Photo: peruforless.com

I heard a voice coming at fullest volume from my lungs into the packed-full bus: "SILENCIO ES PAZ!!" Maybe sort of an enigmatic message in itself? The bus stopped -- only a mile now from Cotahuasi after the early walk and unexpected long day's wait -- the lights came on, and people looked to the back seats. The fellow to my left, with tongue well loosened by the two hours of sharing pisco and wine with others who came to the back (not spilling too much on me with the rough ride), volunteered: "The gringo has a bowel problem (colico)". The five-minute nonstop team effort of two ramped-up -- radio advertising specialists? narco addicts? -- overselling everything in town now with overexcited voices to fit in with the money tsunami pouring through the banks into a new group of victims -- had finally been too much. I followed up -- "WHAT'S THE RADIO FOR? FIVE MINUTES OF ALL ADVERTISEMENTS! WHERE'S THE MUSIC? SILENCE IS PEACE!" It fit in well, people thought it was just another drunk in the back, the lights went off and the bus started up again. The ad volume was turned down until music came on again. Maybe only Ramiro seemed a bit puzzled -- after I helped him with his new little "hotel" balcony railing those two days and I explained over Janet's good meals that I hadn't had a drink in nine months -- 'Rick start drinking again?'

I always "knew I'd get my heart broke" in Cotahuasi Canyon. I looked it up in my diary (only a few blank holes in the eight years of "South American retirement plan") -- it was six years almost to the day since I first set foot in magic, peaceful, roadless and electricity-less Quechualla, and January of that same year ('09) for the Canyon.

I left for "Souther America" Chile and Argentina/Patagonia last January with one plan being to be able to get a six-month Peru visa again. Bolivia has a limit of three months per year for US'ers, and it seemed I'd been getting extra time in Peru (six months per year is usual?) just going back and forth for those six years. Now the plan worked and I got the 183 days, until November -- but I'd "known" I'd be in for some unsettling changes by the signals coming through last year. People who had met me on a trail or dirt road on one of those early burro wanders might pass me in a street now with a preoccupied expression instead of a happy hello. A few of the many shops selling large boxes of fruits and vegetables closed down, to be replaced by others with flashy techno-modern merchandise. Wasn't that a few new banks? Your friends, you know, helping you "develop" and stop being "poor."

But then -- talking about "poor"? When I left It had been seven full months since the public internet shops that were available for five years before that had shut down, with only brief use of the computer room at the colegio (middle/high school) still possible. Now it was a full year! And the internet service at the school closed down too! I told a few people that Cotahuasi now qualified as the most backward, poverty-striken town in "all America" as far as my experience goes. While traveling by land from Mexico to Patagonia, I have never found a place anywhere near the size of this main Cotahuasi Canyon town that lacked a public internet shop. And that after it had them! So OK, whatever, I try not to paint a coat of paint called "judgement" or "conclusions" over reality any more than I must, just deal with it. I'd first arrived in town from the "souther" lands about the same time, eight at night, two hours after dark, ten days before my "bowel problem" on the crowded bus. It was my ninth time over my now-preferred route, that Grand High Ridge and final canyon rim dividing the Cotahuasi Canyon from its "downstream sister" Huanca Huanca/Maran, with each time being full of different and interesting experiences. From classic Corculla (3550 meters) to at least the road fork coming from Sayla (4700 meters/ ) there's no regular bus or minivan service I'd walked it, with and without help with my load, got that ride with the soccer team the first time, caught lucky truck rides twice, and walked the long way around to Sayla with a porter's help once to catch the twice-a-week bus from there. (I still want to write about all of these and put them in some kind of sensible order!)

Now, after five pleasant days of conversation and helping with the last Abba-bean harvest in Corculla with the likeminded Frenchman I'd met last year in Quechualla and the Peruvian girlfriend he's met now and is looking to settle into these traditional zones with --and also waiting for a chance to get to Cotahuasi -- along came Roberto, one of those truckers from last year. After a 5am combi ride to nearby Oyolo and an eight-hour wait, we'd gone over a new road across the highlands through Charcana and to Cotahuaasi in a mere five hours.

It was too late for a soup at my favorite lady's "Tipika" restaurant but a poster caught my eye. It advertised the ninth annual Cotahuasi Adventure Sports Festival, May 1-3. The main photo showed a guy in an inflatable kayak poised at the very rim of -- that can't be the enormous and terrible Sipìa waterfall?! The river makes a left turn just before the fall, it sure looked like it -- already I couldn't quite figure this out. Sure, experienced people run waterfalls. But why use a photo that looks just like the upper part of Sipia?

