Llama for Lunch (12 page)
Early in the morning, approaching Buenaventura, a large port on an island off the Columbian coast, we took on the pilot – as well as several guards bristling with guns, ammunition and other lethal means of destruction. All doors on the decks were locked. There were many small, crude boats on the dirty brown water, as well as low wooden canoes in which two men sat with fishing nets heaped between them. The captain pointed out a ‘pirate’ going fast. He said they were all pirates. Sixty per cent of the people of Buenaventura are unemployed and it is said to be the worst place in the world for crime and, we were told, much too dangerous to go ashore. A tug painted bright red, yellow and blue with a dirty old rag of a Columbian flag hung at its mast came alongside and pushed us broadside into the wharf, belching black smoke as its engine strained.
At lunch Martin told me the story of the pilot who had come aboard this morning. Not long ago he had been kidnapped on his way across the harbour and a ransom of fifty thousand dollars had been demanded. It had been paid by the pilots’ association. The chief mate also told me about a German ship that had been boarded by pirates at the wharf in Rio de Janeiro. The pirates grabbed hostages and held them to ransom, and when the fracas was finally over the police arrested the German captain, tied him to a chair, put a bright light in his face and insisted that he was part of the conspiracy. Martin said that captains don’t want to take their ships in to the wharf there now. They tie up out in the harbour, but even that is dangerous.
At Buenaventura the water at the wharf was shallow but it has a safe bottom, which means that when the tide goes out the ship can sit on the mud. But you have to leave with the tide. The captain said, ‘We go whether the cargo is ready or not.’ So at half past nine in the evening, when the tide was full, we were pulled out by a tug. Looking over the side of the ship into the dark I saw the little tug, pulling its hardest to get us out from the wharf and turned around so that we could sail down the river.
It was a long way down to the sea. As we retreated from the wharf we passed a line of container ships tied in a row along the quay, and even those dingy old vessels looked fine at night thanks to the lights that were strung along their sides and on their rigging. The town also looked pretty – which it wasn’t.
We passed a red buoy that glowed constantly, then a white one that flashed nine times and was still for three seconds. I had learned in my boating past that those signals all mean something and you can tell exactly where you are by navigational lights. After we passed a couple of bobbing fishing boats I went to bed. It began to rain. I could hear it pelting down outside for quite a while and in the morning all the decks were ankle deep in water.
The weather was considerably colder that day and I had to put on a woollie. At midnight we anchored off Guayaquil in Ecuador, having arrived too late for the high water that would have enabled us to tie up at the wharf. From then on I woke every so often with the tugging of the ship on its anchor. By morning I could feel the ship floating freer and then the tugging stopped. The pilot came out, a jolly person who insisted on kissing me soundly on both cheeks and we commenced our long ride in. It took about four hours to pass up the Guayas River, dodging sand bars among very low water. Large shrimp farms were visible on one side, rows of sticks with a sheet of water behind them that didn’t look much but were big enough to show on the radar. The pilot told me that he had done nearly five thousand trips up this river. He called the readings from memory to the man on the bridge.
In Guayaquil the pilot, who seemed to fit the name Jolly Roger, and his gorgeously handsome and perpetually smiling son, Tino, took Wojciech, Laura and me for a tour of the town in a red Nissan van. The tour was a total fizz, but after ten days at sea it was nice to put my feet to the ground again. At least I can say that I have been in Ecuador, not that I’d want to return to Guayaquil with its dreary, scruffy streets where crime is a serious threat. It is Ecuador’s largest city of two million people and the commercial and financial centre of the country, as well as one of the Pacific’s most important ports.
Our first stop, almost our last, was at a supermarket not far from the wharf. Here, Wojciech bought provisions for the ship. Ecuador had just started to use US dollars for its currency, which made conversion easy. I found the prices about the same as at home except booze was very cheap. There was also a huge counter entirely devoted to perfume. Loaded up with unlabelled white washing powder in clear plastic bags – and looking very suspect – Wojciech returned to the ship. The pilot, Tino, Laura and I had progressed a few feet further when the van broke down in the middle of the street. Laura and I sat and sweated. Jolly Roger and son pushed. No success. We did it again. More people were enlisted to push until – another triumph for People Power – we arrived at the main road.
I looked behind and saw a great horde of men approaching and thought, Oh good, more pushers. Then I noticed that they bore a coffin shoulder-high in their midst. It appeared to be inhabited.
The coffin bearers and the big crowd of mourners passed by. Finally the van was given up as a lost cause and JR went to retrieve his car from the wharf. It was ninety minutes before we were eventually rescued.
The new vehicle was hot and pokey and I couldn’t see much from where I was scrunched in the back seat but I don’t think I missed much. The city looked a lot like some of the less salubrious towns of Indonesia. There were box-like houses made of cement bricks, hole-in-the wall shops and dirty streets heaped with rubbish even in the affluent suburbs, where all the houses were behind grilles and bars. In the downtown area with its smart buildings we parked and walked on the new riverfront corniche, which was clean and grand but overpopulated with large bronze statues and guards toting gigantic guns. One statue was of a rabid-looking pig that dripped water from his mouth in a most unpleasant manner and one was of local hero Simon Bolivar. He was carved shaking hands with a friend, but something in the angle of their hips and wrists looked decidedly camp.
