Cloud Road (9 page)

At last, in late afternoon the road began to fall. People now seemed a little more prosperous. A girl and her mother came, bent double under huge sheaves, down the hill from a steep field, where they had been cutting hay. They had a big American pick-up waiting at the road, but could not get a jammed tailgate to drop. I stopped to help them throw the sheaves in. Even with three of us helping, we could only just get them over the head-high sides. When we finished, we were all wreathed in sweat and
laughing, picking bits of grass out of each other’s clothes and hair.

At the end of the afternoon I stopped in a large hamlet and sat chatting in the village shop, whose owner had to be called down from the mountain to unlock it. I bought biscuits and poured a couple of litres of water back into my system. The owner gave me a sweet bun. We chatted and he offered to let me sleep in various buildings, but they were all very dusty and I was keen to have the privacy of my tent. Someone offered me the rough lawn in front of his house. The village seemed a nice sleepy place where I would be left in peace, so I said yes. As soon as I began to erect the tent, a lorry stopped opposite and twenty agricultural workers jumped down and crossed the road to watch me for two hours. When I returned home I read, with heart-felt comradeship, Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes:

Worryingly, my stove would not prime properly. I could not rely on buying gas canisters, so I had bought a new stove, which could take paraffin, unleaded petrol and a few other liquid fuels. A hand-plunger provided the pressure, and although it was supposed to be suited to high altitude, it was temperamental; the mixture of air pressure and fuel flow had to be just right. If you did not obtain the intended roaring blue flame, the leaflet
provided the following troubleshooting advice:

• too much pressure: symptom, large yellow flames
  
• too little pressure: symptom, large yellow flames
  
• too much fuel: symptom, large yellow flames
  
• too little fuel: you’ve guessed it.
  

Supper was bread and bananas and water.

Like Stevenson I couldn’t face performing breakfast and toilet next morning as another theatre piece, so I set the alarm for five fifteen, packed the tent wet and was on the road before dawn, munching nuts and dried fruit, and began to climb. It was still early when I came up through light mist onto a broad ridge at 11,320 feet. The little villages on the hill were waking up, livestock being turned out to pasture, children packed off to school. Knots of curious people gathered good humouredly about me. I shook hands until my own smelled of sheep, goats and warm milk. Often one person would relay all the questions to me. ‘So, how far are you walking?’

I told him. There was a small twinkle in his eye as he asked me, ‘Why? As a punishment?’

Small triangular fields parcelled huge hillsides in
ever-varying
patterns. The land was reminiscent of shaken laundry, half-smoothed green sheets that had floated to ground under their own weight. A long-tailed hawk came over the ridge, each narrow wing like a dark sabre. It followed a gully down, careful as a thief.

In Peru, spring, summer, autumn and winter are imported ideas; they mean little. There are two seasons, wet and dry. Now, in mid-May, the wet season’s six inches of rain a month was finishing. The dry season, with an inch or so a month, would last until November. The days were becoming hotter; the threat of rain seemed less each day. Once the sun had cleared the tops of the mountains, the air temperature rose quickly. By noon, when I reached Guamote, a small, poor town with the railway running right down the main street, it was hot. The Inca road was again buried under the Panamerican so I walked the railway line. At the first break, I spread the tent out to dry, which it did in minutes. Below me were green irrigated fields. Above me was a dust-dry sandy hillside, on which two figures appeared: twelve-year-old girls who ran down squealing, kicking up billowing clouds of dirt. They smiled a lot, showing brown tidemarks along their teeth. One talked as loud as a megaphone and wouldn’t believe England was a real country. The other treated her as if she were one llama short of a full flock.

They walked with me back to their home, just above the river. The railway crossed the river on a high bridge where we hopped from one rough sleeper to another, each leap offering a fine view of the river far beneath our feet. They were unconcerned; it was just their walk to and from school. On the other side they waved me goodbye, and pointed the way ahead. In a scrubby stand of trees, men had been felling, and there was an overpowering aroma of pine sap and eucalyptus oil. Then came another longer, higher river bridge to be hopped across. Women
washing their clothes stopped to watch, sitting in the freezing waters.

