by Joe Kane
Given my pain and the lunar bleakness of the landscape, it was easy to see why the indigenous Andeans, who refer to themselves as Runa, or “the people,” but who are more widely known as Quechua (the name describes a linguistic group; Quechua was the language the Incas imposed on their subjects), call the puna “savage” and consider it forbidding not only physically but spiritually. It is, for example, where one must go to perform sexual acts, such as incest, that are prohibited within the villages, and it is home to the most powerful deities in the Andes, the apus and wamanis, often described as bearded white men who wear European clothing and live inside mountains and lakes. If not placated through ritual offerings, a wamani may eat a man’s heart, cause his wife to miscarry, or kill his infant child.
Shrouded in dust, rumbling through the lonely Aguada Blanca Reserve, the truck offered the only wrinkle of motion on the puna’s dun canvas until, flushed by our intrusion, five long-necked, goggle-eyed vicuña galloped suddenly along a ridgetop. They were a sight at once otherworldly and heartbreaking. They and their fellow ruminants, the guanaco (both, though humpless, are related to the camel), are the largest wild creatures in the puna, but they are not big at all, about the size of small North American deer. By the late 1960s the vicuña had been hunted almost to extinction for their fine wool. Though they have come back strong in the reserve, and though they are swift, graceful beasts, moving easily at thirty miles an hour, their speed seemed annulled by the sprawling brown plateau. They ran and they ran, but they appeared not to get anywhere at all.
Such immensity of scale overwhelms the first-time visitor to the Andes. They are the planet’s tallest mountains outside the Himalayas and the Pamirs, running north and south like a spine along the west side of the continent in a series of ridges, or cordilleras, separated by impossibly deep canyons and high, endless puna plateaus. However, although the Andes are never more than a hundred miles from the Pacific coast, their quixotic and frequently violent weather is greatly influenced by the mass of hot, moist air that rises from the Amazon basin and drops its moisture as it moves west. Consequently, the Atlantic slope is lush, the Pacific parched and nearly lifeless. It is said that in the Atacama Desert, southwest of Arequipa, one can travel a hundred and fifty miles at a stretch without finding life large enough to be seen with the naked eye.
I witnessed the puna from the bouncing bed of the GMC. The bodies around me changed constantly, shifting from bed to cab and back, but the ride was miserable, and I quickly abandoned any effort to communicate. Instead, silently and without success, I tried to divine some order, some binding pattern, in the babble of strange tongues that percolated above the wind: Polish, Spanish, Afrikaans, English spoken in dialects I had never heard before coming to Peru. Altogether, nine men and one woman; a born-again Christian, an Old World Catholic, a Christian Scientist, agnostics and pagans of various stripes; two Poles, one Brit, three Afrikaners, two South Africans of British heritage, a Costa Rican, an American; four husbands, two fathers; political convictions from far left to far right.
Only four would reach the sea.
Late in the day we dropped down below twelve thousand feet into an immense patchwork of delicate agricultural terraces rising sharply from the Colca River, which runs northwest through the Andes, hairpins south, and drains into the Pacific. The hand-worked terraces (tractors would fall off the steep walls) give the lower reaches of the otherwise arid Colca valley the look of a verdant amphitheater.
High overhead, two Andean condors, the world’s largest birds of prey, floated easily on the valley’s strong thermals, their ten-foot wingspans casting shadows hundreds of feet below. Viewed through binoculars, the condors, showing a white neck ring on an otherwise black body, looked like hooded executioners. Behind them, white-tipped volcanoes guarded the valley rim, and a few miles downriver, a black slit identified the point where the Colca River has carved the world’s deepest gorge, more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. At one point the canyon rim is two and a half miles above the river.
When emissaries of the Inca first penetrated the Colca valley, about 1450, they found the Collaguas, a people who worshiped volcanoes and shaped their heads like cones. (Their bizarre cranial effect was achieved by strapping boards to the soft skulls of their infants.) A century later, when the Spanish arrived, the Colca was the second-most-productive unit in the Inca agricultural system, generally recognized as the most sophisticated in the New World. Assisted by Franciscan missionaries, Gonzalo Pizarro wound up with control of the Colca. Within thirty years half the native population was dead, the rest herded into towns and their farms and irrigation systems all but destroyed.
