Cloud Road (11 page)

Dazzling blue-green hummingbirds buzzed the field, including a new one with a tail longer than its body. When
I stood up a little quickly, I felt faint; not a good omen for walking down a cliff. I drank the last of my water. My mouth held a twisted dryness. I found the least terrifying gully and picked up a goat track down, which I would normally have considered too dangerous. I tried not to look ahead to the sections below where the path had fallen away, where mud had flowed over it, or small trees fallen across it. In some places the ground I stood on began sliding down through the mud towards a drop while I tried to stay calm and choose another step forward, grab a branch, and keep going. The sheer length of it was daunting, perhaps five or six hundred vertical feet where any slip would kill. My legs tired quickly through nervous tension. After half an hour I staggered out onto the scrub at the bottom, filled my water bottle and stared at my watch for ten minutes waiting for the sterilising drops to take effect. I drank a litre in a minute, then set about cleaning the stove. The fine filament of wire in the needle valve was bent. It was something I might have missed, or dropped and lost, had I tried to fix it in the dark. I reassembled the stove; it fired, warming my spirits. Then went out. I left it to cool, then tried again; it fired and went roaring blue. Of the food I had left, the things which cooked fastest were instant noodles. Two portions vanished without trace.

I washed up, re-packed and took a long look at the river. It flowed swiftly over boulders two feet in diameter, and was about thirty yards wide. I selected a promising line, faced myself downstream, so rolling boulders would hit calves not shins, grabbed my stick with both hands, and stepped into the torrent. Standing still felt fine, but the second I moved my weight, the force of the current
whipped away all control. The water was up to my thighs. I edged across sideways, like a walking tripod, with sudden lunges, staggers, doubling ups. When I hauled myself out of the other side I celebrated with a dance then drained my boots.

Another seven hundred feet of climbing got me to the road. I was still getting my breath when a small cattle truck pulled up. It doubled as a local bus and was coming down from Achupallas.

‘Alausi?’ they called.

Alausi was a twenty-minute ride in the wrong direction, but it had hostels and cafés.

I flung my pack, then myself, into the back. Bouncing along, I stared straight down into the abyss I had just climbed. We rolled into the little town and pulled up in the sleepy main street. Boys from the various hostels came up touting. I asked one twelve-year-old wearing a Brazil football shirt, ‘Where can I buy a newspaper?’

He said, ‘What’s a newspaper?’

So I headed straight for the hot food stand and bought a bag of boiled potatoes and four bars of chocolate. A heavy cold I had been fighting off had made a comeback, and my lips were chapped and ulcerated, as the chilli sauce which smothered the potatoes soon told me.

I found a wooden hostel festooned with flowers. I dropped my pack on the bed, which gave a long sigh, like a harmonium whose bellows had been shot. My stomach had shrunk, and although I needed a spell of four meals a day, eating was a chore. There were two cafés. Each had only chicken, rice and chips. For lunch, I picked Danielita’s because she had more children to feed; they spilled around on the dirt floor. In the evening, I waited
for my supper in front of a grainy television where an orange-faced astrologer was offering a glimpse of the future at premium call rates. I could cheerfully have pitched him into a tank of things that chew slowly. After another helping of starch and chicken, I took a stroll down the peaceful main street and e-mailed Elaine from a café: ‘Am going back in time, have got figure of an adolescent boy.’ The reply came back next day, ‘Do not pass puberty.’ I would find it difficult to do these trips without her humour and belief.

We arranged to meet in Chiclayo in Northern Peru. I would have to reach Ingapirca quickly and then take a string of long-distance buses. There was nothing more to do in Alausi, except walk up and down the main street, sit on one of the concrete benches and watch other people sit on concrete benches. Bus-boys called ‘A-Quito-a-Quitoa-Quito-a-Quito!’ and ‘A-Ri’bamba-a-Ri’bamba-a-Ri’bamba-Ri’bamba!’. Every hour of the day, the population was encouraged to leave, and go somewhere bigger and better. On a hillock above the town was the single thing which most encouraged me to leave: an enormous colour statue of St Peter. It looked like a lost piece from a garish Vatican chess set. If only a huge hand would descend and move it out of sight. At least it would soon be dark. But, as night swept down the hill on soft wings, there were three audible pings, and St Peter was lit by floodlights. There were days when I missed not having a bazooka.

