All the Creatures that Breathe, page 12
Jack and Casey stiffened their backs, looked at each other, and sat back in their chairs. They both had the same look on their faces; then, they looked back at the map studiously.
“I realize that’s a lot to think about,” Al said, “and some of it may even seem crazy, but this is a wild, crazy part of the planet.”
“You implied there’s a variation to Trip Two?’” Jack asked.
“Yes,” Alberto replied, “that’s a bit more straightforward. Whereas on the first part of the trip, you’ll be in the highlands, meeting Campesinos, I thought it might be a good variety to take a week-long trip into the Manus, into the Madre de Dios.”
“The Mother of God,” Claire said.
“Si,” Alberto replied. “The department was named after the Rio Madre de Dios.”
“Where the Mashco-Piro tribe is,” Jack offered.
“You know of them?” Al seemed surprised.
Jack shook his head. “Only the photos on the wall of the Explorer’s Club in Lima.”
Alberto had forgotten that Jim had some prints. He smiled his wide, toothy smile and touched his chest. “I took those photographs!”
Jack nodded approval.
“We could spend a week traveling upriver in the Manus. That way,” Al looked at Jack, “anthropologically, you’ll be able to observe and interact with both the Andean highland culture and the Amazonia. We might not have enough days to get that far up the river where the Mascho are … or could be. They move around, and no one knows exactly where they are at any given time.”
“Alberto,” Claire said, “these are two amazing trips. Tough to decide. Personally, I’m game for any version.” She motioned to Casey and Jack. “It’s your first time in Peru, so whatever you two want to do is good for me. I’ll be coming back anyway for fieldwork.”
“I think you’re right,” Alberto said, looking at the map. “They are fine trips. I also think you will love the Auzangate trek. You know…” Al’s tone became more reverent, “it will be something of a privilege for you all. Maybe you can think of it as a pilgrimage. You will experience more than just beautiful natural wonders. The mountains there, called Apus by the locals, are considered sacred beings at the center of ancient Andean spirituality.”
“Well,” Casey said, “I think we should try to commit right now. Otherwise, we could be up all night trying to decide.”
“I agree,” Al said, “because if you can, here and now, I can perhaps answer any questions you might have. For instance, your gear. You are geared for climbing and trekking. If you choose the Amazon, we’ll have to re-evaluate your clothing and gear — and what vaccinations you’ve had. Whichever trip you choose, I’ll need tomorrow to arrange everything. We can leave the following day.”
“Now?” Casey asked Jack and Claire. Both nodded, but neither said anything. Then they all studied the map.
Finally, Jack spoke. “I must confess, I feel strangely drawn to the Amazon. I don’t know why. But that could be for another trip. I’m also intrigued by the idea of exploring the country north and east of Ollantaytambo — did I say that correctly?” Alberto nodded. “I like the idea of hiking the road less traveled. I don’t know about a ‘lost community” high in the mountains like some sort of Shangri La but exploring tiny farming communities where nobody goes and doing some fishing sounds pretty good to me.” He looked at Casey, who was deep in thought. “Unless you want to do Machu Picchu.”
Casey didn’t say anything.
“I guess,” Claire said, “truth be told, I’d rather stay in the Andes than the Amazon. I’ve been reading about Ollantaytambo, and I’ve been excited to spend time there. If we go to the Amazon, we won’t see that city. But, as I said, I’m up for anything.”
That helped. Casey had already eliminated the Madre de Dios. “Okay. Now that you’ve both weighed in, we can say no to the Amazon.”
“Okay,” Alberto said. Putting one index card in his pocket.
The three friends all looked at each other. Then, Casey looked up at Alberto and said, “You’d think this would be easier.”
“No, this is good. I offered to help plan some potential world-class trips, and in ten minutes, you’ve made progress.”
“Do you have a suggestion regarding us choosing Macchu Pichu?” Casey asked.
Al cocked his head to one side and grimaced. “Two of you are archaeology students. You would like the citadel, but you all seem like the type of people who, like myself, are interested in exploring. There’s no more exploring at Machu Picchu.”
There was another moment of silence.