It was a tragedy repeated throughout sixteenth-century Peru, where the Quechua death rate was two and a half times that of Europe during the Black Plague. Though there are some ten million Quechua-speaking people in Peru today (there were an estimated six million when the conquistadores arrived), they have never really recovered from the Spanish conquest. They occupy the lowest position in Peru’s variegated social stratum. The country is controlled by an oligarchy of criollos, people of predominately Spanish, or white, descent. Between criollo and Indian are several vaguely defined mestizo, or mixed, classes. Through cultural assimilation and the shedding of their traditional ways, some urban Quechua have managed to assume mestizo status. But the rural Quechua most definitely have not, and often the face they choose to display to those who bother to look back down the social ladder at them is hard as stone.
In the four centuries since Pizarro’s butchery the Colca valley has regained a delicate equilibrium, though it is not nearly as productive as it once was. Now there is also a new joker in the deck, the $900 million Majes project, which, if ever completed, will pump Andean water westward over the mountains into Peru’s coastal desert.
The Majes dam on the upper Colca was inaugurated two months before we arrived. What long-term effect it will have on the valley is unclear, but so far, according to Sister Antonia, a Brooklyn-born Maryknoll nun who has lived in the Colca for fourteen years, it has been devastating. The delicate indigenous economy, based on barter, subsistence agriculture, and cooperative labor, was blasted out of balance by the project’s sudden infusion of high technology, hard cash, and steely pragmatism. Precious farmland was bought up and destroyed, farm animals were killed on the fast new roads, and the local cosmology, which held the river and many of the surrounding mountains sacred, was callously assaulted. The few people wise enough to save money during this period left the valley quickly. Most of those who remained rejected the old life for sunglasses, Polaroid cameras, cheap cane alcohol, and, when the project closed down, unemployment.
Chmielinski had hustled free accommodations for us in Achoma, a chunk of contemporary suburbia plopped down square in the middle of the valley and protected from the rest of Peru by chain-link fence, barbed wire, guards, and an electronic gate. At one time Achoma had housed more than one hundred and forty Majes engineers and their families, from Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, and South Africa. Beyond the fence one smelled dung fires and the musky, freshly turned earth of fields that had been tended by the same families for generations. Inside the fence were rows of identical ranch-style houses, graded streets, yards, electric stoves. I felt I could walk into one of the houses, turn on a television set, and watch baseball.
Left with the compound, the Peruvian government had been promoting it as a tourist hotel. We had the place completely to ourselves. We spent two days there, sleeping fitfully and nursing headaches and queasy stomachs as we tried to adjust to the eleven-thousand-foot elevation. Then, on an ice-cold clear-blue Andean morning, we reloaded the trucks and followed the dirt track back along the Colca River. An old Quechua man chased us in silence, until he could run no more. We rounded a turn with two crosses erected on the outside curve. The smaller one, made of twigs, marked a road death. The larger one, aluminum, supported the power line that ran to the Achoma compound.
We crossed t
he Colca and drove west along the river for six miles, into the village of Lari. From there, Odendaal, Chmielinski, Bzdak, Biggs, Van der Merwe, Van Heerden, and I would begin our climb to the source. The GMC and its Peruvian driver would return to Arequipa. For the moment, Condorito waited with us in Lari. After we climbers hired burros and set off, Leon, Durrant, and Truran would drive the Land Rover back along the Colca and around the mountain to what our map said was a small weather station in the high puna some fifteen miles north of the source. We would try to meet there in three to five days.
The Lari sun stood alone under a brutal silver-blue sky. Its glare singed the eyes, and the air, dry as cotton balls, seemed to suck the moisture right out of them. Two dozen crumbling earth shacks and one sturdy Catholic church, the largest in the valley, lined an empty, baked-earth plaza. The whole hung on the lip of the sheer canyon like a snail climbing a wall. Quechua—stocky pink-faced women in bowler hats and enormous skirts, pinched leathery men in blue jeans and holey sweaters—slouched in doorways or nodded in the sun. No one moved.
