Llama for Lunch Read online

  It was a long way down to the sea. As we retreated from the wharf we passed a line of container ships tied in a row along the quay, and even those dingy old vessels looked fine at night thanks to the lights that were strung along their sides and on their rigging. The town also looked pretty – which it wasn’t.

  We passed a red buoy that glowed constantly, then a white one that flashed nine times and was still for three seconds. I had learned in my boating past that those signals all mean something and you can tell exactly where you are by navigational lights. After we passed a couple of bobbing fishing boats I went to bed. It began to rain. I could hear it pelting down outside for quite a while and in the morning all the decks were ankle deep in water.

  The weather was considerably colder that day and I had to put on a woollie. At midnight we anchored off Guayaquil in Ecuador, having arrived too late for the high water that would have enabled us to tie up at the wharf. From then on I woke every so often with the tugging of the ship on its anchor. By morning I could feel the ship floating freer and then the tugging stopped. The pilot came out, a jolly person who insisted on kissing me soundly on both cheeks and we commenced our long ride in. It took about four hours to pass up the Guayas River, dodging sand bars among very low water. Large shrimp farms were visible on one side, rows of sticks with a sheet of water behind them that didn’t look much but were big enough to show on the radar. The pilot told me that he had done nearly five thousand trips up this river. He called the readings from memory to the man on the bridge.

  In Guayaquil the pilot, who seemed to fit the name Jolly Roger, and his gorgeously handsome and perpetually smiling son, Tino, took Wojciech, Laura and me for a tour of the town in a red Nissan van. The tour was a total fizz, but after ten days at sea it was nice to put my feet to the ground again. At least I can say that I have been in Ecuador, not that I’d want to return to Guayaquil with its dreary, scruffy streets where crime is a serious threat. It is Ecuador’s largest city of two million people and the commercial and financial centre of the country, as well as one of the Pacific’s most important ports.

  Our first stop, almost our last, was at a supermarket not far from the wharf. Here, Wojciech bought provisions for the ship. Ecuador had just started to use US dollars for its currency, which made conversion easy. I found the prices about the same as at home except booze was very cheap. There was also a huge counter entirely devoted to perfume. Loaded up with unlabelled white washing powder in clear plastic bags – and looking very suspect – Wojciech returned to the ship. The pilot, Tino, Laura and I had progressed a few feet further when the van broke down in the middle of the street. Laura and I sat and sweated. Jolly Roger and son pushed. No success. We did it again. More people were enlisted to push until – another triumph for People Power – we arrived at the main road.

  I looked behind and saw a great horde of men approaching and thought, Oh good, more pushers. Then I noticed that they bore a coffin shoulder-high in their midst. It appeared to be inhabited.

  The coffin bearers and the big crowd of mourners passed by. Finally the van was given up as a lost cause and JR went to retrieve his car from the wharf. It was ninety minutes before we were eventually rescued.

  The new vehicle was hot and pokey and I couldn’t see much from where I was scrunched in the back seat but I don’t think I missed much. The city looked a lot like some of the less salubrious towns of Indonesia. There were box-like houses made of cement bricks, hole-in-the wall shops and dirty streets heaped with rubbish even in the affluent suburbs, where all the houses were behind grilles and bars. In the downtown area with its smart buildings we parked and walked on the new riverfront corniche, which was clean and grand but overpopulated with large bronze statues and guards toting gigantic guns. One statue was of a rabid-looking pig that dripped water from his mouth in a most unpleasant manner and one was of local hero Simon Bolivar. He was carved shaking hands with a friend, but something in the angle of their hips and wrists looked decidedly camp.