“Here’s a thought,” Alberto said, “after Ausangate and once we get to Ollantaytambo, the logistics don’t change a lot. If we strike out into lesser-known territory, we just buy food, put on our boots, and walk out the door.”
Jack wondered if Al knew he had again quoted the legendary mountaineer Bill Tillman, who famously said, “You can start an adventure by strapping on your boots and stepping out the door.” Then again, Alberto might be Tillman reincarnated.
Al continued, “If you decide late in the game to make the trek to Machu Picchu instead, I can make the arrangements in a day. There’s talk about the government regulating the hiking traffic on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and getting permits in advance, but we’re a few years away, I think.”
“I like that,” Casey said. “It gives us some flexibility and allows the trip to evolve as circumstances arise, which is more our style.”
“Excellent,” Alberto said. “Tomorrow, we can pack and buy some supplies. I can meet you here in the hotel lobby after breakfast, say, nine o’clock, and we’ll go to the San Pedro Market. As far as transportation goes, I’ll get a private minibus, called a colectivo here.” Alberto handed Casey the remaining postcard. “On the back of the card is an estimated dollar amount for food and transportation.”
“We’ll be ready,” Casey said.
“Before I go, how are you all feeling with the altitude?
Casey, Claire, and Jack all looked at each other.
“Claire and I got whacked when we got here,” Casey said, “but we seem better today.”
“No problems yet,” Jack said.
“Good,” Alberto said. “Cambridge is, what, forty feet above sea level? We’re at about 11,000 feet here but the Ausangate trek averages over 13,000, and there are two passes over 16,000. Luckily, you’ve got a month in Peru, so we’ll have plenty of time to acclimatize if any of you get altitude sickness. If anyone gets it severely, I’ve got some Diamox … we just have to make sure there are no existing liver or kidney disease or any drug allergies. And that none of you are pregnant.” He pointed at Casey and Jack.
Both said, “All clear.”
“You guys are all fit, and you’ve had a few days here in Cusco to acclimatize. If we take it slow for the first two days, I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
The whole decision-making took less than an hour. Claire spoke only a couple of times, as did Jack, but they gathered a wealth of information.
Later, as they spoke about the trip at bedtime, Claire told Casey how excited she was to be in Cusco. But Casey had already drifted off to sleep. She looked over at him. It had been a long time since they’d made love. He is in expedition mode, she thought. She was fine with that.
j
The walk to the San Pedro Market was a pleasant one. From the Plaza de Armas, they walked south along Calla Manta, past the Incan stone foundations, past Plaza San Francisco, and through the stone archway to the market. The closer they got, the more street vendors and ladies in traditional layered dresses there were. They sat next to the street selling dried fruit, nuts, popcorn, and fabrics. There were tiny local shops nestled ever-closer together selling all manner of things. With Alberto’s dickering help, Claire bought a pretty alpaca sweater for $12. She loved it. “It’ll be a nice layer in the mountains.”
At the market, their senses were taxed. The colors, the humanity, the smells of food cooking in stalls, and the din of people speaking in Quechua and Spanish and vendors playing music struck them head-on. Alberto had brought three large cloth shopping bags. He purchased a bag of nectarines and two bunches of bananas, oranges to make juice with, and some frozen chickens. Al found some small bags of spices. He also picked up small quantities of local fruit, like lucuma, which has a hard, green outer shell and soft yellow flesh with a dry texture and sweet flavor, that’s often likened to a mix of sweet potato and butterscotch. There were also granadilla, a sweet passionfruit, and chirimoya (custard apple) which is dark yellow. World traveler Mark Twain had called it “the most delicious fruit known to man.”
Alberto worked from stall to stall, buying avocados, tomatoes, and potatoes. Because Al was doing the purchasing, the prices did not fluctuate to gringo prices. The market was a marvel of supply. You could get anything and everything at the market or within a block of it. For sale were pens, kitchen magnets, lighters, key rings, bottle warmers, dolls, and cigarettes. Chicha beer could be found under some of the stall’s tables if one dug a little. In one stall alone, you could purchase shoes and potatoes, bottles of Inca Cola, tablets of yellow-lined paper, and carburetor kits for either Ford or Chevy trucks, “no matter the year.”
