Author Archives: The Chronicler

Time Travelling Grocer

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When it comes to food provisions, I feel like I’ve become a time traveling anthropologist, touring the differing points on grocery’s evolutionary curve.

High up on the altiplano she’s called an ‘artisanal’, a western concept that offers images of specialist crafters, when the reality is necessity and survival. The Andiña pastoralist with her solitary, hand harvested milk cow, who crafts a simple boiled white cheese. A simple necessity, there’s no milk-tanker collection service for raw milk. It’s her sole cash crop. Now she has to stand in the bitter wind by the roadsides trying to sell to a disinterested passing public. Her only other alternative is to sell to an intermediary or travel to town on market day. And history is cluttered with rapacious middle-men and fickle markets. If it doesn’t sell, she has costs but no income. Raw capitalism.

From road verge sale to the town market. In its basic form, ranked rows of steel poles canopied in polythene. Structures that can appear and disappear with sudden alacrity. Twenty tented structures, twenty vegetable sellers, twenty chances to buy the same identical produce. Raw competitive capitalism.

The temporary tent now evolves into bricks and mortar. Small dark caves where an eclectic selection of offerings are stacked deep and high. Move next door and the exact same offerings are available, only the random layout is different. And yet, what is interesting, the tent and the cave still survive when the basic supermarket opens across the road. In its essential form, the latter is just an enlarged form of the formers. A maxi-kiosk. It has more space for exactly the same offering. A larger display of toilet rolls.

Now grocer evolution evolves the ‘hypermarket’. Western capitalist wisdom dictates that the tent, the cave, the kiosk, will simply wither away, swept aside by the hyper-efficient. We’ve cycled small town USA and witnessed the effect. Main Street with its’ ‘pay-day loans’ and beauty nail-bars, dollar-shops and drawn shutters. Blind windows papered over with last year’s news, these unrentables to be filled with ‘op’, ‘thrift’, or ‘charity’ shops. Alter the monetary denomination and I could be describing certain Scottish High Streets. Yet this scenario has yet to be enacted in the Andean towns and cities that we’ve visited.

Maybe the answer is walking towards me. A diminutive, determined matriarch bustling her persuasive way along the street. I step from the pavement so as not to impede her path; you wouldn’t dare to argue with her. It’s her street. It’s her town. It’s her country. It’s her stall. It will survive.

Yet, all this grocery-anthropology leaves me with one question. The average height of an Andeña is well under 5′ 5″ (….), why is the top shelf in this hipermercado so far out of her reach?

 

Hipermercado

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Why walk a round trip of several kilometres to the city’s hypermarket when there’s more ethnic colour to be found just around the corner?

I would like to claim research, serendipity and exercise. A chance to measure the incursion of the ‘global grazers’ and the other trans-national emporiumists. A chance to find some new story or at least a new set of street arts. A chance to stretch some muscles that haven’t been exercised whilst granny-grinding an Ecuadorean hill. Only the real reason is more prosaic.

The Forager wants to see what is available, what is possible. Because when small town foraging, you need to be able to recognise the dusty objects buried in the rafters, set deep within the murky depths of the market stall. There’s never any self-service, just like there’s never any price tag.

Mall del Rio was just like the many that we’ve checked out. It’s morning, an empty silence of polished marble, a clamouring contrast to the manic confusion of the narrow colonial streets across town. An emptiness filled with expectant designer boutiques, imported sports trainers, luxury car lottery salesmen and empty massage chairs. Off to one side is the ‘grazers’ food-court’, there to capture the cinema-goer, where local brands try to outstare the likes of Ronald and The Colonel. All offering overpriced fast-food with a side of chilli. But what we’re here for is placed at the rear.

Couture for the well dressed lady dog.

The food author Michael Pollen’s advice is to walk the outer reaches of a supermarket, avoid the centre and only choose items that which your grandmother would recognise. (Advice that will, for some, need recalibration, adding a Great to the Gran.) We ignore his maxim in the interest of pure research, and stroll up and down every aisle. It was worth it.

Of course there were stories and a narrative on a nation to be found. Where else would you expect to buy a twenty gallon stainless steel milk churn or non-slip auto clutch pedal pads, frilly-laced dog dresses or a 50 tonne bottle jack? Who knew that I might need them?

Our wanderings determine that salt has a sell-by date four months after I start to draw my pension, that flour can be purchased in pretty pastel patterned cotton sacks, that rice comes in six grades, that diet rusks are called ‘toasts of air’ and that we could buy a 10kg bag of either boiled sweets or sweet biscuits. We now know that there is little point in searching for tinned evaporated milk, (our Peruvian treat) or powdered cheese. But of much greater significance, there’s shelves filled with ground coffee, which translates as a significant amount of time can now be devoted to assessment and tasting. We had gathered intelligence that there was a shop that specialised in coffee tastings, it figured high on our to-do list. Closed for the holidays. Just like the German bakery whose anticipation and promise had sustained us up that last big climb before we descended on town.

These wanders take time, the packaging’s font is Spanified Minuscule. The forager has to re-perch her specs for each perusal. Having noted that, Ecuador has enacted ‘traffic light’ warnings for grease, salt, and sugar. Which does help in choosing for the dire warned red-lit carbs and calories.

