Now there were very steep bends on the road, but luckily not much traffic. We passed only a truck or two. As I rocked and rolled to the toilet in the back of the bus in the afternoon, I saw that everyone was asleep, including the stewardess. When I stood up I was struck by a sudden severe headache, the first sign of soroche, the altitude sickness that is caused by lack of oxygen. I had read that it has no respect for age or condition. I took some paracetamol and it went away.
From very high up in the snows at about 5000 metres we descended to Ayacucho at 2700 metres, arriving late and in the dark of night. I asked the man in charge of the small bus station to help me procure a taxi, which he did. The ‘taxi’ turned out to be his beat-up old car. He took me to the San Francisco Hotel, a peculiar but adequate place that incorporated much local decoration and was close to the plaza. My room had a television, a touch light that I amused myself by playing with seeing that the television was no use to me, a comfortable bed, a basic bathroom and a small balcony that was really an encased window over the narrow cobbled street.
In the dining room, which came complete with a television set and an enraptured audience, I had a tasty local version of a schnitzel and then took a walk. It was cold but I did not feel it as much I had in Lima.
At breakfast the T-shirt-clad waiter of the previous night now wore a spiffy suit and tie. He looked about fourteen and the cook looked twelve. I walked to the plaza which was sunlit and clean. The sky was clear and a brilliant blue – I realised that I hadn’t seen the sun for what seemed ages. The town was rimmed by brown mountains that were so close the houses ran up them, and the flat-roofed colonial buildings and small houses topped with big old rounded tiles were as brown as the mountains. The plaza was reminiscent of Spain, but the courtyards had no pleasing gardens or flowers.
The last obstacle to an independent Peru was overcome in Ayacucho when Simon Bolivar and field marshal Antonio Jose de Sucre defeated the Spanish royal army at a great battle here in 1826. A large church dated 1670 dominated the square, which also contained trees, plants, seats, flowers and a bronze statue of Bolivar on a horse. I noticed that everyone crossed themselves as they passed the church.
The colonnades surrounding the plaza were pleasant to stroll under. They housed shops, offices and the tourist bureau, where no English was spoken – but the man in charge drew me a mud map to help me locate the bus station that sold tickets to Cuzco.
I continued along the pleasant, sunlit cobbled streets until I reached the market. From among a multitude of sacks of beans and seeds of all description I bought, very cheaply, Brazil nuts, bananas, mandarins and bread rolls for the onward bus trip. Judging from the primitive bus station I estimated (correctly) that the posh bus ran no further than here. I also finally found a poncho, in wonderfully warm, but light-weight alpaca, for which I paid ten Australian dollars. All the women I passed in the streets wore the local garb, which I thought most unbecoming – dark-green, black or brown bowler hats, short skirts with several layers of petticoats, a blouse, a woollen pullover, a vest-like jacket, a cotton apron, a shawl, and a rectangle of cloth slung around the back and across the shoulders as a carry-all. No wonder they all looked dumpy. And they wore their hair in two long plaits joined by a piece of wool. At least I didn’t have to worry about what I looked like – there were no fashion stakes here. Studying a woman of the Andes standing alongside her llama, I concluded that the llama was the better-looking of the two. But I loved the rubbish cart. A man rode on the back step of it tolling a big, brass hand bell. Shades of the plague, bring out your dead!
For a couple of sol I lunched on a huge bowl of delicious soup, made no doubt from all of yesterday’s leftovers, and some curry and rice. The meat was almost inedible but the rest was tasty, especially when I added the chopped chilli in vinegar mixture that was served as a condiment.
Ayacucho had one memorable attribute in its favour. I saw no ashtrays and no one seemed to smoke. I guessed that the altitude prohibited it.
I was up, protesting, at five in the morning and reached the bus station when it was still dark. I waited, leaning against a wall with the other passengers, who were all locals, alongside the smallish, oldish bus. By the simple expedient of removing the door handle and putting it in his pocket, the driver kept us out of his bus until he was ready to go. Baggage was heaved up on the roof. Thank goodness I was now in that part of the southern hemisphere where winter is the dry season. The window alongside my small, uncomfortable seat had been broken in some trauma and it had been repaired by sticking a piece of plastic over the hole.
