Sketches of moments

Leonie has a new project over at Weekends Collected. Already the posts have begun to accumulate, building a collection of stories in words and photographs about "the times that are lived within the space of our arm’s reach… the places that are the source of our ‘humanness’… the foundations on which the rest of our life is built."

I've contributed a short post; please think about submitting something yourself.

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Photos and original text © 2011 Pete McGregor

Scarred for life

The first scar left the most lasting impact — the tip of your left middle finger vanished when, almost as long ago as you can remember, the car door slammed on that tiny finger. You remember nothing of the pain, nothing of the trauma; you have a few mental images — vague forms, impressions — of the car, your parents, the house, the driveway, the garden and the ash tree that was always there in front of the house, always the first thing seen beyond the big ceiling-to-floor windows and before the view over the market garden (usually a chaos of weeds, long dry grass and an occasional caterpillar-raddled cabbage). Of the trip to hospital you remember nothing, nor do you have anything but the faintest of impressions of the hospital itself, and those impressions might well have arisen from other visits, perhaps the apparently long stay when you had bronchitis or pneumonia or something similarly life-threatening at that age. Whether the illness preceded or followed the incident with the car door, you don’t remember.

You do recall coming home in the car after hospital — you were told the incident happened on your return after the operation on your hand, but you think it might have been after the illness and protracted stay — and saying nothing, refusing to speak during the entire journey, until someone (your mum probably) got out at the letter box and collected the mail and your first word since leaving the hospital was, “Bills!” An indication you were grumpy, that the world clearly conspired to wreck your life. You don’t know how old you were at the time, only that you hadn’t yet started school but could walk and talk — the latter only when you felt like talking, mind you.

Now, all these decades later, you look at the scarred, shortened fingertip with its deformed nail, and the zipper-like scar at the base of your thumb where the doctor peeled back the skin, folded your finger so the injured tip fitted into the incision, then sewed up the wound. When the skin had grown over, the doctor cut the finger free and sutured the skin on the fingertip and at the base of the thumb. This is why you have scars in both places. At least, this is what you were told, but you don't remember having had your finger sewed to your palm. The position and form of the scars agrees with this explanation, but you’ve not heard of this approach to fixing fingertips so you wonder whether your recollection, like so much memory, might be wrong.

Now, all these decades later, the scar at the base of your thumb remains as clear and pale and tough as ever. You spread your fingers to stretch the skin of your palm so you can see the scar as clearly as possible, and suddenly you’re struck by its faint resemblance to pre-European Maori rock drawings — in particular, one that featured on a New Zealand postage stamp when you were still a boy; a stamp released when you were still years away from your teens and when you still possessed the small-boy lust for possessing things like postage stamps and dead insects. The stamp collecting soon faded away, although you still have your badly-assembled album, full of mostly worthless stamps, but the insect-collecting persisted late into your teens. Later, the desire vanished; now, you feel no urge to collect the fascinating invertebrates you come across from time to time, although you sometimes photograph them (which seems a far more satisfactory way to extend and share your enjoyment).[1]

 

The next scar arrived when you were eleven; you tripped while running at school and ripped your right knee open on the asphalt (the only grass at your school grew in the guttering). A teacher put you in a taxi and sent you to A&E where someone stitched the wound. You don’t remember the stitching but you do remember the attractive nurse who flattered you with probably bullshit comments about how brave you were because you never flinched. You were proud of those stitches, just as you were proud of the four you added to the same knee when you tripped while running at home and sliced it open on a sharp edge of concrete. You began counting your tally of stitches, then.

Now, so many decades after the first scar, you have to think hard to remember how many times you’ve been sliced open, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, sometimes as a precaution and sometimes because you weren’t cautious enough. You no longer count sutures, though, because the doctors most often sew you up with a single stitch like the closure on a sack of rice. You wonder what stories your scars will tell to the person who lays you out on a cold table you cannot feel under bright lights you no longer see. Eventually those scars will vanish, but the breaks in your bones might tell other stories — fewer, you think, with relief — to anyone who might for god-knows-what reason retrieve them. But so much will have been lost. Who will know those healed ribs broke in a long fall; who might guess how your friends helped you down from the cliff, rowed you across the bay, flew with you to the hospital and drove you home? Given one paragraph, could you recover a book?

A white gull flies past, the black on its back and the upper surface of its wings hidden from beneath so the bird seems almost invisible against the pale, overcast sky. As the gull flies past, you see its head moving from side to side, looking, searching, ready to drop at the possibility of anything edible — the slowly inflating corpse of a road-killed possum, perhaps, or maybe a featherless chick fallen from a nest. You imagine the pale gull falling from the sky like an angel to consume the dead, and you count yourself lucky your scars healed: that you still have the chance to accumulate more, so many decades after the first.