With the market shopping finished, Alberto parted ways. He was off to arrange the van, he told them. “Be ready early tomorrow morning,” he suggested. “We’ll leave your hotel by six-thirty.”
They said their goodbyes, and Casey waited for Alberto to get about thirty yards away before telling Claire and Jack, “Oh! I forgot something I wanted to ask him,” and jogged after Al. Jack and Claire watched them speak for only a minute until Casey returned.
“I had wanted to ask him about the Sendero if they are active where we’re going.”
Claire said, “Last Christmas, my dad told me to be careful of them, but except for that assassination attempt in Lima in April, I haven’t heard anything. What’d he say?”
“He said there hasn’t been any history of them harassing anyone where we’re going on this trek. He also told me he was planning on giving us a briefing on the five-hour drive to the town of Tinki, where we’ll start the trek.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Jack said. “You worried about them?”
Casey weighed that for a moment and said, “Not with Al there. I think he can handle anything you throw at him. You know, I just believe that old saying that chance favors the prepared mind. We’ll know more tomorrow.”
SIXTEEN
“Remember the Apu”
The friends were packed by five-thirty and in the lobby, ready to go by six in the morning.
The Colectivo, outfitted with two full-sized spare tires and a homemade luggage rack on top, stood parked in front of the foyer. Al had hired an “outdoorsy-looking” driver named Alonzo. There were four bench seats in the back, and one in the far rear had been permanently removed to make room for gear stowage. Everybody was ready to go.
As they loaded their gear into the back of the van, Jack and Alberto looked at Claire and smiled.
“What?” she exclaimed. Alberto quickly looked away and positioned the gear to keep it from jostling around. Jack didn’t. He kept up a wry smile.
“What?!” she said again to him.
“You look really cute in your adventure outfit, that’s all.”
“Shut up,” she said, also smiling.
Casey grinned at them as he walked past. “She does, doesn’t she?”
They all got into the van, with Alberto in the forward bench seat directly behind Alonzo. Opposite Al was Jack, with Claire and Casey in the seat behind. All three friends carried fanny packs with their money, passports, and cameras.
The drive to the tiny hamlet of Tinki felt longer than five hours. Some stretches of the road were macadam, some were under construction, and some were paved. Within an hour, the massif Ausangate and its neighboring mountains could be seen looming on the horizon through the windshield.
Alberto motioned to them and reiterated, “Remember the ‘Apu,’” he said, “are how the locals often refer to the mountains, but in the old days, Apu also was the name given to powerful mountain spirits. The Incas also used Apu to refer to the sacred mountains themselves. Each mountain had a unique spirit, with the spirit going by the name of its mountain domain. Because of your chosen fields, I’ll explain more about the mythology over supper one night if you’d like.”
The van ambled along about forty miles per hour. Alberto pointed ahead. “Up here, we’re going to pass through the small town of Urcos. There’s a beautiful lagoon there that holds trout. If you don’t have any fishing luck on the trek, we could try here on the way back. But you’ll have many opportunities to fish over the month.
An hour-and-twenty-minutes later, the van rolled into the village of Tinki. Each person unfolded themselves from the vehicle, plunking their feet onto the dirt parking spot. Tinki was a traditional Andean village with less than a dozen buildings.
“This is where we meet your arriero and the horses,” Alberto said.
Casey and Jack looked at Claire; “Arrieros are muleteers … burro drivers, she said. “Or, in this case, horse wranglers.”
“I’ll go find him,” Alberto said.
Everyone stretched and walked around. Casey and Claire strolled through the alleys between the farmhouses. “This is strictly an agricultural community,” Claire said. She held her hand above her eyes to shield the sun and scanned the countryside. “I don’t see any Incan stonework.”
Jack was already wandering around the village with his camera. He had a disarming, genial way about him, and he seemed to exude kindness and compassion. People who typically did not want their photograph taken or might want to charge a fee often asked Jack to take theirs — no charge.