  Next we visited a park opposite an imposing twin-towered church. The nineteenth-century park was home to a large collection of iguanas. It was encircled by a high, ornate iron fence with an elaborate gate and contained a cast-iron rotunda, manicured lawns edged with flowers and cobbled paths, on one of which two iguanas were fighting. Many people sat on benches to watch the iguanas, which posed draped along tree branches or skittered evilly across the lawns. It was a horrible sight. Iguanas must be the ugliest specimens in creation – they have the most malevolent eyes. But they do have pretty colours. Laura said her son once kept one as a pet. Yuk. It would put you off your food. Maybe that was the idea.

  We drove up a perpendicular road to a look-out high above the city. The view wasn’t inspiring but you could see how big the town was from there.

  By now it was dusk. A car stopped beside the stone bench on which I sat and the young woman driver spoke to me. Tino told me that she had said, ‘It’s not safe for you to be here at this time. There are many robbers.’ That was enough for me. We headed home. On one side of the hill, with milliondollar-real-estate views, were the shacks of shanty dwellers. The other side was a cemetery crowded with many crypts. The view was rather wasted on the inhabitants of those.

  Back at the wharf no one stopped the car at the first two gates, although large guns were much in evidence, but at the third a guard read our passes intently even though they were upside down and he obviously had no idea what they said. We paid Tino the agreed sum of thirty dollars. He offered no discount for the time spent on the side of the road – all part of the tour experience, I suppose. Our dinner had been kept for us. Wojciech had bought some delicious fruit in town– custard apples, guavas, fijoas and tamarillos. He asked me how the tour was. I said, ‘If you want me to go again you must pay me thirty dollars.’

  The crew were still busy loading the ship when we returned, and work continued well into the night, with containers whizzing here and there. Afterwards the ship was very grubby with cigarette butts, papers, cans and rubbish. At six in the morning the engines started. The captain hadn’t wanted to leave until the tide was higher but the wharf space was needed. We had to proceed very slowly as the ship had just two metres of draught and you can’t go faster or you end up creating suction and get stuck on the bottom.

  Walking around the ship I looked over the bow and saw that we were churning up pure mud. The sailors washed the decks to get rid of the filth and soon the ship was squeaky clean again. Out on the water the sky was clear azure and the sea dark, dark blue and empty. I watched a couple of big sea birds and wondered why they flapped alongside us when we were going in the same direction and it would have seemed more sensible to hop on and hitch a ride. I certainly would have.

  At about eight that evening the sea produced a few white caps and the ship started rolling. Then it began to buck and heave and continued to do so all night with increasing ferocity. Walking on the deck I would climb uphill and then gallop down with a rush as the waves flew away under my feet. It was like riding a demented camel or a carousel pony that tipped forwards and back. I had to dance a sort of sailor’s hornpipe just to keep on one spot in the shower or the water kept missing me. The sea still looked reasonably calm for all its tipping. The captain said that it was the current and that it had cut us back a couple of knots in speed. Los Americanos missed two meals – I gobbled up their share.

  Approaching Callao, the port of Lima, we doddled along at half speed waiting for the pilot. The sea all around was pitch black as I watched from the darkened bridge where there was no light except for the dim glow of the navigational instruments. It was a spooky feeling being above the dark sea on this dark ship. I wondered how the navigator knew where he was going – nothing showed except a flickering buoy on one side. Then on the horizon I saw the lights of several ships and later a faint, yellow glow appeared. This turned into shining silver pin-pricks that eventually became twinkling lights strung along the shore.

  The pilot radioed that he was on
his way and soon a red glow detached itself from the shore lights and came ever closer until there he was underneath us in a boat with a green and a red light atop its cabin. The pilot caught the side ladder and eventually was puffing on the bridge. The captain had warned me that he had a voice like a ‘drunk man’. It was more like a gorilla with laryngitis. As he neared me a wave of chemist shop passed over me – cough lollies or mouthwash. Maybe he really was a drinking man.

  A pair of tugs positioned themselves either side of the ship to guide us through the narrow entrance of the breakwater – the current was very strong here – then we were inching up to a wharf where trucks with containers on them were lined up waiting. There were no cranes on the wharf. Only the two on the ship were used here. There was a lot of cargo to be offloaded, so work began immediately and went on all night.

