"You must understand the two souls of Peru", murmured the old blind harpist, busking in the mountain town of Yungay. "There is the Indian soul and the Spanish soul, the Condor and the Bull" - hence the statue often seen in Peru of a condor, representing Peru, assaulting an anguished bull, symbolising Spain. Tio Nazario touched his instrument and a light tune wafted breezily from it. "That is the condor", he intoned, staring intently upwards, through his darkly tinted glasses, as if to watch the sacred bird soar high and free on the updraft of his melody. Then his fingers crashed onto the lower strings, and the barrel-bellied Andean harp bellowed. "That is the bull, the Spanish soul." He proceeded to play both motifs at once, the two souls of Peru in emotive juxtaposition.
Once upon a time, Andean villagers would tie a condor to the back of a bull, and let the two fight it out. Civilisation has now rendered this slightly barbaric practice illegal, by recognising the condor as an endangered species - although condors raised in captivity have been successfully released into the wild. However this is of little interest to Tio Nazario, who sees himself as an endangered species, one of the remnants of a rapidly vanishing ancient culture.
As he played, his fingers blurring on the strings, crescendoing rhythm and melody clashed, collided and became fused in a magical flurry. "You see", he explained, "the two souls are at war. But when the war is over, the two are as one."
I had arrived in Yungay with my two travelling companions, whilst making the return journey to Huaraz, the base from which we had launched our expedition into the high Cordillera Blanca mountains of the Andes. Only here can mountain ranges to rival those of the Himalayas be seen. The Blanca is the sister massif to the Cordillera Huayhuash, home to one of the most infamous summits in the world, the 5,000m Siula Grande, immortalised in Joe Simpson's book, Touching the Void. Simpson could keep his mountain though, as we wanted to circumnavigate the majestic bulk of Mount Huascaran, at 6,768m the highest mountain in Peru, indeed the highest peak in the tropics, anywhere in the world. Impossibly gung-ho and poorly equipped, the trek was to prove to be harder than we imagined.
Having endured intense cold, driving snow and the early demise of our supplies of rum, we had been caught in a 36-hour blizzard, and been forced to hole up just below the final pass. Deciding to make a run for it, we had climbed the ridge in an almost total whiteout, feeling our way gingerly over the treacherous and icy ground, roped together and blindly following a trail of faint footprints, despite not having seen another living soul for almost a week. We sneaked over the pass - which boasts one of the most spectacular views in the whole of Peru - shrouded in dense cloying cloud, with visibility of merely 10 metres. Simultaneously elated, relieved and disappointed, we had begun descending rapidly. Hours later we overtook a small group of trekkers with their guide and donkeys. On one of the donkeys lay a young woman, eyes closed, ashen skinned, dry spittle caked to her chin. I have never seen a dead body, but that is how she looked. The rest of them are dull-eyed and look shell-shocked. Poorly acclimatised, the group had succumbed to altitude sickness and were being forced to descend in order to improve their conditions. Together we slip-slided our way into the remote village of Cashapampa.
From here we hitched a ride in the back of a battered Combie van bound for Huaraz. Comfortably ensconced, things had taken on a surreal note when our van had been invaded by weathered locals, a couple of raggedy girls and boys, a dog, some chickens and a giant inflatable rabbit dressed in pink. Clutching bundles of dubious content, swaddled in brilliant, vibrant shawls and chewing mechanically on Coca leaves, our new companions had proceeded to doze off almost immediately, oblivious to the cramped conditions and the debilitating heat.
Our chauffeur had then hurtled down the mountain, on tracks literally inches wider than the van, at unthinkable speeds, peeping and whistling at every corner - apparently this passes for a horn in these parts - hurling the bus around the bends, crumbling the edges of the trail. All this, above near vertical drops of hundreds of metres, as if he was in the final scene of The Italian Job, only there is more than mere gold at stake, and Michael Caine doesn't appear to be present to announce that he has a plan to save us.
Even so, the scenery was utterly breathtaking. The whole region looked unfinished, so craggy, sheer and disjointed did it appear. In the thin and freezing air every line and every colour was sharp. All was jagged. There were no curves, no fading, no blurring. In places it looked peculiarly lunar, in others simply like a different universe, into which we had stumbled from the sanctity of our softer, fleshier world. It's beautiful. A peasant woman next to me murmured, "Cristalina" (crystalline). It was said in a hushed, almost awestruck whisper and I looked across at her. She was old and withered, like a potato baked too long in its skin, leathery-tough against a harsh world. You would have thought that she had long since lost any capacity for tenderness. Yet she was staring out now at a scene with which she may have been familiar since birth, still lost in wonder.
Eventually we entered Yungay, to the sound of a paroxysm of whistles and hoots. Cramped and sore, the driver had chosen to pause here, at the scene of Peru's worst natural disaster. Under certain conditions, a huge wall of water breaks lake boundaries high in the Andes, and rushes down the mountain, causing massive destruction, collecting snow, ice, mud and giant rocks. This mixture of avalanche, waterfall and landslide is known as an "Alluvion". On 31 May 1970, a massive earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale rocked central Peru, killing about 70,000 people. The earthquake loosened some 15 million cubic metres of granite and ice from the west wall of Huascaran Norte, way above the town of Yungay. The resulting Alluvion reached speeds of almost 300km per hour, as it dropped over three vertical kilometres on its way to the unsuspecting town, some 14 kilometres away. It covered the distance in about twenty seconds, accumulating giant, house-sized boulders, which caused terrible carnage.
The town and nearly all of its 18,000 inhabitants were buried. Only the very top of the old cathedral tower remains visible. Today the site is known as Campo Santo, and is marked by a huge white statue of Christ, perched on a knoll, overlooking the devastated countryside. Wandering through flower-filled gardens, amongst occasional gravestones and monuments commemorating the thousands of people who lie buried beneath your feet, it is still possible to see the path of the Alluvion, twenty nine years later, etched into the mountain side like some terrible scar. Similarly, it is etched into the minds of the people from the area - like Tio Nazario, the blind harpist - many of whom lost friends or family members during the tragedy, and speak emotively about it, in almost reverential terms.
Yet because the people here are an extraordinarily hardy breed, and because they appreciate that their lives must go on, whilst they believe that the deceased have passed to a better place, abandoning their shells, they have built New Yungay, just beyond the path of the Alluvion. Here, although the houses are perched precariously amidst the foothills of the Andes, scrabbling for purchase in the arid soil, the people eke out an existence. And once the people and nature cease to be at war, the two coexist as one.
I used the Lonely Planet guide for Peru, although both the Footprint Peru guide and the Rough Guide to Peru are excellent. The annual Footprint Handbook to South America remains the definitive guide to the entire continent. We stock a wide range of detailed maps for Peru.
The single best source of information is the South American Explorers Club, who have offices in Lima, Cusco and Quito. They are a friendly, expertly informed non-profit making volunteer organisation, who will usually be able to provide you with all of the necessary help, advice and support you require when organising your trip.
We also stock Joe Simpson's Touching the Void.
Author: Alex Stewart
Date: 1 September 2001
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