Darkest Peru

By Robert Cooke

Disillusioned with his life and the mundane stress of living to pay your rent that plagues young people in London, our narrator, a struggling actor in his early 20′s, travels to Peru where he embarks on a perilous journey to discover the secret Inca temple Quyllur-Wasi. With the towering Andes and sprawling Amazon before him he seeks an escape from ‘real life’, an adventure to make the explorers of old proud.

However, being completely unprepared for the whole thing, events start to go a little sideways. Miles from civilisation, and with no contact with the wider world, he must fend for himself in a land getting more dangerous by the minute. Alone in the wild, and pursuing a goal he isn’t even sure exists, he is left with ample time and opportunity to reflect on quite what it is he is doing with his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Cooke
• Release date: Nov 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370972913

Robert Cooke

I’m a Writer, Theatre Practitioner and avid traveller from Suffolk, England. Having trained at Middlesex University in Theatre Arts I have worked and performed in a number of capacities from Lighting Designer to Stand-Up Comic. My debut play ‘The Box’ was Highly Commended in the Liverpool Hope Playwriting Prize 2014. My first novel, ‘Darkest Peru’, came into being as a result of a 6 week backpacking journey around Peru that resulted from a growing frustration of working and paying rent in London. I’ve recently released a novella entitled ‘The Indescribable Library Of Oddments’ based on an ongoing storytelling project. I’m currently starting work on the follow up to these two books tentatively titled ‘The Vault Of Horrors’.

Book preview

Darkest Peru

Robert Cooke

Copyright © 2016 by Robert Cooke

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

without the express written permission of the publisher

except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

First Printing, 2016

Smashwords Edition

Cover design by kitfosterdesign.com

https://robertcookeauthor.wordpress.com/

For all those with adventure in their souls.

Contents

1: How It All Began

2: The Second Day

3: The Crossing

4: Night Time Wanderings

5: The Great Mountain

6: The Shadows Of The Mountain

7: The Long Night

8: The Long Descent

9: Jungle Encounters

10: Quyllur-Wasi

11: In The Stark Light Of Day

12: The Return Begins

13: Darkest Peru

14: The Summit Of The World

15: Recompense

16: Back To The Trail

17: The Last Day

18: Consequences

About The Author

1

How It All Began

How to start a tale? There are many places in which I could start this recount for there is always a background as to how events come to happen, the events that lead to those events if you will. However since there would also be things leading to those earlier points I think it better to just jump in.

I had found myself in darkest Peru; as Paddington Bear likes to call it. I suspect that he calls it such not owing to the lack of sunshine, as I can assure you it’s quite toasty, but owing to the fact that he too had, at one stage, had his phone pinched by a no good pickpocket in Cusco. I won’t recount the details because they aren’t very interesting and don’t, as it happens, have anything to do with this tale. All it serves is to frame the situation I had found myself in. Trekking along a dusty abandoned road, hours from civilisation, without any means of communication with the wider world. I’d set off with the grand hope of discovering some lost Inca ruin in the wilds of the country. I’d provisioned myself with the sort of equipment you’d expect to need on such an expedition: Tent, sleeping bag, insect repellent, sturdy machete, toilet roll, cooking gear, dehydrated meals, water purification tablets and filter, gaffer tape, a week’s supply of cooled chocolate. You know, the essentials. How did I embark on such a mission you might ask? Well it all began in a small village in the Colca Valley.

***

I was hiking as many people do, the famous Cañón del Colca. The second deepest canyon in the world, behind the neighbouring Cañón del Cotahuasi, it sits at over twice the depth of Arizona’s famed Grand Canyon. Instead of being an empty gorge as that is though, the Colca Canyon is filled with lush vegetation, fruit trees, cacti, a whole extravaganza of flora and fauna. I had stopped at a small village and was there met with a disapproving look from one of the village’s elder women.

Hola, bueños dias, I said in my most excellent Spanish.

The woman responded by giving me a questioning gaze as though she didn’t quite trust me and just wanted me to go away. Rather than be dissuaded I decided to take it as an opportunity to prove myself, so I dug around in my memory before asking, How are you? in my most charming Quechua, and many blessings be upon you this fine day.