Once over, I sat on the end of a sleeper to rest and drink. There was a faint singing in the rails so I moved off the track. A hand-driven flatcar came racing down the hill; five men squeezed on top of sacks of grain and vegetables. They had been to market, and were flying home to Guamote, waving to me, grinning at life. Had I been five minutes later, we would have met on the bridge, and I would have been grinning at death.

The valley became higher, shallower and bleaker. Families were burning off clumps of pampas grass, the tall ornamental grass that adorns a million suburban lawns. It burnt fiercely and quickly, the fires difficult to control. I was too tired for company. When I reached a copse of pine trees by a clean stream, I pitched the tent as much out of sight as I could manage, like a criminal on the run. The stove worked first time and I cooked pasta, and added a packet of soup, a simple and light meal, but something only a hungry person would relish; that wasn’t a problem. It was dark when I had cleaned up. I sat outside with a mug of coffee and watched the rings of fire spread wider but fainter over the hills. With darkness came the frogs’ cord-throated night music.

In the morning I soon reached an abandoned railway station called Velez before the railway slipped over a shallow watershed of black, silty peat, puddled to a mire by cattle. It was breezy, and the grasses rustled in a million minute tinkles; like running water. In puddles at the trackside, beefy tadpoles kicked the silt. As the sun’s heat grew, the rails expanded, and groaned in their ties. Coming over the top of the hill, I saw the track run away
in a dead straight line as far as the eye could see, through sandy dirt studded with pine cones the size of grapefruit. The next station, Palmira Davila, was a shimmering pale gable-end, which grew larger without ever seeming to get any nearer, shuddering in the rippling air at the dead eye of the rails’ vanishing point.

I walked into the village feeling like Clint Eastwood remaking
High Plains Drifter
without a horse. A tall, thin puppy, all wisps and crescents, cringed itself into a black omega, and crapped on the hot rail. Maria Ana came out from the first house. She was a young housewife with a round pretty face and an engaging smile and manner. I asked where I could buy food.

‘I wouldn’t buy here. Wait until you get to Palmira, there’s more shops there.’

‘You’re not local?’

‘How did you know?’

‘A local would not tell me to spend my money in the next town.’

She grinned sheepishly. ‘I am from Quito, my husband is from here, and all his family.’

The pup came over and snarled at me. It had an open sore over its right eye. A gust of wind threw dust and grit all over us. ‘Do you like it here?’

‘It’s okay, but so dusty. Last week we had dust storms, it was awful. But it is nice and quiet. Quito is polluted by so many chemicals.’ Every remote place I go, they say it is quiet and clean. The boredom and claustrophobia that would stifle and choke me is never mentioned. Do they suffer silently, or is it an unfelt absence?

From the miserable houses around, a few mothers appeared with children, staring at us; but they would not
come closer or talk. ‘Do you have any work here?’

Her gaze travelled back to where the railway line vanished into the boiling air, and on to Quito. ‘No, I used to, in the city. But there’s nothing for me here.’

She talked like the thirsty drink.

I stopped in a shop with woven matting for walls. The owner was a surly woman, with hips wide enough to take a pair of china spaniels. Her children were pretending an animal turd was a toy car, running in from time to time, to dip their hands into the pot of stew she was selling, and pull out a potato. I sat on a busted sofa, drank a cola and watched a little girl trying to pull two sheep into the wind. It was time to leave the railway and get back on the Panamerican for a few more miles, then, near Palmira, find a mountain track that led into some remote territory on the road to Achupallas. Achupallas is a small town, founded by the Incas, from which I would begin a spectacular remote hike to the best Inca remains in all of Ecuador, the temple complex of Ingapirca.

