The Road to Zagora

by Richard Collins

  I knew that bus station, with three different entrances onto the street, was dodgy and I was on the ball and quick and also lucky. The man chose to let go of my bag rather than risk further trouble; perhaps there were police around. I might have got a punch in the face or worse doing what I did. I know that I was tremendously happy to have rescued my bag and I walked back into the bus station with a big smile on my face. I felt like the conquering hero.

  T is for Tel Aviv (Israel)

  Tel-Aviv is wonderful city. The old port of Jaffa, where we stayed, is both decrepit and revamped, historical and modern, laid back and vibrant, artsy, earthy, picturesque and zany.

  The people are friendly and helpful and there’s a little buzz in the air, something that reminds you of New York. The place is multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. Road signs are in Hebrew, Arabic and English. In Jaffa you can hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day and church bells ringing on a Sunday.

  I felt at home in Tel Aviv. But an hour or so away is the border with the Palestinian Occupied Territories and down the coast is the Gaza Strip. The list of injustices against the Palestinian people since 1948 is too long to recount here.

  We cycled along the seafront into Tel Aviv and saw the burnt out shell of the Dolphinarium nightclub where twenty-one teenagers on a night out were killed by a suicide bomber in 2001. There have been eight such attacks since the year 2000. That’s the other side of a complicated story.

  People all over the Middle East are warm hearted and fun to be with. They greet each other with a salaam or a shalom – words meaning peace.

  21

  At the End of the Road to Nowhere

  I read Flic’s journals for our South America trip and find three noticeable preoccupations. First there are the daily descriptions of the food we ate; that runs through all her diaries. And then there are her regular descriptions of my state of health. It makes me feel sad to think that her happiness was so much determined by my ups and downs. Did I say ups and downs? Think of a yo-yo on a roller coaster ride and you will get the idea. And think of a drizzly winter’s day when it’s getting dark at four o’clock and how hard it is to imagine at such a time that summer ever existed or will exist again. You try to imagine the sun still hot enough to lie on the grass in just a pair of shorts but outside it’s cold and wet; you know summer will come back again, of course it will, but it’s hard to really believe it. And so it is with my health; when I’m seriously disabled and in great discomfort (which happens for part of every day) I can’t always imagine that in an hour or maybe in a day’s time I will be fine. It seems so unlikely. So my emotional state is, to put it mildly, somewhat variable. Poor Flic has to cope with this when we travel. At home she can go out and forget about me for a while.

  The third of her preoccupations in the journal is the frequent comparison of South America to India. In India there is endless hassle and often enough it’s useful. Look lost and someone will help you find your way. Get tired and a tuk tuk or a taxi will magically pull up beside you. People are interested in foreigners and it’s not just a question of separating you from your money. But in South America there is so much reserve. It’s OK but sometimes you miss the interaction. And India is so profoundly foreign and colourful. Anywhere else in the world will be disappointing after India. We both felt that when we first arrived in Peru.

  It was in Arequipa that Flic made a note of a young teenager (she didn’t specify gender), wearing a t-shirt bearing the words, Vida con no sexo es no vida (vida sin sexo sounds better Spanish to me but that’s what she wrote in her diary). Life without sex is no life. Yes, in South America sex officially exists. Maybe in some mountain communities it’s a little hidden away but in most places you will see couples on the streets walking arm in arm or hand in hand or more. You will see a young woman wearing moderately sexy clothes and catching the eye of men in the street. It looks so normal and healthy and joyful and it contrasts with those buttoned-up parts of the world we have visited like India or Nepal or the Muslim countries.

  Unfortunately the greatest difference between South America and Asia is the amount of crime in the former. We met a number of people who had been victims of crime and there were so many places where we were less relaxed than we might have been because of this. It’s a shame.