Odendaal and Chmielinski were not having an easy time hiring burros. “It’s like walking into East Selsby, Texas,” an exasperated Odendaal said, “and trying to borrow someone’s Cadillac.”
I stood at the edge of the village and peered down. The Colca’s deep drop begins just downstream from Lari. Staring into the canyon, I was overcome with a numbing, jelly-kneed vertigo, and I felt as if a little man with a hammer were beating against the backs of my eyeballs. If I had altitude sickness here, at eleven thousand feet, how would I handle the further six-thousand-foot climb to the source?
Inside my skull, the man with the hammer shouted: “MGFLARHA!”
But it was Bzdak, standing next to me and shouting above the wind that now swirled up out of the canyon. He opened his mouth to reveal a green quid. He spit it out.
“Coca leaf,” he said. “You want?”
“I don’t know.”
“You feel like shit?”
“Yes.”
“You want.”
In the Andes it is legal both to grow and to chew the leaves, and according to what Durrant had told us, they are an effective antidote to the ravages of high altitude. But that endorsement didn’t really matter to me. I hurt. I was willing to try anything.
Bzdak extracted half a dozen finger-sized leaves from a clump wrapped in newspaper and folded them in half. I tucked the wad into my right cheek. It tasted like tea leaves. Then he gave me a half-fingernail sliver of charcoal, or llipta, which I worked into the leaves. The ash, from the quinoa bush, is extremely bitter, but it catalyzes the leaves’ cocamides. Without it the leaves would have no effect.
Nor with it, at first. When my soggy wad started to disintegrate I replaced it with another, and a bigger chunk of llipta. My gums burned horribly. Minutes later the right side of my mouth went numb, then the back of my throat. I felt none of the mule-in-a-stall kick of cocaine, but the hammering man put his instrument away, and Lari no longer seemed so grim, or our expedition so improbable.
Bzdak and I walked to the plaza and joined the rest of the team around Condorito. Odendaal and Chmielinski were negotiating with two Quechua men, Pastor and José, who owned four burros between them, but there was some sort of snag.
A crowd had gathered. An old woman drooling coca-green saliva yelled “Filthy gringos!” then walked from one to another of us screaming obscenities. She was toothless and barefoot, her rumpled cotton dress torn and covered with mud. She stuck her hand on my chest and pushed me backward over one of the kayaks. Dignity shot, I left the plaza.
I found a cold, dark, windowless shop, and from amid its bags of white rice and cans of fish and evaporated milk dug out a warm bottle of soda. Shivering, I paid a dour Quechua woman and stepped toward the sunlight that filled the shop’s door.
Suddenly, through the glare, I saw a dust ball of pounding hooves and Vibram soles and plastic boats stampeding down the dirt street. Urgent cries of “Chorro! Chorro!” filled the air. Beneath the dust, sticks in hand, Chmielinski and Biggs were beating four bewildered, nostril-flaring burros.
“Get one and go!” Biggs yelled. I did as commanded, falling in behind the last wild-eyed beast and screaming “Chorro!” in a manner that convinced neither of us.
Van Heerden and Van der Merwe were trotting alongside Biggs.
“They tried to burn the truck!” Van der Merwe shouted. “Chased it out of town! We hijacked the animals!”
Back at the roadhead, Odendaal and Bzdak were holding off the Indians. “We find the end of town,” Chmielinski yelled, “then we make a deal.”
I ran down the street screaming at the clod-flinging hooves before me and thinking: It was not supposed to be like this. Three weeks in South America and already I had degenerated into burro thievery. I pictured myself strung up in sullen Lari like some raunchy outlaw in a spaghetti western.
But Chmielinski had it figured correctly. We passed the last hut on the trail and stopped. Odendaal and Bzdak caught up with us, and behind them came not an angry mob but only the burros’ owners, Pastor and José.
“It was the women,” Pastor said. “They did not trust you.”
“Yes,” José agreed. “The women. My wife does not want me to go with you.”
“What do women know?” Pastor said, and gave a dismissive wave.
