How to Walk a Puma (9 page)

We refused the discount, stayed the night, then pushed on the next morning, passing huge groups of volunteers who were busy building shelters or distributing food. This worst of disasters had brought out the best in people, and I felt a little guilty that on the night of the quake I had been so concerned about looters.

During our two-week-long tour of Chile details began to emerge of just how powerful the quake had been. At the epicentre it had registered as 8.8 on the Richter scale, with a reading of 8 in Santiago. Its effects had been felt as far away as New Orleans. The city of Concepción had moved a staggering three metres from where it used to be, Santiago twenty-seven centimetres. Even Buenos Aires, on the other side of the Andes, had shifted four centimetres. South America’s tail had wagged, making maps of the world subtly wrong. The quake had been so violent that the Earth had shifted slightly on its axis, shortening the length of the day by a fraction of a second.

The only way I could conceptualise this was to think of a picnic blanket laid out with food, glasses and drinks, then wondering if I could drag it twenty-seven centimetres without anything falling over. Imagining it that way made me realise how incredible it was that anything had stayed standing, and how lucky we had been.

The Family Minke and I carried on with our travels into regions that geography had spared from any damage. We attracted many stares along the way; at first I attributed this to us being the first tourists people had seen in weeks, before realising that as a group
we probably looked like a lesson in genetics. Papa Minke is a slim but commanding six foot three, Mama Minke comes in at a statuesque five-eleven, and the Minke herself fits evenly between at six-one. My five feet nine presumably made me look like their pet koala.

It was my second time to some of the regions we visited, but this time around I was able to look at them with fresh eyes. Whereas when I first arrived in Chile I was disappointed by its civilisation and order, now I realised how selfish my earlier disappointment had been. I would never wish poor living standards on anyone, but I had been a little disappointed in how developed Chile was. Bolivia had felt more like the South America I expected—ramshackle, fetid and berserk—while Chile felt more like an outpost of Europe. I could not begrudge Chileans their advancement, and seeing the way they had dealt with the savage blow of the earthquake I now admired and respected the people of this country enormously.

But the most important lesson for me had come on the very morning of the quake, as we sat eating breakfast, bread toasted over a gas grill while we waited for the electricity to come back on. Without Chile’s economic development things would have been so different. I had the Minke with me, and my feelings for her grew stronger every day. But I also had Harris and Marguerite and their brood, as close to family as we could be without sharing DNA, and seeing them safe and unharmed made me very, very glad.

Fuerza
, Chile.

Getting High in Bolivia

Sometimes travel can be testing but the tests bring great rewards. At other times, though, travel is like testing your breath by getting someone to kick you in the nose. That was how I felt after getting off a flight from London that had come to Santiago via Dallas, with little time to do anything other than wash off the travel sauce and brush my teeth before getting onto a bus scheduled for a twenty-three-hour trip to San Pedro de Atacama, a small town close to the Chile–Bolivia border in the world’s driest desert.

I’d been in London to promote my last book; after a fortnight of wearing ironed clothes and shoes that shone, I immediately felt more at ease in rumpled T-shirts and battered sneakers. Despite how remarkably comfortable and clean Chilean buses are, I rarely sleep on them, but as this one lurched away from the terminal my eyes began an inexorable droop, and soon I was drooling onto the headrest of the unfortunate passenger beside me.

A few times that night I woke, slurped, apologised, then fell asleep once more, but on the whole I had a not unpleasant trip, waking properly as sunbeams pierced chinks in the drawn curtains, and passengers got up and queued for the loo at the back. I went to stand, but found that I no longer had any joints in my legs. After more than forty-eight hours sitting down on buses and planes, my knees had apparently left me for a younger man, and only unlocked with a noise
like a giant crushing rocks. Outside, the view had changed from Santiago’s sculpted lawns and office blocks to true desert, a place where rain was so rare that a few drops could wash away roads that weren’t built to deal with moisture and would have been deadly—if anyone actually lived here.

Anyone, that is, apart from miners. The road swept past occasional mining operations, the tailings piled in pyramids that evoked the men’s Inca ancestors, strange mineral colours swirling through the rock like ice-cream toppings.

Finally reaching San Pedro, I acknowledged the tightening of a headache, that had built as the bus climbed through the desert to this mountain town. Headaches rarely afflict me except on mornings after red wine. This was no hangover though, and it was paired with a shortness of breath. San Pedro sits at just under two and a half thousand metres, so the oxygen content is significantly lower than Santiago at a mere four hundred and fifty metres, or London, which cruises along at sea level. With protesting lungs I trawled the town for the hostel I was booked into, scanning local maps seemingly designed to baffle visitors and lead them past every possible place but the one they were looking for.