  Peru is big and empty and we travelled big distances by bus but also took an aeroplane a couple of times. After staying a night at Casa Ana in Lima we flew down to Arequipa in the south of Peru where we stayed off and on for between two and three weeks. It’s a handsome town with many fine old buildings from the colonial period; one church, for instance, has the date 1698 carved into the stone-work. And the view from the rooftops takes in a vast open landscape dotted with snow-capped volcanoes. But our reason for being in that part of Peru was to go hiking in the famous Colca Canyon. The landscape around there has a very special arid, high altitude beauty that left a great impression on me.

  In Arequipa you can see notices in travel agent’s windows advertising whole day tours to the Colca Canyon. We spent ten days in and around the canyon. That’s the way we travel. Our first stop was Chivay, a small, high town three hours away from Arequipa. We got off the bus in a dusty square and followed a helpful man to his hotel. We had a little walk around the streets and then we got up on the roof to watch the light fade. We looked over the low roofs of the scruffy town and out at the bare hills. The light, at that altitude and in that dry atmosphere, was clearer than we ever experience at home. The mountains were lit sharply against a cold sky. As the sun descended the colours changed and shadows filled the hollows. Flic drew and painted, I took photos, and we both wished we hadn’t left some of our warm clothes behind in Arequipa. Flic wrote: I feel very happy here, it’s so beautiful and peaceful.

  I found an internet place down the street and blogged: High in the mountains again. Vast wild landscape, populated by scattered flocks of alpacas, llamas, sometimes a shepherd, sometimes delicate wild deer. Snow on the tops. Big yellow flowers like chrysanthemums on the cactus trees. In the small town of Chivay. Half the population, the female half, are in fancy dress, as they are every day – very, very colourful clothes and improbable hats. The men more ordinary but with cowboy hats. Amazing market, whole skinned alpacas hanging up. Everything more amazing and beautiful than words can tell. Happy us.

  And the next evening I recorded: A walk in the countryside this morning. We saw a sort of giant humming bird, about the size of a starling, hovering with its beak in a flower. Later we found out it’s called Picaflores gigante. We passed a woman with a baby on her back, knitting as she walked along the road. A boy herding a few donkeys and sheep on a bicycle (he was on the bicycle). A man ploughing a field with two little oxen – he wanted to talk to us in Quechua but got a better response when he changed to Spanish. We crossed a deep gorge on a suspension bridge and looked down on ‘hanging tombs’ constructed in the cliff-face. We saw Inca terraces and irrigation systems. Fields planted with broad beans. It was really hot but we saw fresh snow on the mountain tops. And more besides. And then we hitched a lift back to our hotel.

  The next day we caught the bus to Cabanaconde, about thirty-five miles away. In the morning I woke Flic at half past five and we walked through the town to the bus station arriving an hour early in the true Collins manner. So we wandered around and came across two bullfighting arenas, the new one inaccessible as it was surrounded by a corrugated iron fence, and the old one, built of stone and with a painting of a bull with a condor strapped to its back on one door. The heavily symbolic and ritualistic nature of the bullfight is sometimes taken a step further by the addition of condors, a practice that continues to this day in one or two remote parts of the Andes, but probably not here, in Chivay.

  The bus was a local one with no tourists on board but just village people; the men wearing big brown cowboy hats and the women in very colourful skirts and aprons and embroidered hats. The time has come for me to say more about hats. The fact is that women in Peru and other A
ndean countries wear extraordinary hats. Here’s a short list of some we came across (from my blog):

  Huaraz: the stove-pipe trilby, taller in the crown that is practicable on a crowded bus, worn at a jaunty angle

  Chavin: felt hats with plastic flowers affixed

  Chavay: sequined boaters

  Puno: bell-shaped bowlers with two tassels hanging over the left ear

  Llachon: four-cornered felt hats with bobbles

  Cusco: cream-coloured tapering top hats.

  As you can tell, traditional (i.e. everyday) dress is subject to quite distinct local variation. Every woman among the campesinos will wear the local hat and the local style of clothes. It’s a huge cultural difference from our society where people dress more or less individually. An anthropologist might explain it but I can’t. Obviously the main factor is that people don’t travel around much and distinct local cultures develop and carry on. And they are carrying on: young people as well as old wear traditional clothes. Did I say people? I should say women, because men dress in more modern, what we would call if we weren’t so far west, Western clothes. It was the same in parts of India. You might guess from this that men in these societies are able to move around more and are less parochial in outlook. That might explain it.