The trail turned sharply north, and up. One by one, the two Quechua men in the lead, we began to climb.
3 • Headwaters
Marching at the rear of our ragged parade, free at last of engines and wheels, I soon found myself rejoicing in the solid thump of foot on earth. “One felt the happy sense of being free,” Graham Greene wrote in Journey Without Maps. “One had only to follow a path far enough and one could cross a continent.” We’re off! I thought, chasing the tips of my boots with heady anticipation. Into the wilderness.
Wilderness? A tittupping procession of men, women, children, cattle, sheep, mules, burros, llamas, alpacas, goats, and dogs came slip-sliding toward me down the steep trail, an endless clattering farrago bound for Lari and below. Here a stony Quechua face, here a primordial goat eye cowering behind a quinoa bush, here—phoot!—a warm wad of llama goober shot squarely at the chest.
“Don’t get close to llama!” Bzdak yelled from up the trail, too late.
I stopped at a spring to clean myself and met a Quechua man.
“What is above?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“Nowhere.”
He hoisted a load of gnarly wood and set off downhill, the calluses on his bare feet thick and creased like old boots. One cracked heel had been sewn shut with red yarn.
Two hours later I found Biggs and Chmielinski resting on a broad sandstone outcropping. Chmielinski pointed to a spot five miles southwest, where the Colca plunges most deeply into her canyon. Glinting ochre in the afternoon sun, her sheer ramparts soared out of the earth like giant organ pipes.
Chmielinski said that a month earlier he and Bzdak had rafted through the area searching for the body of their close Peruvian friend Alvaro Ibañez, whom Biggs had also known—the four men had run the Colca together in 1983, Ibañez becoming the first Peruvian to make the descent. The spring before I arrived in Peru, Ibañez and four fellow Peruvians had returned to the Colca. The river was at high water when they put their raft in, and it flipped in less than a minute. One of the men disappeared, never to be found. Another crawled out on the far side of the river. A third washed up on a boulder only to see his girlfriend flushed by a foot beyond his reach. Ibañez had also made the rock but dove into the Colca to try to save the drowning woman.
“Last time anyone saw Alvaro,” Chmielinski said. “The helicopter found the girl’s body a few days later, on big rocks. Somebody tied a yellow life jacket there to mark the spot.”
“Alvaro?” Biggs asked.
“Must have been.”
“And Alvaro’s body?”
“We fo
und his raft. It was the one we had given him. No body. One life jacket. It was a bad day when we found the raft. We could not talk or eat. We turned over our own raft. Zbyszek took the worst swim of his life. Our trip was very dark after that.”
“Alvaro had a wife, didn’t he?” Biggs asked. “I think I met her once. She was very pretty.”
“She was seven months pregnant when Alvaro drowned,” Chmielinski said. “Now she has his baby.”
We continued up the dry, dusty trail in silence, hiking steadily through the hot afternoon. The altimeter loaned us by the Royal Geographical Society ticked off our altitude in meters, which I converted roughly to feet: twelve thousand five hundred, thirteen thousand, thirteen-five.
The trail climbed steeply into the young, soft, harshly eroded Andes, and my heavy pack hurt. But there was pride in hauling one’s weight, and, in a sense, identity. Bzdak lugged his cameras and film; Biggs, his Bible and sketchbook; Chmielinski, the maps he would pore over each night. Van Heerden and Van der Merwe had cameras and cigarettes. I carried my notebook, photos from home, the thick socks I wore to bed in cold weather.
Only Odendaal did not bear a pack. Instead, he loaded his gear on a burro, saying that if one of us were to be injured, his back would be available. After the first few hours on the trail, however, he seemed naked without a pack, and strangely alone. He went from man to man offering to carry his load, but no one would give it up.
The burros plodded along before us. The kayaks that were fastened awkwardly to their backs banged their heads, pinched their ears, and blocked their vision. We would meet Condorito before the kayakers entered the river, but Odendaal wanted to carry two boats to the source as props for his film. Suddenly, as if they understood the impurity of this exercise, the burros knelt down in the middle of the trail, jiggled their ropes loose, and pitched the kayaks.