When I finally found the hostel I was surprised that the Minke wasn’t there waiting for me. She’d been booked on a bus from Argentina, where she’d spent the last two weeks viewing its wine regions. Eventually she arrived, accompanied by a local man on a bicycle. ‘We met at the bus stop,’ Lisa told me, ‘and he insisted on helping me find the hostel.’ She shot me a remarkably articulate glance that said, ‘No, I am not picking up stray human beings; he wouldn’t leave me alone.’ The man clearly suffered some powerful delusions (perhaps a life with little oxygen had taken its toll), and
while twitching, insisted that the town was not safe, and that it was a combination of New York and Miami. (‘Have you been to either?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied, confirming what I’d suspected.) He seemed to want to offer his services as a guide, or bodyguard; while one of his eyes rolled in random directions I politely refused his offer, and thanked him for helping the Minke. Once he’d wobbled off on his bike I was aghast when Lisa said she wanted to press on the next day into Bolivia. She had had a hellacious journey that had included a three-hour wait at the Argentinian border, but was eager to keep moving. Meanwhile I was all for some R&R.

‘You can rest when you’re dead,’ she pointed out, and even though it felt like that state might come about sooner rather than later I agreed to the plan.

So the next day, still tasting airline food between my teeth, I trudged with Lisa to a tourist office and booked a three-day trip into Bolivia. We’d been warned that many of the operators who offered this trip were shonky, but a friend had recommended one company and it was with some relief that I saw there was a little tread on the tyres of the four-wheel-drive Toyota LandCruiser we boarded later that morning.

There were six of us plus a driver in the LandCruiser, which had incongruous T-Rex decals on the windscreen. In this chariot we would wend our way over the Andes into Bolivia, then across the world’s largest salt flats to a town called Uyuni.

We had a near-disastrous start. On the outskirts of San Pedro we cleared immigration procedure to exit Chile, then headed into no-man’s land where we climbed, climbed and climbed some more, the dry landscape punctuated by occasional bursts of mineral colour and the even more unlikely sight of high-altitude springs with lurid
green and red algae, speckled with the pink of feeding flamingos. Then, just as incompatible with the surrounds, we sighted a solitary shack, and beside it a flagpole from which the brightly coloured Bolivian flag snapped in the strong wind. All we had to do here was get our passports stamped and carry on, a simple procedure in most places. There was just one problem. The Minke.

‘What is this country?’ the border guard asked in Spanish, looking at the Minke’s passport. Lisa had written ‘
Gales
’ on her form, the Spanish word for Wales. She explained that it was near England, and was part of the United Kingdom, like Scotland.

‘It is not a real country,’ the guard said, crossing out ‘
Gales
’ and writing ‘
Inglatera
’ beside it.

Of course, the Welsh and English, despite being neighbours and ruled by the same parliament, have a contentious history that includes acts of colonial bastardry by the English that have not been forgotten by the Welsh. Calling a Welshman English is not the greatest insult imaginable, but may cost you some teeth if the Welsh person in question feels sufficiently aggrieved by it. As the Minke straightened to her full and imposing height, I started to fear we might just see the inside of a Bolivian jail before the day was out, so I grabbed her and said, ‘Choose your battles.’

She glared at me.

‘Of course Wales is a real country, he just can’t be expected to know that, what with Bolivia not playing rugby,’ I said.

She didn’t look convinced.

‘They don’t have schools here either,’ I added facetiously.

She laughed then and we were stamped in, and in no time we were back in the vehicle, shivering from our brief exposure to the bitter mountain air.

The temperature had gone from pleasant and sun-soaked in San Pedro to a harsh, windswept chill now that we had hit three and a half thousand metres. As the vehicle climbed further we passed larger lakes with the occasional pause for photos. Small herds of vicuñas scattered at our approach, their daintiness in stark contrast to their more famous relative, the camel. The lakes themselves were so saturated with naturally occurring minerals that the water ranged from red to green, with shades of blue and orange in between.

Despite their toxic appearance, each lake had a population of flamingos working the water, avocets too, and many smaller birds that took off before I could get close enough to identify them, probably alerted by my harsh panting. Every step up there felt like a marathon, and just climbing a rocky outcrop for a better view left me wrecked, condor bait—if there had been any condors around. This was without a doubt the most inhospitable place I had ever been to. Parts of this mountain range had never recorded rain, and temperatures ranged from scorching in the lowlands to the
breath-fogging
cold of the spring-fed lakes.

Our group was all European, apart from myself and Eduoardo, our driver, who was Bolivian. The Minke was, as noted, proudly Welsh, there was a French girl, a softly spoken young German man with spiky dyed-red hair, and a Polish couple. The Polish couple spoke no Spanish, but the woman had some understanding of English, so that—conveniently for me—became the common language.

