Sunday, El Tambo. Cheapest hostel in Huaraz which we can’t afford without special discount from Reyna who is a saving grace of the industrial sprawl towards which gravitate all and sundry, starting from wrinkled Peruvian grandmas with their baskets of herbs and mounds of nobbly potatoes piled up on colourful rags, local alpine wilderness being their backyard, and finishing with off-world tourists drawn like moths to the brilliant radiance of Cordillera Blanca beckoning from its deceptive immediacy: it only takes a day of huffin’ and puffin’ to find oneself out of breath and close to passing out, having climbed barely quarter of the way up to any of the peaks dressed in pristine whiteness, regal as regal gets, and laughing silently to themselves at your expense.
And there you are, beaten by the incapacity of your lungs to embrace the vision, sharing hostel space among likewise gravitationally bound Frenchmen, united in their cracker and cheese infatuation, Slavic-sounding Checks, may their boiled eggs be blessed, Peruvian bikers in their leather and Gore-Tex liveries walking the premises like Hamlet’s ghosts or sitting in chairs with equally stone faces, staunchly awaiting midnight hour of their drinking sabbatical, in spite of fairly well expressed pleas of Reyna against doing so on behalf of those following their circadian rhythms and trying to sleep at the time. Lastly, there’s also random numbers to contend with, such as Uruguayan artisans going up in smoke and peddling their mediocre pendants to impressed young ladies, courtesy of splif-sharing, whom our self-made legends lure into becoming benefactors of their vagrant lifestyle by well-greased new age pathos I can’t help but overhear cutting up veges for a variation of borsch, ditching cabbage out of recipe in favour of locally grown spinach and swapping potatoes for kamote for extra sweetness. It’s a last day of July, Monday being first of August, which coincidentally happens to be Rachel’s birthday. It’s supposed to be the promised day of rest and recuperation, exclusively devoted to herbal tea drinking and doing nothing… yet I feel the strong urge to get the hell out of town. Which entails packing up our room, down to the last almond, toothbrush and sock, to accommodate its next transient inhabitant. Leaving no trace, each and every time, is perhaps a good zen practice and meditation on impermanence, yet it leaves you wishing for a repose from all the hassles at the end of the day.
Rachel is ambushed by my sudden proposal, comfortably stretched on the woollen blankets, and I end up suggesting that I go ahead to the camping spot we both know while she rests in peace and catches up with me the following day. I sense there’s no use waiting for her un-forthcoming answer and retreat downstairs to pack the food, a fairly scrupulous task considering that carrying any surplus food back reflects on your back and forgetting essential item of cuisine will be dearly missed. You want to have that chunk of ginger to warm you up; a slice of beet brings joyful dash of colour to your quinoa and later on, your stool; with a drop of vinegar any meal, just about, tastes better. And god forgive to forget extra coca, to replenish the salt in the spice container and make sure there’s enough dry stevia leaves. Everything is measured in exact amounts, according to the number of meals. By the time I climb back the stairs to our room, Rachel hasn’t moved an inch, stitching her space pants and stewing under the lid as you do when the Universe turns its back on you (a frequent misconception among us humans which has a lot to do with the way one has been brought up to believe oneself to be an island). Upon seeing me getting seriously ready with no time to waste, she starts shoving things around in earnest display of seething anger until I push her over and land on top, suppressing her dismayed protests to violence. What does it matter if internal violence is brought to the surface and expressed, don’t you feel a relief in doing so? Isn’t it what you want? To be unburdened, to take it out of your system? Shallap really hammered us on the last excursion to the mountains, both physically and emotionally. Staying a couple of days in El Tambo, however convenient hot showers and toaster oven is, is far from the best environment energetically as far as recuperation goes.
Fast wi-fi comes at the price of 5G tower; sharing communal space means rubbing shoulders with your fellow backpackers that tend to be excessively vocal seemingly for the sake of being vocal, calling ‘having a conversation’, while you try to zone out way past designated bedtime while sliding between synthetic sheets with earplugs firmly embedded in the ear cavities in hope to get some sleep before catching first colectivo out of town in ungodly hour of the morning, passing through empty streets to avoid forthcoming congestion and bustling trade in favour fresh breeze and tranquillity of alpine expanse. It’s a bit like escaping to Mars. Such excursion bears the cost of physical exertion, sore calf muscles, cracked skin, courtesy of overbearing sun that sucks you dry of moisture and equally unforgiving cold rendering your nasal passages full of phlegm. Lungs expand in futile attempts to enrich blood with oxygen once you climb four thousand meter mark that happens to be the lowest altitude as far as ditching the cows and having a go at the glaciers next day is concerned.
Higher one climbs, more clarity of perception one achieves, which taxes the body accordingly. The glorious shots of sunlit vistas, bathing in radiance streaming from above, precious jewels of pristine lakes embedded in dancing landscape and frozen marvels born of playful metamorphosis of elements at work in the glacier caves as seen in the pictures shared here are but a tip of the iceberg; the hidden bulk that supports this colourful display is not so pretty and this is why I take time to report in earnest, to confess the failings and painful attachment to dead weight that prevents one from getting to higher places, both in external and internal landscape.