She selects a salami, it has claims to artisanality, “better take two then”, more importantly; it’s got three artery clogging stop lights. We can always counter the vascular damage with ‘healthy’ bacillus infused yogurt.

As we walked across town, it became apparent from the accents which were surrounding us that there was a significant visitor and expat population of European and, in particular North American citizens. One of that’s catered for by the bags of anaemic bagels, Nestle iced tea, Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix and Hershey chocolate bars. Then for all those on an all inclusive expenses trip or a newly cleared mortgag, there’s Nutella.

We then progress upstairs, hoping to reach the DIY and find a bottle of benzine or a can of alcohol. (For stove cooking purposes!) only to be waylaid by the toy shop. Passing shelf upon shelf stuffed with the next great mercantile event of the year: Giant Teddy Bear for St. Valentine. From there to the ranked regimen of China-built cycles branded as ‘Relax’ and ‘Still Man’. Oxymoronic, if you assume these bikes are intended for the city’s narrow cobbled streets with their impatient taxis. Or simply a metaphor for my protracted progress up an Ecuadorean hillside. Like the weird and wonderful inscriptions on the tee-shirts that barely conceal the over-endowed mannequins that are propped outside every ladies clothing shop, you have to wonder; to which random lexical search engine they turned.

The morning progresses. Slowly the store fills with shoppers and a conundrum. I turn down breakfast cereal canyon and find an Andean family, all three generations of ladies in traditional dress. I shouldn’t be surprised: after all, I’m in their country, yet I especially notice them, where I wouldn’t if they were outside on the other side of the street. Is it the juxtaposition of westernised shopping mall and this family, the same comparison, the same alienisim, as the gringo cyclists in the local market place? For our ethnicity seems to require the appropriate back-cloth to enable us to blend in, to be comfortable on a stage. Is this the real reason we’ve walked all the way across the city? The chance to wallow in a milieu, in a familiar, comprehensible place. A mild sedative from the concentration of abroad. It would appear that we still require that dilution to culture shock, even after all this time.

Satiated with our successful retail research, I’m ready to head back to the other world, to collect some ciclo-radical graffiti I saw in the distance, to stride out down the trail beside the river. When serendipity steps in. To understand our incredulous amazement, you need to know one incontrovertible fact; the ‘shoe-shine boy’ is always, without exception, male. Yet there before us is a ‘shoe-shine’ lady. Not one, but two ‘shoe-shine’ ladies. Like the incursions of the mall into Andean retailing, am I witnessing the imminent death of Latino machismo.

 

Many Names: One Bread.

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There’s a certain routine to our returning arrival in BA. Collect cargo and clear the airport, bus into town, walk around the corner and head for the metro. Stop by the first vendor and buy a bag of four. (This is our first opportunity to measure the rate of inflation in our six months of absence.. Once it was five.) Of course they will be consumed long before the train reaches San Isidro and the flat. We know where to find them in Salta, we know that they’re a guaranteed fixture to every exit from every roundabout in Paraguay. In Asunsion, the ‘chipaeros’ jump on and off the still-moving buses, their dexterity with a wide wicker basket a true skill. Yet, beyond these locals they’re an elusive treat. And like genuinely seasonal fruit, or a rare alpine plant, they need to be treasured when found.

Chipas. That eponymous Paraguayan bread roll, who’s primary constituent is manioc flour. Or Mandioca flour, or Tapioca flour, or Casava flour, or Brazilian Arrowroot flour and now Almidon de Yuca. They’re all one and the same plant: Manihot esculenta. To which, certainly in the quality ones, boiled white cheese will have been added. A confection best eaten warm, or at least before midday, when they still have the glutinous chew of a comfort food. Breakfast food. A bread that can stand alone and doesn’t require the addition of unguents.

It’s been a while, but now those elusive panes have reappeared, not out of a calico covered wide wicker basket balanced on a chipamonger’s head, but the hot box of a chip shop. Fast-food. An aside to your ‘burger, egg and chips. Or, as we’ve just discovered in Cuenca, the accompaniment to a frozen yogurt.

It was the Navigator in her forager mode that first spotted them. When it comes to ‘Chipa Coursing’ she’s has the nose of a bloodhound. Which now leaves a problem. Having awakened the chipa taste bud, the search is on. Only fast-food outlets are a city phenomenon, yet verge-side evidence suggests that ‘Dominos’, ‘Subways’, KFC et al, exist somewhere, although Ronald and a McChipa are hopefully still a nightmare fantasy away, because that would introduce a truly monumental ethical problem.

The solution has been simple. That provendorial instinct has sourced the necessary raw ingredients. All we now need is a shade tree. Set up the petrol stove and mix up the flour, ‘Royal’, dried cheese and powdered milk. Season heavily with salt, pepper, nutmeg or what ever else seems appropriate or more likely, what’s lurking dead at the bottom of a pannier. And to add a soupçon of fusion cuisine, throw in a handful of oats.

