Cloud Road (32 page)

The road descended in tight steep hairpins, the river at its side crashing through boulders into a much greater valley. In the airless canyon, the midday sun was fierce. We wove in and out of light and shade. It was two o’clock before I led Dapple over the old stone arch that bridged the main river and took us into the small town of Yanahuanca, or Blackrock. It was market day: hire cars were pulled up, the first vehicles I had seen for a week. The drivers hailed me: ‘Taxi! Taxi!’ Bemused, I looked over my shoulder to check that there was still a donkey on the end of the rope, and I had not simply been dragging the bags along the road.

Jaíme had recommended the Jamay Wasi hostel as the best in town, but implied that this didn’t mean much. However, I saw with glee that they had many small lawns that needed cutting.

The local council ran it. ‘You can’t keep the donkey here,’ said a very pretty woman on the desk, twirling an orchid under her chin, ‘it’s against council rules.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is unhealthy.’

I looked across to the yard, where men without
facemasks were paint-spraying a council lorry. ‘So is that.’

‘It’s not my hotel, I don’t make the rules.’

I took one of their depressing rooms, then went to the market and bought ten pounds of carrots for Dapple. He had earned rest and feed. When I came back, Jenifer and Mila, two fifteen-year-old girls in navy blue school uniforms, were petting him.

‘How much did you pay for him?’

‘250 soles.’

‘That’s expensive, round here –’

‘Don’t tell me.’

‘Where are you going to keep him? I have a small paddock, by the college. But it is the other side of the football stadium, we have to pass through it.’

‘That’s not a problem. Is it?’

‘If they charge us admission, you will pay for all of us?’

I thought it was her little joke. When we got there, it was match day, and there were five hundred people waiting for kick-off. We walked along the edge of the pitch, and laughter began to break out, then applause. The two teams were lining up for the officials. I stood Dapple on the end of the away team, and shouted ‘New signing!’ Even the away team laughed. The referee stopped to say hello. With a train of fifty children in tow, we left the far gate. The paddock had long lush grass to fatten up Dapple. I left a few carrots.

Walking back, I could see the town was squeezed into a narrow high-sided valley, making it very vertical. It had a touch of a Tuscan hill-town about it. Sheepskins lay drying by the side of the road. Freshly flayed, they still had a moist, pearly sheen to the inside. Two lambs sniffed at the base of the tail of one of them: I hoped it wasn’t
its mother.

Of the two schoolgirls, Jenifer was the boss. ‘It is not safe to leave him there at night, he might get stolen.’

‘That’s not a problem,’ I said. ‘I hope someone will steal him so I can claim on my insurance for the original purchase price.’

She gave me a ‘your little joke’ look.

‘At night we will take him somewhere safe, either to our house or find somewhere else.’ I liked the idea of finding a safe house for him: Dapple, International Donkey of Mystery. I gave them some money and arranged to meet them next day. The market was still busy. I bought fruit, and pondered the centrepiece of one stall: a donkey’s severed head. Around it were pots of nauseous-looking orange and brown fat. ‘Donkey-head fat,’ explained the owner, ‘everyone knows it is excellent for asthma and bronchial complaints.’ I wondered if Dapple could carry a donor card, his head useful at last.

I found a public phone on a telegraph pole. I rang Elaine to tell her she still had a live boyfriend and to find some ways to say I love you. She sounded relieved to hear from me. She had been feeling the separation more since returning home. I told her tales of Dapple to make her laugh, said my farewells, hung up, went to the college and begged use of one of their two computers to e-mail her. Then I changed some more money and rang her. She seemed bemused, and I wondered if she thought me foolish for calling again. I asked what she had been doing. She
mentioned
girlfriends, staying in a lot. It didn’t sound like her.

As I put down the phone, a man in western clothes approached me. ‘I am Reynald, I am head of education for the province, may I welcome you to Yanahuanca?’ I
bought us beer. ‘I am paid $150 a month, and I have almost no budget. It’s very rare to be able to do anything for the bright ones. Most can only learn a little. They lack outlook – any perspective or experience to know how much more there is than they have seen in their village or little town.’

In the evening I bumped into Jenifer and Mila. ‘We have a place for him in the
matadero
’ – a word I didn’t recognise. ‘They will lock him in with food and water, for two soles.’ I bought meat-filled doughnuts from a woman street vendor, and ate them sitting on a tiny stool on the pavement, chatting to her about my trip and Wales. Before bed, I remembered to look up
matadero
: it meant abattoir. In bed I planned trips I would make with Elaine, to warm places with clean water, pleasant donkey-free places.

