Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (43 page)

We decided then that it was time to try for some of the other delights of the Pacific.

'At Chiclayo’ said Bruno, 'is the Tourist Hotel, where we will eat oysters and lobsters. It will be wonderful. I have been told about it. Oysters and lobsters with cold white wine. Prepare yourself.'

I had to admit the hotel looked promising. The entrance was grand, the waiters wore starched white coats. There were table cloths and, wonder of wonders, white bread rolls.

'Waiter,' I said, as one approached with a menu, 'we want oysters, oysters as big as this plate.'

'No hay,'
he said.

'In that case,' said Bruno grandly, 'we will have lobster.'

'No hay,'
said the waiter, and offered us prawns in batter.

We looked at the menu. We knew it was no good, but could not bear to admit that the feast was cancelled. The prawns were very expensive. Almost certainly they were frozen, but we ordered them.

'And a bottle of white wine,' said Bruno.

'No hay vino,'
said the waiter snootily. 'It is forbidden to sell vino during the revolution.'

That was how we first heard about the revolution. We stared at each other in amazement. It was a serious matter. The police in Lima and Callao had staged a coup. Many had been killed. The tanks were out in the streets and the fate of the country was in the balance. So far the government had managed to survive. There were rumours of chaos and bloodshed in Lima, but the only noticeable effect in Chiclayo was that you could not get wine with your prawns.

Anyway the prawns were no good. They were fried in bread dough, and the chef had forgotten to put in the prawns.

We left poorer but little wiser. At the next traffic light a dozy Peruvian driver ran into me from behind, ripping off one of my panniers, denting the oil tank and throwing me to the ground. It was that kind of day. I made a tremendous row about it and the crowd came over gradually to my side. Reluctantly the driver peeled off a hundred sole note, gave it to me, and rushed away. I tied my broken box together and took my hundred soles into a wine shop where I got a bottle from a man who had seen too many revolutions. So something good came of that day, though it was not over yet, by any means.

We rode on to Paita which surprised me by being a really graceful town of old and elegant
wood frame
buildings. Unhappily the hotel was the grubbiest of all the buildings, and far too expensive, so we had a chicken dinner and decided to sleep out again. I remembered the telegraph poles

lined up along the road on our way into town and we drove out to sling our hammocks between a suitable pole and opposite ends of the van.

As I was dozing off a faint creaking sound disturbed me, but before I had time even to identify it, the pole came crashing down. My head was towards the pole, and Bruno was asleep with his head at the van end of the hammock. In the moonlight I saw the pole fall directly on to Bruno and the porcelain insulation strike his head. I was so horrified imagining the weight of the pole behind that sharp glassy knob that I did not even notice that I had fallen to the ground.

For a second or two he was deathly still as I struggled up in alarm from the tangle of bedding. Then he woke. He said he had felt nothing. Astonished but relieved I began to consider what the police in Paita might think if they found their communications cut during a revolution, and we decided to leave the site rapidly. Pausing only to pull on our trousers and bundle all our loose things into the van we rushed off for another five miles. Then the bike blew a fuse and stopped, without warning, for the first time on the entire journey.

Hoping we were out of range of suspicion we stopped and slept. I rode back to the scene of our 'crime' next morning to recover a piece of cord that Bruno was missing. I was puzzled by the incident, wondering why the pole had fallen, and why Bruno's head was not split open. The cord was there. The pole lay as we had left it, and I touched one end of it. It was as light as cork, having been entirely eaten away inside by termites leaving only a thin shell.

We rode a long way north that day, and were approaching Ecuador, and still the idyllic beach had eluded us. We came then into a surreal landscape of wind-whipped sandstone shapes where petroleum wells glittered and nodded mysteriously in the wilderness, like a colony of extraterrestrial beings. When the road swung back to the ocean after Talara I looked down and saw it, a broad, gently curving bay embraced by headlands, a fine beach rising up to a cliff face, two small brightly-painted fishing boats beached, two others at anchor in the bay, and no other sign of people or habitation.

I rode down to it and dissolved in its beauty. The sand was soft and unspoiled up under the cliff face, and washed clean and smooth down by the ocean, with no dividing line of sea weed to attract irritating insects. Along one part of the beach some black stone thrust up through the sand. It had been lapped and hollowed by the tide into elegant geometrical forms, lovely in themselves but also so deliberate and precise that I could almost fancy Nature mocking: 'Fit a function to this then, if you please.'

Other bigger rocks stood out into the ocean and offered good platforms for fishing. Squadrons of grey pelicans cruised complacently a few yards offshore, falling now and again like feathered bombs to prove the fish were there. Frigate birds hovered above, printing their primeval black silhouettes on pure blue. The Pacific stretched calm and glorious under the afternoon sun and the cliffs around glowed rosy and warm.

Bruno followed me down and parked the Renault on a hard shelf, by the rock face, resisting the temptation for once to rush in and sink the van irrevocably into the sugary sand. I unpacked the bike and constructed a nest for myself in the sand. It was quite unnecessary, I could have done it later or not at all, but I needed to do something to mark my arrival and stake my claim.

Then we fished, I from the rocks, Bruno by swimming out to one of the anchored boats. I caught nothing but was filled with peace and pleasure. After an hour I looked up to see a police car drawn up behind the Renault, its red light still twirling on its roof. Two policemen were standing by the van, looking fairly relaxed, and Bruno was swimming into shore. I decided to stay where I was. It was a disturbance. I could not help connecting it with the news from Lima, even the telegraph pole we had brought down, but I preferred not to speak to policemen.