This plethora of local terms used in the construction of our favoured bun, is but one part of the many interests in frontera hopping. Our regimen of eating fare might be similar to Perú, but it’s the names that have changed. To the south, our ‘tortilla de carne’ would be an egg omelette with rationed flecks of meat through it, in Ecuador it’s a solid hamburger patty with a fried egg on top. Our palta, the avocado is now an ‘aguacata’. Our ‘Chifa’ fried rice is now a ‘Chaulafán’, still a volcanic heap that can still erupt if too much chilli is added.

Our Chipas are now called ‘Pan de Yucas’ that comes in a ‘Meal Deal’ with frozen fruit yogurt. A rather enticing combination of hot and cold, sweet and salty. I suspect that for the next while we’ll be doing a bit of hunting. Maybe not a seasonal food, but a regional one, and as such wil need treasuring.

 

Quirks, Oddities and Plazas.

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The main plaza is our favoured point of reference when tackling a new town or city. On the app-map they’re invariably the large pale green square set in the middle of a grid of boxes. The genuine centre to which the Spartan road signage tries to point. They’re generally a refuge away from the heavy goods traffic, a hot sun and the hive of moto-taxis.

For us, in particular, they are a place to park-up and drink deep shade. To take a breather from the shock of negotiating unregulated junctions, semaphoring traffic lights and wayward wandering pedestrians. Then for the Forager to deploy her divination and recce a room for the night.

Throughout all our southern travels, these plazas have come with certain characteristics, a certain conservative ground plan: The Catholic Church, in one of it’s many guises, a clutch of telecom vendors and a fist of Banks, all facing in on some notable personage, column busted or astride a prancing horse, invariably poking the sky with a sword. The plan will always be a square. That is, until we reached Ecuador.

The frontier town of Macarà was our first encounter with un-gridded streets laced with un-rideable gradients. Its plaza defies any recognisable geometric description; likewise the accoutrements of archetypical architecture. A chapel and a basilica stand at opposite corners, the latter, when floodlit, is a pink and yellow blancmange, so defying of the mandatory Papal yellow on white. The council ‘gin-palace’ is rendered in brutalist concrete and occupies yet another quadrant. It’s the final face that is unique. An airport terminal. Where many towns can be divided along rail tracks, Macará has a runway traversing its entire length, whose main purpose appears to be a dog walking trail and jogging track.

By the time we’ve reached Cuenca, we’ve started to get the measure of Sr. Town Planner and his partner Sr. Road Engineer. Gradients in excess of 9% are permissible, hairpin bends are not, and in town, replacement with flights of stairs, a useful solution; just don’t note them on an app-map. Widening the sidewalk and installing one-way traffic management is the start of a ‘liveable city’, only it might be useful to alternate the ‘una-vias’. Installing a two-way cycle path, but allowing it to disgorge you onto every unregulated roundabout renders it problematic. As you might have guessed, it took a good deal of quartering and quandering to reach Cuenca’s central plaza. It felt like we had circumnavigated its old town twice. It was worth it.

The old colonial centre is on a grid, is peppered with plazas, each with an attendant cathedral, basilica or capilla. Held in place by steep valley hilsides and the Rio Tomebamba, whose cliff-like banks have given rise to those long flights of stairs that so thwarted our entry.

We keep to the script and eventually park up in the plaza, (Parque Calderón…which gives you an idea as to who is stuck up on his column, trying to puncture a cloud), sitting under manicured mesquites and soaring podocarps. Arboreal architecture that complements the vast, imposing monumental edifice of the city’s ‘new’ cathedral. I don’t know where the Navigator found her diabolical divining rods, only it bothers me, given that I’m surrounded by so much ecclesiasticalism. But I do know that they work. She returns to our corral of cycles with a smile….”wait till you see what I’ve found….” Maybe she employs the services of our ‘guardian angel’ or just has a dead reckoning instinct. Whatever; it’s colonial in style, a balcony room that overlooks the plaza and the Santo Domingo church. Our bikes are parked behind a stuffed sofa in the ‘palm court’ of the secluded central atrium, there to complement the chaise longue, the ornaments and antiques; there’s even a piano, just no pianist.

It oozes that potential for ‘slow death’ and ‘faded grandeur’, an ambiance that you know will never materialise, if only because of Julio the dueño owner. Even the cleaning regime is in keeping. No mechanical device attacks the Axminster. Whilst not quite ‘the sprinkled tea-leaves’ of an inter-war Britain, the principle is the same. A damp cloth wiped over the surface before a gentle broom sweep. It could descend into a pastiche if it wasn’t so genuine.

It’s all so at a variance with the antiseptic norm of the generic, bland-washed, star-encrusted ‘international hotel’.

So good… we didn’t buy it, but did end up staying several nights.

 

Traditions

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I first saw them a few days ago, in Macarà, three kilometres inside the Ecuadorean border. A Disney cast of characters, augmented by a Smurf and personages that my ignorance of the national political scene fails to identify. They’re propped against a wall outside the balloon and party shop, such that I wonder if they’re might be a local story involved. Some life sized, others just models. Gaudy bright, but with a distinct amateurish finish; as if the local primary school’s P6 has been perfecting the art of papier-mâché. The detail is exquisite, only they lack permanence. Short shelf lives.