As he walked around the back of a tiny farmhouse, he almost stumbled onto a Quechua woman weaving a sarape on a loom. She was plump or appeared so because of the many layers of clothing she wore, and on her head was a peculiar hat; it looked like an upside-down pan, embroidered with a multi-colored cloth, and fringed for its entire rim with short, dangling pieces of gold yarn. She was sitting on a colorful blanket on the ground. Her loom was constructed of a piece of Rebar driven into the ground, some sticks, and a short section of thin PVC tubing.
“Buenos días,” Jack said.
The woman smiled, blushed, and shyly replied, “Buenos días.”
Using the few Spanish words he had picked up from his walk around Cusco with Eliana and Maria, Jack asked, “¿Puedo tomar tu fotografía? The woman seemed embarrassed but nodded approval. After taking a few photos, Jack bowed forward on the grass. Leaning on the knuckles of one hand so that she might look up at him, he made the eye contact he was searching for and said, “Muchas gracias. He made her smile again, and once more, she blushed. Then he left.
He walked to the front of the stuccoed cement house where Alonzo had parked the van. Alberto and another man walked up the road leading two horses. Casey, Claire, and their driver had all the backpacks unloaded and placed off the road on a grassy spot.
“All set,” Alberto said as he and the arriero swung the horses by their bridles around so they were abreast of the packs. They were nice healthy horses. One had a sawbuck saddle, and the other had a western saddle with a cleverly built rack made out of more PVC pipe with large, empty canvas bags hanging from it.
Claire, who had ridden some in her youth, looked at the improvised saddle.
“Everyone,” Alberto said, “this is my friend Pedro. He will tend the horses and help with setting up and breaking down camp and with cooking.”
The friends greeted Pedro and shook his hand. Pedro was tall for a Peruvian. He had a tattered Carhart jacket, an old felt sombrero with the brim permanently turned up in the front, and he had a sparse, black mustache that did not meet in the middle but turned down around both corners of his mouth. He looked very much like someone who might have ridden with Pancho Villa.
“And this boy,” continued Alberto, patting the first horse’s head, “Is Sucio. He likes to take dirt baths — and that one is Perezoso. He needs encouragement sometimes. Now, you guys are climbers, so you’re used to carrying your packs, but these horses can carry up to 250 pounds. One of these pack bags has my and Pedro’s gear, along with the mess kit and cooking tent. Casey, the gear list you gave me had tents enough for you three, sleeping bags, and such, so we should be all set. I recommend you lighten your loads a lot, and Pedro will pack your gear in the saddle-pack bags. Put it all in separate piles, and he’ll keep it that way. You’ll each have your horse-pack bag, and your backpacks should feel lighter than daypacks.”
Each friend did as Al suggested. They kept out camera gear, fly rods, water bottles, a small first aid kit, snack food, and hiking poles. Before long, Pedro was ready.
The packs were indeed light, and it felt good. They were underway, and it was not yet noon.
This was it. Pedro went ahead with the horses, and Claire, Casey, and Jack followed Alberto on a wide dirt road out of the village. Dry fieldstone walls two feet high lined both sides of the road. The brown rolling hills on the landscape, dotted here and there with sparse conifer trees, gave way in the distance to the serrated white peaks — the Apus.
“Look at those hills,” said Jack, pointing his trekking pole at the glacier-covered peaks in almost every direction. “I’m getting pumped.” They passed a simple sign that read, Upis Alto with an arrow. A trail left the road heading southwest toward the mountains. It was slow-going, and no one wanted to rush and run the risk of getting altitude sickness.
Once they were outside of Tinki, alpacas seemed to be everywhere. Grazing a few hundred yards off, a herd of several dozen of the camelids watched the group through shaggy, Ziggy Stardust hairdos. “Did you notice they all had this little shit-eating grin,” said Casey, “like they know we’re idiots?”
“They might be right,” Jack said.
They were in the puna now, a diverse grassland ecosystem that exists above treeline and below the permanent snowline. Assemblages of cushion and mat-forming species of grasses characterize the puna vegetation. None of the varied grasses grow very tall. The alpacas seemed to have plenty to graze on. Several birds flitted about the camp. Jack noticed two finches and a couple of tunnel-dwelling miner birds nearby.
