Llama for Lunch Page 12

  The Inca boy rushed past me in his red knee-length tunic trimmed with gold. Leaping down the steps at breakneck speed he shouted ‘Hola’ at me and disappeared into the thick greenery. I heard him shout at the bus as it went by on the road, then another boy dressed identically passed me and, as I progressed further, another and another. One handed me a sprig of some fragrant herb as he flew by and another showed me where the path re-entered the jungle as he stood waiting for the bus.

  Sometimes I had trouble finding the path again when it crossed the road. It occurred to me that I would not like to spend the night out here with the cold, not to mention the snakes and pumas. At length I reached the dirt road to Aqua Caliente. It was great to walk level again, although I still had a one-and-a-half-kilometre, mostly uphill hike to the village, crossing a suspension bridge over the boulder-strewn, wildly tumbling river on the way. Only the garbage littered everywhere spoiled the beauty of the walk along the quiet road.

  At Aqua Caliente I rewarded myself with a cold beer, though I was almost a candidate for CPR and felt more like a nice lie down, a cup of tea and a Bex. A peddler came to my table and I bought some jewellery as a result of the beer. Then, as if I hadn’t done enough walking for one day, I hiked up the main ‘street’, a flight of concrete steps up a steep hill lined with restaurants and shops. I invested in a pair of handknitted alpaca socks, so warm that once I put them on I only took them off to wash my feet.

  Arriving early to board the train back to Cuzco that evening, I found it already packed almost full – and still mobs more passengers crushed on, filling the aisles and shoving bundles anywhere they could. An iron pick-axe came to roost under my feet and a Cyclopean Indian woman, clutching a massive bundle, squatted in the aisle next to me and almost obliterated me when she leaned across to bellow to friends outside the window. In the space between our carriage and the next a solid mass of people was squeezed, some of them hanging out over the sides of the train.

  The journey back to Cuzco was mainly downhill and the train travelled fast, rattling frightfully on the hillsides, which had big drops beneath them. As the train lurched along I watched the people hanging on to the outside, and was terrified that they might fall. The conductor shoved his way through to the end of the carriage and, waiting for the train to stop, got out and sold the hangers-on tickets as though they had regular seats.

  Soon it was dark. In the headlights of the train I saw the line curving away ahead. The Southern Cross appeared outside my window, shining brightly in the clear dark-blue night. After two hours of near asphyxiation in the pack of bodies, the train stopped at a village where many got off. Without all that body heat the train was suddenly cold, but my alpaca jumper, shawl and socks preserved me. I stretched out on two seats and went to sleep.

  Then the lights of Cuzco appeared far below, lying like a diamond necklace in the valley, and the switching of the rails commenced. Each switch magically brought the lights closer until I could clearly see the square with its three massive churches. Five switches later we were at the railway station, where the red van that had brought me here waited to take me back to the Hotel Felice, just as Maria had promised, bless her. I was in bed by midnight.

  The next day was Sunday. I declared a day of rest and did nothing except walk around Cuzco and the market. Once again the skies were blue and sunny, but it was still cold. Many of the streets, especially those with old walls, were redolent with the smell of urine. This was not surprising in a place where public toilets were as scarce as hen’s teeth. Even when you did find one it cost twenty-five cents.

  It was now time to move on to Bolivia. I was pleased to find that I could go part of the way by train – to Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, about half way to La Paz – so the next morning I was again forced out of bed early to catch it. It had been raining and the cobblestoned streets were slippery but, undeterred by this, the taxi flew along skidding and skittering. Maria accompanied me to the train. She had arranged a hotel for me with a friend in Puno, and in return I’d given her a daggy cast-off bag. She was so thrilled that I wished I’d given her the new one I’d bought to replace it.

  The train was very comfortable. Red plush seats were placed in pairs facing each other with a table between. I’d had many warnings of the dangers in South America, especially of robbery on trains, and I had been nervous about travelling here. However I read up well on how to avoid scams, dangers and annoyances and found that the fear of the unknown was worse than the reality. Once in South America I never thought about being afraid.

