Llama for Lunch Read online

  Downtown Lima is no longer the social hub of the city, especially in the evening when the focus moves to the suburbs. The Lima area has been inhabited on a permanent basis for at least four thousand years but the city of Lima was founded in 1535 by Francisco Pizarro, who led the Spanish invasion of Peru. Lima’s main square is fringed by beautiful buildings, including a magnificent cathedral. Some of the buildings and houses have enclosed and shuttered Moorish fretwork boxes around their windows and small balconies that reminded me of Saudi Arabia. It was also a bit like San Miguel in Mexico but not as nice. I saw no plants and greenery as I did there. And the weather was putrid – foggy, smoggy, grey and depressing as well as cold. It is apparently like this for almost all of the year. The dense overcasting is called ‘neblina’ and is caused by the fact that, although Peru is near the equator, the chilly Humboldt current flows up from the south and supercharges the air with humidity without rainfall.

  The bus station was very posh and upstairs there was a waiting room that beat the pants off scruffy old Greyhound. A trendy cafe, enclosed by glass, sported a big television set and comfy lounge chairs. At the ‘inflammation’ desk a lovely girl patiently extracted enough fractured Spanish from me to discover where and when I wanted to go. A first-class ticket to Ayacucho, which was about halfway to Cuzco and from where I could get another bus to continue, cost fifty sol – there were roughly three sol to an Australian dollar – and the bus left at the respectable hour of ten in the morning. The journey took eight hours, I think I was told. Four well-armed policemen guarded the bus station office, who knows why? But it reminded me of the high probability that I could get mugged in downtown Lima so I did not linger.

  The return taxi driver couldn’t change even a small sol note. He told me to ask the moneychangers on the street corner when we reached Miraflores. They wouldn’t, the stinkers, but a nearby riot policeman saw my predicament and changed a note for me. Four Australian dollars got me an ‘all-in lunch’ of soup, fish, rice, salad and fruit juice at a cafe. Then I bought a four-page English newspaper for the outrageous price of two dollars fifty and went for a long walk up and down the main street in the afternoon sunshine to thaw out.

  Next morning I went downtown to Lima’s main market. I wouldn’t have wanted to wander around this area too much and certainly not after dark. It was exceedingly grotty. Great piles of rubbish lay in the streets, apparently thrown there in the hope that they might be swept up. In the huge undercover market many stalls were still not open at half past ten. It seems the Peruvians don’t get going early – too cold I guess.

  The cold also kept the meat market from smelling too horrible, but the fish market didn’t need a tropical climate to get a pong up.

  I failed to find the woollen poncho I wanted to buy for my trip into the Andes. I had thought that Peru was the home of the poncho, but despite searching high and low I couldn’t find one for sale. I accosted a woman I noticed wearing one and she directed me to a shop but it offered only lairy tourist stuff made of cotton.

  This day was a religious festival and, as it was also close to National Day, balloons and bunting in Peru’s red and white colours were draped everywhere possible. Behind the ornate gates and fence that surrounded the grounds of the presidential palace – which looked a bit like Buckingham Palace – a band resplendent in red, blue and much gold braid, straight out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, played lustily while guards, who were also dressed pretty fancy, stood to attention on the palace steps and outside the gates.

  I visited the cathedral. I thought I had seen it all in the way of ornate in Mexico, but this bulky edifice was absolutely stupendous. Inside everything was covered with ceramic tiles, even the pillars and arches. Altar after altar proceeded down both side walls and each one was covered with lights and flowers. It looked almost pagan and it was not hard to see the ancient animistic religion seeping through the Catholicism that took over. But I suppose the glut of glitter is preferable to the previous human sacrifices – certainly it would be if you had been on the day’s list. There were catacombs under the church that could be visited but, as it was a religious holiday, long queues of local people waited to enter them – I saw no tourists anywhere downtown – so I gave them a miss.