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1. You do accept the need to collect “specimens” for scientific purposes, but you’re glad you no longer need to do this.

Photos and original text © 2012 Pete McGregor

The journey at night

Driving home at night you see immense clouds piled up, illuminated by a hidden moon, and you think of alien planets; you think of places humans will never go. But if through some unimaginable process you stood on one of those planets, what would you feel, standing alone, looking up at a sky like that, as far from home as any human had ever ventured, impossibly far from anyone you knew, so far from anyone at all that the rest of your species might never have existed? Terror? Panic? Probably. But perhaps you might also feel an overwhelming joy, an ecstasy you could never have imagined until now, until this moment when you stand somewhere no one has ever stood, looking at an elegiac sky no one until now has ever seen, ready to explore a world where you have almost no idea what to expect. You hope to find something alive but have no idea what form it might take, nor even whether you’ll recognise it as a living thing. If the metaphor of being torn between conflicting emotions has any truth, you have already been dismembered.

Driving home at night you see eyes shining from the long grass clogging a roadside drain. Knowing the eyes belong to a cat, you slow down; you expect the cat to crouch and wait but know cats sometimes misjudge a car’s speed and dash for the security of their own territory. You relax as the car cruises past and the eyes wink out. Further along, a tiny hedgehog wanders on the road as if following some convoluted, invisible path; the little creature stops, runs a little way, turns, trots a little further, returns to the middle of the road. You slow down and pass carefully, hoping it survives the night yet torn by the knowledge that this beautiful little animal lives here at the expense of other lives with histories here that stretch back millennia. Yet you could not run it down and save those other lives. A year ago a hedgehog ran out in front of the car as you drove home one night and you’ve never forgotten the dreadful crunch as you crushed it. You could not deliberately run down an animal no matter how righteous the rationale. One death won’t matter to the population, but it matters to the individual.

Driving home at night you cannot hear the crickets singing in the dry grasses. You cannot hear the ruru calling from the dark inside the macrocarpas, nor the rustle of the poplar leaves shimmering in the moonlight. You hear only the rush of air, the sound of tyres on tarmac, the engine humming and the intermittent rattle of something loose in the boot. You know the night wind outside will feel cool but not cold, but you know this only because you’ve switched the heater off. The car smells slightly of chlorine from the swimming gear you used this afternoon but you imagine the night will smell like cow shit and silage because right now you’re driving past a dairy shed. When you drive somewhere, what you imagine is as important as what you sense.

You could drive forever on a night like this, driving in moonlight with wild clouds, with strange things slipping through the shadows and stranger things inhabiting the edges of your imagination. Your destination no longer matters because you have already arrived; here, driving home at night you are already at home.

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Photo: In the fjords of southern Chile, December 2011.

Photos and original text © 2012 Pete McGregor

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Shortly before I left for South America, I stayed with friends in Wellington and attended a screening of Werner Herzog's film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Immediately after the film I had a few hours on my own, so I jotted down some thoughts about the film. Here they are. I'll resume the South American posts shortly.

Thirty-two thousand years ago, prehistoric humans drew pictures of astonishing sophistication on the walls of the Chauvet cave in the south of France. The depictions of movement, the use of line and shading, the way the artists used the contours of the walls to emphasise the form of the animals — these and other aspects of the artwork seem impossibly advanced for humans who coexisted with Neanderthals. Yet the works can't be forgeries: calcite crystals which take thousands of years to form have grown on top of some of the drawings.

A typical documentary might have delivered the usual 60 Minutes type of product, with straightforward interviews clear, to-the-point narration and an arguably slanted perspective. But Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a film by Werner Herzog, and viewers should expect anything but the straightforward. Much of the film does provide extended footage of the drawings — maybe too extended for some, although I found them so beautiful and fascinating I didn't mind the repeated shots. Instead, I enjoyed the freedom to look again, to consider what I saw, to pay attention to the details — was the apparent duplication of an eye a second attempt after the first appeared out of position (and if so, why did the artist not erase the failed attempt); why do some aspects of a drawing seem roughly sketched or inaccurate when the remainder appears so lifelike, and so on.

But Herzog seems interested in more than just the wonderful drawings and more than their artists, about whom we know almost nothing other than what their art suggests. His fascination also — perhaps primarily — focuses on the most fundamental of subjects: what it means to be human. Sometimes he queries this directly, although not always literally — one of the things I love about Herzog is his ability to ask questions that require careful thought not just to answer but to understand; his questions encourage exploration far more than they demand answers.