Her tone eased and she apologised sincerely, saying how in her haste she mistook me for a good for nothing tourist and not the true friend of Peru she now saw me for. I told her that it’s absolutely fine, how horrid I found it that tourists had invaded this fine area, much like they had that of Machu Picchu and increasingly so Choquequirao too. I switched back to Spanish, my grasp of the old native Quechua langauage being basic at best, cursing them, their families and their childhood pets and what have you; lamenting how they had defiled the land, all the while congratulating myself on a most stellar performance. Yes, for I too was a traveller in the country; even if I did generally try to be a conscientious one, I wasn’t the White Peruvian she took me for. We continued to talk and the woman, whose name I learnt was Isabel, absent mindedly mentioned how at least they hadn’t got hold of Quyllur-Wasi. Quyllur-Wasi, I thought, I’d never heard of this place. I’d scoured Lonely Planet’s guide to Peru quite thoroughly and nowhere was Quyllur-Wasi mentioned. So, hoping to tease a little bit more information out of her without seeming ignorant, I exclaimed my sadness that my usual route to this great place had proved impassable recently due to a landslide, and enquired as to her preferred path. I was silently praying that this treasured place was resting somewhere in the mountains and not the low lying Amazon, or sprawling desert flatlands. I got lucky and she said, the northern pass? eyes digging right into me.

I nodded my head, completely blocked off.

Ahh, she said, then you’ll have to take the old trail.

Now assured that I was above suspicion I confessed to my ignorance as to the start of this trail, only seeing its termination at Quyllur-Wasi. She then said that I shouldn’t be ashamed; that it was an old and now rarely used path that starts at a jagged outcropping of rocks, where rests a steep track, then staircase that leads up the valley; that I had to follow the riverside track from Paucartambo; and that after a couple of hours walking I should find the path. Not wanting to sound too eager and arouse suspicion I said that I’d have to pay my respects there soon as it had been far too long, before changing the subject and enquiring as to the health of her family and if she’d like a nice mug of coca-tea.

We talked for a good long while and I learnt a lot about the local area, plants, Peru’s history and her own family. She even insisted upon cooking me dinner and I didn’t leave till long after I’d originally planned. I won’t trouble you with the details of what she said for it was a very long chat and irrelevant to the tale in hand in most parts; all you need to know is that Isabel was a lovely, very knowledgeable woman, who astonished me with her open heartedness once she had set aside her initial suspicion. A woman who nevertheless failed to realise I wasn’t in fact born to a Peruvian/American couple from Mancora, but did in fact hail from the sleepy seaside town of Southwold in her Majesty’s England.

***

This was, to return to the point, how I came to be trudging along a dusty riverside path. I might sound slightly disgruntled at this fact, but this was more owing to the swarms of flies and mosquitoes that were pestering me, despite my stern application of insect repellent, than anything more substantial.

The river cascaded loudly beside me. Trees that signalled I was in the Amazon basin rose up alongside towering mountain peaks. Birdsong filled the air and I couldn’t help but feel that I was on the verge of a great discovery.

Now, so that you understand the situation a bit more accurately, I wasn’t as you might expect, an explorer; I didn’t make my living off finding old ruins. I wasn’t a wilderness expert either; my mountain survival experience consisted of three days hiking in Derbyshire for my silver Duke of Edinburgh award when I was 15. This whole thing was, in point of fact, a very bad and very stupid idea. Now before getting any bright ideas about how all must have worked out fine as I’m writing this blah blah I should point out that I could be writing this en-route, maybe someone else is writing it, or maybe I’m making the whole damn thing up. Either way I shall remind you that you should never trust a writer. They get bored, they elaborate, they mess with your head and sometimes, they even tell the truth. So don’t second guess.

Yes! A dusty trail. The taxi driver whom I had hired at my hotel in Paucartambo, having taken a terrifying bus there from Cusco the previous day; had dropped me off at the end of this riverside path and supposedly had no knowledge of any ruin by the name of Quyllur-Wasi, at least no knowledge he was willing to divulge. Rather than discouraging me, this made me quite content that I was on the verge of a great discovery. Truly the thought that I might be going on a wild goose chase orchestrated by a bitter old Peruvian lady, angry at the westernisation of her country and prying cameras that followed, never crossed my mind. This was darkest Peru! This was a magical land, home to the Incas, the Waris and the Chavin cultures in days gone past. Walking out into the cloud forest stretched around me and not finding something remarkable seemed to me the more improbable scenario.

The path along the river was mostly flat, easing me into my expedition. That being said I wasn’t accustomed to the size of my pack. Till this point I’d only been carrying it from bus station to taxi, then from taxi to hostel. When I’d ventured on short hikes so far on my trip I would generally take a smaller day bag with me. Not to mention how my bag had taken on a fairly large amount of added weight of late due to the extra, specialist equipment I’d bought. I mean a machete, honestly? I was beginning to rue that purchase, especially seeing as any situation in which I’d need to use a machete I’d be far more likely to cut off my own limbs than do anything remotely helpful. All this weight combined with the mid-morning sun beating down on me had me questioning, momentarily, what I was doing. I wasn’t an explorer, I don’t want to labour the point but I wasn’t Indiana Jones. I was an actor, a bad one, I wasn’t even Harrison Ford; I couldn’t even pretend I was Indiana Jones.