I took a look round the old railway station. It was all locked up, but a clerk ran up to me and seized my arm, ‘Do you want to ride the train tomorrow? There is a special excursion down the Devil’s Nose! Come early for a ticket, the office opens at nine.’

The Devil’s Nose is probably the most hair-raising piece of railway construction in the world, so dangerous that trains seldom use it. I settled down on the wooden bench outside my room, to catch up on my diary and a bottle of Zhumir lemon rum. It tasted like air freshener. Soon I had to fetch my pillow. I didn’t have any buttocks left.

The railway line comes right down the middle of the road, across the end of the main street, to a station sitting in the angle between the main line and an old siding, which housed a few antique railcars. At least I hoped they were antique curios, and not working rail-stock. At nine fifteen, I climbed the stairs to the ticket office. Inside was the young clerk who had told me they opened at nine. ‘Come in!’ He ushered me into an office, which contained a lime-green steel floor safe, closed with a cheap Chinese padlock. On the desk was an antique Adler typewriter, an English-made Bakelite phone with a cranking handle and no dial, and a brass Western Union Morse code tapper.

‘The train left Riobamba a day late because a section of track was washed away. It has been repaired but she is travelling slowly in case there is any more damage. She will leave here at eleven, the ticket office opens at ten.’

As he had an open door, a passenger and a roll of tickets, I thought sales could commence now, but you don’t ask. I returned at ten, not because I expected punctuality, but because there was nothing else to do. He came in at ten fifteen and discussed Ecuador’s World Cup hopes with Paul, a forty-year-old Englishman travelling on a
westbound
round-the-world air ticket, next stop Easter Island. Had Ecuador been drawn against Easter Island, population
3,000, they would have been in with a shout. But, like a lot of the rank outsiders, they were organised in defence, but unable to create clear chances against experienced opposition. The crucial weapon in their qualifying strategy was simple. They played all their qualifying matches at 10,600 feet, an altitude at which the International Federation of Sports Medicine has banned track and field athletics events as too dangerous for the athletes. The largest city, Guayaquil, on the coast, didn’t host a single game. Bolivia used the same tactic and nearly squeezed Brazil, the eventual winners, out of a qualifying place.

Eleven o’clock passed. An informal game of football began in the street; the pitch included the railway line. Paul and I ate plate after plate of delicious cheese and ham toasties. The footballers grew tired, and disbanded. An old man with short, very bandy legs hobbled down the hill, in the centre of the railway line, too old to believe a timetable. Not long after two a head popped out of an upstairs office, ‘It’s coming! Five minutes.’

There was a shuddering, grinding, growling, ringing noise; a bellow of a horn; then a silver diesel engine with a chevron of red, yellow and blue on its nose felt its way down the rails. It looked like a bull, hooves splayed, sparks flying, being pushed forward from behind. Paul and I had decided that if we were going to ride the most terrifying railway in the world, we should do it in the most dangerous way, and we swarmed up the ladder to the roof. By the time the first, uncontrolled lurch shunted us into motion we were packed in. Some local girls, who had made the journey all the way from Riobamba on the roof, all six hours of it, were looking tired, and decidedly insecure.

We crept down an incline below the town, where workmen had just finished digging mudslides off the track. Dogs ran out to bark at the brakes’ screaming metal. Our speed built up as we dropped down into a gorge and over a river. This section of railway was begun in 1901, designed by Archer Harman, John Harman and William Shunk, and built by Ecuadorians and imported Jamaican labourers. The descent of the Pistichi Hill, which we were approaching, took two years, and cost half a million dollars and dozens of lives; no one is quite sure how many. At times, there was a vertical drop from my boots, resting on the carriage’s eaves, to the foaming water, six hundred feet below. Aplomado falcons shot past our ears and out above the chasm; the drop held no fear for them.

Soon we slowed and emerged at the junction of two valleys, in the acute angle of a Y-shape. The daring and skill of the engineers was breathtaking. The track found itself on the top of a rounded spur, 6,250 feet high. It was too steep, unless they dug away half the mountain, to make room for the turns on a hairpin. Instead, they used a switchback. At the point in a hairpin where you would expect a turn, the track levels and crosses a set of points. When the train has cleared the junction, the points are thrown, and the train reverses back and descends on a line cut below the first one. This is repeated, again and again, with one-and-a-half-mile long sweeps, all the way to the valley floor, more than a mile below. We swung our way down and then back up.