All cultures have ways to conclude the dying year, to draw a line under what has gone before. I remember being sent to take the hot ashes from the fireplace to the bin, the front door being opened just before the ‘bells’, so to hear the shipping horns down on the Clyde. Yet some are best forgotten, if only for the sake of embarrassment, to wit: that epitome of Scotch kitsch: The White Heather Show. All lost tartan trews and Andy Stewart.

With these customs observed, it’s time to start afresh. Traditions that persist and we’ve just happened on some new ones.

Los Años Viejos; the old year brings out the Monigotes, those effigy characters that we first spotted a few days ago. Now they’ve moved from lounging nonchalantly to clambering onto car roofs, motorbiker pillion seats, parked outside car showrooms and tethered threateningly in front of vets’ surgeries. The hardware store has spray painted spades in the colours of promised prosperity, whilst I wonder if the pharmacy is suggesting that it might trade in anabolic steroids. Traditionally they would be representing those that you didn’t care for: your politics, your boss, your creditors. those that you have deemed to have sinned, like the over-remunerated football striker who failed to score, or the customer who’s failed to settle their tab.

Then the tradition morphed to include characters from the popular imagination, Marvel’s superheroes, or Looney Tunes’ animates, to those who have been prominent in the previous year. It will also include the wish list; hence the motorbike on a car roof that passed me. Many of the creations are wonderfully crafted. There was ET who filled the cargo bed of a pickup, Spider-Man clinging to the roof of a speeding car, Peppa-Pig impregnated into a van’s radiator grille. On other occasions you get the impression that there’s a back story, an ‘in-story’, a history of incident that’s being purged.

What is a near consistent: they’re all male orientated.

Which introduces another cast of performers. The Vindas. The Widows. The ‘wives’ of the Monigotes, those effigies that will be burnt at midnight. Performed by young men dressed in luminous wigs and stuffed bras, suspenders belts and high heels, who then hold to ransom the passing traffic. That is, until some beer money has been elicited.

As if all this frenzy were not enough, there’s all the other traditions to be adhered to.

Tradition: Retail Therapy. The purchase of yellow underwear to encourage prosperity, try red if it’s love you crave or green for the filthy lucre. Silver and pink wigs to re-enact ‘Frozen’, a black plastic scythe with a white face mask to mimic Munch’s ‘Scream’. Then there’s the acquisition of fireworks, and don’t forget the beer. Crates of Pilsen are stacked in canyons down the narrow pavements, whist the explosives vendors furtively materialise after dark.

Tradition: the clear-out. The gents’ barbers are ankle deep in hair clippings, metallic spray is in fashion. The car-washes are queued out, sudsy sludge flowing down the gutters.

The dark comes quickly, private parties break out in the now closed shops and cafés. The music from the karaoke bars steadily magnifies. With an half hour of the old year left, the impatient start to detonate the first rockets, little boys fling fire crackers into echoing alleys. The countdown reverberates across the plaza, and on the stroke, the first bonfire blazes. All those effigies, all that bad karma from last year goes up in flames. Purged. With the leaping flames comes one more ritual. Fire jumping. The cathartic purification of the old and if you want to add a little excitment, carry a tumbler of your favourite fire water.

We watch from a safe distance, I’ve seen one to many mis-fired rockets, one too many squibs skittering at ankle height today.

Tomorrow all that will be left will be a heap of ghost ash, an occasional part-charred paper skull and a populace being poured into taxis. For the party still has a full day to run.

Another year has begun, another year of collecting characters for the next old-year’s bonfire of the sinners.

 

The Art of Relax

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For those in the know: Ruta PanAmericana: E35 Macará Internacional Border crossing > Loja.

“New country”, strange but true, we’ve not been able to say that for some time. Last year’s trip was in some ways a reprise of the previous year’s curtailed travel, when the Navigator had a disagreement with a Chilean highway. (3 days hospitalisation and insertion of some ironwork). It then developed into some circulatory perambulation through southern Perú. This year’s trip started from where the previous had left off, and after yet more deviations has finally managed to reach A New Country.

A New Place. That tantalising anticipation of something different. The most immediate being, what will the immigration and customs officials take exception to? Relax …. they’re just not interested in us.

It’s but a simple dotted line on a map, a short bridge over a stream, the tarmac shows no break, even the ceibo trees are no different, the parrots still scream from bank to bank. But we’ve entered a different place. I still find it remarkable, given South America’s shared colonial, then independence history, how different each place is. It’s what makes SA travel so fascinating. Sure, you can study the guidebooks, read the blogs, garner some wiki facts, but these are the gross simplifications, the broad-brush pictures. The realities are in the minutiae. And it’s these that will colour-in my perception of this place.

Some things haven’t changed. The bin lorry still plays a melodic lullaby. The light switch is still hidden behind the toilet door. The hot and cold taps are still transposed. The cockerel still sounds reveille for the pre-dawn. They are still selling ‘prosperity seeking’ yellow underwear for the New Year.