I stopped, hauled my bag off my back, placing it with a thud on the dirt path and then grabbed my water bottle and took a long swig. I wondered if I might have contracted Dengue Fever, I’d heard it was prevalent in this part of the world. I shook my head, I’d been walking for twenty minutes! Who gives up after twenty minutes? Robert Falcon Scott didn’t. Of course that little devil on my shoulder whispered that Robert Falcon Scott also died in the frozen wastelands of Antarctica so perhaps it’d have been best if he had given up after twenty minutes. But then the names of all the other great explorers came into my mind: David Livingstone, Christopher Columbus, Vasco de Gama, Sir Walter Raleigh, James Cook, Marco Polo; and I thought to myself, ‘meh, it can’t be that hard’. So I put my monster pack back on, tightened the straps and hit the road.

With my renewed vigour I made good time. Well it felt like I was making good time, since I had no basis to judge this on I assumed that my merry strolling was at a good pace. I was, at the least, stopping less; which could be no bad thing. The sun though, intensity only increasing, was making me sweat rivers and so I crossed into the shade of some overhanging trees and there took stock of my situation. I’d been walking for an hour and a half at this point. If the old lady’s directions were accurate I should be hitting the trail head within half an hour. Of course this was an elderly lady saying it was a two hour walk, I could therefore feasibly be hitting the trail-head any minute as an active man in his youth. Buoyed by this thought I set off once more.

Ten, twenty, thirty minutes... an hour passed and there was no sign of the outcropping of rock. Had I missed my mark? I was half tempted to back track my route, but the mere notion of undoing the work I’d done stayed my hand, or legs I guess. For the first time I started to question Isabel’s directions. Had I been deceived? Was this just an elaborate practical joke to pull one over a gringo? Was she even now sitting laughing in her house? No, I refused to believe so. We’d had a nice chat over a cup of tea, I refused utterly to believe that I’d been deceived so. You may now be wondering if I had indeed been tricked, after all I’d tricked Isabel; no-one lies to elderly people, that’s just mean. It’d be only fair after all. Was this, therefore, the end of the story? You get short stories after all, anticlimaxes. Was this one of those; an anti-climactic, unfulfilling, short story? Well the words are continuing so let’s assume my perseverance paid off and there is some life left in this story yet.

***

I continued on my route, certain that I couldn’t have missed a sign as obvious as the one I was looking for. I started to panic though, taking little tracks that I thought, nay hoped, might be the trail, even though they looked nothing like what I was looking for. This wasted more time as I had to work my way back to the river as it became clear the path was incorrect. But lo! With perseverance about to run out, I saw it! Light, a shining beacon, a large jagged outcropping of rocks splitting the dense forest and jungle on either side! I nearly whooped with joy. As foretold there was my path, though it was quite hidden with overgrown bushes, masking the path to any passers-by. An old, low stone wall confirmed the trail though farther up, climbing steeply alongside these rocks and reassuring me that I was in the correct place.

Despite the lushness of the surrounding forest my path itself was bone dry from the sun; much as the path along the river was. Frequently my footing would slip and send small stones tumbling far down the path. Fortunately, due to the wall on one side, and steep rock on the other, it was only really possible to fall on my face, or flat on my backside. Luckily neither of these happened, despite my backpack threatening to overbalance me.

After a while I reached the top of the rocky outcropping and the valley to my left revealed itself in all its glory. The river stretched far into the distance, winding its way left and right. Mountains stretched high around me, some snow capped, some covered to the peak in trees, others obscured from midway up by rolling white clouds. I could see the path I’d started on a pleasing distance below me, I sat down and congratulated myself on how far I’d come. I took a long swig of water, then seeing my bottle already half empty, cursed myself for a fool for not filling it up at the river. Why did I insist on drinking so much earlier; why did I not pack more than a couple of bottles? At least, I supposed, it was less weight to carry.

Checking my watch, a cheap and basic black Casio, I saw it was now 1 o’clock and decided that this was as good a time as any to stop for my lunch.

My lunch consisted of some trail mix, of which I’d brought a large bag, and some cheese and ham sandwiches. Sandwiches, of course, wouldn’t keep long in the heat but I thought, why not cling on to a few luxuries whilst the opportunity presented itself. ‘Sandwiches luxuries?’ you might say. They certainly weren’t a warm burger or a Domino’s stuffed crust. They weren’t even fancy sandwiches like lemon and crayfish. The ham wasn’t even honey and mustard, it was wafer thin. But still, sandwiches are not trail food.