Next day I headed back to the trail. I looked for a bus to take me back to where I had finished my last walk. San Luis Transportes was a small truck with no benches, and
only me for a passenger, until, after two hours, we went for a bounce round the town to drum up trade. The driver whistled at any unaccompanied fat girl, and picked up two young evangelicals in suits just the colour brown that psychologists say signals dishonesty. They sported large tin badges saying ‘If you want to know the meaning of real happiness, just ask.’ I decided to stay miserable. After finding a middle-aged couple who had finished their shopping, we tore off up the hairpins. A bright morning had turned to a grey afternoon, and, in an instant, I was freezing cold. The couple got down at a small hamlet, the evangelicals at the foot of a bleak, bare hill, which they began to climb.

I was alone on the truck for the last half-hour, and stood down in the square of Achupallas, the sole object of curiosity. It is now no more than a tiny country town with a busy fruit and vegetable market on Saturday. But it was once an important
tambo
, or Inca staging post, and the small church in the corner of the square was built on the foundations of the Temple of the Sun.

The Inca road was just another country lane out of town, sad in the rain and the lowering light. I bought as much food as I could carry, and promised myself that I had to be hard. If anyone begged food I would have to say no. I could not let myself run out of fresh food and rely on the cooker and the weather. As the arable land gave way to rough grazing and moorland, the valley narrowed to a pinch point between two dramatic crags, and dense cloud rolled down swiftly from the mountains and drifted in easy grandeur down the valley. Visibility fell to fifty yards. I saw a pleasant-looking little riverside meadow below the path, and climbed down. The ground was deceptively wet
but the rain had eased. I found a small knoll and pitched tent. It was only three feet above the water level, which was far less than I liked, but the river was now just a stream running in two channels around a little mid-stream island, and, unless there were a cloud burst, it was unlikely to rise too quickly for me to retreat.

By the time the tent was pitched, my fingers were numb from the rain. The heavens opened, and the stream began to rise. I crouched in the tent, chewing hungrily on fresh bread rolls and cheese.

As soon as I finished a bottle of water, I found I had diarrhoea, which my dehydration had concealed. Coming back from the third visit up the slope, I saw a horseman and a man on foot standing against the sky, just visible in the murky dusk. The man on foot came down to the meadow on one side of me, while the rider came down the other side, which made me uncomfortable, but as they grew closer, I saw the rider was young, around fifteen. ‘My son,’ said the man, bowing. They were thin, wet and freezing; poorly clothed apart from their thick ponchos. ‘We cross the river here, because of the island. I don’t suppose…’

‘Of course.’ I brought out two bananas and some rolls of bread.

‘¡Caballero!’
he said, touching the rim of his hat. The hand I shook was rough with the dirt of a day in the field.

I said,
‘¡Suerte!’
– good luck. They picked their way across the river and climbed into the cloud on the other side, never once looking back.

It rained hard, I slept little. On my enforced sorties I tracked the stream rising and washed my numb hands in the freezing water and realised the only higher piece of flat
land I could possibly move to was the place I had been using as a toilet. As I struggled to get to sleep I repeatedly dreamed my feet were wet until I woke up and found out they were. I rushed outside the tent, but the stream was still a safe distance away. I found the sodden guy ropes had slackened, and water had ponded on the roof and dripped through. As I mopped up, my only toilet roll jumped out of the pocket in the side of the tent, and into the only puddle. I lay down again and set the alarm for two hours ahead, to check on the stream. The ground shimmied beneath me: another Andean lullaby.

In the morning, the tent fabric was saturated, making my pack even heavier. The cooker wouldn’t light and I delivered a lecture on the quality of American manufactured goods to the morning drizzle. Huddled shapes began to come and go on the hill above, taking animals to pasture. The path was simple to find but little fun to walk. For three-quarters of a mile the path disappeared into a bog-meadow grazed by highly strung horses and cows whose stares ponded their eyes into hypnotic pools. Tiny thatched beehives dotted the hillsides. In hut doorways, tea boiled over small fires, women rubbed their eyes and small children ran back and forth, freezing like statues when they saw the stranger toiling up the valley. I walked on into the empty spaces.