Rising Above it All

The flight to La Paz was delayed because
of bad weather in Cuzco. We waited in Arequipa for conditions to clear,
stretching our legs on the airfield. I breathed my first Andean air,
and felt dizzy, partly through lack of sleep, partly through lack
of oxygen, and mostly through the sheer enormity of the situation.

I leaned against a fuel truck to steady my legs, my thoughts. These
were the Andes - my prize and my goal. A broad sweep of ridges across
a map, the setting for a thousand daydreams - for years I had held
the idea in my mind, savouring it like the last caramel in the tin,
turning over the name and myriad possibilites it held. I had dreamed
so often of standing a mile above the sea, shivering in the dry wind,
breathing thin Andean air and looking out over snowcapped mountains
and dusty plains that actually being there, doing all that, was a
little overwhelming. I shivered again. It was very cold.

We had left
the oppressive flat humidity of Lima at dawn, rising through the low
cloud that seemed to hang permanently over the city, as if entering
a second sky. As we headed east, moving from the coastal lowlands
towards the Andes, crumpled brown mountains, like discarded wrapping
paper, appeared, their peaks breaking through the low cloud. From
my smudged and freezing window, miles above, they looked like stranded
islands, the wild sea of clouds breaking over their shores with the
dawn.

I was exhausted from the long series of flights to get to this
new world, and from too many hours spent killing time in sterile airport
lounges. London, Madrid, Santo Domingo, Lima - my eyes ached with
purified air and lack of sleep, and names and flights and times blurred
together in my mind. I have always wondered why airport lounges are
so dull, being as they are associated with journeys, arrivals and
departures. The seating always the same - long rows of semi-comfortable
seats; the duty-free shopping identical, and always the only thing
open. Rum from Barbados, Gin from London, Perfume from Paris. And
where are we this morning? Tuesday? Must be Peru.

A matter of scale

My mind swum with the enormity of this
step - physically, a movement between a building and a machine; mentally,
a giant’s leap to a whole new world. I had always been amazed that
leaving a country was that easy - one step, and you’re gone. Yet we
are so busy fumbling with boarding cards and bonkbusters that there’s
barely time to register such a passage.

On each flight I had strained
forward in my seat to peer out of the tiny scratched window, eager
to catch a glimpse of dusty mountains, winding roads like veins, shimmering
lakes, moss-like forest shining sea, lying far below. On each succesive
landing, as the plane neared the runway and the miniature became life-size,
I had searched for a human in the landscape, the network of streets
and shacks beneath the flight-path. It was only then that I could
begin to take it on board. I am in Spain; The Dominican Republic;
Peru. That person is a local - he’s raking his yard, as he always
does on a Wednesday afternoon - life is normal, undisturbed, but for
the noisy crashing of the aircraft thundering overhead. I am the one
who is out of place, out of normality.

Ever since I had first been
tall enough to see out of the tiny boxed window on an aeroplane, I
had been fascinated with seeing the world in minature. I loved the
way that borders meant nothing up there - that the movement from one
country, state, province to the next was infintissimal; that from
that height the relations between mountains and cities, rivers and
the ocean could be seen clearly.

And as we landed, I could count off
- There’s my first Peruvian; now I can see the face of another; and
then the eyes of still another. I counted - still count - the nations
by the faces, and the surface of the world as one, from my metal cocoon.
As we had come in to land on Arequipa airfield, the mountains which
had previously seemed so small and delicate had towered above us,
majestic and desolate.

Nowhere land

When we came to a halt, we disembarked, wandering and stretching close
to the plane, as if scared that it might leave without us. Arequipa
is a bit of a nowhere place, really. It is not the usual stop en route
from Lima to La Paz, but actually lies in the mountains to the South.
It is over three thousand metres above sea level, and is famous for
its isolation - and its weather.

In Lima I had stopped for a meal
with a distant friend of a friend. I knew no-one else in South America,
save the handful of fellow students from the University of Liverpool
who, like me were spending a year doing independent research in the
region, in locations from Northern Mexico to Southern Chile. I knew
that one of them, Neil, had planned to go to Arequipa, and had told
me so back in January, the last time I had seen him before I left Liverpool
to live and study in Southern Spain for seven months. But this was
August. Plans change as much as people, and who knows where he was
by then. I stared down the bleak valley wedged betwen the mountains,
where the guidebook had indicated that the city lay, and silently
wished him well, if he was there.

Living in colour

While waiting for the weather to
clear for our ongoing journey, I read more of the guidebook before
I was drawn into a conversation with two other strandees. One was
a flight attendant on the AeroPeru flight, taking the opportunity
presented by the unexpected stopover to have a cigarette (or ten).
The other was a plump businessman from Lima, heading to the Bolivian
capital for a meeting, hence the dawn flight. Their faces looked much
like those I had grown accustomed to during my time in Spain - olive
skin with dark hair and eyes. But I realised that these men, with
their relative whitness, were a minority, at least in the country
to which we were heading, Bolivia. Already, scanning the rows of seats
on the aeroplane I had noticed the brown faces and features which
belied indian ancestry. Both Boliva and Peru have sizeable indigenous
populations, and even larger groups of ‘mestizos’ - a term which literally
means ‘mixed’, but which carries many more, less favourable connotations.

One of the men with whom I had been talking, the flight steward, asked
me if I had plans to visit Arequipa ‘properly’ during my time in South
America. His accent was strange to my ears, used as I was to the rapidity
and mis-pronunciation of the Spanish spoken in Andalucia. His voice
meandered slowly and with precision. I told him, with typical Andaluz
directness, that it was okay, that I spoke Spanish well,
that he could speak faster. He grinned lopsidedly and lilted ‘Pero
hablamos asi….. But we speak like this’. I blushed and realised
that with such scarcity of oxygen, there was danger in rushing anything.
I tried to slow my speech, knowing that if I did not, I would soon
be breathless.

The steward chuckled, and his cigarette butt flew through
the air as he flicked it. I watched the glowing arc it made, and saw
it come to land next to the fuel truck. So this is South America,
I thought, and turned my back.