Next we visited a park opposite an imposing twin-towered church. The nineteenth-century park was home to a large collection of iguanas. It was encircled by a high, ornate iron fence with an elaborate gate and contained a cast-iron rotunda, manicured lawns edged with flowers and cobbled paths, on one of which two iguanas were fighting. Many people sat on benches to watch the iguanas, which posed draped along tree branches or skittered evilly across the lawns. It was a horrible sight. Iguanas must be the ugliest specimens in creation – they have the most malevolent eyes. But they do have pretty colours. Laura said her son once kept one as a pet. Yuk. It would put you off your food. Maybe that was the idea.
We drove up a perpendicular road to a look-out high above the city. The view wasn’t inspiring but you could see how big the town was from there.
By now it was dusk. A car stopped beside the stone bench on which I sat and the young woman driver spoke to me. Tino told me that she had said, ‘It’s not safe for you to be here at this time. There are many robbers.’ That was enough for me. We headed home. On one side of the hill, with milliondollar-real-estate views, were the shacks of shanty dwellers. The other side was a cemetery crowded with many crypts. The view was rather wasted on the inhabitants of those.
Back at the wharf no one stopped the car at the first two gates, although large guns were much in evidence, but at the third a guard read our passes intently even though they were upside down and he obviously had no idea what they said. We paid Tino the agreed sum of thirty dollars. He offered no discount for the time spent on the side of the road – all part of the tour experience, I suppose. Our dinner had been kept for us. Wojciech had bought some delicious fruit in town– custard apples, guavas, fijoas and tamarillos. He asked me how the tour was. I said, ‘If you want me to go again you must pay
me
thirty dollars.’
The crew were still busy loading the ship when we returned, and work continued well into the night, with containers whizzing here and there. Afterwards the ship was very grubby with cigarette butts, papers, cans and rubbish. At six in the morning the engines started. The captain hadn’t wanted to leave until the tide was higher but the wharf space was needed. We had to proceed very slowly as the ship had just two metres of draught and you can’t go faster or you end up creating suction and get stuck on the bottom.
Walking around the ship I looked over the bow and saw that we were churning up pure mud. The sailors washed the decks to get rid of the filth and soon the ship was squeaky clean again. Out on the water the sky was clear azure and the sea dark, dark blue and empty. I watched a couple of big sea birds and wondered why they flapped alongside us when we were going in the same direction and it would have seemed more sensible to hop on and hitch a ride. I certainly would have.
At about eight that evening the sea produced a few white caps and the ship started rolling. Then it began to buck and heave and continued to do so all night with increasing ferocity. Walking on the deck I would climb uphill and then gallop down with a rush as the waves flew away under my feet. It was like riding a demented camel or a carousel pony that tipped forwards and back. I had to dance a sort of sailor’s hornpipe just to keep on one spot in the shower or the water kept missing me. The sea still looked reasonably calm for all its tipping. The captain said that it was the current and that it had cut us back a couple of knots in speed. Los Americanos missed two meals – I gobbled up their share.
Approaching Callao, the port of Lima, we doddled along at half speed waiting for the pilot. The sea all around was pitch black as I watched from the darkened bridge where there was no light except for the dim glow of the navigational instruments. It was a spooky feeling being above the dark sea on this dark ship. I wondered how the navigator knew where he was going – nothing showed except a flickering buoy on one side. Then on the horizon I saw the lights of several ships and later a faint, yellow glow appeared. This turned into shining silver pin-pricks that eventually became twinkling lights strung along the shore.
The pilot radioed that he was on his way and soon a red glow detached itself from the shore lights and came ever closer until there he was underneath us in a boat with a green and a red light atop its cabin. The pilot caught the side ladder and eventually was puffing on the bridge. The captain had warned me that he had a voice like a ‘drunk man’. It was more like a gorilla with laryngitis. As he neared me a wave of chemist shop passed over me – cough lollies or mouthwash. Maybe he really was a drinking man.
A pair of tugs positioned themselves either side of the ship to guide us through the narrow entrance of the breakwater – the current was very strong here – then we were inching up to a wharf where trucks with containers on them were lined up waiting. There were no cranes on the wharf. Only the two on the ship were used here. There was a lot of cargo to be offloaded, so work began immediately and went on all night.
I had to wait for the ship’s agent to clear me ashore in the morning. As I waited I watched the antics of the pelicans fishing nearby. Wojciech said you have to be very careful in this port. Pirates try to board ships even before they come in – they come out to get you in little boats. He said he would just run them down and not go around them if they tried this. Even when the ship is tied at the wharf, he said, they try to steal ropes and anything else they can get their hands on. This really is a desperate place. And this was where I was to be put ashore.
The agent finally came and demanded one hundred dollars to allow me to land. Wojciech blew a fuse and we went to lunch while it was sorted out with a higher official. Landed at last, I survived the inspection of a sombre customs woman and was taken to the minister for the interior’s office for immigration rites. In this grand shore-side building my passport was stamped. We shook hands all round. Wojciech kissed my hand, I kissed his cheek. I was now on my own in South America.
Callao is a colonial fortress that was built in the mid 1700s to defend Peru’s Spanish viceregal capital, Lima, from English and Dutch buccaneers. It replaced previous fortifications that had been destroyed by earthquake and tidal wave.
As soon as I climbed into his taxi the driver reached over and locked the doors. We travelled all of one hundred metres before the taxi broke down. An inauspicious omen. The driver tried over and over to get the engine going again but finally conceded that we were out of gas. A man selling sweets on the corner was commandeered to help push the taxi to the petrol station. It was a long way. At an intersection we passed an impressive policewoman who was dressed in long black boots, black shirt and jacket and had a white gun holster slung on her hip. At the station I had to pay for the little bit of petrol that was infused into our unwilling vehicle. The driver had no money. After much coughing and belching of black smoke the engine was coaxed into starting again and we continued on.