After two days, the only offer to buy Dapple was from a taxi-driver with a face like the hands of a losing boxer. I would give Dapple to the schoolgirls before I would sell to him. To avoid meeting him in the only bar, I drank beer in a grocery shop. The owners’ daughter was a friend of Jenifer and Mila, and they were among the more prosperous citizens of an impoverished town. Sitting snug among the standing sacks of grain, I effortlessly diverted the conversation to the local economy, ‘You must often have to carry heavy sacks, a donkey would surely be useful to you.’

The wife flung up her hands. ‘Us, no, good Lord! We have no money for a donkey, we have nothing, nothing at all.’

I looked round the well-stocked shelves, their good clothes. ‘Very cheap to a good home.’

‘Have you tried the men in the market who deal in
potatoes? Some of them don’t have transport.’

‘What a good idea!’

All week I held out for 200 soles, but they all knew I couldn’t stay here forever. Twenty minutes before the only bus of the day left for the next town, I was haggling with half-interested people in the market. Men had opened Dapple’s mouth so roughly one nostril was bleeding. One of the boys pinched a nerve on his back leg, and made Dapple kick me. Kicking was about the one vice Dapple didn’t already have. I said, ‘If you don’t stop messing me about I’ll give him to the priest.’

A pleasant-looking couple offered 110 soles, £22. I waited ten minutes while they rushed round town collecting the money; some theirs, some borrowed. I said goodbye to Dapple for the last time, and left him to the existential horrors of being a working donkey with an allergy to motion. I hoped his new owners understood him better than I did.

I made the bus. As I sat down the last line of an old nursery rhyme came to me: ‘And then there was one!’ But I hadn’t heard the last of Dapple.

The bus had been sold by a company with a vestige of pride left, to one with none. No suspension, no springs in the seats, and the floor was a sheet of steel, slick with oil. As we went up the hairpins, I saw Yanahuanca dwindle, to a few blocks of coloured roofs and the dusty football pitch. They were resurfacing the dirt road, and had cut away the bushes that usually concealed the unprotected
edge: no money for a crash rail, or a kerb to push back a wayward wheel from the edge. It was a bone-shaking ride. I tried to jot down simple notes, but the ride was too rough. The marks on my pad looked like a farewell from a dying drunk. But you can get used to anything; the woman next to me was knitting and never missed a stitch.

We topped 13,000 feet at a place where the route was so convoluted we crossed a bridge over our own road. As we came out onto the level
altiplano
it began to drizzle. Figures waiting for the bus were muffled in heavy clothes, scarves wound round their heads, dark mummies. For the first time, I saw local people looking cold in the middle of the day.

The
altiplano
was poorly drained, the rough pasture pocked with standing water. Farms and houses huddled onto better-drained hummocks, as if it were fenland. Small cultivated hills were contoured with drains shining like sickles.

Lines of dust-caked adobe houses led us to the two colossal pits that make up the mining town of Cerro de Pasco. From these holes come copper, lead and zinc, metals which earn half the country’s total export value. Many people wore black woollen scarves over their faces to keep out the cold and the dust. It looked as if the town was being overrun by guerrillas. Before we descended into the first hole, we drove below a gated compound for foreign workers, a barracks village looking down over their work: the steel railway tracks, along which massive engines dragged lines of trucks to the cyclopean smelting sheds. Huge chimneys towered over all, feeding the funereal cloud that fitted the town like a lid. The compound even had a name: Bella Vista, Beautiful View.
Another metal first brought miners here. According to legend, one bitter night in 1569, Aari Capcha, a llama herder, built a fire against a rock. A stream of silver ran from it. How his campfire exceeded the 1,764°F needed to melt silver is not explained, but over half a billion dollars’ worth of silver has since been extracted.

The hotel was only two blocks from the bus station, but an elderly tricycle porter had been beaten to the work by younger men, so I let him ferry my bags through sleety air to the newly refurbished Hotel Arenales. After the rigours of the trail and the squalor of Yanahuanca, a spotless, freshly painted room was luxury. Just two things had been forgotten: heating and hot water. I ran enough water over my skinny body to wet it, soaped myself down and braced myself for the heroism of the rinse.

I rang Elaine and described recent life without a fleece, refreshed by a cold shower. ‘You’ll survive,’ she said, which I thought showed more stoicism than would have been on show if she had been washing her hair in water only guaranteed to stay liquid when moving.