  Back on the bus now: we found seats but the aisle was full of people standing and what with dirt on the windows and the hats on the heads we could only get glimpses of a beautiful landscape. The road to Cabanaconde runs along the rim of the canyon, three or four thousand feet above the valley floor and with the mountains around several thousand feet higher again. The land has been formed by recent volcanic activity and the hills look burnt, as if made of cinders, which they more or less are. And the higher of these grey-brown-yellow-black mountains are topped by snow. Add some llamas and alpacas on the high slopes and Inca terraces lower down and condors flying overhead and you might imagine that quite a few tourists come here. They do. Halfway to Cabanaconde is a viewpoint called Cruz de la Condor, where it is possible to see condors drifting by on outstretched wings. It is a tourist honey pot visited by coach loads of day-trippers from Arequipa. The canyon itself is popular with trekkers and has simple backpacker accommodation in several of its villages. But somehow the vast landscapes and the rural way of life remains if not untouched then certainly unspoilt by tourism. And if you want to get away from your fellow tourists or fellow travellers you just have to take a little more time and step off the well worn path.

  When we arrived in Cabanaconde we found a very cheap hotel and got ourselves up on the roof from where we could look down on the square, the sprawling little town, the dry fields around and the mountaintops beyond. Cabanaconde was a quiet, one horse, one llama, kind of place at the end of a road to nowhere. The buildings, for the most part, were scruffy, dirty, shapeless things built of adobe and rough stone with flat cement or gently sloping tin roofs. Think of a Mexican town in a low budget Hollywood western and you’re halfway there. The Plaza de Armas (as the town square is called in Peru) had been tastelessly revamped in recent years and featured a waterless fountain and weird geometric-shaped patches of almost-grass behind little hedges. There was a huge, squat, white-washed church and a lorry parked across the street with the words Christo es el Camino written above the cab. There were window-less shops and cafés with hand-painted signs on the doors. There were torn posters over peeling paint over crumbling plaster and an air of in-built decrepitude. We liked the place very much indeed.

  Cabanaconde really is at the end of the road. The tarmac stops here and beyond the town are only rough dirt tracks. In the afternoon we wandered out of town towards a viewpoint overlooking the canyon. At that altitude (over 10,000 feet) and in that dry climate there was an exceptional quality of light and clarity to the air that added some drama and beauty to an astounding landscape. Around us were pastures and dried out arable fields on gently sloping land leading up to small hills and mountains beyond. There were rock outcrops and boulders lying on the stony ground and stone walls, some topped off with a row of cactus plants in lieu of barbed wire and others in varying states of disrepair.

  We walked past an old bullfighting ring occupied by a single donkey and a football field more dusty than grassy. In shallow places between the hills the ground was washed out by the rains of a different season. There were cacti large and small, the biggest like fifteen foot high candelabras. We walked to a little flat-topped hill where there stood an adobe barn with a tin roof and next to it a timber cross decorated by bits of coloured material and carpet and a garish plastic head of Jesus. Then we went across to the edge of the gorge.

  The land dropped away in front of us with cliffs and steep slopes leading down several thousand feet to the valley floor where the Colca River was just visible as a winding strip of blue among the rocks and trees. The slopes opposite us were not so very steep and we could see distant villages halfway up the canyon side. And higher above them were the mountains, cinder grey and yellow and sometimes white with patches of snow. We wandered about for a while until we were too hot and tired and thirsty and needed to go back to our hotel.

  In the morning we were out in the square by five for a walk before breakfast. I guess there was little to do in the evenings here and we had got more into the habit of going to bed early and rising early to make the most of the twelve hours of sunlight. Flic seemed to get used to her day starting with the sound of my voice saying, excitedly, Flic, Flic wake up, it’s nearly light. We weren’t the only people about. A woman crossed the square carrying a mattock on her shoulder, another came by with a bundle of green animal fodder of some sort, and a man came the other way with a huge bag of corn stalks. Two shops were open and then we saw a woman putting out a table with two chairs and a stall with some breakfast food. We sat and had hot sweet quinoa drink and cheese and avocado rolls.