As Maria Ana had said, Palmira was larger, but it was shut. I checked my diary: it was Saturday, not Sunday. Unusually, all the shops had closed for siesta. I had enough dry food but I would have liked to buy more bread and fruit. I found just two people out of doors, a father and son moving eucalyptus poles from a donkey at the front of their house to the yard at the back where they were adding another room.

‘Where is the old road, is it up this track?’ I said, pointing to the road they had come down.

‘Aargnngh,’ is the nearest I can render the reply.

‘Up there.’ The father’s gaze swept the encircling peaks.

‘And this track will lead me to it? This one I am standing on?’ I thought I had the conversation cornered at this point.

‘Aargnngh.’ He gave a shrug of his forearm, covering three mountains. I stomped off up the track. Another great meeting of minds and cultures. I followed the track down to a small river, and sat down on the bank to eat biscuits, dried prunes and a block of local cheese, selected for early eating because of its great weight. I was disappointed I wasn’t covering the ground faster. The hidden mileage in the hairpins was one reason; the GPS showed me the other. It told me my average walking speed, over easy ground, was only two and a half miles per hour. My best was only three and a half miles per hour. The pack and the altitude were slowing me down far more than I had thought.

A straight line on the map proved to be more huge hairpins on the ground, more hidden miles. I skipped my next rest break to try to catch up time. For an hour and a half, my progression was in the right general direction. But then, the road ahead was forced left by a very large, bare mountain. The map and the GPS compass were telling me I needed to turn right and get up the mountain, but I couldn’t see a track. I decided to walk to the next village and rest, and ask.

At the point where the road bent left, there was a small village, half of it clustered below the road, half above. Accustomed to country people being reserved, even when they were friendly, I was surprised to be hailed by a man wearing an orange and red poncho. He bounded down towards me. I moved my walking pole to my left hand and held out my right. He brushed it aside, grabbed the pole and shook it in my face, angry and aggressive, flecks of
spit flying from his mouth. I could smell spirits on his breath. In a moment, my world had changed. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Men and boys came running towards us. I felt very alone. ‘It’s not like other communities,’ he shouted, ‘this belongs to indigenous people.’ He banged his fist on his chest, ‘You have to pay.’

He made to punch my face. He was smaller than I was, but younger, and used to manual labour. He might be as strong as me. He was surrounded by friends and neighbours, used to communal defence; there are no policemen in the countryside. I couldn’t fight with the pack on. If I put it down, I might never see it again, and if I hurt him, the rest of the village would be on his side. I had a sudden realisation of how easy it would be, while I was encumbered with the pack, to club me to death.

Whatever happened, I didn’t want to be beaten up with my own stick, so I gave him an excuse to return it without losing face. ‘I need my stick, I have a bad back.’ That was true enough.

‘No.’

I grabbed the stick, placing my hands outside his, and began to wrestle it from him. The stick was now a symbol of who controlled the situation. We were encircled by men, all smelling of alcohol. One sipped spirit from a pink plastic teacup belonging to a toy tea-service. I made eye contact with several of them, and said, ‘He has taken this stick from me, I need it to walk, I am walking the Royal Road.’ I wanted to impress them with the banality of it: I was no threat. Moments passed. No one backed him up. He had become isolated. He pulled back a fist, and again shaped to punch me in the face. I stared him in the eye; he made several feints to punch. When he didn’t carry
them through, I knew I had won. Violent men hit first and talk later; men who talk first don’t hit. I snatched back the stick. It now turned to farce for everyone except the man, who continued to fume with righteous indignation. He made pantomime lunges at me while two neighbours held him back. A woman, who looked unhappy enough to be his wife, came up crying, and hung on to one arm and begged him to come away.

‘Who is the head man in this village?’ I wanted an individual to deal with, not a mob. A quietly spoken man said, ‘I am Reynaldo, you can speak to me, what are you doing here?’

I took out my letter from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, which I kept in the waterproof map folder. I had asked the Ambassador for a brief letter of explanation, to confirm that, although I had a camera and tape recorder, I was not a spy, and should not be shot out of hand. What he gave me was magnificent.