  I left Lima on a cheerless morning and in drizzling rain. The bus was a surprise. It had a toilet, video and even heating and, after lunch, which had been served a la aircraft, the charming conductress passed out bingo cards and called several games. I didn’t win the prize – which was probably a washing machine anyway – but it was good practice for my Spanish numerals. The bus driver was encapsulated behind a screened door as on buses in Mexico. I was the only tourist on this bus ride (later I found out why) which, despite few stops, took ninety minutes longer than the promised eight hours to reach Ayacucho.

  At first we travelled on the road that ran along the coast, a 2300-kilometre narrow band of some of the driest desert in the world. The Andes divide the length of Peru like a spinal cord and from the coast there is a difference in altitude of almost 13,000 metres within a distance of eight hundred kilometres. But due to the lack of roads into the mountains, the local culture, customs, crafts and lifestyles have been kept alive over the centuries.

  Looking out from the window of the bus I decided that a more desolate landscape would be hard to imagine. Everywhere was grey-brown dirt that eventually rose up into the bleak, barren hills of the western Andes. There was no vegetation whatsoever. Everything was the same colour as the smoggy sky, even the occasional hovel and the poor villages of decrepit, square, flattopped boxes with a few lines of washing flapping on their roofs.

  We passed through two toll gates and then began hours of climbing ever higher. The mountains became pointed but they were still bare. Three hours from Lima we saw blue skies and left the frightful climate behind. Now and then there would be a house or two right on the edge of the road and there were many, many – far too many for my peace of mind – crosses and shrines that had been erected in memory of travellers who didn’t make it any further. But I loved the quaint green dunnies that guarded the rear of each house. Every one was identical, a tiny outhouse built of green corrugated iron sheets and with a chimney vent poking from its top. Later they were all red, possibly due to a change of district.

  Higher and narrower the road wound ever upwards, until finally the mountains were covered in green grass that looked as smooth as moss from a distance. There was even an occasional tree. Higher still and the vegetation was gone and there was snow on the black, jagged peaks and in the crevices on the lee sides of the mountains. In the valley way below I saw an occasional farm house and, on the fields around it, llamas and goats. And once I spied a family living in a Beduin-style black tent with their livestock grazing about them. There were few running streams of water but I saw one river frozen to a huge sweep of solid ice that cascaded spectacularly over a wide stone ledge near the road.

  Now there were very steep bends on the road, but luckily not much traffic. We passed only a truck or two. As I rocked and rolled to the toilet in the back of the bus in the afternoon, I saw that everyone was asleep, including the stewardess. When I stood up I was struck by a sudden severe headache, the first sign of soroche, the altitude sickness that is caused by lack of oxygen. I had read that it has no respect for age or condition. I took some paracetamol and it went away.

  From very high up in the snows at about 5000 metres we descended to Ayacucho at 2700 metres, arriving late and in the dark of night. I asked the man in charge of the small bus station to help me procure a taxi, which he did. The ‘taxi’ turned out to be his beat-up old car. He took me to the San Francisco Hotel, a peculiar but adequate place that incorporated much local decoration and was close to the plaza. My room had a television, a touch light that I amused myself by playing with seeing that the television was no use to me, a comfortable bed, a basic bathroom and a small balcony that was really an encased window over the narrow cobbled street.

  In the dining ro
om, which came complete with a television set and an enraptured audience, I had a tasty local version of a schnitzel and then took a walk. It was cold but I did not feel it as much I had in Lima.

  At breakfast the T-shirt-clad waiter of the previous night now wore a spiffy suit and tie. He looked about fourteen and the cook looked twelve. I walked to the plaza which was sunlit and clean. The sky was clear and a brilliant blue – I realised that I hadn’t seen the sun for what seemed ages. The town was rimmed by brown mountains that were so close the houses ran up them, and the flat-roofed colonial buildings and small houses topped with big old rounded tiles were as brown as the mountains. The plaza was reminiscent of Spain, but the courtyards had no pleasing gardens or flowers.

  The last obstacle to an independent Peru was overcome in Ayacucho when Simon Bolivar and field marshal Antonio Jose de Sucre defeated the Spanish royal army at a great battle here in 1826. A large church dated 1670 dominated the square, which also contained trees, plants, seats, flowers and a bronze statue of Bolivar on a horse. I noticed that everyone crossed themselves as they passed the church.

