Urubamba was at a much lower elevation than Chinchero and it was much warmer and it was a lovely ordinary town with markets and town squares and no tourists apart from ourselves. It was a good base for little trips along the valley. There are famous much-visited Inca ruins close by but first we wanted to go to Salineros, where a salt rich stream flows out of the hillside into a number of pools from which the salt is harvested.
We took a bus up the hill towards Chinchero and got off at a junction. Then a shared taxi took us a short distance to a little village with a big church clinging to the hillside. We were high above the Urubamba Valley in a vast open landscape with mountains all around. The slopes here were convex, that is to say the ground fell away in front of us more and more steeply, so we couldn’t see the salt pans of Salineros but knew they were below us somewhere. Our plan was to walk down to them and then carry on to the valley floor where we could catch a bus back to Urubamba. We set off down a dusty track through pasturelands and cultivated fields that were maybe quite green at other times of year but now looked dry and barren. Far away on the opposite side of the valley we could see quite large areas of land blackened by recent fires.
We met a man leading a donkey and asked the way. He muttered one or two words in Quechua or Spanish and waved his arm vaguely downwards. We carried on for a while. Then the track divided to form two paths on each side of a widening gulley; if we went wrong we would go very wrong but we had to choose. We took the left hand path and continued. An hour passed and we still saw no sign of Salinas. The sun was very high now, we were very hot and we had finished most of our water. The path subdivided and we chose to follow some tyre tracks but they led us into a field. We turned back, took the second path and carried on descending. I was limping a little and doubted that we would make it back up to the village; we had to carry on down.
After a while a little smoke and the not unpleasant smell of burning herbs drifted up to us on the breeze. Then we turned a corner in the path and there was a fire, the crackling sound of burning vegetation, the smoke and flames apparently coming towards us. We turned and ran.
Of course we couldn’t run far uphill. We stopped and waited but the fire didn’t seem to be getting closer. We walked down again for a better look and found that the fire was small and was only on one side of the track. We made a decision and ran down, feeling rather warm for a few paces before coming through and away. We were genuinely scared for a few minutes and now were relieved. And we felt better again when we got our first view of Salinas.
We saw the steep slope below us terraced and divided up into a patchwork of little areas separated from each other by banks in exactly the same way that rice fields are in the Himalayas. These weren’t fields but pools of water evaporating to leave a deposit of salt. The pools were in different stages of use, some newly filled with water from the stream, others half dried out and turning brown and grey, others glistening white with salt where the water had all gone. As we got closer we saw a few men at work, shovelling the salt into sacks and carrying it up the bank to a track. It looked like a tough way to earn a living.
The place was visited by a few people who came up by car from the road in the bottom of the valley below. This meant that there was a café and we found ourselves suddenly transformed from intrepid adventurers crossing a barren land under a burning sun into tourists sitting in the shade and eating icecreams. We didn’t mind at all.
We made other day trips and took walks from Urubamba and then went to Ollantaytambu and Machu Pichu further down the Sacred Valley. There’s a problem with these places: they are touristy to the point of feeling unreal, they are like theme parks where tourism is the only visible activity and the ordinary life of the country is submerged beneath it. What was very real was the rain, which we had experienced very little of for a month but which fell heavily on our arrival at Ollantaytambu. The other uncomfortably real thing was: a political rally with amplified speeches in a town square. It seems a lot of nonsense, hundreds of people are listening, most in their costumes, men in orange boiler suits and yellow hard hats, school uniforms on girls, women in traditional gear. Policemen and firemen and magistrates and town chiefs. Loud interminable speeches. We climbed high up above town to get away from the noise but we didn’t succeed.
