Going to Extremes

by Nick Middleton

  The very fact that I was prepared to consult him reflected my readiness to accept his prognosis, but another part of my brain wanted me to hedge my bets. If Don Cecilio’s forecast was bad, I thought to myself, I could always dismiss it as an interesting, yet doubtful, piece of local anthropology. But this rational argument from my cynical European mind had fast lost ground during the day that I’d spent asking around to find Don Cecilio’s abode. Everyone I spoke to talked about him in hushed and revered tones. There was no doubting his elevated position in the community. He was clearly the top banana on all matters futuristic and spiritual. The only glimmer of hope for my sceptical side was Don Cecilio’s daytime job as a maintenance man for the local water company. It was not the sort of occupation I would have expected of a man who could look into the future.

  He greeted me at his gate and led me into a shadowy garden where we sat on opposite sides of an ancient low table, he on a rickety chair and me on a pair of breeze blocks. A single electric light bulb dangled from an overhanging tree. Don Cecilio had the appearance of a kindly old hawk, with a creased leather face and piercing eyes that he used to look at me only sparingly, as if just a glance was enough to see deep into my soul.

  From inside his windbreaker, he pulled a cloth that he laid carefully over the table top. He produced an old plastic bag from his trouser pocket and emptied its contents onto the cloth. ‘Coca,’ he said simply, as he piled the dry leaves into the centre of the cloth with his right hand. ‘They are not fresh, they are from Bolivia.’ He selected a couple and popped them into his mouth to chew, then another, which he offered to me. The leaf had little taste; it was like munching on dry privet. I saw him tuck his wad into the corner of his cheek, so I did the same, resisting the temptation to spit it out. Don Cecilio then carefully folded the sides of the cloth over the dry coca leaves and pulled a very old pair of spectacles from his windbreaker. Holding the glasses in his left claw, he opened them and placed them crookedly on his nose. He checked the cloth, tugging at one corner and flattening the bundle with his good hand, then removed his spectacles to place them on top of the cloth between us.

  He accepted my offerings, lit himself a cigarette and bent down into the shadows beneath the small table to produce two small glasses that he filled with pisco. Before drinking, he poured some onto the ground beside the table. ‘For the god of the earth,’ he said quietly. Then he lifted his head and drained the glass.

  It took another cigarette and a couple more slugs of pisco before Don Cecilio announced that I should ask him a question. I explained the nature of my journey and made my request. ‘How will my trip go?’ I enquired.

  Don Cecilio nodded and proceeded to unwrap the cloth bundle to reveal the desiccated leaves. He spread them out with his good hand and studied them intently. The look of concentration was evident in his eyes, but the larger part of my brain remained sceptical as Don Cecilio selected seemingly random leaves, picked them up, turned them over, and examined them. Some he dropped back into the pile, others he popped into his mouth to add to his wad. It looked as if he selected only the smallest leaves, but that might just have been my need to observe method in an apparently haphazard process. I had expected to be a bit more involved, to have to ruffle the coca leaves, or shake them in the folded cloth, at least to touch the leaves before he read them.

  The procedure took place in silence, with just the desert wind rustling the tree above us. A moth, attracted to the scene by the electric light bulb, fluttered in and out of my vision. Don Cecilio sighed and I held my breath, but he discarded the leaf in his fingers. Then finally he spoke. ‘Your journey will be a happy one,’ he said without looking at me. He picked another leaf from the pile in front of him for examination. ‘The roads will be clean.’ He dropped the leaf and selected another, rubbing it gently between his leathery fingers. ‘Yes, all the roads will be clean.’ He lifted his head and gave me a kindly look. I gave him a smile of nervous relief in return. Don Cecilio went back to the coca leaves, gently spread them out further with his fingertips, and picked another from the pile. He lifted it close to his nose for examination, dropped it, and quickly selected another. This one he held by its tiny stem and turned over and over. He held it further from his nose, so better to catch the light from the bulb above us. ‘There will be one problem,’ he announced, twisting the leaf under the light. My heart sank. ‘But just a small problem,’ he added, discarding the leaf. There was a very long pause. The moth landed on the table beside the coca leaves. Don Cecilio ran his fingers casually through the pile again and the moth flew off to circle the light once more. Don Cecilio ruffled the leaves a final time. ‘But otherwise,’ he said slowly, ‘your journey will be a good one.’