Yet, many things have changed. The solitary fork provided with my lunch comes with substance and a companionable knife; the rice is no longer mouldable into a ‘gutty-ball’, fit to go eighteen holes of golf. The dogs are occasionally tethered, and as a consequence the felines have a modicum of chances to survive. I’ve seen more cats in the last five days than we’ve noted in two Peruvian months. They still have to furtively slink around corners, and in ‘Looney Tunes’ fashion, I watch one bristle-haired moggy scale the face of an unrendered brick wall, remaining clamped there whilst the yapping terrier vexed its fury below.

Relax. That Peruvian War of Clarion Attrition, that uncontrollable armed decibel race for ever more strident horns, hasn’t crossed the frontier. In part, because neither have the fume-belching moto-taxis nor the fare-honking combi buses, which makes for a relaxing, silent night if we’ve purchased a room in the vicinity of any Ecuadorean intersection.

Relax. Try a nice cup of the native caffeinated brew. Whist Ecuador isn’t known for coffee production, it does have the favourable conditions around Loja to grow some, and unlike it’s southern neighbour, doesn’t export the best, leaving the floor sweepings for the local markets. However this new bounty is somewhat tempered by the relaxing electrical supply. It’s a 110v system and when boiling the kettle, this translates as funereal sluggishness. We’ve given up on cooked porridge and now brew the morning’s fix the evening before. Otherwise it would be an unexaggerated three hour session.

Relax. Macarà’s sidewalk pavements are portico’d and pillared. Evil looking hooks stick out from said pillars, just at eye level, there to enable a hammock to swing. At four degrees south of the equator, the shadows have little creep; your siesta might not be disturbed from above by the near-stationary shadows, but by the speeding car passing within inches of your head.

Relax. You’re standing at one of Loja’s crossroads, the yellow taxi pulls up and hesitates, even stops, to check the state of the crossing, then encourages you to cross first. This is disconcerting.

Relax; “Ecuadorians are honest and friendly people….”, you’ll find variations on this redundant statement in every country’s tourist info-fiction. Frankly, most people are! Only it’s the actions that prove the claim. We’re creating our latest substitution for bread, a variation on a pancake mix, by the side of the road. A car pulls up and we’re presented with a selection bag of biscuits. We chat, they take a photo of the cyclo-Scots-gringos, leave…. Then turn around and come back with three kilos of mangos. We’re filtering water at a well, and we get presented with a turkey sandwich in real, un-sweetened bread. (It’s the 26th December; everybody’s suffering turkey sandwiches, so why should we be exempt?). Two hours later and it’s a wall poster, then it’s more mangoes. All this and we’re only a hundred kilometres into the country.

Relax. The next few kilometres are in a valley bottom, a rare few moments of level land. All too soon we’ll be back to bottom-gear grind up those notorious gradients. Ecuadorean roads are always in such a hurry to reach their hill-tops. Then they either get bored or distracted and fall all the way down the other side. Relax, and scream “concentrate!”.

Relax. It’s old year’s night. Try not to jump every time a howitzer shell explodes. Or you’ll be a quivering nervous un-relaxed wreck before the evening is out.

 

Historical crossroads.

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Cajamarca was a physical crossroad, where we had opted to turn to the right and head off east. But it was an historical crossroad in 1532. It’s also another wonderful case of the “What Ifs?”

A brief history. The Inca Lord, Atahualpa has defeated his brother and is heading north to the empire’s capital in Cusco, there to claim his crown. He stops off at the thermal baths in Cajamarca for a clean and spruce up, when his vast civil service of informants and messengers informs him that Pizzaro, the conquistadorian Spaniard is marching out of the coastal town of Piura. The Inca has a possible ceremonial army of 80,000 to attend on him, Pizzaro has 62 mounted horsemen and 106 foot soldiers. You wouldn’t bet against those odds. Pizzaro does.

Cajamarca slaughter

The first great ‘What if’?’ question has to be…why didn’t a minor portion of that vast army deal with this insignificant, irritating intrusion at one of the many potential ambush points? We’ve ridden some of the route; all he had to do was roll a few boulders down a hillside onto the advancing aliens. Nature’s been doing that to us for some time. The valley sides are so steep the caballeros would have been leading their horses, the foot soldiers would have almost certainly have shed their plate armour in the high humidity and tangled confines of the valley floor. The radicalising friar would have been preaching, encouraging, threatening, ‘hell, fire and damnation’. Sound familiar? Recurring religious history does.

The andeancondor pecks the heart from the Spanish Bull

More history. The conquistadors make it into the plaza, and distribute themselves throughout the buildings that cover the three sides of the square. Atahualpa enters and is confronted by the Dominican friar Vicente de Valverde who proceeds to preach unintelligibly at the Inca Lord. A sacrilege is claimed and the man of God calls on the Christains to “come at these heathen dogs who reject the things of God”. Or at least that’s the version that the victors claim, bearing in mind that the only barely literate character in this whole scenario is the friar. Two cannons loaded with grapeshot are fired, carnage and slaughter ensue. 5000 ceremonially armoured troops and unarmed civilians are butchered. Atahualpa is captured and a ransom agreed. A room is required to be filled to the specified line with gold and silver, all within two months. But something happens; actually Pizzaro and his cohorts get greedy, they ‘try and find guilty’ the Inca. He’s executed. The Spaniards pocket the ransom. Is there nothing new in history?