The street was bustling and unpretentious: no patternbook plazas or pointless statues. It was strange to see real shops with doors and windows, and stickers for Visa, MasterCard and Diner’s Club International. There were smart displays of clothes and cameras, all priced in dollars, and luxuries like leather jackets. In fifteen minutes, I was wearing a new super-thick fleece. I realized how poor everyone’s clothes had been in Yanahuanca: I had been in the countryside so long that I had stopped seeing the poverty.

Mitsubishi four-wheel-drives and Toyota Land Cruisers prowled the streets: money from the mines. A huge street
market was full of tropical produce from the coast. A cloudburst darkened the sky, and I dodged into narrow lanes, avoiding chutes of water cascading from plastic awnings held up on scantling and string. People pulled their collars close and stamped their feet and complained about the cold. The smell of spices filled the air.

On one trestle was a glass tank full of attractive frogs, with knobbly green and buff skin. Next to the tank was a blender, and next to that, a pan of brown soup, which the young man was decanting into small bottles. ‘Very good for the lungs and the brain, for asthma, physical and mental tiredness, anaemia and nerves. Five soles a bottle.’

As I walked back to the hotel, buying chocolate, feeling satisfied with life, someone behind me began shouting. I slowly suspected they were calling me. I turned around and twenty yards away was a man waggling his hands behind his head, shouting, ‘What did you do with the donkey?’ He nudged his friends and said, ‘I told you there was a Gringo with a donkey in Yanahuanca! What did you do with it?’ he repeated, as the street stopped to listen.

‘I ate it.’

From Cerro de Pasco I was heading to another mining town, La Oroya, which my
Lonely Planet
guidebook alluringly described as ‘a cold, unattractive place’ with ‘attendant slag heaps’. La Oroya lies where the railway line heading directly inland from Lima meets the main routes along the Andes. From there, everyone assured me, I could catch the train south towards Huancayo, passing through the station of La Galera. At nearly 15,700 feet, it is the highest standard gauge railway station in the world. As many of its passengers have come straight up from sea level, the train carries oxygen cylinders to re-inflate the
more sensitive travellers.

The early morning bus to La Oroya was comfortable, and the roads were surfaced. I could write, and yesterday’s knitter could have done needlepoint. We wound out of town above the maw dug by The Volcano Mining Company. Far below, inhumanly scaled trucks scuttled over the neat terraces, their drivers like the
nearinvisible
performers in a vast flea circus. It is easy to contrast beautiful wilderness and desecrated urban landscapes. The guidebook described Cerro de Pasco as ‘a miserable place’, and so it is for knobbly green and buff frogs, but I took to it. It was a lot better than industrial South Wales valleys in the 1960s when Britain was a far richer country than Peru is today. It’s not pretty, but it has jobs and money, and the Sierra has too little of both. Money brings hope, and possibilities. A stone hut on the
altiplano
makes a picturesque photograph, but it is not what you would want for your own children. With a mining job, you find yourself inside a chicken diner filling your belly with the five-and-a-half soles special with free Inca Kola instead of pressing your nose to the glass and sending in your children to make the rounds of the tables, begging leftovers.

Whenever it stopped, the bus was boarded by women selling hot food wrapped in large leaves. Lake Junín appeared on the right. Nearly twenty miles long, it is the largest lake wholly within Peru, Titikaka being shared with Bolivia. Puna ibises delved the drier land above the road. Below us, yellow moorland grasses ran down to the green marsh encircling the lake. The shadows of the passing clouds bowled along the flanks of the opposing hills.

Great battles have been fought on the desolate plains
that surround the lake. When the Spanish were trying to pin down Atahualpa’s brilliant general Quisquis here, they found a mound of skulls and human bones of 2,000 dead killed by Atahualpa’s northern Incas just a year before, when they subdued the local Wanka nation. Most Wankas then joined the Spanish and the southern Incas to attack the northern faction, another opportunist alliance in the manoeuvrings which allowed an empire to be conquered by an expeditionary force small enough to fit into three buses like the one I sat in. Camping in the country had made me respect the toughness of the Spanish soldiers, and the strength of leadership demanded of Pizarro to hold the expedition together. He approached this area after a spell on the coast, with the prospect of open battle imminent. They were suffering from altitude sickness and fearful of ambush, and spent a night on a bare mountain. Pizarro’s secretary, Pedro Sancho, wrote that the men ‘remained continuously on the alert, with the horses saddled. They had no meal whatsoever, for they had no firewood and no water. They had not brought their tents with them and could not shelter themselves, so they were all dying of cold – for it rained heavily early in the night and then snowed. The armour and clothing they were wearing were all soaked.’