From Ollantaytambo we travelled down to Aguas Calientes, below Machu Pichu, on a special tourist train. I found myself sitting next to a young Englishman. He really didn’t want to talk much but somehow I managed to draw him out and learnt a bit about his circumstances. I never found out his name. He was a graphic artist by profession and had been living in California, making a lot of money and saving up to buy a house and settle down with his girlfriend, with whom he was very much in love. She left him and he was shattered. He gave up his job, took his surf board (a seven foot longboard) and headed south. He travelled to Mexico and various other Latin American countries, spending most of his time by the ocean but also travelling far inland and into the hills, taking his board with him on public transport. It must have been an incongruous sight. I’m reminded of Odysseus who was told by the blind soothsayer, Teiresias, that he must
go overland on foot, and take an oar,
until you come one day where men have lived
with meat unsalted, never known the sea
in order to placate Poseidon, the sea god, who he had upset badly. The Odysseus sitting next to me had by now left his board behind somewhere along the way. I don’t know if he still had it with him in Quito, where, he told me, he had been beaten up a little and robbed. It wasn’t a traumatic experience for him because he had done some boxing in his time and was used to being hit. In fact when the two guys had cornered him that night he had thought about throwing some punches but decided against it; he was a small man and it was two to one. We never bumped into him again but I expect he has had some more adventures since then. He seemed a little accident prone.
The Urubamba River flows steeply down from Ollantaytambu to Aguas Calientes which is less than 7,000 feet above sea level, much lower than the places we had been staying most of the time in Peru and therefore in a completely different natural environment, something like tropical rain-forest. In fact the river is a tributary of the Amazon and its waters carry on out to the Atlantic Ocean nearly 4,000 miles away. So while Aguas Calientes is a tourist town serving visitors to Machu Pichu it was for us something else too: a chance to experience tropical jungle.
We walked downstream from the town along a track beside the railway line that took us to a sort of private piece of half jungle and half botanic garden. Here we followed a path to a waterfall. There were orchids and bromeliads, tree ferns and giant ferns, a type of courgette or squash plant thirty metres long, a parrot with a red and orange head (called the Cock of the Rock), big colourful butterflies, and the almost continuous noise of an insect that sounded like a dentist’s drill. For us, who never made it to the rain forest in all our time in South America, it was a special experience.
Then we went to Machu Pichu, the Lost City of the Incas, which must be one of the most tourist infested places in the world. We had bought our ticket in Cusco two weeks in advance as visitor numbers are limited to a mere 2,500 per day. To beat the crowds we got up at 4.30 in the morning and got one of the first buses up the hill. The extraordinary nature of Machu Pichu is partly its setting, on a very high, very steep hilltop in the jungle. We couldn’t see this because of the rain and mist. It seemed like we had chosen the wrong day. But we continued with our plan to go up Wayna Pichu, which is a thousand foot high, jungle-clad pillar of rock overlooking the main part of the site. For me, with a moderate fear of heights and with Parkinson’s disease affecting my movement, it was a challenge. But we were fit and very acclimatised to altitude and managed to be among the first people on the top. The clouds opened a little and through the gaps we could see the ruins of Machu Pichu right below us and the Urubamba River snaking through the forest further down again. You can choose your own clichéd superlatives; I’m ju
st going to say that it looked pretty good. And, despite the tourist overload, we were glad we went there.
W is for Westport (Ireland)
Eric Clapton’s Layla was in the charts so that must make it 1971 or 1972. I was camping near Westport, County Mayo, with the school scouts. Oh, really? Yes, the scouts. I was fifteen or sixteen years old.
Sometimes I see a human being as a building that survives over the years, still recognisable from the outside despite increasing decrepitude and botched renovations. But inside there are many changes. Occupants come and go as time passes; some of them barely memorable in future years. And so it is that I would recognise myself in a photo taken in 1971 or 72, the outside of the building, as it were. But I’m not sure that I would be able to recognise much of the inside, the person that I was then. I’m not convinced that I even want to try.
Westport is situated at the end of Clew Bay, where, legend has it, there are 365 islands. There are, in truth, only 117, including sandbars and rocks (but not submerged drumlins). They have names like Carrigeennaronty and Freaghillanluggagh, and John Lennon once owned one of them.