Why did Ataualpa delay an attack? Was it arrogance, ignorance, or plain bad management? Who knows? Had he dealt with Pizzaro, almost certainly another character with a thirst for gold would have come along. Had he or they prevailed, it would be his language that I would today be trying to make myself understood in.

However those histories are still an interesting exercise in consequential chronologies. The wealth that flowed out of the defeated Inca empire fuelled the Spanish conquest of the Western Hemisphere. Which in turn prompted an English queen to unleash her crown-sanctioned slaver pirates: Drake, Hawkings, Cavendish, et-al on plundering that same wealth to create an English, and subsequent British Empire. Thus creating an atlas of imperialistic regal border drawings, for which much of today’s troubled world is still trying to solve the consequences. The Middle East and Africa are obvious examples. I’m sitting today, in British recorded terms, on another less well documented, border dispute.

More regal dabblers in history

Yet more history. It’s 1830, not long after the break-up of the Spanish empire, Ecuador has seceded from Gran Colombia, but finds itself in debt to a group of British investors. It clears said debt by swapping away a large tract of her Amazon basin. From these mercantile beginnings are birthed a series of wars that have only now been finally (possibly?) resolved. It explains the troops of fatigued, chanting soldiers off for their morning jog that we’ve been passing over the last few days. I do enjoy their exertions, if only because the ever-present dogs find more sporting interest in a group of squaddies than they do in passing cyclists.

Even yet more history. I was educated under that curious Scottish conundrum. To study History or Geography….”either or” but never both. I chose the latter on the adolescent grounds that it was more relevant to a modern world, then spent my subsequent adult life realising that the two subjects are mutually inseparable. Crossroads litter life, both past and present. For me, it’s interesting to speculate what’s down each of the roads; for our decision makers it’s an imperative. History always repeats itself.

 

Yet more geography lessons.

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For those in the know: Cajamarca > Celindin > Balsas > Leymemarca > Pedro Ruis > Bagua Grande…all places that might not show on an atlas map, but are in northern Perù. Dropped pins ( k > q )

 

I thought that I had got a handle on the clima-geography of the Andes. Dry desert on the coast, bisected by great rivers flowing from out of the glaciated mountains that feed an irrigation agriculture, surrounded by bare plantless desert. Rising quickly from the ocean coast to an impoverished Altipano. Dropping down to an elevated Central Valley, only to climb a second ridge of similar hills and then descendIng to the jungly flats.

We had a choice. We arrived in town from the south, we can leave on any of the remaining three quarters of the compass. Which makes Cajamarca a genuine geographical crossroad. It’s also a cross-road to history.

Head straight on at the crossroads, on what would be the obvious line to reach the Ecuadorian frontier and we would find a major road construction project. Gravel roads in the wet are ‘interesting’, but only in the euphemistic sense; add in the prospect of road graders, dump trucks and one hour temporary road closures, and that ‘interest’ becomes problematic. One night’s rain will render the route into an impassable glutinous, glaucous paste. We know, we’ve been rescued by a four-wheel driven pick-up once before.

Turn left and we quickly arrive back down in the coastal Suchera desert, a place described as ‘there will be nothing, then more nothing and then absolutely nothing’. Dieter’s quote concludes, ‘but just as zero is a valid mathematical result, so a desert is a multifaceted entity’. I like his sentiment and I love that countryside, but we’ve been through it many times, and anyway, we’ll end up down there soon enough, whenst it will offer a useful contrast to the mountains.

So we head off to the right. It will be the other three sides of that rectangle. Another deviation, another diversion. We have just enough information to know that there’s going to be a variation in elevations. A couple of high points over 3600m, and a river crossing around 500m, which suggests a rollercoaster ride. It is. But it’s an even bigger rollercoaster of variety.

On our excessively scaled map, the valley that carries the Rio Marañon looks like a major geographical feature. Crest to crest is twenty kilometres as the condor soars, by asphalt it is three times longer and will take us two and a bit days to get to the other side. That’s the trouble with mapping apps; you get the good news and the bad news all together. With that sort of ratio, you know that there’s going to be very few flat sections of road. Do the math and you know the average gradient is going to be constant work.

We crest the first ‘abra’, to find a bank of thick fog clinging to the upper slopes. That makes clima-sense. Warm moist air rising on convection currents meeting cooler drier air arising from the valley that we’ve just left. Roiling, tumbling clouds that are in perpetual motion, yet never retreat or progress. We fall into this murk, down a narrow road that’s been chipped out of the steep hillside. An apparition of a gaucho horseman merges out of the white gloom, but that’s virtually the only traffic. Down. Down. Down. Breaking into clear skies and a vertigo-inducing descent. Each subsequent turn of road appearing to be folded underneath where I’m standing; the road a mere illiterate scribble on the scape.

Hot blasted drafts of ventilated air buffet us as the vegetative zones merge into a dry desert of mesquite trees. Then just as suddenly a spring-fed plot of jungle fruit, papaya and bananas materialises; only to return to that thin shadeless tree cover.