  The colonnades surrounding the plaza were pleasant to stroll under. They housed shops, offices and the tourist bureau, where no English was spoken – but the man in charge drew me a mud map to help me locate the bus station that sold tickets to Cuzco.

  I continued along the pleasant, sunlit cobbled streets until I reached the market. From among a multitude of sacks of beans and seeds of all description I bought, very cheaply, Brazil nuts, bananas, mandarins and bread rolls for the onward bus trip. Judging from the primitive bus station I estimated (correctly) that the posh bus ran no further than here. I also finally found a poncho, in wonderfully warm, but light-weight alpaca, for which I paid ten Australian dollars. All the women I passed in the streets wore the local garb, which I thought most unbecoming – darkgreen, black or brown bowler hats, short skirts with several layers of petticoats, a blouse, a woollen pullover, a vest-like jacket, a cotton apron, a shawl, and a rectangle of cloth slung around the back and across the shoulders as a carry-all. No wonder they all looked dumpy. And they wore their hair in two long plaits joined by a piece of wool. At least I didn’t have to worry about what I looked like – there were no fashion stakes here. Studying a woman of the Andes standing alongside her llama, I concluded that the llama was the better-looking of the two. But I loved the rubbish cart. A man rode on the back step of it tolling a big, brass hand bell. Shades of the plague, bring out your dead!

  For a couple of sol I lunched on a huge bowl of delicious soup, made no doubt from all of yesterday’s leftovers, and some curry and rice. The meat was almost inedible but the rest was tasty, especially when I added the chopped chilli in vinegar mixture that was served as a condiment.

  Ayacucho had one memorable attribute in its favour. I saw no ashtrays and no one seemed to smoke. I guessed that the altitude prohibited it.

  I was up, protesting, at five in the morning and reached the bus station when it was still dark. I waited, leaning against a wall with the other passengers, who were all locals, alongside the smallish, oldish bus. By the simple expedient of removing the door handle and putting it in his pocket, the driver kept us out of his bus until he was ready to go. Baggage was heaved up on the roof. Thank goodness I was now in that part of the southern hemisphere where winter is the dry season. The window alongside my small, uncomfortable seat had been broken in some trauma and it had been repaired by sticking a piece of plastic over the hole.

  Standing up front by the driver was the look-out man, whose job it was to shout out if he could see anything coming around the blind corners – of which there were many. As we moved through the town and outskirts the look-out man canvassed for passengers. When the seats were all taken, passengers sat on the floor.

  Half a kilometre from town the road turned into rough gravel, and from there got worse. No one looked at our tickets until we were well under way. Then it was discovered that one Indian woman had no ticket and no money to buy one. While the conductor argued, she remained mutely defiant with eyes cast down. He gave up. When a paying customer claimed her seat she sat on the floor next to me. Boy, was she on the nose! As the throng at the front thinned she camped on the engine cover alongside the driver. He even gave her a blanket to sit on. She rode the whole way to Andahuailas, twenty-five sols’ worth, free.

  This journey took twelve hours. The going was rough and slow but not slow enough for me at times. Villages were hours apart and the road took countless kilometres to cover every short distance as it had to make many loops to climb some mountains and many circles to wind around others. Clouds of dust eddied through the innumerable cracks in the floor of the bus and before long I was coated in a film of grime.

  We didn’t take the narrow road with its many blind corners slowly or carefully, but it was on the sides of steep mountains, with their sheer drops straight down thousands of metres, that I was truly terrified. Looking down at the crumbly edge of the dirt road directly beneath our wheels, I saw under it nothing but space. In order to achieve the feat of putting our wheels on the extreme edge of the road, our cowboy driver was haring along on the wrong side of the road. Why? Several head-on smashes were narrowly averted by the shouts of the look-out man and the driver backing up. Going downhill he put his foot flat to the boards and roared along, skittering around corners.