I can remember that we were taken out in boats to fish for mackerel in the bay and that we would reel in several at a time on the multi-hooked fishing lines. I remember that they tasted good cooked over an open fire.
So, there it is. A one-time occupant of this building, long since fled, has left a little something behind.
24
The Earth Moved
Huaraz and the Cordillera Blanca; Arequipa and the Colca Canyon; Lake Titicaca; and then Cusco and the Sacred Valley. We had adventured for between two and three weeks in each of these four areas and although it had been difficult at times it had often enough been a more than moderately wonderful experience. Now we went back to Lima and set off by bus on a leisurely overland journey from that capital city to Quito, the capital of Ecuador. It took about three weeks during which we had some memorable times, including one of the most exciting moments of all our travels.
In the bus station at Lima we had a new insight into Peruvian culture. We had to wait a while for our bus and watched television on a large overhead screen. Most people in Peru are of mixed race, that of the native Americans (for South Americans the word America describes their continent and they deplore the use of it to mean the United States) mixed with some blood of the Spanish invaders, or they are pure blooded native people. They all look Peruvian; that was our experience in the two months we had been there. But there are a few people of more or less pure Spanish blood who, of course, look rather European, and who form much of the wealthy and powerful ruling elite. We never met them. In the bus station we sat among ordinary Peruvians and watched Peruvian television, soap operas and news programmes and adverts, in which all the participants were of European blood. People from another world. What does that tell you about that society? I’m not sure, but it isn’t good.
Then we saw a cow fall from the sky, but that was after we had got on the bus and that was on television too. (I mentioned it in chapter five.) We travelled northwards to Pacosmayo on the Pacific coast. It turned out to be a strange town with weird birds over the sea including pelicans, turkey vultures, which are as ugly as those two words added together might incline you to imagine, and a bird we didn’t know the name of but if I call it the greater cormorant kite you’ll get an idea of how it looks. There were a few fishing boats, the world’s most dangerously decrepit pier, and some big waves which lured the occasional surfer including an American, oops, North American who we met over breakfast.
Next stop was Cajamarca when we got stuck in our hotel and later trapped in a shop by a massive demonstration against an American, oops, North American, mining company. The streets echoed to the cry El Pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido (the people, united, will never be defeated). The speeches in the town square got more and more heated but then the thing fizzled out. Being rich foreigners we kept a low profile throughout.
On the bus to Celandin there was an Englishman, let’s call him Kevin, with his recently acquired Taiwanese girlfriend. They weren’t getting on well to the point that when he got off, she stayed on. He was another accident prone guy. It turned out that they had been robbed at gunpoint on a night bus a few days previously. He had his thousand pound laptop stolen and went to the police station to report its loss to be able to claim on the insurance. They asked to see his passport and it was then that his girlfriend discovered that he had pointlessly lied about his age to her, taking ten off his forty something years. While he phoned the insurance company to find that his computer wasn’t covered she was able to think about his lie. She thought some more during the course of the day with predictable consequences. All this he told us with great frankness and honesty; after all we were his friends, with whom he had a different standard of truthfulness to that which he practised with a lover.
It was in Celandin that we saw a man walking a dog on a lead, a strange occurrence that we hadn’t witnessed for a long time. Dogs are allowed to run wild in Peru. In the mornings and evenings they are very active, meeting and greeting friends in the usual unmentionable doggy ways, sometimes hanging out in amiable packs of half a dozen or more. In the heat of the day they are asleep and you might have to step over one in a doorway or on the street. They are never taken for walks on leads. When we got closer to this particular dog we saw that it was, in fact, a pig. This was quite normal; animals of all sorts are taken out in the morning and tethered to graze or root on some local patch of dirt.