  The passengers in this train carriage were mostly foreigners or South American tourists. As the train gathered speed it rocked a lot and ours, being the end carriage, was even more shaky. We almost took off on bends. Soon the food sellers started clambering onto the train and from then on for the South American travellers it was one long munch. I had lost my appetite days ago – yes, me! Altitude does that to you. I could eat but I wasn’t hungry, a sensation totally new to me. I had also been drinking coca tea, which prevents altitude symptoms, but takes away your appetite. My only real trauma from the changes in altitude was that some of my sponge-bag contents leaked and I lost most of my deodorant. Physically I suffered no ill effects, except that I was a little breathless on climbing and had a slight headache at times.

  Suddenly I was hungry again and set about making up for lost time. This train even ran to meal service. A waiter took my order for Pisco Sour, salad, bifsteak and fruit and delivered it to me at my table. The meal was okay but I was soon hungry again so I bought an item from a vendor that looked like a pasty. And it was. A delicious homemade pasty like Mum used to make. I had another. The seller’s small girl stood by my side absorbing me for an hour, and never said a word.

  The train trip took eleven hours but it was a pleasant ride. The track climbed only a little and there were no alarming drops over the side to contemplate. Even so, we were at a height of almost four thousand metres on the alti-plateau by the time we reached Puno, three hundred metres higher than Cuzco.

  Leaving Cuzco with its appalling amount of rubbish by the tracks we had travelled, with mountains on either side of us, through small villages and plots of land that were now mostly fallow for the winter. The rain and cloud soon cleared as we continued to run south through valleys where snow-topped mountains sometimes formed the backdrop. Later the land opened up and there were large expanses of green grassland on which small flocks of sheep, cows, alpacas and llamas hoofed around. The train stood for a while at one of the wallenclosed, thatch-roofed, mudbrick villages. Then, as a train from the opposite direction passed, I realised why we had been waiting. There was only one line. The meeting of the trains had been timed rather well as we had only been there for fifteen minutes. USA Rail eat your heart out – we would have been there all day with that company.

  In the afternoon the mountains became more rounded and were covered in the same brownish-yellow grass as the pastures. More vendors got on and off the train. I felt sorry for one old man and, in a moment of folly, bought a white, fluffy alpaca fur hat. It suffered a sad fate when I got home. Unbeknown to me it was to appear to my cat, Josephine, who is also a white ball of fluff, as a deadly rival and at the first opportunity, in the middle of a dark night, she leaped up onto the cupboard where it sat, challenged it to mortal combat and attacked in deadly earnest. I heard the commotion and found the chewed remains of the alpaca on the floor.

  At five exactly, as advertised, we reached Juliaco, where the train stops to connect with the train from the south, and then we continued on to Puno in the dark. I was met by Oscar, the hotel owner. He bundled me off the train, trundled me through the pack of sharks at the station gate, pushed me into a van and took me to his hotel.

  Peruvians seemed very laissez-faire about payment. I had a scrappy note from Maria that told Oscar to take four dollars off my bill because the Hotel Felice owed it to me. It had been the same at Aqua Caliente, just a scrawl on an old scrap of paper to say that I had already pa
id. No one asked for cash in advance or tickets before you got onto transport. If shopkeepers needed change they would go off to find it, leaving you alone with all their goodies.

  At the Hotel Baija my first-floor room was almost warm. It had an entire wall of windows that received full sun during the day. Oh, the bliss of lying in bed in the sunshine while taking my siesta after lunch. I was even given a feeble, one-bar electric heater, an item I had thought to be an unknown quantity in Peru. As usual I had asked for extra blankets and slept in my long-johns. You do some disgusting things when travelling. The shower, another of those frightening electric devices, produced water that was almost warm. The shower curtain rail was a piece of wire devoid of curtain, the toilet seat disintegrated under me, the wardrobe was a few pegs on the wall and the only furniture was a sturdy wooden chair and a bed, but everything was clean and the hotel staff were, as usual, friendly.