Ego is useless as far as ever-changing environment goes by definition, and there’s no such dynamic environment to behold in its purity and magnificence as the mountains in my experience. You ain’t stuck on a piece of floating fiberglass, your feet are planted on the ground, and anytime you wish for more grounding you take your boots off, hug a tree or a stone, dip oneself in the lake. Mountains call you again and again, inexplicably so. Two days in Huaraz is more than enough to start looking at the map once more, tracing dashing marks of walking tracks to the point where they disappear at the feet of the rocky escarpments, unable to traverse thickening contour lines. Shallap is exactly that: an enormous bowl of smooth polished rock wherein curved channels are cut reminding you of waterslides in amusements parks, except that these terminate in significant drops of either fatal or crippling heights. All it takes is a moment of distraction and down you go for a ‘joy ride’ without control.
After arriving to a green lake bearing the same name as the peak, we had to back down from the first attempt at climbing any further due to a mix of drizzling rain and snow and return to the abandoned compound and its graffitied walls, broken windows and collection of empty bottles left on the window sill by rogue youth, as one has to presume (copious love arithmetic scored in charcoal is a plentiful testimony), most likely escaping chances to be caught merrily inebriated in this forgotten outpost of failed ambition. The compound once housed labour force employed to dam the river flowing out of the lake and install hydroelectric station, which never happened. The compound, however, remained, invoking feel of bygone Shakespearian ruins with its crumbling walls of partly collapsed building covered in hieroglyphic lichens and hardy moss - tragedian’s heaven, in other words. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would happily accommodate themselves in these settings for time being, given enough coins to toss. Having procrastinated one day due to aforementioned weather conditions, we woke up to clear sky and magnificent views of glaciers above.
Striking shortly after dawn, we tried crossing the glacier stream in a dozen places to no avail – the rocks in the stream had a coat of ice, presenting no opportunity for steady footing whatsoever. Thus the easier route on the left known to me from previous years climbing had to be forfeited as we had little choice but scale up the buttress of rock on the right which reminded one of piled-up whales thrown on top of each other in the towering shadow of cliffs still higher up. Already being at least four-and-a-half thousand meters above sea level, not a single ray of sun reaching down to warm us up, grasping onto frozen rocks with equally frozen fingers in our puffer jackets that constrict the movements is not fun, to say the least. Going up, one takes the chances among the labyrinth of dead-ends and traverses across smooth channels polished by millennia worth of slow-motion sliding glacier ice to a state of perfection, no finger grips to be found. The only way to stay in place is exerting pressure on the opposite sides of a channel. Apart from my own accelerated heartbeat and grave apprehension, I read a fair bit of fear on Rachel’s face. We were, what you call, in a pickle. “I can’t do it,” Rachel pleaded in the middle of our acrobatic performance across carved into the rock channels, the only way out towards scree slope on the far right. “Yes you can,” I reassured her. “It’s just rocks. Breath into your stomach, otherwise you tense up and lose contact with the mountain.”
That’s how accidents happen. After our return from Shallap (we did make it to the glacier, paying our way with kintu offerings of coca, few kernels of toasted maize for the birds to pick and a dash of blood) we found Alfi, a Peruvian mountain guide also residing at the hostel, looking unusually sombre. When asked where he’s been, he said he went up Huascaran peak. How did it go? Oh, he didn’t make it to the top. Two people fell onto hard ice some twenty meters down, scattering arms and legs like broken scarecrows at unnatural angles (Alfi contorted himself to demonstrate) and are now in hospital but he has no idea alive or dead. Not his clients, they were from previous group that went up two hours prior, one o’clock in the morning. He caught up with them just in time to watch them plunge and bounce off the ice. There’s no helicopters in Huaraz, and hence there’s no heli evac either. He ended up lugging hapless fellows down to base camp, some six thousand meters above sea level… I should have seen the look on the face of the woman who received the aftermath of the “accident” having dispatched perfectly healthy and cheerful fellows earlier on. There ain’t no accidents. And the fact that our starting point was only 4,250 meters up doesn’t make a difference as far as dangers of free-styling around glacier rocks is concerned.
I’ve apologized to Rachel after we traversed the channels, saying she was my responsibility when adventuring up and down precipitous terrain, and she said, no, I’m solely responsible for myself. It’s my own life, she said. I take my hat off to this girl for accompanying me in these crazy missions; it takes guts, steady beating heart and great degree of awareness to inhabit this awe-inspiring environment of Cordillera Blanca where true beauty lies above and beyond the beaten track, just some steeples of stacked up rocks scattered in the mind-boggling labyrinth of stone – if you are lucky to spot them at all.