Slowly the bottom of the valley emerges out of the haze, and acquires some definition. I’d convinced myself that if we were going down to those reduced elevations, that we would be entering wild jungle, with visions of howler monkeys, strangler pythons and malarial mozzies. After all, the Rio Marañòn is the major precursor for the Rio Amazonas. Wrong. It might have only a further five hundred metres to drop and over four thousand kilometres to travel to the Atlantic Ocean, but this is a powerful, creamed, mud infused desert river. I will always be incredulous that a river with those potential physics, it’s a gradient so negligible as to be insignificant, can still move. All we find is a meagre strip of mango cultivation on it’s banks. A minor oasis of hardscrabble subsistence farming.

Or so I had assumed. We find a room on a ‘finca’, a smallholding. The family are sorting through a heap of leaves, picking out the woody stalks. Of course I know that it’s coca, but it could possibly be for the chewing, drinking market, the ancient antidote for ‘sorache’, the altitude sickness. Only, in the middle of the night I hear a soft tap on the locked outside gate, whispered conversation, and in the morning the sorted bag has been replaced with a new pile of leaves. There’s also a new powerful Yamaha motor bike parked in a yard that is scattered with the paraphernalia for cock fighting. We play the ignorant Gringo, and start our climb back up the other side of the valley.

Not to break my habit for misjudging the local clima-geography, I had assumed that the re-ascent would be a reverse of the descent. Wrong. True there is the mesquite tree, but now it’s surrounded by withered, desiccated grasses that slowly, with altitude, turn green and grow clovers. More altitude and the trees grow plate sized leaves and garner a canopy that near the top evolves into a cloud forest. The early morning cumulus is an inversion; islands of hill tops break through the cloudscape, wisps of white are teased apart and spiral like geyser’d fumaroles out of scalloped hillsides. The roadside banks are dripping mosses and ferns, a single bead of crystal’d dew on each new unfurling frond.

Cresting the second ‘abra’, we enter yet another world. Possibly nor’west Scotland, circa 1850. Granite outcrops erupting from a wildflower infused swards, docken-chocked patches of potato and rickets of gnarled fence posts held up with rusted tangles of barbed wire. It might not be good traveler etiquette to compare locations, but the emotions engendered by this high river source are so strong as to be impossible to ignore. Then I realise I was in the right century, only the wrong country….County Donegal; Ireland, as a herd of horses, asses and donkeys come clattering around the corner, driven on by three whooping lads. “Gringa, amigo”, to which I’m tempted to reply: “an’ the top o’ the mornin’ to you”. I wonder if they’re straight out of central casting, and the Navigator questions if we’ve stepped into Brigadoon. Will it all disappear around the next corner?

Another long river valley descent, the pay-back, a chance to spend or squander all of the last two days accumulated work. A chance to acquire more stories of violent thunder storms, collapsing hillsides and the surreal evidence of nature’s capriciousness; Jungled bromeliads growing on desert cactus. The weird is just plain wonderful.

I’ve learnt my lesson and given up on trying to second-guess what might be coming around the next corner.

 

Hats

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Ubiquitous imagery.

In a world of globalised, western-influenced fashion, it’s invigorating to watch the strength of resistance and the power of pride that’s exhibited in the Andean ladies. The baseball cap may have conquered the world and the Andean male, but the ladies are in aggressive attack mode.

Quechuan style: Cusco.

Only I have a problem. The varying hats that we see bear no resemblance to the near-ubiquitous painted and woven images that are sold in all the artisanal markets the length and breadth of the Andean highlands. The slumbering figure in native dress, a wide brimmed hat, surrounded by a clutch of terracotta pots. It’s taken three trips and a lot of pedalling to find the answer.

Puritan in style, if not in colour.

Pre- the conquistador’s arrival, each community, each ethnic clan, each regional district had their own style of hat, which, along with the fringes of the pollera’s underskirt, it was possible to realise where a lady originated from. A dialect of couture. A map of ethnicity. Of course the Spanish tried to eradicate these tendencies towards cultural and national identity, and attempted to enforce European clothing styles. Like in the religious iconography, the carvings and the paintings in the ecclesiastical establishments, there was a low level of rebellion. A cuy, a guinea pig, in San Francisco’s portraiture; the stone-carved puma with foliage erupting from its mouth in Arequipa – so reminiscent of the pagan green-man carvings found in early British churches. So it’s no surprise that the hats survived the culturacide.

The Bowler of Bolivia, alongside the ‘Chullo’; the beanie with ear flaps so favoured by every gringo visitor, are the most recognisable, but there are many more. Although not as many as there once were. Over fifty styles are held as museum pieces, many of which are unfortunately no longer manufactured.

Tales of how the bowler arrived in the Bolivia are many. The shipment that was delivered in the 1920s for the Irish Navigators on the rail construction gangs and were found to be too small. Said shipment subsequently sold on to a wholesaler. This does seem to be the most plausible, if only because the bowler-hat-wearing andeñas carry theirs with total panache, perched on top of their heads, generally at a rakish angle. I’ve yet to see one fall off. I’ve seen them readjusting them, or when it rains, removing them to cover with a poly bag, and can confirm that there’s no recourse to pins, clips or straps. There’s some alchemy involved. The bowler hat might have been born in Victorian Britain, but it’s been perfected in Bolivia.