  A little later a queue formed for the six-thirty bus out of town. Most of the women here wore traditional clothes as everyday attire but the women in the queue outshone everyone else in their finery. Flic noted velvet sleeves, embroidered waistcoats and hats, and full bright coloured skirts with embroidered hems. They all carried huge bundles and were headed for Cruz del Condor where they would make some money selling gaudy craftwork to the tourists. And we were headed that way too.

  Cruz del Condor is a viewpoint with parking for cars and coaches and plenty of walled terraces from which you can look out across the canyon and are very likely to see condors drifting past on the updraft. It was cold there sitting around in the early morning even wearing the extra jumpers we had bought in Chivay. Buses pulled in and the crowds grew and the sun warmed us a little. We talked to a German couple who were travelling in a camper van and therefore, I thought, missing the joys of public transport and contact with the local population. And then the condors came quite suddenly and quite close, not beautiful birds but impressively large. We saw maybe eight or nine, rising up on the breeze and cruising past on outstretched wings. Then we set off to walk back to Cabanaconde.

  When we were coming along this stretch of road the day before I so wanted to be out on foot or on a bicycle and not looking at the world through the window of a crowded bus. The walk back to town took us three hours and was as dramatic as I had thought. When we got close to town we passed a man leading a bull by a rope and I found myself thinking about the male animal in South America.

  At home it is the female domestic animal that earns a farmer a living. Ewes give us lambs to rear for meat and cows yield milk and hens lay eggs; the rams and bulls and cockerels are relatively superfluous or at least limited in their usefulness. So in Peru I was struck by how many cockerels you would hear in the early mornings and how often you came across bulls in the countryside. Of course they are important for cock fighting and bull fighting. Both sports seem to us unpleasantly aggressive and very different from the way animals are cared for at home or revered in India. You might think that South America had a more macho society. But in Peru men tend to have a modest and gent
le demeanour, not at as aggressive as you might anticipate. And while we’re on the subject of preconceptions overturned I had better tell you that the buses run on time in Peru and if they are a minute or two late in leaving there will generally be one or two old ladies calling impatiently from the back of the bus, vamos, vamos. Let’s go. People aren’t so laid back as you would expect.

  The next morning we set off to spend a few days in the canyon. At first we met giggling school children coming up the track and then as we got further down there were backpackers looking very exhausted and hot. We made it to the bottom of the canyon quite early in the day and decided to stay in a little wooden hut at a place called the Oasis. It was the greenest place for miles around with little grassy fields and eucalyptus and palm trees growing among the rocks. Spring water had been diverted into swimming pools for the delight of foot-tourists like us. The river ran fast around boulders. There was a patch of handsome large cacti with yellow flowers. It was beautiful but somehow phoney; a far too small area of fertile land to support a village. My health continued to be a problem as Flic recorded in the evening: Richard loved the walk down, he kept saying how he loves travelling but now he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to walk across to the bar and get dinner. I told him he had to and he did but went back to lie down straight away afterwards.

  The next day we had a challenging walk that took us to the village of Tocay situated on some less steeply sloping ground halfway up the other side of the canyon. It was a beautiful place that could be reached only on foot and was totally unspoilt. Fortunately there was one simple guesthouse. Flic noted: the streets are mud and stone. There are blossoms outside our window and tiny apples on the tree. There’s a beautiful church here and we were welcomed into the village by a lamb and a sheep and an alpaca. We liked that place very much and stayed a couple of nights, pottering about above the village among fields with huge rocks and cacti and eucalyptus trees. From there we could see the path leading back to Cabanaconde. It went up three thousand feet or so of the almost vertical canyon wall. Flic followed the path with her eyes, counting forty-five bends in the bottom two-thirds of its zigzag route to the top. It looked daunting.