This focus on the meaning of being human includes all the people in his film. The prehistoric artists, yes, certainly — but also the diverse experts he interviews. In the first interview, Herzog interrogates a young archaeologist about his background. Why should this young man's career have any bearing on a film ostensibly about the Chauvet cave drawings? Perhaps precisely because it makes him more human. Another example: a palaeontologist demonstrates how a simple wooden device extends the range and accuracy of a thrown spear (Australians know this as a woomera, although this isn't mentioned in the film). After the expert's unconvincing attempt, Herzog suggests prehistoric humans were probably much better at throwing spears, to which the expert agrees: I'd probably be very poor at spearing horses, he says. This dry humour makes him more human — he’s not just an expert, he’s one of us.

This humanizing humour crops up often during the film — references to Fred Astaire and Baywatch find their way in, along with Herzog’s typically acerbic commentary — and this also, I believe, exemplifies his concern with the nature of being human. As far as we know, we're the only animals with a sense of humour (many animals play, but play is not humour; the "humour" we identify in animals is our own interpretation, also known as anthropomorphisation — a word, incidentally, that should be ritually speared if an alternative existed), and to introduce humour into a potentially dry, albeit fascinating, film is to make it more human.

But perhaps I'm overanalysing, and to me the film came dangerously close to failing when some experts began extending analysis into interpretation. One of the cave's guardians explains the excellent work that enabled her to identify an individual artist and follow his work throughout the cave; however, she then begins to interpret the drawings — in glowing terms, of course, but the language sounds like that of modern art criticism, although far less convoluted. Fashions in art change; what was avant-garde in the twentieth century has become tedious now, and in Cave of Forgotten Dreams Herzog overtly makes the claim that while we are bound by time, those prehistoric artists were not: some drawings are separated by 5000 years or more, a span incomprehensible to us. An accomplishment like the art of the Chauvet cave cannot be analysed appropriately using the language of contemporary art — nor does it deserve to be so ill-treated.

In the end, my overriding response to the film was emotional rather than analytical. I couldn't help feeling close to overcome by the thought of a human being thirty thousand years ago scratching at those walls with charcoal in the light of a guttering flame; a human utterly unaware of the significance of his actions (or could it have been her actions? — Herzog never asks the question); someone with no understanding of the concept of "art", drawing on those walls simply because he felt compelled to do so. Did his companions consider him odd, a little weird, or did they hold him in awe? How is it possible we know so little about those artists yet can look on their works and be so moved?

Perhaps this is true for most, perhaps all, of us: that in the end we will be unknown, and the only clues to who we were will be our works. Who, then, might leave a legacy that moves our successors — whomever or whatever they might be — as much as that of the artists of the Chauvet cave now moves us?

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Photos:
1. Puerto Natales, southern Chile. What motivated this? What do the people who live and work here think of this? How long will it survive? All I know is the boat — the canvas, the cave wall — will never sail again.

2.  Abandoned bunker, Godley Head, Lyttelton harbour.
3.  Street art, Ushuaia. Do I detect the influence of Banksy?

Photos and original text © 2012 Pete McGregor

The Authentic World

In Arequipa I rent a little room at the Hostal Regis ^[1]; cheap, comfortable with plenty of character (French colonial, apparently), and like most hostels in this range, slightly run down. A little wooden writing table sits against one wall; two simple chairs, the bed and and night table make up the rest of the furniture. The only thing on the pale pink walls other than the usual grimy marks is a mirror, which I try to avoid. The white ceiling has cracks and water stains; the floor is old, polished wood. The room feels well-used — comfortable and cosy and with its little desk it feels like the kind of place I could settle down and work hard at writing.

But Arequipa offers little other than a place to relax for a day. For others, the churches, the monastery, the other architectural works, the ascent of Volcan Misti, the tours to Colca Canyon and other places must seem like enough for days of exploration and excitement; I, on the other hand, prefer to watch the actual life of the city, the present taking place among the remains of the past. Being crammed in a minibus with others to travel for two days to stand shoulder to shoulder in a crowd of strangers for a brief view of condors (which I might see in Patagonia in far more preferable circumstances) doesn't appeal, and while the mountains around Arequipa have a character of their own, after Huaraz they seem low and muted. Here I've enjoyed my room and the good cafés and the walks around town, but I want to keep moving; the restlessness drives me on; Patagonia calls. I decide to continue to Puno in the morning.

From where does this restlessness arise? Was Chatwin right when he speculated humans are essentially nomadic? Sometimes the restlessness feels like a compulsion, but I wonder whether I'm travelling towards something or running from it. But from what, or whom?