You might have expected to see one style form predominating in a group of adjacent pueblos, and then would anticipate them to be marginally adapted in the next clutch of places. It’s not so. The diversity in style from one small area to another is extreme, and there seems little in the way of progressive design development. Which for us is exciting, you never know what to expect next.

In the space of one week of cycling, (not a great distance given the severity of the inclines), we’ve had four very differing styles. A black felted Homburg whose dish brim is filled with real flowers, to the ‘Montera’, an upturned fruit bowl, appropriately decked in luminous plastic fruit; a stove-pipe adorned with a complementary cockade; and now an exacerbated version of the straw hat. A hat whose brim, in the time it took us to descend from the high ground, expanded to encompass the (admittedly diminutive) Andeña’s shoulders and whose crown has acquired Puritan proportions. Whilst the conservative Bolivian bowler comes in the dappled shades of black, brown and green, the range of colours exhibited in Perù are near kaleidoscopic. From lipstick pink to lime green, crushed mulberry to sky blue. And these ladies have only gone out to do their shopping.

A Texas rancher and the Ladies of Ascot simply don’t have a look in.

 

Lima Bypass.

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One thousand, nine hundred and eighty-six kilometres later, and we’ve completed our Lima bypass.

We’re back down on the Pacific coast again, and the last ‘km’ post that we noted suggested that the capital was exactly 500km behind us. Oddly, as we don’t seem to have shaken off the Lima fog. This despite the fact that those murky clima-conditions are supposed to be particular to a mere 80km stretch of coastline around the capital. In fact we’re back in desert and it’s been raining for the last two days.

A meagre deviation of nearly 1500km, all to avoid the capital’s notorious manic traffic. It also scores for us what I think of as our eleventh Andean traverse. Each has been unique, each has had a different feel to it. This one has been no different.

Mapped, the route has a sense of indecision. Focus in and set it into the third dimension and it takes on the plot of a wanderer. As we waver around bends, clamber up and over passes, then wend along meandering rivers. It’s as if there was a plague in Lima, such has been our effort to avoid it.

Moving south to north has certain peculiar aspects to it. For one we have the prevailing winds at our backs, which allows for lazy starts to the day. No need to rush, in the hope to beat the afternoon gales. It also allows us to faux-sympathise, secretly gloat, with those other cyclists who all seem to be heading for Cape Horn. All heading south, ergo we get to meet them, they all comment that we’re the first bike travellers they’ve encountered since somewhere in Central America.

 

Is it our euro-centric concept of Mercator’s globe and an unbound belief in gravity that all the ‘Enders’ start in that most inspiring of place names: Dead Horse, Alaska, from where, presumably it’s downhill all the way. (The accepted advice is to follow the southerly prevailing winds on the US coast, having achieved that relatively short, easy distance, they are now well placed to face the headwinds on the infinitely longer SA coast). We know, we were taught that lesson two trips past.

Then there’s the fact that our track has been so obviously ‘off-gringo’, such that we’ve taken note of it, more so than on previous occasions. Between Ayacucho and Huaraz, seventeen days travel, the only non-Peruvians that we’ve met, let alone seen have been three meetings with four cyclists. In part because not one town between these two points warrants a mention in the guidebooks. And yet we’ve never had that: “two headed town” moment. The silent stare as we wander by, the spooky, silent store assistant who follows you round the near empty shelves. If anything it’s been the opposite. Walking up the single, meagrely lit street, avoiding the slumbering dogs and the pueblo’s rooting swine, the locals passing like dark wraiths in the night, without exception offer us “good evening” greetings. The school children newly sprung from their desks who want to practice their “hallo mister” English and then remember their good Latin manners and wish us a “Buenas tardes”. The Navigator, whilst queueing for bread, watches the gent in front purchase a piece of cake, then turn and present it to her.

There is no plan, there is no timetable, there is no race. That’s why ‘by-passes’ are so invaluable. They offer the chance to break up the trail, to vary the pace, to stop us from becoming enthralled to the linear ‘Ender’ route.

We’re not yet finished with by-passes. Having climbed back down to sea level, we have the intention to bounce back up to height again. The town of Paiján has a strange reputation, one that I find difficult to equate with all the many Peruvian towns that we’ve safely slept in and safely passed through. The advice from online forums, law enforcement and other travellers, is to avoid it. Banditry is rife. And long-distance cyclists are a particular speciality. Your initial reaction is to question the relevance and the veracity of these tales. Are they the fertile imaginings, the oft repeated, inflated fifth-hand tellings of ‘newbie’ travellers? Only the town isn’t a second day stop away from an European entry point, an international airport, but stuck in the middle of the Pan-Americana. Many of the reports are all too real, from cyclists, some into their fourth or fifth year of world travel, from people who must have acquired a well developed sense of ‘street safety’. Paiján is like a black plug on our route, sending us inland. Only I suspect, even expect, serendipity to intervene; we’re bound to find at least one unscripted good-feeling story along the way.