‘Can you breathe?’ I asked the Polish woman as she stumbled up onto the rock beside me. All she did was pant in reply, waving at her mouth to indicate she couldn’t speak. So I guessed not. Not only had I not been at altitude for some time, I had never before been quite so high. Australia and Botswana, the countries where I have
spent most time, are both markedly flat, their highest peaks mere pimples on the landscape compared to the Andes. I was struggling.

There’s a certain sheer bloody-mindedness that comes with being a bird watcher, that seemingly most passive of activities, and so when we reached our final destination for the day, the azure Lago Colorado, I was determined to get out there and see what new species I could spot from its shores. Lago Colorado is one of the only places on the globe where three species of flamingo can be seen, as well as many specialist high-altitude species with eponymous names like Andean goose, Andean avocet, and gasping foolfinch. (One of those names might have been made up while addled by lack of oxygen.)

There was nowhere near enough water in the vehicle for the group, and the dehydrating caffeinated drink the driver constantly sipped on would do me no favours, so I took what water could be spared and set off on what I thought would be a leisurely stroll. The flamingos were easy to find, as were several of the other larger species. It amazed me how diverse the bird life was—we had peaked here at four and a half thousand metres, a punishing altitude for anything with lungs, yet I easily saw twenty species of birds in a few hundred metres. For some reason, though, I was convinced that on the other side of the lake, only a half-kilometre around, would be more species that I had not seen before. There was no logical reason for this, but like many enthusiasts, bird watchers can become irrationally fixated. So I stumbled along, mouth open, ignoring the dizziness I felt and the weakness in my legs. A drab brown bird called a cinclodes lifted off in front of me, so plain that it could only delight the most hardened bird nerd; I was sufficiently inspired at this sight to carry on.

A natural spring fed the lake, and I soon found its outlet, which was bright green with algae. I was thirsty, having finished the bottle
of water I’d brought, but feared drinking from even this most pure of natural sources might turn me green, like an anorexic Hulk.

I pushed on, spotting a few more species, my shoes now coated with dust as I could only drag my feet, not lift them. Eventually it dawned on me how stupid I was being—a remarkable moment of clarity considering how foolishly I’d been behaving to that point. I could barely breathe, and a mere stroll had me close to collapse. Now I had to get back.

As I looked over the flamingo-coated lake, our camp, less than a kilometre away, suddenly seemed impossibly far. I groaned, made a shuffling turn, and started retracing the drag marks my feet had left. ‘I’m too old for this,’ I thought, returning to my new favourite theme. This time though I didn’t mean I was too old for adventure, but too old for such stupidity. Getting back seemed improbable; doing it before blinding dark certainly so. The sky was turning the same shade of pink as the flamingos, and there was no source of artificial light between me and the camp. This was no place to spend the night and wait it out—exposure could kill up here, and soon I wouldn’t even have the energy to shiver.

I began dragging my feet again, a shambling figure. I’d told Lisa that I was going for a walk, but had neglected to mention exactly where I intended to go. How long would it be before they sent someone to look for me? If they had hardly any water in the car, would they have flashlights? This was not Chile but Bolivia, the country I’d expected to find in South America—undoubtedly charming, but chaotic and ramshackle. I felt such a fool as the light faded, too exhausted now to even lift my binoculars at what might have been a bird but was probably just an hallucination, the product of an oxygen-starved mind.

The lake edge had a gentle curve that I needed to follow back to the camp, with an ill-defined trail following the arc. I decided to cut a corner, but soon realised the folly of that as I sank almost to my ankles in rich, gluggy mud, weighing down my feet further. I was torn between the need to hurry to beat the setting sun and conserving energy by moving at a less lung-busting pace. From the outside I must have looked like an arthritic tortoise, but I felt even more decrepit. Earlier I had found the lack of oxygen and its effects a novelty—not pleasant, but a new experience and therefore worth savouring. Now it scared me. I felt like I was drowning on land.

One step, then another. I paused, leant over and rubbed my thighs. They ached, deep aches as though I’d run a marathon (not that I know from experience what that’s like). My mini-break over, I started moving again, making it only a few paces before stopping once more, my breathing now rapid and harsh, like a horny bull elephant that has spotted a breeding herd.

In the distance I saw a light come on, and realised it was from the arrangement of huts that made up our campsite. It was still distant, too distant, and it hit me that I wasn’t going to make it. The will that had driven me forward to see some different birds was absent now. And, incredibly, making it through the night was not as powerful a motivator. I sometimes joked that my lack of coordination disproved the theory of evolution, and my lack of will to survive now made it quite clear that this was true.