  Dawn seemed to come earlier in Puno. By six it was fully light and at that time the spruiker at the small bus station directly opposite my room started shouting destinations. The station was merely a vacant block where drivers waited in ancient buses behind an old grotty wall. The buses slept here at night and started off very early in the morning.

  Hotel Baija’s exterior was utterly without charm and the lobby was a grim freezing hole, but I considered my warm room wonderful and I enjoyed the breakfast that was included in the price – egg rolls and delicious, freshly squeezed orange juice. This was provided in a room at the back of the building whose windows looked onto the rear of the hotel and the surrounding roofs. The view was, to put it mildly, uninspiring. The area looked derelict, like an abandoned slum. Electric wires protruded from the walls to swing in the air before re-entering the crumbling brickwork. Broken windows were edged with haphazard bits of tin and the roofs defied description. They were covered in a collection of battered, loose bits of tin thrown one on top of the other and held down with old planks of wood. The whole mess was overlaid with rubbish.

  7 Gaol bird

  Puno, which was founded in 1668, is on the Peruvian shore of Lake Titicaca and on the overland route that I had chosen to get to Bolivia. From there I could travel by bus to La Paz, and onwards north to Amazonia.

  Oscar organised a trip on Lake Titicaca for me. A deep sapphire blue, the lake straddles the Peru–Bolivian border at an altitude of 3810 metres and is the highest navigable body of water in the world. It is also large, 233 kilometres long, 97 metres wide and 457 metres deep. The pre-Inca peoples believed that the sun and their god, Viracocha, arose from the waters of the lake. The Incas also believed it to be the birthplace of their civilisation. Life around the lake has not changed much since those days.

  My excursion would take me to the floating islands of the Uros people, who began their aquatic existence centuries ago in an effort to escape the Incas. The islands, made of totora reeds that break free from the bottom of the lake and join other clumps of weed to form islands, have a population of approximately three hundred inhabitants. The Uros folk use totoro reed to make canoes, boats, furniture and as feed for animals. The Ra Two was built of this reed for the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, on the island of Suriki in Lake Titicaca.

  I joined a united nations of tourists that included a jolly pack of Israelis. We clambered into a crowded minibus to drive to the lake. Puno’s streets and houses were run down and the town was crammed with so many tiny shops that I wondered how they all survived. Reaching the water’s edge we climbed down onto a five-metre wooden boat with a half cabin. At first I sat up the top in the warm sun, but the wind quickly froze me and at the first stop I zipped inside the cabin.

  As we moved slowly out onto the calm lake I was surprised to see birds perching on floating clumps of reeds. One narrow island that had been formed by dredging soil from the lake’s bottom was a mere strip of land, but cows and sheep, as well as a reed house stood on it. Nearby a man harvested reeds in a reed boat. The other islands we saw were the floating kind made entirely of totora. We stopped at one and as I walked on the piles of reeds that constituted its surface, they sprung under my feet like sponges. This little island was only a few metres wide but it boasted not only a village of tiny reed houses, but also a miniature museum that had a collection of stuffed birds, native foxes, long-tailed rabbits and fish. One exhibit turned out to be merely asleep – in a small patch of sun that fell in the centre of the floor, a grey cat snoozed in a contented curl.

  Back on terra firma I ate a set lunch in a nearby cafe. I found these set meals intriguing – you never knew what sort of a surprise was in store. This one produced a bowl the size of a bucket full of mushroom soup, an equally large plate of spaghetti and a glass of juice. All for five sol. But the biggest surprise was that Hamlet blared from the television set in the corner. That night I dined at the posh hotel in the main square. It even ran to fabric serviettes instead of the usual paper one cut into quarters. The meal cost five dollars more than my hotel room, but the Lake Titicaca trout with garlic was divine. Back in my room I put the one-candle-power heater on, survived a lukewarm shower, erected my emergency lighting system and, toasty warm, jumped into bed to read.

  The bus to La Paz left at eight in the morning. And what a swish beast it was. The collection point was only two blocks away so Oscar carried my bags to it. I was presented with a form I had to complete with my passport number and other details in order to get on the bus, but no one looked at my ticket.