Standing up front by the driver was the look-out man, whose job it was to shout out if he could see anything coming around the blind corners – of which there were many. As we moved through the town and outskirts the look-out man canvassed for passengers. When the seats were all taken, passengers sat on the floor.
Half a kilometre from town the road turned into rough gravel, and from there got worse. No one looked at our tickets until we were well under way. Then it was discovered that one Indian woman had no ticket and no money to buy one. While the conductor argued, she remained mutely defiant with eyes cast down. He gave up. When a paying customer claimed her seat she sat on the floor next to me. Boy, was she on the nose! As the throng at the front thinned she camped on the engine cover alongside the driver. He even gave her a blanket to sit on. She rode the whole way to Andahuailas, twenty-five sols’ worth, free.
This journey took twelve hours. The going was rough and slow but not slow enough for me at times. Villages were hours apart and the road took countless kilometres to cover every short distance as it had to make many loops to climb some mountains and many circles to wind around others. Clouds of dust eddied through the innumerable cracks in the floor of the bus and before long I was coated in a film of grime.
We didn’t take the narrow road with its many blind corners slowly or carefully, but it was on the sides of steep mountains, with their sheer drops straight down thousands of metres, that I was truly terrified. Looking down at the crumbly edge of the dirt road directly beneath our wheels, I saw under it nothing but space. In order to achieve the feat of putting our wheels on the extreme edge of the road, our cowboy driver was haring along on the wrong side of the road. Why? Several head-on smashes were narrowly averted by the shouts of the look-out man and the driver backing up. Going downhill he put his foot flat to the boards and roared along, skittering around corners.
At first the countryside consisted of barren, sweeping expanses of mountains, valleys dotted with one or two small cultivated patches and an occasional mud-brick hovel – an infinitesimal mark of human habitation in nature’s grand wilderness. What a hard life this must be. Further on, greenery appeared in some of the valleys and there were tiny plots of crop on the hillsides. At intervals I saw a few animals – sheep, horses, cows and small flocks of goats that were always tended by women in local dress. Later, vistas of green valleys flowing to black, jagged, snow-topped mountain peaks extended for ever. Way below in the bottom of one deep valley a wide, pale-jade river flowed fast. Now there were two kinds of mountains – big, fat, rounded green ones and bare, formidable, black ones whose jagged tops had ice and snow on them.
The bus climbed in what seemed endless up-and-down patterns to get over the mountains. Most of the time we were travelling high up near the snowline and at times I experienced a sharp pain in my head and my ears popped like castanets. Our driver, who seemed to have a death wish, casually looked right or left to admire the scenery as he chatted to nearby passengers. And as if he needed further distractions, his dashboard blazed with bobbing ornaments, while a great glittering orb twisted directly in front of his eyes. The only decorations I approved of were the holy pictures and medals. Lord knows we needed them.
We stopped for lunch at a small village cafe that I remember as having the world’s smallest hole-in-the-floor toilet. Ten centimetres wide – you had to be a crack shot to hit that, especially from a height. This rough cafe was surrounded by total squalor and all that was on offer in the nourishment line was some pretty ordinary soup – but I ate it anyway. Who knew where the next food was?
Once we reached the side of the mountains that was not in rain-shadow terrain, the land became more fertile and there were more crops, villages and farm houses. We zoomed through the villages in clouds of dust, scattering dogs, goats and pigs – cute white ones and ugly, sway-backed black ones – that narrowly escaped annihilation under our wheels. Later there were towns situated in valley floors where bananas and paw paws grew in profusion and herds of alpacas grazed. Out here also roams, but is seldom seen, the endangered vicuna, which is now protected. Although similar to the alpaca it is not tameable and cannot be domesticated.
People got on the bus to travel between villages. One woman stood in the aisle near me. She wore several shawls, one of which was slung over her back and had some large bumps in it that I presumed to be a baby. Then I saw the southernmost bulge in the shawl emit a stream of yellowish fluid that ended up in mother’s skirts. Looking closer I saw three darling little heads sticking out of the top of the bundle, two white baby alpacas and one black one. They were close enough for me to pat before they all got off again at the next village.
At six in the evening we made it to Andahuailas, where I had to change buses for the all-night ride to Cuzco. At the bus office I bought another seat so that I had two seats to lie across for the night. It made all the difference.