Time and again you find yourself swaying from tiredness, completely spent by exhilarating ascent, staring at the valley down below with a few trying hours yet to reach that promised meal at the end of the day, the one and only. Snacks you take, of course, carefully measured to keep the body going. Lady-finger bananas go well with homemade cheese; a handful of gooseberries for a burst of vitality, loaded with vitamins, that come in a neat packaging of their own; dry figs; cancha, toasted kernels of maize that last months, dubbed as ‘bread of Incas’; a handful of farinha, a jungle export not available in Huaraz for unknown reason; an apple and a lucuma each (if you never tried it, you should – it’s a complete meal on its own that grows, you guessed it, on lucuma tree!) And, above all, coca. A good bag to keep diving in at every stop to replenish juicy wad behind your cheek. It regulates oxygen content in your blood, helps digestion, provides energy and contains complete list of minerals your body needs. Magic!
We cook on fire, every time. No gas stove for us in Huascaran National Park, designated World Heritage Site, Holy of Holies. Nobody is stopping us, either – advantages of getting out of the way, picking routes ignored by park rangers posted at the entrances of sought-after valleys to collect their over-inflated fees, thus I’m liberated from arguing my case as a human being freely walking the earth on a pilgrimage of spirit. Each night we take a hot rock into bed, heated in the fire and wrapped into item of clothing that miraculously stays warm till next morning! Burgundy-coloured rocks are the best at keeping the heat in. We dream vividly whenever sleep comes between twisting and turning and it’s enough to face the new day, enough to process the madness in the world at large and chill out for the time being. Friends left behind, family far away yet close in heart. Giving thanks and receiving blessings, smoking odd mapacho to connect with the earth, falling asleep listening Osho’s discourses at barely acceptable 48kbps bitrate on a tiny player that happens to have a speaker hidden inside, as we discovered some time ago. A freaking paradise!
Rachel had hard time getting to lake Radian on that Sunday, day before her birthday. Admittedly we had a late start, sun was up, and that scene in El Tambo earlier on didn’t help, either. Every time you have an argument or a fight (I can’t seem to shed my hands-on approach to dissolving dilemmas of misunderstanding, no matter how often I recite the mantra of being aware of the present moment and letting it flush over me detachedly), every time energy field is disturbed ripples follow you throughout the day till you address the issue and chose to centre yourself instead of being swayed back and forth on the periphery of your thoughts. Once again, we are not our thoughts, we are based in the stomach, and there’s no mental trick to remembering it. Head always finds itself. We speak through it, we look through it, and we worship our brain, most complex biotech computing machine known in universe. However, this is not where man is at energetically. Our soul resides an inch below our navel. That’s why you have ‘gut feeling’. This is where the centre actually is. To be centred is a moment-to-moment choice to feel well by being both inside the experience, as a starting point, and at the same time beyond it.
Speaking of eternal. The world being what it is, a playground of dualities… there’s no choice, when you think about it. Freedom is choicelessness. Choice presumes division, one can only choose between something and something. It destroys totality. As far as dualities go, one either transcends them or becomes forever caught in the samsara wheel of one’s making based on popular beliefs that this is all there is. I should just refer you to the sutras. To walk in the mountains affords one opportunity to meditate (else you get bored to death moving your feet over and over and over again) and this is what we are aiming for – centeredness. Balance. Awareness of breath going in and coming out. Each inhalation is life, each exhalation is death. Of course mind is going to resist, to throw tantrums, to fight for survival. Anything will do. I’ve been prepared to let Rachel go just about on every trip to the tops, seeing the difficulty. You can’t hide anything in the mountains. All the tension, all the stale farts, all the misery, all fears and doubts are gonna surface their ugly face and make you look ugly. To raise the vibration is arduous. But your face also shows it: it gets the inner glow, eyes sparkle, heart sings. This is what we’d like to share. But it won’t be of much help; without knowing the full story, you’ll be stumped to find yourself wishing to scatter a steaming pot of quinoa and kamote on the ground by the camping fire at the end of your beloved’s birthday spent in bathing in bright sunlight underneath the glacier by the stream of such purity one has to climb five thousand meters high and be fairly lucky to stumble upon one… with a wee help of wachuma eaten raw on empty stomach, in the spirit and accord with ancient custom of chasquis, the messengers of the Inca empire who had responsibilities of delivering tangled knots of higher authorities over great distances and decipher them for each other, which makes one fairly hungry at the end of the errand because neither coca nor cactus compares to a hot plate of soup. Why would you throw it? Because you just had an argument and wish to divorce yourself from the whole thing. Just to illustrate the pointless, you gonna destroy your meal, the one and only.
Luckily, Rachel stopped me. We enjoyed it and toasted maize bread on a Y-shaped twig with banana inside, which is a real treat, especially served with a herbal brew loaded with fresh camomile and stinging nettle which one always finds growing on the shady side of a boulder underneath the brush. Smoking mapacho, we both agreed and lamented the silliness, blaming it on being tired, and went to bed snuggling up to each other while revising photos taken up high during the fabulous day we have had. Here they are for your viewing pleasure. I gave Rachel photoshoped prints that kept me firmly glued to the laptop for a day back in Huaraz to celebrate her awesomeness and we made love inside the sleeping bags that happen to zip up together, as we recently discovered, you could say by pure accident. Truth and nothing but the truth, folks, take it or leave it; I do hope you take it and give this post thumbs up for its blatant honesty, if nothing else. It’s just nice to know someone visited… thank you!
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