  The road to the border of Bolivia was fairly good. For a while it ran alongside Lake Titicaca’s immense blue expanse, which had an occasional boat at its edge and looked as limitless as the sea. Then we were among rolling brown and yellow hills and fields dotted with animals and mudbrick villages. Potatoes, barley and fava beans grow here in land that is still ploughed by oxen. Women shepherds stood in the fields knitting and near one village a small boy played at bullfighting, waving a towel at two young steers. Occasionally we passed through a town. There were few vehicles on the road, but we did encounter a van that had three sheep sitting on top of it in the pack rack.

  Then the lake was near again. Behind it, brown hills rose in front of another range of higher mountains whose tops were heavily laden with snow and ice.

  At the Peru–Bolivia border I shuffled slowly forward in the long line that waited in the dusty street in front of the immigration office. I had read that the border officials were notorious for stamping passports with the wrong date, then tracking you down and fining you. But I encountered no such problems. Next I walked a couple of hundred yards up a hill and, passing through an old stone arched gate in the wall that divides the two countries, emerged the other side in Bolivia.

  Soon after being reunited with the bus we came to Copacabana, a lovely little town set between two hills and nestling around a splendid bay. This place has been a site of pilgrimage since Inca times and now it is a religious sanctuary, famous for the Virgin of Copacabana, a black Madonna who is said to perform miracles. We stopped at Copacabana for lunch and in a tree-shaded garden I sat on a piece of chopped-up log thinly disguised as a chair, at a table of rough wood, and ate what was described as a ‘send whitch’, a whacking great lump of bread the size of a small loaf.

  After lunch we were transposed onto a Bolivian bus that was old but horribly fast, especially on blind corners in the mountains we entered. The bus, top heavy with piles of luggage tied haphazardly high on its roof, swerved dreadfully along narrow dirt tracks below which five-hundred-metre drops fell terrifyingly close. The speed maniac of a driver roared up and down the mountains with his brakes screaming. By the time we reached La Paz they were making the horrible sound of grinding metal and pouring forth smoke like a train. To stop the bus on the steep downhill street of our final destination the driver had to jam its wheels into the kerb at an angle. But the view was superb from the sides of the heavily snow-capped mountains down to the beautiful blue lake with its sunny islands.

  Halfway to La Paz we arrived at the isthmus of Lake Titicaca
where we had to alight and get into motor boats while the bus crossed the lake all by itself on a barge. The barge was welcome to it. The boats were grossly overloaded and we were bobbing about on a freezing lake with no life jackets. But this was still hugely preferable to the bus. I can swim, but I can’t, as yet, fly.

  After a couple more petrifying hours in the mountains, the bus was running on flat ground in a valley of brown and yellow grass with soaring mountains in the background. The countryside looked much the same as Peru. We climbed again to negotiate the highest pass of 4200 metres and looked down on La Paz before descending to it at 3800 metres. The city appeared to radiate up from its centre at the bottom of a deep valley and, rising from the bottom of this bowl, it swarmed up the surrounding hills. The houses were all much the same brown colour as the hills, only the odd tree made a splash of green, while behind the enclosing arms of the brown hills a backdrop of jagged snow-covered mountains stood against a clear blue sky.

  Almost four kilometres above sea level, La Paz is called the world’s highest capital city (but it is only a de facto relationship – Sucre is the legal capital). Many visitors suffer soroche here – the city is so high that it doesn’t need a fire brigade. It is hard to keep even a match burning in the oxygen-poor air, making it a depressing place for pyromaniacs.

  When the Spanish marauder Pizarro swooped on this peaceful spot in 1531, a prosperous community lived here, irrigating crops and fruit and mining and working gold and silver. The Spaniards seized the mines and founded La Paz as a post on the trade route between the silver mines of Potosi in the south of Bolivia and the Peruvian ports. The Spanish extracted fortunes of gold and silver from the Potosi mines, making the miners work under atrocious conditions. The Potosi mines were the holocaust of Bolivia. The Indians died in droves, despite – or maybe because of – being given coca to keep them working harder without food. Black African slaves were also imported by the million and worked to death or killed by silicosis.