Earlier in the afternoon I'd visited La Canasta for a coffee and struck up a conversation with a Canadian in his seventies. Bob enjoyed referring to himself as "the old goat", emphasising the phrase with an impish grin. He wore a Captain Ahab beard and had been well tanned by the Peruvian sun. He'd first come to Peru almost thirty years ago as an irrigation engineer working on a massive project funded by the World Bank and ever since, he'd been spending half the year in Canada and half here. Converting the desert into productive agricultural land still continues, he said. I didn't say how I felt deserts needed protection from development just as much as many other land types, but did say how beautiful I'd found the deserts I'd passed through in Peru. He seemed to understand that.

But who benefits from these irrigation schemes, I asked, the local people or the big companies?
He leaned forward and tapped the table with a long, tanned finger. You've hit the nail right on the head, he said, and went on to explain how the locals worked so hard for so little for the companies reaping the profits.
If you complain they just tell you to go and find work somewhere else — if you can.
They walk such long distances, he added, and described the places they lived. I recognised some — the kind I'd seen from the bus, the kind that had filled me with horror.
Some of them don't even have roofs, Bob said. Although retired, he worked with local communities, trying to improve their lot. Mostly irrigation, I think. The changes he'd seen saddened him. When he'd arrived, Colca had been beautiful; now the changes were too much, too fast. He'd tried to tell some of them, no, you don't need electricity here, but it was no good, they all wanted electricity and TVs and other modern things.

Later I wondered how he reconciled his desire to help improve the lives of the people he clearly loved while not wanting their lives to change. Perhaps he wanted only certain changes — those that fulfilled his own desire to help but not those that allowed those people much greater control over their own destinies.
He'd admitted his preferences didn't matter, and when he said he wouldn't be around much longer he sounded almost as if he relished the idea of his own extinction — perhaps because he wouldn't see the changes that had already begun to sadden him. I liked him, liked his compassion and his love for the place and its people, and I hope his work remains valued, that he's remembered as someone who made a difference for the right reasons.

The bus crawls out of Arequipa with the air conditioning turned off; already the air has turned hot and stuffy. A man with uncoordinated limbs and a severe speech impediment stands at the front of the bus and with great effort manages to deliver a long speech, of which I understand a few words. He starts moving down the aisle, forcing lollies on the passengers. Later he'll return collecting payment or the uneaten lollies. This is a way of life on all but the high-end buses everywhere I've travelled so far in South America.

We stop to pick up two women with a huge load of boxes of produce and bales of grass and straw. Quarter of an hour later we stop again to load a pile of enormous blue bags of potatoes. People on the bus begin complaining angrily about the painfully slow progress; someone starts stamping his feet and others take it up, drumming on the floor, shaking the bus. The driver berates the potato loaders — ineffectively, of course. Patience and acceptance seem unusual here — at traffic lights, for example, the moment the lights turn green horns begin blaring. An instant response isn't good enough; it's as if the person in the car at the head of the queue is to blame for the person further back not being at the head of the queue.

Outside Arequipa the conductor moves through the bus, closing the windows and at last turning on the air conditioning. We pick up speed and I gaze out at the stark mountains where high up a little snow still clings. There at least I can see no sign of humans. High mountains can be a last refuge because they offer nothing material, nothing that can be exploited. Yet even those mountains can sometimes be desecrated; not satisfied with revering them, we mark them with the signs of our veneration — crosses on summits, swastikas painted on rocks. Sometimes even the non-material gifts of mountains become a reason for leaving our marks — for example, while delighting in the ascent of a difficult climb, we leave a line of bolts on a buttress — and sometimes we desecrate simply in the attempt to immortalise ourselves — graffiti aren't confined to fences, buildings and railway sidings.

Yet this is how the world is. In Puno in the evening while talking with Stephen from DC I mention the idea I'd discussed with Bob — that in a sense everything is authentic. I point to the wood-fired pizza oven where we wait for our orders. That's not part of traditional Peruvian culture, I say. He grins. I explain how I think cultures can't be static, how I admire more than regret the way Peru and other places have capitalised on their history and culture while also providing what the tourists want — wood-fired pizza, for example (but not authentic pizza, as my Italian friends later point out — what's being offered is the abomination from the United States). Yes, the loss of traditional ways of life saddens me. Here in Peru it's still strong in places but it's inevitably weakening and will eventually survive only as scheduled shows for tourists. But despite the protestations of the romantics, traditional ways of life were and are hard and consequently short. Who can blame those forced to live those kinds of lives for seeking a more comfortable existence? Whether the modern lifestyle really lives up to the expectations of those who desire it is questionable — I suspect mostly it doesn't, but at least those seeking it can hope it might. Nevertheless, the gentle, wood-fired-pizza guy in jeans and T-shirt (and who looks disconcertingly like Willem Dafoe) is to me just as authentic as the women in their colourful, traditional dress and cowboy hats — this is the authenticity of the present.