I sneaked an occasional glance. Bruno seemed to be talking to them quite amicably. Two fishermen walked past me along the beach dangling several big fish at their sides, and stopped to join the discussion for a while. The fishermen walked on. The police climbed back into their car, and drove off. Bruno went back to the water and swam out again to the boats.

Later Bruno showed me his fish. It was a huge thing with golden discs shining on a gunmetal skin, called a sierra. He had not caught it, however. The police had requisitioned two of them from the fishermen and passed one over to us.

'What did the police want?' I asked.

'Who knows,' he shrugged. 'Maybe they come every day for a free fish. They warned me not to go out too far.
Nada mas.'

It was an odd, meaningless event. Nothing ever came of it, and I never forgot it either. The sierra was one of the most prized fish on that coast, and we must have each eaten about two pounds of it, grilled to perfection. I lay back with tea and cigarettes at exquisite peace with the world.

Even Bruno was unusually calm. He was a good traveller, tough and inquisitive and (it must be said) unusually flexible for a Frenchman. But he was in his mid-twenties with a lot of life ahead of him, and in a bit more of a hurry than I was. That night he seemed willing to let time stand still.

'Who wants to be in Paris in some shitty box?' he said. T wish I didn't have to go back.'

'Why go then?' I asked.

T don't know. It's expected. It's the system - and there's the family farm to sort out now that my father is dead.

'But I don't want to get fucked in that bloody machine, stuck in a box for the rest of my days,' he said angrily. The French call a business a box, one of their better ideas.

'There was a man in Paraguay, out in the Chaco, a Frenchman. I really admired him. Self-made, self-taught, he lived in his own world surrounded by books and his farm. But his mind, it was extraordinary. He thought everything out for himself, and his ideas were original, marvellous. That is a life I envy, but I could never do it alone. I suppose I'm bound to get a job for a while . . . it's not too easy these days.'

Lying on that warm beach under the stars it seemed like the utmost folly even to contemplate it.

We stayed there another day and a night. Some of the time I sat and studied the crabs. They were small and lived in holes spaced about a foot apart. Around the holes was a curious pattern like the footprints of many birds, which first attracted my attention. I waited to see what it was. After a while the crabs would start to emerge, popping their brightly coloured periscope eyes over the top, before daring to climb out. Almost invariably each crab had a small ball of sand tucked under one arm, reminding me of an American footballer about to make a run. Some crabs kicked the ball, others walked a little way and then broke it up. Either way they then went over the loose sand with their pincers, stamping it down to leave those marks I had noticed.

In front of me were three holes set to form a triangle. One crab sat confidently at the mouth of its hole watching the other two. When another crab appeared the first crab made a rush for it, but always failed to get there before the other had bunked down its hole again. After many unsuccessful attempts, the aggressor decided on a final solution. It filled up both the other holes with sand, stamping down on them until they had disappeared. I waited a long while to see if either buried crab would reappear but did not see them again.

I had no idea what the game was but, for all its strangeness, the episode had an uncomfortable familiarity.

From that beach the road led almost directly into Ecuador. Right up to the frontier the country continued barren and rainless. Immediately beyond it we were enveloped by lush wet vegetation, waist-high grass, marshy land, muddy roads and mile upon mile of banana plantations.

In Quito we were accommodated by two Frenchmen seeing out their military service as teachers attached to the Legation. Of all their luxuries, we appreciated most the hi-fi. For an entire afternoon we both lay in their living room with the volume turned full on, playing, again and again, the same recording of Wagner's Overture to
Tannhaiiser,
until we were drunk and saturated with it.

The teachers themselves, for all their hospitality, were less satisfying. One of them was particularly boorish. We all joked at times about the awkwardness of South Americans, but he had no room for humour.

'Ilfaut les supprimer,'
he said again and again. 'They must be put down.' When I realized that he was seriously thinking of exterminating them, like vermin, I became rather uncomfortable and was glad to leave.

In Quito, at a crossroads, I encountered two Americans riding a Norton Commando. We all stopped, on a whim, and talked for a while in a cafe. The meeting led us to stay together for ten days in a hacienda that they were sharing with some others near Otavalo. It was an enchanting experience, not least because we were there long enough to know and talk to some of the Indian girls who came to help with the house and garden. Even Bruno contained his impatience well. The Americans, Bob and Annie, left a deep impression on me. They were, at that moment, contemplating marriage. Indeed they made a valiant attempt to
fulfil
it in the next town, but were defeated by the residence qualifications. So they were happy, of course, but their happiness had an unusual quality of clarity and depth, like a clear pool that invited others to jump in and share.

After a few days they spoke to me about a ranch somewhere north of San Francisco, and some people they thought I would like to meet. I knew this was significant to them, but they were being deliberately vague and so I asked no questions. I had an address of friends where we could meet up again in California, and I put it aside until then. It always seemed strange afterwards to recall the apparently haphazard way in which we had met. It was one of those meetings which, with all the hindsight in the world, must have been a pure chance that changed my life.

The Andes resolutely refused to pall. North of the Equator they became more beautiful than ever, as they spread out across Colombia. From Ipiales to Pasto to Popayan, I was prepared to swear that I would never see anything more beautiful than these great mountainsides clad in greenery and bursting with flowers and flame trees. The homes were more evolved, and built in the most pleasing shape of all, around patios, with red tiled roofs running out over
verandas
. Unlike Peru, Columbia was a soft, habitable country, with streams and waterfalls, and good earth apparently everywhere.

It also had the reputation of being the most dangerous country anywhere. Throughout South America I had been accumulating stories of what happened to travellers in Colombia. Armed robberies at night, tourists shot in hotel rooms, fingers cut off for rings, watches ripped off wrists, every kind of daring hit-and-run theft, and a record of privately motivated murder and violence unparalleled in modern history.