This next bus was better than the last. It was comfortingly large and had bigger seats. I had a thirty-cent toilet break in a squalid dump and layered on all my spare clothes in preparation for the ordeal to come. High in the Andes, in an unheated bus, in the middle of winter, is not the best place to spend a night. I survived. I even slept, huddled under my poncho. But the bus windows rattled themselves open every now and then and condensation ran like rain down the windows and wet the floor and the side of the seats. Gee it was cold out there! But at dusk I watched the unforgettable sight of the full moon rising between the black, snow clad peaks of the Andes, the moon a glowing, yellow gold disk in the not-quite-dark, misty grey sky.
After leaving Andahuailas the road deteriorated even more and the bus lumbered along very slowly at times, for which I was eternally grateful. But it still rattled, shook, bumped and rolled. Some time in the middle of the night we stopped for bladder relief, men on one side, women on the other, in the unwritten law of bus travel.
Outside on the road I could see quite clearly by the full moon. We were on a mountainside and way down below in the valley the lights of a town twinkled most beautifully in the clear air.
At about three in the morning there was a terrific bang and thump. The bus braked suddenly then started to back up. At this several women behind me in the back seat began screaming and shouting, ‘Basta, basta!’ Enough! The driver stopped and tried to move forward again. He couldn’t possibly have seen what was behind him. The women and some men screamed again. I couldn’t see anything from my seat but what they saw obviously terrified them. It seemed that we hadn’t made a bend, had backed up and had a wheel almost over the edge of the precipice. I heard that this happens a lot – that’s why there are all those little crosses. I prayed fervently that I wasn’t about to get one of my very own.
At half past six in the morning I was in Cuzco, freezing cold at 3700 metres, but still alive. The town is cradled in a high Andean valley. It seems to surge up from the earth in orange-hued adobe brick houses with pottery shingles that match the deep red clay tones of the soil. The old core of the city consists of stones of volcanic granite and limestone that the Incas quarried for their palaces and temples. The Incas inhabited the Cuzco region from the twelfth century. They rose to power when one Incan leader, convincing the people that he and his wife were the children of the sun god, established a benevolent dictatorship.
Cuzco is laid out in the shape of the condor, which the Incas revered and was the fountainhead of the Incan empire, an advanced civilization that had been isolated from the rest of mankind. When the Spanish arrived in 1531 the Incas thought that they were the manifestation of a legend that said the gods would come as bearded white men. The Inca empire was called ‘Quechua’ which means the four quarters of the world, and the network of roads, trails and steps that radiated out from Cuzco’s square, deemed the navel of the world by the Incans, was as far reaching as the Roman Empire. The Incas had three-dimensional clay maps and it is thought that they explored as far as Manaus on the Amazon, 2500 kilometres away.
From Cuzco the Inca expanded their political boundaries, building great stone cities. Like the Romans, the Incas were law-givers, warriors, administrators and statesmen par excellence. They constructed an elaborate system of royal highways along the dorsal spine of the Andes, as well as awe-inspiring suspension bridges. By communal land ownership they made provision for bad harvests, natural disasters and aid for the poor. They had a splendid grasp of architecture and masonry, bevelling stones to fit tightly together. Their buildings have survived better than those of the Spanish. In the 1950 earthquake that felled much of the monastery of Santo Domingo, which had been built over the Temple of the Sun, the inner Incan walls withstood the quake, and were revealed in all their glory.
The social foundation of the Incan and Andean world was the village, a tightly knit community of kinsmen who worshipped the local spirits. This religion continues today in the villages around Cuzco. The Spaniards imposed their culture only superficially.
Cuzco, I discovered, is a real tourist town. A woman tout with a kind face accosted me in the bus station and in my weakened state it seemed like a good idea to let someone else take care of me. Maria was a doll and I’m glad she grabbed me. The Hotel Felice, where Maria deposited me, was adequate, the staff helpful and the price good. I ate breakfast in the dining room and huddled under my shawl in the freezing lobby until a room was ready for me. The hotel had been built around a large central courtyard that had a flagstone floor and was covered by an atrium of perspex. The courtyard doubled as the sitting room. It had a TV that had prudently been built into the wall in a glass case in order to keep the guests’ sticky fingers off it. At one side a wooden staircase went up to the balcony of the floor above, which was surrounded by sky-blue, wooden, Moorish-style fretwork arches.