I'm not sure Stephen's convinced. I doubt Bob was. I doubt many others would be, particularly those who prefer to call themselves travellers not tourists and claim to be searching for authenticity. Still, for the moment I'll stick to my assertion that what we think of as authentic is mostly the unpreservable past being left behind by the present, and what we think of as fake is often part of the authentic present.

At ten to midday the conductor starts the video to satisfy the demands of those like the man next to me who apparently see the journey as a necessary evil — those who have been reading newspapers, playing portable video games, sleeping, talking on phones, and ignoring the beautiful, sere, stony desert through which we're passing. Am I the only one who loves these tenacious, flowering cacti, the shrivelled plants, the high mountains under a sky streaked with mare's tails, this land like a gasp?

At 12:18 p.m. we pass a sign saying "Zona de Vicuñas", and there, a short way off in the desert, a vicuña lifts its head. Lithe, golden-brown, the pale under its belly extending a little way further up its body. Further on, four more, then more still. Does anyone else see them, even when we pass a family right next to the road?

The bus pauses at the Putahuasi pay station, then drives on. A dust devil, swirling; a small, simple shed with grey walls and a yellow thatched roof; many vicuñas; a few llamas; mountains on the encircling horizon. Soon after, we pass a 22-wheel lorry on its side, a similar lorry waiting while men transfer gas bottles from the overturned truck. This time, everyone on the bus gawks.

The sense of altitude increases. We stop briefly at Imata near a strange monument of a flamingo with outstretched wings. A caracara flies past and another perches on a rock as we leave the tiny town. I feel so high I never want to descend; coming down will be as figurative as literal. I love this landscape: bleak but not unrelentingly arid; small waterways, half stream, half tarn, in shallow valleys; the hills of the altiplano rolling gently towards the sky — the sky, through which we drive. Somewhere in all this emptiness we pass a small cemetery crowded with crosses tilted at various angles and enclosed by a low adobe wall. A sign says 4528 m. Can we go any higher?

Apparently not. We begin the gradual descent, past a lake among yellow-brown hills. A small flock of flamingoes feeds near the shore. More lakes  — Andean geese, coots, teal, more flamingoes. Another accident — a van rear-ended by a truck —  and again the bus passengers turn from the dreadful video.

A caracara sits like a sentinel on a rock above the road. We stop in a small, quiet town — the sort where I feel like getting off just because I know no one and am known by no one; the kind that offers the dream of vanishing forever. After the bus has set down and picked up passengers the conductor opens the vents in the roof and as the bus picks up speed the wind rushes and howls in a way utterly fitting this landscape.

But someone gets up and closes the vent.

At Juliaca the light comes from another time, another world. On the outskirts the busy streets also appear curiously deserted, the contradiction disorienting. This is how one might imagine the streets of a city after some catastrophe — an epidemic, perhaps — with a few survivors mingling with the ghosts of those who no longer live there. Further in, the town looks like a scene from Blade Runner, with people everywhere, jostling, dodging tricycle and motorcycle taxis, squeezing past innumerable stalls, somehow functioning amid the chaos. Everyone seems to be welding, fixing things, making things in small dim workshops or outside on the dusty, potholed streets. We drive past an open shed, dark, full of big carcases hanging on hooks; past a man in a green and yellow dragon suit striding along the street, clutching the dragon's head while his own head hangs between hunched shoulders as if depressed. For all the horror of the place — almost everything the opposite of where I feel most at home — I like Juliaca, or at least find it fascinating. Here I could be lost and anonymous; for the first time, a plane flying overhead seems like a link to a world I'm not ready to rejoin.

I still don't know whether I'm running away or travelling forward, and even less idea who or what drives me.

A flock of Andean gulls with their beautiful black faces. Straw stooked as it was in New Zealand before I was born. Three ostriches (not rheas) in a small paddock as we leave Juliaca, one of the strangest places through which I've passed.

Finally we reach Puno, where I take a taxi to the Hostal Los Piños. On the way, a rat scampers in a street, but it turns out to be only a brown plastic bag swirled by the wind. Rats, I suspect, will outlive us, but perhaps these ubiquitous scraps of plastic, the symbol of our dependence on oil and our wilful rejection of caring for our only home, have become the new rats of the modern world.

I think I prefer the old rats — the authentic rats.

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Notes:
1. “Hostal” is the usual spelling in South America. 