  Despite being more than 2,400 metres above sea level, I had not felt any effects of the altitude at San Pedro. Headaches, nausea, and difficulties with sleeping are all problems that can potentially hinder the unwitting traveller further while he or she is struggling to catch their breath at high altitude. More serious problems can occur above 3,000 metres, and that was where I was heading. Acute mountain sickness has been likened to a bad hangover, but without the pleasures of getting drunk first. It can entail vomiting, migraines and severe problems with sleeplessness. The human body can also succumb to ataxia, a constitutional unsteadiness in the use of your arms and legs. It becomes difficult to think clearly and to concentrate, and people can fly into violent rages for little apparent reason. It all sounded like it might be quite fun.

  With its backdrop of snow-capped volcanoes, I headed out of San Pedro northwards. I had joined up with a local guide who had agreed to drive me along my route to Arica. Zahel was a quiet man with long black hair and a penchant for reflective sunglasses. At our initial meeting, he seemed rather remote, corroborating my first impressions of him as a cross between an ageing hippy and a Latin American revolutionary. His radical credentials were confirmed when we drove past the local militia station fronted by a green sign that read ‘Carabineros de Chile – un amigo siempre’ (always a friend). The slogan was a post-Pinochet attempt to polish their tarnished image in the eyes of the populace. ‘Are they?’ I asked Zahel. ‘Never,’ he replied. ‘How can anyone who carries a gun ever be your friend?’

  Ruta Nacional 23 sliced its way north-west across a landscape of unrelenting aridity towards Calama, ‘a land of sun and copper’, as the town’s welcoming signpost announced. Calama is the nearest town to Chuquicamata, the largest of Chile’s numerous copper mines, and acts like a safety valve for many of its miners to let off steam.

  ‘Calama is the richest town in Chile,’ Zahel announced as we drove round its ring road, ‘but intellectually the poorest. It is full of prostitutes, homosexuals and transvestites; an awful place.’

  Off in the distance, through the desert haze, I caught a glimpse of the mineworking itself, a giant hole in the hillside sitting beneath its own little milky cloud of contamination generated by the copper-processing plant. Zahel told me that pollution from the plant was blown across the Andes to Bolivia and Paraguay and that Chile had started paying them in compensation. ‘Locals know Chuquicamata as Chuqui que mata (the mine that kills).’

  We climbed slowly away from Calama back towards the Andes, briefly following the Loa River, the only waterway to make it across the Atacama Desert from the mountains all the way to the Pacific coast. As we gained altitude, the landscape began to sport some meagre vegetation, but it was just clumps of tough-looking grass and the occasional wiry bush. A brown eagle sat momentarily in the middle of the road, before flying off at a leisurely place. After the tarmac ended, a dirt track followed a chain of gigantic salars, salt lakes that spend most of their time without water, their arid surfaces cracked into polygonal patterns by the sun. Mini sand dunes, no more than half a metre high, began to appear along their shores as the perfect cones of volcanic peaks crept closer and closer.

  Signs of human habitation became fewer and further between, just the occasional small village where men laboured in the rare
fied atmosphere, filling sacks with salt from the salars. Otherwise, there was just the dirty track we drove along, its very presence casting doubt on the Don’s soothsaying skills, and a small-gauge railway line that didn’t look like it got much traffic. It amused me that every time the track crossed the railway, Zahel religiously applied the brakes to halt at the stop sign, despite the fact that the clear lack of trains was apparent from a vast distance away. From a stationary position, he would look both ways, before engaging the gears once more and setting off.

  Up on the Altiplano, a grand plateau shadowed by snow-capped summits, the browns and reds of the desert had given way to gleaming black boulder fields spat forth from ancient volcanic furies, and dark lava flows fossilized in position down mountain flanks. The track followed a pipeline that Zahel told me carried water from the mountains down to the desert town of Calama and to the city of Antofagasta on the coast, the latter more than 200 kilometres distant. We stopped to stretch our legs on a plain of small pumice stones, the size you use in your bathroom, which made a glassy clinking sound when I kicked them. I put my ear to the pipe and heard the strange sound of water flowing through the parched landscape. The pipe provided a lifeline for Calama and Antofagasta, Zahel told me, but left small Andean villages with water problems.