  I had to wait for the ship’s agent to clear me ashore in the morning. As I waited I watched the antics of the pelicans fishing nearby. Wojciech said you have to be very careful in this port. Pirates try to board ships even before they come in – they come out to get you in little boats. He said he would just run them down and not go around them if they tried this. Even when the ship is tied at the wharf, he said, they try to steal ropes and anything else they can get their hands on. This really is a desperate place. And this was where I was to be put ashore.

  The agent finally came and demanded one hundred dollars to allow me to land. Wojciech blew a fuse and we went to lunch while it was sorted out with a higher official. Landed at last, I survived the inspection of a sombre customs woman and was taken to the minister for the interior’s office for immigration rites. In this grand shore-side building my passport was stamped. We shook hands all round. Wojciech kissed my hand, I kissed his cheek. I was now on my own in South America.

  6 Llama for lunch

  Callao is a colonial fortress that was built in the mid 1700s to defend Peru’s Spanish viceregal capital, Lima, from English and Dutch buccaneers. It replaced previous fortifications that had been destroyed by earthquake and tidal wave.

  As soon as I climbed into his taxi the driver reached over and locked the doors. We travelled all of one hundred metres before the taxi broke down. An inauspicious omen. The driver tried over and over to get the engine going again but finally conceded that we were out of gas. A man selling sweets on the corner was commandeered to help push the taxi to the petrol station. It was a long way. At an intersection we passed an impressive policewoman who was dressed in long black boots, black shirt and jacket and had a white gun holster slung on her hip. At the station I had to pay for the little bit of petrol that was infused into our unwilling vehicle. The driver had no money. After much coughing and belching of black smoke the engine was coaxed into starting again and we continued on.

  It was a very long way to Miraflores, the suburb where I had a room booked, and reaching it necessitated asking directions frequently of policemen and passers-by. People seemed kind and friendly. They were, to my surprise, very darkskinned. I had expected them to look more Spanish than Indian. But they are mestizo, of mixed Indian and Spanish blood. One policeman was the spitting image of a picture I had seen of an ancient Incan leader. He had the same coppercoloured skin, strong hooked nose and ferocious features. I could imagine him performing a human sacrifice by tearing out a still-beating heart. But this image evaporated when his severe countenance smiled at me.

  But what a dump Lima was so far! The guide book had been dead right about the perpetual smog and fog. And, worse in my opinion, it was cold. Yet no other city in the Americas enjoyed such power and prestige in the colonial era as Lima. The long road from Callao wended through a barren, treeless landscape congested with daggy old cars and lined by squalid concrete or adobe box-shaped houses.

  When at last we reached the foreshore of Miraflores the houses began to improve, until eventually some were quite grand. Miraflores, ‘view of flowers’, a century ago was a small resort town where people went for summer weekends, but now it is a prosperous suburb of Lima and I had read that it was a much safer place to stay than downtown. We drove up the main street, which had some magnificent buildings and was crowded with modern shops. But as my taxi circled the central roundabout I saw that it was surrounded by soldiers and riot police with clear plastic shields. Black clouds of strong acrid smoke rose from piles of burning tyres. Seeping into the car, they made me cough. This was scary.

  Later I learned that this was the dress rehearsal for the protests planned for Independence Day, two weeks away on the twenty-eighth of July. People were angry because they felt that the last election had been rigged.

  After a lot of inquiry and a couple of circumnavigations of the block, Domingo Elias Street and the Pension Yolanda were located. There was no sign on the high wooden fence and the gate was locked, but the number was right so I rattled the handle hopefully. A hatch opened in the gate and an old lady with a sweet face examined me and let me in. This was not the entrance to your average hotel, but the owners turned out to be friendly.