Photos (I have no photographs from the bus journey from Arequipa to Puno. These words, with photographs from elsewhere, will have to suffice):
1. A small village in Bolivia, from the train between Oruro and Uyuni.
2. The road to Chimbote from Trujillo, in northern Peru.
3. The Isla del Sol on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia.
4. Salt pan just outside Oruro, from the train to Uyuni
5. Flute player in the Valley of the Moon, La Paz. Clearly not a vertigo sufferer.
6. Caracara on one of the summits of the Muela del Diablo near La Paz
7. Coastal desert on the road from Trujillo to Chimbote.

Photos and original text © 2011 Pete McGregor

Leaving Huaraz

 

The dueño at La Familia Meza shakes my hand and mumbles something sincere and incomprehensible in Spanish. I manage to make out something about recommending the hostel to people I meet in Lima, and I'm more than happy to do so. The hostel's been a wonderful base: the people welcoming, kind and helpful; the rooms simple but comfortable; the showers as good as I've had in South America; the kitchen functional; the tables with plenty of room for friends; the views from the rooftop patio inspirational. Another hotel that's developed from a place to sleep into a place with the feel of home, and not entirely because of the wonderful people with whom I've shared it. Even the young French couple, notably the young, wild-haired man with what seemed a fierce and perpetual frown, came to feel like friends. The evening before they left for the Santa Cruz trek we chatted briefly and his smile transformed him.

We step out onto the street and the dueño locks the doors behind us. That awkward moment of not knowing how to say goodbye. She laughs and says something about yet another goodbye; we hug; I say something inadequate about how I've enjoyed spending time with her, thanks for the help with trying to change or refund Marijn's bus ticket, safe travels, if you ever come to New Zealand, etc. All unsatisfactory, but sometimes understatement says more than eloquence. At least, I hope so.

I walk off towards the Cruz del Sur station and turn the corner without looking back.

By the time the massive double-decker Volvo inches out into the street, Huaraz has transformed into a blaze of sodium light and headlamps, fluorescent glows in small dim shops and the silhouettes of people crossing streets, leaning in doorways, holding conversations on broken footpaths. The bus reverses, moves forward, stops, then finally manages to turn into the street, heading away from the hostel, away from Cafe Andino where my friends will be deciding whether to go out for drinks, away from Cafe California with its home-made bread and jam and Lapsang Souchong tea and delicious food. It stops a short distance down the road while the safety announcements play.

Then the long drive through the night to Lima. The steward distributes salty sandwiches with some kind of sticky, chocolatey dessert, and offers a drink; I opt for tea, which is awful. I drink it anyway, for the liquid, and sleep for most of the eight hours, waking often but returning quickly to dreams of which I remember nothing. Consequently, I also see nothing of the land between Huaraz and Lima until we reach the dreary, repellent streets of the huge city in the early dawn. At the Cruz del Sur station I check the Litehaul in for the afternoon bus and buy a small café con leche that doesn't taste like coffee but at least lets me write at one of the tables. Later I buy apple pie  — this at least tastes like apple — and when I'm confident the South American Explorers' clubhouse will be open, take a taxi there to collect my books.

So much record keeping. This, I suppose, is an aid for memory, but does it have any other useful function? Can the small details of anyone's journey, repeated so often in slightly different forms, be of interest to anyone — even to the person to whom they happened? Sometimes they can add a flavour to the journey; perhaps also the sum of these insignificant details amounts to more than a simple sum of parts. Conversely, the big events that apparently give a journey structure can fail to give it life: the travelogue that simply documents which sights were seen can read as if they were seen by something other than a human being. This then is the difficulty — how to record and yet bring the record alive, how to allow the reader to enter the journey.

In the afternoon the bus leaves Lima with many seats still empty, but the one next to mine is occupied by a phlegmatic Canadian, probably in his late thirties. He'd flown to Lima in the morning, missed the early bus and had waited at the station most of the day. He must be exhausted. His voice sounds slow and tired. We talk a little and he tells me he's travelling to Bolivia to do some research for six months. We discuss modes of travel — how we both like the process of moving through a place yet also like staying somewhere and coming to know it, gradually, perhaps through the small details that eventually accumulate into affection and then love. He has reservations, though. You can spend too long in a place, he says; the people you meet can keep you there longer than you should. He trails off, hesitates, then says, "Women ...", almost inaudibly, and lets it go, and the empty space in his voice seems large enough to contain all the loss and memory in the world.