  At first the countryside consisted of barren, sweeping expanses of mountains, valleys dotted with one or two small cultivated patches and an occasional mudbrick hovel – an infinitesimal mark of human habitation in nature’s grand wilderness. What a hard life this must be. Further on, greenery appeared in some of the valleys and there were tiny plots of crop on the hillsides. At intervals I saw a few animals – sheep, horses, cows and small flocks of goats that were always tended by women in local dress. Later, vistas of green valleys flowing to black, jagged, snow-topped mountain peaks extended for ever. Way below in the bottom of one deep valley a wide, pale-jade river flowed fast. Now there were two kinds of mountains – big, fat, rounded green ones and bare, formidable, black ones whose jagged tops had ice and snow on them.

  The bus climbed in what seemed endless up-and-down patterns to get over the mountains. Most of the time we were travelling high up near the snowline and at times I experienced a sharp pain in my head and my ears popped like castanets. Our driver, who seemed to have a death wish, casually looked right or left to admire the scenery as he chatted to nearby passengers. And as if he needed further distractions, his dashboard blazed with bobbing ornaments, while a great glittering orb twisted directly in front of his eyes. The only decorations I approved of were the holy pictures and medals. Lord knows we needed them.

  We stopped for lunch at a small village cafe that I remember as having the world’s smallest hole-in-the-floor toilet. Ten centimetres wide – you had to be a crack shot to hit that, especially from a height. This rough cafe was surrounded by total squalor and all that was on offer in the nourishment line was some pretty ordinary soup – but I ate it anyway. Who knew where the next food was?

  Once we reached the side of the mountains that was not in rain-shadow terrain, the land became more fertile and there were more crops, villages and farm houses. We zoomed through the villages in clouds of dust, scattering dogs, goats and pigs – cute white ones and ugly, sway-backed black ones – that narrowly escaped annihilation under our wheels. Later there were towns situated in valley floors where bananas and paw paws grew in profusion and herds of alpacas grazed. Out here also roams, but is seldom seen, the endangered vicuna, which is now protected. Although similar to the alpaca it is not tameable and cannot be domesticated.

  People got on the bus to travel between villages. One woman stood in the aisle near me. She wore several shawls, one of which was slung over her back and had some large bumps in it that I presumed to be a baby. Then I saw the southernmost bulge in the shawl emit a stream of yellowish fluid that ended up in mother’s skirts. Looking closer I saw three darling little
heads sticking out of the top of the bundle, two white baby alpacas and one black one. They were close enough for me to pat before they all got off again at the next village.

  At six in the evening we made it to Andahuailas, where I had to change buses for the all-night ride to Cuzco. At the bus office I bought another seat so that I had two seats to lie across for the night. It made all the difference.

  This next bus was better than the last. It was comfortingly large and had bigger seats. I had a thirty-cent toilet break in a squalid dump and layered on all my spare clothes in preparation for the ordeal to come. High in the Andes, in an unheated bus, in the middle of winter, is not the best place to spend a night. I survived. I even slept, huddled under my poncho. But the bus windows rattled themselves open every now and then and condensation ran like rain down the windows and wet the floor and the side of the seats. Gee it was cold out there! But at dusk I watched the unforgettable sight of the full moon rising between the black, snow clad peaks of the Andes, the moon a glowing, yellow gold disk in the not-quite-dark, misty grey sky.

  After leaving Andahuailas the road deteriorated even more and the bus lumbered along very slowly at times, for which I was eternally grateful. But it still rattled, shook, bumped and rolled. Some time in the middle of the night we stopped for bladder relief, men on one side, women on the other, in the unwritten law of bus travel.

  Outside on the road I could see quite clearly by the full moon. We were on a mountainside and way down below in the valley the lights of a town twinkled most beautifully in the clear air.

  At about three in the morning there was a terrific bang and thump. The bus braked suddenly then started to back up. At this several women behind me in the back seat began screaming and shouting, ‘Basta, basta!’ Enough! The driver stopped and tried to move forward again. He couldn’t possibly have seen what was behind him. The women and some men screamed again. I couldn’t see anything from my seat but what they saw obviously terrified them. It seemed that we hadn’t made a bend, had backed up and had a wheel almost over the edge of the precipice. I heard that this happens a lot – that’s why there are all those little crosses. I prayed fervently that I wasn’t about to get one of my very own.