  Entering the pension I found myself in a terrazzo-paved courtyard with steps at its rear that went up to the guest rooms. The place was rather like the house that Jack built, all higgledy piggledy with bits and pieces everywhere. The office was downstairs on one side of the courtyard and the family lived at the back underneath the guest rooms. Climbing the outside stairs you entered a sitting room, and two rooms went off that. Then there was a tiny communal kitchen with another two rooms off it, and from a side door in the kitchen outside stairs ascended to yet another two rooms. The kitchen had a supply of coffee, tea and boiled (I hoped) water, and a fridge that had a shelf labelled for the use of each room.

  I moved into a second-floor room off the kitchen. My room must have been under the top-floor bathroom as it often sounded as though water was running down my walls. The room had an attached closet of a bathroom that was painted a screaming lolly pink. I had to ask at first where it was. I had thought that the odd-looking door up a step on one wall, was the wardrobe. Oh well, I hadn’t expected the Hilton.

  It took a while to work out why I kept coming out of the bathroom with plaster in my hair. Then I looked up and saw that the ceiling was disintegrating and hanging down in ribbons like Christmas decorations. The plumbing was exceedingly ancient and no toilet paper was permitted to pollute it. There was only spasmodic hot water and you had to order it in advance. The furniture, except for a magnificent carved chair and bedside cabinet, had a bush-carpentry look.

  The room was freezing cold. I pinched all the blankets from the vacant room next door.

  With directions from the hotel I walked to Miraflores’s main street. McDonald’s dominated the central roundabout where the two one-way main streets with their central parks containing seats and trees met. In the shops I again found that booze was very cheap, especially imported vodka. Maybe the Peruvians had a special deal with the Russkies. At five I returned to the pension absolutely frozen. I piled all the blankets onto my bed and crawled under them to read. I was very tired and when I was finally warm and had finished my whodunit, I slept.

  Next morning I looked out of the window of my room into the narrow space between the pension and the neighbour’s wall. Against the wall one floor below I could see the outdoor wash trough. From a little above the level of my room a wooden trellis that was completely overgrown with creepers sloped down to rest on the top of the wall. This made a safe haven for many birds and I enjoyed watching and listening to them. A teeny brown hummingbird had a home in among the vines, as well as a dove-grey bird smaller than a sparrow. And the ubiquitous pigeons hung around, one in particular looking rather forlorn. I thought he might be looking for a feed, so I put on the window ledge some crumbs from one of the delicious bread rolls that were left in the kitchen for guests’ breakfasts. After lunch, when I was having my siesta, I looked up to see him walking up and down on the window ledge only a metre away. I lay very still and after a thorough inspection of the inside of my room, he commenced to
eat.

  That day the pension’s proprietress phoned a travel agent she knew so that I could ask about buses to Cuzco, high in the Andes, which is, figuratively speaking, the jumping-off place for Machu Picchu. I wanted to see the ‘lost city of the Incas’ on my way through Peru. To my disappointment I was told that no buses went directly there. The recommended bus takes a circuitous route via the south. But the woman insisted that I should fly. ‘Everyone does,’ she said. Not me. My aim was to cross the continent overland, anyway I could, but preferably by river once I got over the barrier of the Andes.

  I studied my map. The Andes are a formidable barricade that run the entire length of South America; there are few roads anywhere and none cross to the other side of the mountains in Peru. From Machu Picchu I would have to go south to La Paz in Bolivia from where there is a road that travels into the interior.

  Deciding to travel to Machu Picchu by the unrecommended bus method, I took a taxi to the bus station to buy a ticket. When my driver neared downtown Lima he peeled off his taxi sticker from the inside of the windscreen and hid it under the dash mat. On the return journey another driver did the same thing in reverse. I presumed that they were unlicensed. To make up for this deficiency (or maybe because of it) they festooned their vehicles with religious medals, pictures and rosaries. Once again the taxi didn’t have any petrol and I had to buy some before we went far. I noticed that all drivers wore gloves, scarves and hats against the cold, but they kept all their windows down and froze the poor passenger.