I don't push him hard to talk, and he sleeps most of the way, apart from eating his meal with astonishing speed (he's gobbling dessert before I've even finished opening my meal). I sleep a little too, but not for long. For the first several hours we drive along the coast, through a similar kind of desert to the one my friends and I had driven through from Trujillo to Chimbote. I find these deserts intensely beautiful and moving — something about their simplicity, about their purity: stone, sand, sky, nothing else; and about their timelessness,affects me deeply, and it does so in a different way from that of mountains. At Laguna 69, and when we were ice-climbing, and again when I saw the mountains from Huaraz, particularly on that spectacular last evening just before I left, I felt uplifted, exhilarated, but the feeling in these deserts is different  — just as emotionally moving, but with a kind of melancholy as well; perhaps akin to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi.

We drive through the evening, through coastal desert. Grey sky, the horizon out at sea indistinct, surf breaking on small sandy beaches with cliffs and headlands at each end; stony hills, flat reddish-brown plains studded with perfect crescent-shaped dunes of pale grey sand as if some god had swept all the grey into those perfect, geometric shapes. This contrast between the reddish-brown and the pale grey astonishes me; it's very beautiful but so distinct a demarcation it seems impossible — how does this pale sand remain so separate from the other colour?

Perhaps the god is the wind.

But other aspects of the desert are appalling. Litter lines the roadsides; the desert near the roads has been used as a dumping area for truckloads of broken bricks and excavated stones and soil, and the small settlements strike me as inhuman — the kinds of places that breed hopelessness and despair or worse. A man runs across a waste land tracked with a thousand footprints and the tyre marks of trail bikes and cars; I see widely spaced shacks in small settlements and realise with horror that these are the homes of people. Just on dark, we pass a place walled off by two high fences, one barbed wire, the other concrete block, and within the confined area, sodium lamps on high poles shine on blank, box-like buildings. The place looks like a prison. Maybe it is. But who, or what was imprisoned there?

 

To me, the most likely answer is, "Hope".

I look again at the desert away from the areas we've ruined, and think, what compels us to screw up beautiful things? Is this really part of human nature?

Sometimes, pessimism about the future of the world threatens to overwhelm me. But then I think of my friends — all over the world, of all ages — and I realise, even if collectively and sometimes individually, we screw up beautiful things, the world is still full of beautiful people. In his biography of Bertrand Russell the philosopher Ray Monk accused Russell of claiming to love humanity but hating most individuals [1]; in contrast, I'm the opposite — I love most people as individuals, but despair over what we're doing collectively to the planet, and too often, to each other. How I reconcile my attitudes remains a challenge, but if someone of Russell's intellect couldn't find a solution to a similar problem, what hope is there for me?

 

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Notes:
1.The claim has been vigorously disputed.

Photos :
1.From the lower part of the trail to Laguna 69 in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru.
2. The stream near the start of the Laguna 69 trail.
3. One of the mountains overlooking Laguna 69.
4. Coastal desert between Trujillo and Chimbote, Peru. (The streaks in the sky are artefacts from the car window.)
5. Dune in the desert between Trujillo and Chimbote. Elsewhere, dunes like these are used for sandboarding.
6. Rimarima at dusk from the rooftop patio of La Familia Meza hostel in Huaraz.

[Check The Ruins of the Moment, particularly October 2011, for other, larger photos of aspects of the Cordillera Blanca]

Photos and original text © 2011 Pete McGregor

Chachapoyas — the houses of the dead

A note: these posts are selections from a substantial amount of writing by hand. I trust they convey something of the ‘flavour’  of the journey, but they certainly don’t amount to a comprehensive account — I simply don’t have the time, nor the energy to attempt that. Consequently, I’ve skipped substantial periods and will probably continue to do so.

 

October begins — that strange, in-between month I love so much; the month in which Kerouac said everyone goes home [1]. I don't fly back to Aotearoa until mid December, but maybe in a sense I'll be going home soon; maybe in October I'll achieve to a much greater degree that feeling of being at home wherever I am, of not wishing to be elsewhere; maybe when November arrives I'll be able at last to say: I was at home in October.

Today I feel that — perhaps not truly at home, but comfortable, relaxed, enjoying the day. I'd signed up for the tour to the Pueblos de los Muertos and the Sarcofagi de Karajía, two places I'd never heard of, two places where one can visit the pre-Incan Chachapoyas burial sites with their strange, silent sarcophagi. We leave early to avoid the rain (which doesn't arrive), stop for breakfast at the little town of Luya, then carry on to the carpark. Two falcons  — big, barred birds —  swoop down near the minibus; on our return another falcon, smaller, with a chestnut back, flies fast and low across the road in front of the car. These must remain unidentified birds — and how many more before I retrieve the guide book from Lima?

