. He was a slim, dark man with a modest manner. Christa was blonde, less slim, ebullient, and friendly. They were in the middle of a sailing trip back and forth and around the world. I think they had been away six years when we met them. Pascal had been a mountain guide but was unable to work at his profession because of injuries sustained in a parachuting accident. He had jumped off a mountain and his parachute hadn’t opened properly. He’d fallen a long way and was buried in the snow for five hours before being found. He never much liked the cold after that and with his new partner, Christa, took to sailing around the tropical seas, as you do under such circumstances. They had left their boat in the Caribbean somewhere and travelled up the Amazon into Peru and the Andes while waiting out the hurricane season.

  I check out their website now (three years later) and find that they have quit sailing, sold their boat, and settled in Andalucía. Christa describes their meeting with us: Il a bien du mérite Richard (55 ans) qui depuis 6 ans souffre de la maladie du Parkinson. Avant que sa maladie ne dégénère complètement, il profite, en compagnie de sa femme Phill, de faire un maximum de trekking. Quel courage et quel lucidité ! I don’t know much about courage and lucidité but then again I don’t remember a wife called Phill.

  In Flic’s diary I find that she had been subject to a moment’s sexual harassment when she was walking alone on the trail; a man called out to her, oyé bonita, hello gorgeous. It made her day.

  When we had completed the trek and I had given a tip to Pedro, el mejor arriero del mundo, the best arriero in the world, as I described him, we were left at the side of a road in a remote village waiting for the doubtful possibility of a bus. There were four of us, with Pascal and Christa, and we had an amazing amount of camping equipment. No bus came but Pascal negotiated a ride for us on a passing lorry. It was a big vehicle, which was a very good thing as there were already six people riding in the cab. Pascal rode on top and I wanted to but thought better of it.

  The road out of the mountains was the most dangerous we had experienced; and remember that comes after many a bus journey in the Nepal Himalayas. There was a section of lorry-wide dirt track that hairpinned its way down an unrelentingly sheer slope for, I don’t know, several thousand feet. There may have been thirty or forty
hairpin bends and viewed from the cab the lorry appeared to put one wheel out over the edge of the road on each bend. It was too crazily, ridiculously dangerous to take in and beyond scary. It made us laugh. A couple of hours later we had descended far enough for it to get very warm. All the Peruvians in the cab had fallen asleep except the driver, who I thought gave every appearance of being about to drop off. I suggested to Christa, who spoke good Spanish, that she talked to him to keep him awake. She thought that seemed like a good idea. Eventually we arrived in a small town from where we caught a minibus back to Huaraz.

  We stayed about two and half weeks in Huaraz and the mountains and despite the very great difficulties with my health we had some extraordinary adventures. There are more stories I could tell of our time there but I want to move on. We travelled from Huaraz to Trujillo and then to Lima by bus. Then we flew down to Arequipa and stayed around there for a while. On the way we had one difficult moment which I described enthusiastically in my blog:

  Yesterday we got robbed. We were in the bus station at Trujillo and I was trying to keep an eye on our four bags. But a man kept tapping me on the shoulder saying ‘taxi, taxi’, and eventually I turned to him and simultaneously another man dropped a bunch of keys on the floor in front of Flic to distract her. I looked back to the bags and, sure enough, one had gone. Another man had taken my small bag while our backs were turned – the bag with most of my medication and other valuable things in it. This is a very short story. The whole incident took place in a few seconds. But wait – there’s a tiny bit more. Yes, I ran out of the bus station onto the street, caught a glimpse of my bag in the hands of a guy walking briskly away, and grabbed it back off him. He let go straight away and all three guys melted away into the morning crowds. Hooray! It was so exciting.