  We stopped at a Carabineros checkpoint on a mountain pass in the middle of nowhere, which a sign beside a tiny old steam train declared was at 3,966 metres above sea level. Just over the pass, the brilliant white salt of the Salar de Ascotán gleamed like a sheet of pearls in the late afternoon sun and we stopped beside it at the foot of a volcano to set up camp for the night.

  We couldn’t have picked a worse spot. As the sun set behind the mountains, a hurricane-force gale picked up to make pitching the tents a virtual impossibility. This was not helped by the fact that the tent pegs just sunk straight into the volcanic gravel and gave no hold whatsoever. After manfully struggling for an hour, Zahel and I managed to secure a single tent and gave up on the other one when I decided to sleep in the car. Zahel produced some dried coca leaves, which he used to make an infusion of coca tea, supposedly a good antidote to altitude sickness, but it was one of the most uncomfortable and cold nights I’ve ever spent camping. As I struggled to get some sleep, my mind took me back to Don Cecilio’s pronouncement that I should expect a small problem en route to Arica. I supposed that this was it. I didn’t think I would like to see his idea of a large problem.

  I had the vague suspicion of a headache that night, but other than that and some difficulty in getting off to sleep, I was blissfully unaffected by the altitude. Except, that is, for wind. I don’t think I burped more than usual, but my rear end was producing at a phenomenal rate. It wasn’t a symptom mentioned in any of the medical literature I’d read on the subject.

  Zahel’s tent was drenched in dew the following morning and I noticed that the white patches on the gravel, that I had mistaken for snow the previous night, were in fact salt. At five past seven, the sun made an appearance just above the volcano and transformed the nightmarish scene back into a terrain of beauty. Wisps of high cirrus clouds appeared on the horizon in the biggest, brightest, deepest blue sky I have ever seen.

  Down on the salar, which had open water at its northern end, six flamingos stood motionless a few hundred metres from the shore. I walked down to the bright green tussocks of grass at the water’s edge and sat on a heap of salt that had the appearance of brain coral. The lake was a perfect pane of glass, mirroring the volcanic peaks and the six pink birds. The glare from the sun on the water and the white salt was quite blinding. Total silence reigned, other than when one of the flamingos called ‘caw’.

  The town of Ollagüe looked just like a movie set thrown up for a spaghetti western. Sheltering beneath the active Ollagüe volcano, which sent forth ominous wisps of smoke into the mountain air, it sat just a couple of kilometres from the frontier on the edge of a salar that wound its way past the volcano and on into Bolivia. It was a border town and not much else, just two dusty streets, one each side of the railway line which boasted one train a week to Calama.

  We hadn’t been intending to spend any time at Ollagüe, but as luck would have it, Zahel got talking to a man from whom he asked directions, and 20 minutes later we were heading off past the outskirts of town towards a tiny hamlet where the man we’d met was supervising a llama sacrifice.

  Llamas are members of the camel family, but look more like mutant sheep that have spent time being tortured on a rack. Their legs have been stretched and their necks rightly belong on a herd of giraffes. They are kept for their wool, meat and milk and as high-altitude beasts of burden. Finding pasture for llamas is a constant worry on the dry Altiplano, so every now and again one of their number is offered up to the gods to secure the future for the rest of the herd. It had rained in this area a couple of weeks before, so now was an appropriate time, Donato, the local master of ceremonies, explained. He was a middle-aged man of Quechua Indian origin, with jet-black hair and a very low forehead. His face looked the part, but his indigenous features sat somewhat at odds with his pullover, which bore a picture of a football and goal nets with the words ‘Francia ’98’ emblazoned across them. ‘It is an ancient tradition in the Andes,’ he explained, ‘to thank Pacha Mama, (Mother Earth), for good pastures.’