How much more trouble I had later when I heard that a 27-year-old Peruvian from Cusco had gone over the Sipia fall a month earlier! It turned out that somehow he fell out of a raft (?) the last day of the festival while crossing the river with three others to set up a rapelling line -- just above the falls! This 500-foot (some sources say 500-meter) fall is not "beautiful", as it has often been called, but a unique power spot and heavy warning -- here you enter the serious part of a canyon that is finally impassable! The three-stage fall goes into a slot canyon so narrow that you have to walk a mile or more from the road to get to the single place with a view of it. What was left of the guy finally came out five miles downriver headless, armless, with one leg remaining to the knee. I can't seem to shake thinking this thing is somehow symbolic of changes in the Canyon.

OK, so I headed for Quechualla, and spent a blessed six days in the good old tepee camp as I've returned to do so many times these past years. The profound silence with background of a constant riversong, both energizing and calming, is unique in the world of my experience. With two hours' walk still to the road's end, I've always told locals I hoped the road never arrived. Quechualla, with its Quechua (and Spanish)-speaking inhabitants (but Spanish names and faces), a single solar phone for the town and enough panels to charge a few batteries, and highly developed traditional permaculture, grapes and wine even -- and other details making for ideal limited tourism -- hardly lacks for a thing, really is a model of what an alternative simple life can be. But now the roadbuilding -- on hold for three years or more -- had just begun as I caught Janet and Ramiro at road's end with enough space left on their burro for the heavy part of my load. They stopped to look at the first part of the bulldozer's progress on the other side of the river -- scheduled to get to town in five months. And the electricity, poised to be completed any day, is a big line strung with poles hauled in one at a time by two men happy to "get a job". It's part of the grid coming from about forty miles upriver at the Alca hydro plant -- certainly for future use in mines (like the road surely is?) rather than what small power use would be needed by the village.

I was sad with preparations to leave the good old tepee camp this time -- feeling the "marker events" adding up to different times for me in the future. I always blithely remarked that I'd leave with burro when road and electricity arrived. Now -- time to put my, uh, feet where my mouth was? Or decide I already had? -- I did check out the availability of "Gringo Yogi Burro" for some tryouts when I return (the answer is yes) -- and Edwin no longer says they'll "eat the burros" when the road comes. Better to save them for rainy seasons when a new road would wash out anyway

As I began packing at 4am Wednesday I had no idea about the final "marker event" of this visit coming up for the day. I started as planned for the direct uphill three-day route over into the other canyon and Corculla -- load just too heavy!! -- and changed plans to the usual upriver two-hour hike and bus to Cotahuasi, then the Friday bus over to the highland above Corculla. Surprise! -- nobody had mentioned this, including conversations during the mellow two days of helping Ramiro out with the balcony railing for his "hotelito" -- seventy people ended up waiting most of the day at the road's end, a third or so coming on foot with pack animals and others by two special buses from and back to Cotahuasi -- to get their "free gift" of a double-burner gas grill, propane tank and fittings. There were about double that number up on the list to receive this. The speech I barely understood and didn't ask about during my five-hour wait for the bus back spoke of the ill health for their lungs the traditional wood burning causes. It seems the switch to gas is sorta mandatory -- part of that "·Scenic Reserve" that has been so noticeably advertised without much explanation these years I've been coming?. I guess I can quit being hesitant about pointing out the alternative of pure alcohol fuel like I've been using for several years.(who was I to think I could improve their traditions?) Maybe that could even be made in their traditional "copper kettle" stills by running the pisco through a few more times? I guess I might want to check that out on internet before I get back to the poor, backward "modernizing" Canyon where the main city/town has none? And -- for that matter -- where the sale of pure alcohol is "prohibido" throughout the entire canyon and "nobody" knows it can not only be drunk but used for cooking fuel? So now I still can't shake the image of that guy going over the Sipia fall. How much might the poster picture have had to do with those guys screwing around the river just above the falls? The festival organizers did come under fire for poor organization of inexperienced participants. Maybe it's just as well I didn' fish too seriously a month later ten miles farthur downstream? Mighta hooked into a "big one" I wasn't ready for?

So -- my sadness at mindless modernizations finally did get a moment's expression if only as a "colic" problem on that late Wednesday bus ride. The Friday hike over from the highland (4700 meters) down to Corculla (3550m) ended up taking nine hard hours this time! Was my baggage heavier than ever? I realized I'd had help of one sort or another all three of the other times -- how lucky that first time when it would've been a cold allnighter, or what? I guess the signs are in place -- I really could use burro's help on a next hike or two, unless some other company comes along -- and there were NO tourists in Quechualla that near-week I was there, rather unusual these past few years.

------------- Rick(ardo) 

Latest installment of the story of my travels in Peru, Bolivia and... I've only written up the first two of eight crossings now. Every one has been memorable with details of its own -- and now I'm heading (at relaxed pace?) for numbers nine and next ... This one might stand on its own? I'd like to work up the whole series just because "it is there!"  

Part 5: Was That The Apus?
Part 4: Real Grand Canyon Venture
Part 3: The Other Side of that Grand Final Rim
Part 2: Classic Corculla, Long Lost Lands
Part 1: Condors Taking Wing from a Great Divide