A steep, long descent on foot in the heat; through blue-grey haze a distant view of the huge drop of Gocta waterfall, often claimed to be the third highest in the world. Agusto unlocks the heavy iron gate and we file through, following the narrow path flanked by bromeliads, small orange-red orchids, agave and other xerophytes, to the cliff. Agusto explains some of the history and points out particular features including some small, distant sarcophagi. I share my binoculars around our group. Agusto turns to me.
"Do you have vertigo?" he says.
"No," I lie, not wishing to miss out on what he's likely to offer.
He asks the others, then leads the non-vertigo sufferers and liars out along a narrow path on the cliff face, at one point stepping carefully around a narrow corner just wide enough to negotiate. The drop below seems to fall into the centre of the earth. We gather in the comparative safety of the remains of a small room . What appears to be the femur of a small human lies on a flat stone; several other bones occupy small niches in the walls; some lie scattered on the ground among the dust and brittle leaves. Symbols of snake and condor dominate one wall, but the back wall — the cliff face — has been decorated with more modern markings: the graffiti of recent visitors.

Who could do such a thing? Everywhere I've travelled, supposedly sacred sites, or those where one would at least expect a degree of respect for the nature of the place, have been similarly marked. To me, this seems like desecration, an utter lack of empathy, but perhaps one person's desecration is another's desire to be included in the relative immortality of these places.

I wait at the gate for Agusto and the last of our group. The mountainside drops steeply to the haze-hidden river a vast distance below; anywhere not vertical or not crumbling rock has been worked into hard fields by humans. The difficulty of living in such a dry, severe environment must be tremendous, but how much more so must it have been for the ancestors whose bones lie weathering in the remains of their houses, on display for the visitors, vulnerable to the impulses of the gawkers and taggers. Apparently, some years ago hard times led some local farmers to believe a superstition that this place was the cause of their misfortune. They came and burned what they could, and evidence of the fires still remains in the scorch marks and blackened lichen. This is the reason for the locked gate on the access path.

A tiny hummingbird hovers and darts around a flowering shrub, then arcs away out of sight. I think of the farmers' action. The past is inescapable; even if all evidence has been erased and forgotten, the past still exists; the present is the product of the past, and perhaps the only excuse for trying to erase the past is that the attempt arises from what we try to obliterate.

I let the others go on ahead, then follow, enjoying the steep, relentless climb and arriving with time to recover  — surprisingly and gratifyingly quickly  — and look over the mountains. Grey cloud fills the sky; the distances seem immense. I love this feeling of altitude, and think maybe in another life I would have been a bird.

But not, I trust, the highly athletic chicken whose leg I'm served for lunch. Presented on a lettuce leaf with a mound of rice topped with slices of tomato, the leg tastes flavoursome but I spend the next few hours trying to extract the Usain Bolt of chickens from between my teeth and longing for the floss back in my room.

After lunch we drive to Karajía and take the shorter, less steep walk to the sarcophagi. Agusto points out the Shaman cave and the Chachapoyas Shield, an odd, isolated piece of  — what? Sculpture? It has a curious, almost whimsical appearance; enigmatic, inscrutable. Much later I realise this is one of the things I'm most attracted to while travelling: strangeness. The known and familiar can be immensely comforting and delightful, but what is a life without wonder?

We walk the trail under the cliffs, behind the trickle of water free-falling from the overhang, and past bones laid out on rocks. Human bones. Agusto explains the superstition about touching these, suggesting perhaps it might have a factual foundation if the bones carry some kind of disease, but this seems implausible and more like an attempt to discourage tampering or worse. How long will these remain untouched as the number of visitors increases? I can't help wondering about my own right, if any, to ogle them and photograph them, and in some kind of act of simple respect I pause briefly by them as I leave; I try to acknowledge them, acknowledge the people they were, their beliefs, their contribution to the world. Maybe this is the simplest form of prayer, stripped of any religious belief.

But the intention goes unacknowledged. By late in the evening I'm feeling unwell. Was it the chicken? Probably (or, more likely, something transmitted from the lettuce leaf). Or was it my lack of scepticism about the bones?  Probably not, but if it was, I don't mind paying this small price for trying to draw attention to the need to respect those who lived before us and created our present.

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Notes:
1. “The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everyone goes home in October."Jack Kerouac; On The Road.

2. Here’s a photo of the best-known sarcophagi at Karajia.

Photos:
1. The view from just below the carpark on the steep descent to the Pueblos de los Muertos.
2. At the locked gate.
3. These bones and sarcophagi seem inaccessible. Long may they remain so.
4. The Chachapoyas shield at Karajia. Heavily cropped — the shield is small and a long way off. I trust it conveys something of the strangeness.

5. Who was this person? Spare a thought, please, and if you come here, pay your respects.

Photos and original text © 2011 Pete McGregor