  Donato was quite happy for me to witness the ceremony, which would last for an hour or two, he said. ‘You could also help,’ he added with a kindly smile as we bumped along a dirt track out of town, ‘a llama is too strong for a single man to hold down.’ I thanked him but I wasn’t entirely sure whether an active part in the ceremony was what I wanted. Despite Donato’s modern attire, I had visions of an Inca-style procedure involving a beating heart being ripped from a still-warm chest.

  ‘How do you kill the llama?’ I asked him tentatively. ‘We cut out its heart,’ he replied.

  About 30 llamas were wandering about on a hillside where a small spring of sparkling water nurtured a bright green gash of grass and some stunted bushes. On a slight rise, a house and paddock were fashioned from drystone walls. Most of the llamas looked up from their munching as we pulled to a halt and got out of the car. Several came over with inquisitive looks on their faces and proceeded to check me out at close quarters. To my surprise, several llamas sported tufts of pink and orange wool on their ears and some also had coloured tufts on their backs. ‘They have been dressed for the sacrifice,’ Donato told me.

  While llamas look docile and cuddly, they also look very stupid, but this didn’t make me feel any better about the idea of whacking one. Stupid or not, these were still nice furry creatures and the suggestion that I should help to cut one open and rip out its heart was bothering me.

  But I didn’t have time to dwell on the matter because Donato was already introducing me to the llamas’ owner, a very old Quechua woman named Felicia who seemed delighted that I had come to her ceremony. ‘Welcome Caballero!’ she cried with a wrinkly smile.

  Herding the llamas was not a challenging task. For most of the way to the stone-walled paddock, the roles were reversed. All we had to do was walk there and the llamas trotted along behind us, blissfully unaware of the fate that awaited one of their number. But as we neared the walls, Donato signalled Zahel and me to circle round behind the herd and issue them up and into the corral.

  Inside, at one end of the dusty compound, sat a table bedecked with stems of foliage, a bottle of pisco, a carton of red wine, a motley collection of glasses and some plastic bags filled with what I correctly suspected were coca leaves. Donato took charge and explained that the ceremony had to begin with a request to Pacha Mama to ensure that this was an auspicious occasion. He emptied one of the bags of coca on to the table and stuffed most of the dry leaves into a coloured pouch that he hung round his neck. The rest he popped into his mouth to chew.

  Donato then told me to hold out my hands and he proceeded to fill them with coca leaves from his pouch. He did the same for Zahel and Felicia and a couple of
other guys who had appeared to help with the llama kill. We were instructed to sprinkle the leaves over the table in front of us, while making a chant that translated as, ‘Make this a good time.’

  A similar procedure followed in which we each took a glass of wine, poured some of it on to the earth around the table for Pacha Mama, and drank the rest in one go. The coca leaf and wine rituals were repeated twice more, by which time the alcohol was beginning to take effect and I didn’t feel quite as bad about the prospect of dispatching one of the herd that was now mooching around the corral watching our strange ceremony.

  Donato replaced his wine glass on the table and wiped his hands on a cloth. ‘Now we select the llama,’ he said. ‘The best way to catch one,’ he told me as he circled the animals, arms outstretched, ‘is to grab it by the ears.’ And so saying, he launched himself across one of the creature’s backs, seized its ears, and hung on for dear life as the llama bucked and kicked at its captor. Dust flew everywhere as the llama struggled, and its companions pushed and shoved to make way for the tussle. Zahel and I were on top of the chosen animal in a flash and forced it to the ground. It was strong. I had a good grip, my hands full of its thick fur, but it wriggled, writhed and kicked viciously. ‘That is good,’ panted Donato, still clinging to its ears. Felicia was on hand to offer a rope and Donato set about tying the legs of the sacrificial beast.

  As soon as we had it under some sort of control, Felicia started offering coca leaves to us all and we sprinkled them on the ground around the llama, again calling to Pacha Mama to make this a good time. I think by this time the llama had realized that while all his mates might be able to expect a good time, the phrase wasn’t going to apply to him, so with a Herculean effort it managed to stand again, despite the truss around its legs, and we all had to abandon the coca leaf procedure to sit on it again.