Animals are much more a part of daily life in South America in the same way that we saw in India and Nepal. In a later blog post I mention: cows, sheep, goats, hens, pigs, llamas, alpacas, donkeys, horses, guinea pigs and dogs seen on a single walk in the countryside. And we saw a man trying to get on the bus with a cockerel under his arm. But these are modern times; the bird was required to travel in with the luggage at the back. We heard it crowing from time to time along the way.
We were in this relatively little visited area of Peru because we wanted to visit a place called Kuélap, a mighty hilltop fortress of the pre-Inca people known as the Chachapoyas, the people of the clouds. We met the Chachapoyas in the form of 200 or so mummified corpses in the museum at Leymebamba. They were mostly skin and bone, tiny figures bound up tightly, their knees pulled up against their chests and arms tucked in close so that their hands covered their faces, mouths open, as if in pain or fear. The museum was funded from abroad and we met a Swedish dentist working there, taking the mummies out of their temperature and humidity controlled room one at a time and determining the age, at death, of each one by examining their teeth. And so we got to see a five hundred year old teenager as close up as you could wish. He had skin but no flesh, teeth but no eyes, and colourless rags that had once been clothes. He didn’t look happy.
Kevin, on the other hand, who we bumped into again at Leymebamba and who came to the museum with us, did seem happier than before. But I noticed that his misfortunes extended to a resemblance to David Cameron. These things can’t be helped.
We found Kuélap difficult to get to, which made it seem a little bit of an adventure. We left Leymabamba early one Sunday morning in a colectivo, a cheap shared taxi which would take us to a place where there was a market that attracted village people from all around. The market was a very busy affair with an earthy character and it sold basic foods and necessities to ordinary people. Then we found a combi, as we had learnt to call the privately run mini-buses, to a road junction at a place called Tingo. It was a low lying place with semi-tropical vegetation and it was very hot. A small road from there wound up and up into the hills for several thousand feet to tiny misty villages and eventually to Kuélap. We hung about awkwardly hoping to maybe hitch a lift. Eventually a rough-looking old taxi with a rough-looking young driver stopped for us. The guy had a mean look, spoke little, and wanted to charge a lot of money. I felt uncomfortable but we took a chance. We had been robbed once before and had met quite a few others that had ha
d the same experience so this was not exactly paranoia on my part, just caution.
We hadn’t gone far before I noticed the guy had a photo of a baby stuck to the dashboard. Straight away my perceptions were completely changed; this was a young newly married man trying hard to make enough money to feed the beginnings of a family. A nice guy. And when we came to realise how far and how high and what a rough road we were to travel with him that afternoon it didn’t seem so very expensive after all.
Maria, where we stayed for the next two nights, was a pretty village in a stupendous setting. It rested near the top of a ridge thousands of feet above the valley floor in the greenest landscape we had seen in Peru. There were lush fields of grass with cows grazing, ploughed fields of rich dark soil, and plenty of woodlands on the steepest slopes. A patchwork of different colours and textures all appearing and disappearing as clouds and shafts of sunlight drifted over the land. It reminded us of Wales but with a many times greater range of altitude and with every tree and shrub and flower and bird and insect different from those we would see at home. There were, for example, a number of hummingbird species, some with gorgeous colours, some with long tails. We came across their thumb-sized nests in the vegetation alongside the road. And in the evening we saw fireflies looking like hundreds of tiny florescent lights switching on and off as they drifted about among the trees. There were towering clouds and rainbows and, of course, wonderful sunrises and sunsets. And rain, plenty of rain.
We found a small guesthouse in Maria with a concrete patio at the back from which we had a view across the valley. It was mid-afternoon and we had time to visit Kuélap, two hours walk up a small country road. Kuélap is just a massive stone wall with few ruined circular buildings inside but it’s on top of a very high hill in a dramatically beautiful landscape. There were very few people there and we enjoyed clambering about enough to go back the next day. Flic described it thus:
The Road to Zagora Page 21