How long this trek would take I didn’t rightly know, as I had foolishly forgotten to ask. I could quite easily get lost too, making my life much more difficult. In any case it was possible that my food stash could run out and I’d be left relying on whatever I could scavenge, and considering my lack of woodland skills I’d probably just be eating fruit. Even if my stash of dehydrated food were to last, I’m sure in a week’s time I’d be longing for a cheese and ham sandwich to break up the monotony of rice and beans. ‘But you said you have cooled chocolate…’ I hear you ask, ‘why can’t you keep sandwiches cool?’ The short answer is that given my limited amount of cooling packs it was a toss-up between the two and honestly, chocolate takes precedence. Also were the packs to fail, which they would in time, chocolate would melt, but could also reform. Cheese and ham would simply go off and taste awful. I had incidentally also brought with me a quantity of flat bread which should last a decent length of time, although with no accompaniment to speak of they would be less than appetising.

I took stock of my situation. If nothing else were to come of this trip at least I’d escaped, for a time, the well trodden tourist routes of Peru. Looking at the untrodden path in front of me I was fairly certain no one had passed this way for a while and I’d have been very surprised if that person wasn’t a local.

I half wondered if I should have obscured my own tracks at the trail-head, so as not to encourage anyone who happened upon it, but then I consoled myself that if a westerner was going to stumble upon this place by chance then they would have done so already; besides I certainly wasn’t going to climb all the way back down. You see now that I was back on the route any lingering doubts in my mind about the authenticity of Quyllur-Wasi had vanished. I can’t express quite what I imagined I’d find as it changed quite frequently. I guess I had in my head a ruin untouched, maybe ornate, with unpillaged treasure. Vilcabamba was supposedly the lost city of the Incas, but since that isn’t actually lost and got fairly smashed up by the Spanish I suppose I thought I was on the cusp of the true lost city. Who knows? Perhaps the Incas even still live there! Their demise was exaggerated, they are simply lying in wait. Realising that, as is often the case, my imagination was getting the better of me, I decided I should probably get walking again.

The path continued to climb and before long I was out of breath. Trees had risen up on both sides now so I was unable to even see how much farther I’d climbed. Part of me wanted to wander off the path and see if I could find a view down, however the sensible part of me realised this would likely end up with me splattered on a rock; in this instance the sensible part won over.

I can’t say for sure but I feel everyone has these two contrasting elements in their minds. The adventurous, spontaneous, often mad part; and the sensible, mundane worrier, that keeps the other half in check. It’s just the case that they manifest in different amounts from person to person. In myself I believe there is an interesting balance. The sensible part will win the war for a while, for that’s what it is, a war; then thoroughly fed up, the adventurous part will take over and engage on a spontaneous trip or mission. The whole situation I found myself in, amongst the trees hundreds of metres up a mountain, was one such mission. The sensible part of me wanted to wrest some control of the situation, the spontaneous part just wanted to run amok.

I paused catching my breath, wondering how far I could walk before it got dark. It was now approaching three o’clock. The good news was that it was the dry season in this area so bad weather wasn’t much of an issue. The bad news was that with Peru sitting on the equator the length of days in the country stay pretty similar year round with it tending to get dark around 5:30/6 o’clock. So using my powers of deduction I surmised I had about three hours of sunlight left. It was therefore, the sensible part of my head thought, probably a good time to start looking for a flat patch of land to camp on. Refreshed after my brief pause I set off again, eyes peeled. Now the problem with trying to camp on a mountain is that there is a paucity of flat ground, with the mountain in question being in the Amazon basin it made it doubly difficult as what flat land there is, is mostly taken up by plant life; and I don’t mean grass.

***

The light was beginning to fade and I’m not going to pretend in two hours of hiking I didn’t find a single flat bit of land. What I will say is I was picky. The camping I’d done before was done solely in campgrounds; campgrounds with flat, unstony and quite comfortable grass. The flat bits I found on my route were stony, sometimes rocky, always uneven and occasionally wet too. But it was now at the point where I could no longer be picky so I’d settled on a fairly even patch on the trail itself. It was hardly ideal, certainly some of the places I’d passed up earlier on would have been far better. Still it was almost a platform, lying between two sharp rises in the path. To the left the trees opened out, almost like a window, the ground here sloped slightly, with the odd shrub clinging to life on the edge, before dropping sharply down. To the right was a barrier of stone maybe two metres high, atop this the jungle/forest (it was a peculiar mixture of both in this area) climbed up into the distance.

You might say it was a fairly decent spot to camp. What worried me though, and were it not for the fading light I’d have moved on from here too, was how small the platform was. It just fitted my tent, positioning the door it either opened to a brick wall, a sharp incline, sharp decline, or effectively a vertical drop. The guy lines were pegged in perilously at best and it seemed to me that it would be fairly easy for me to roll over in the night and take myself, the tent and my luggage off the edge of the mountain. I consoled myself though with the thought that my bag should have sufficient weight to hold the tent in place.

I secured the ropes as best I could, pegging them in at all sorts of angles and supporting them with whatever rocks and branches I could find nearby. Putting the tent up itself was a perilous challenge with a gust of wind catching the inner sheet as I opened it out and nearly carrying me tumbling down the hill. Fortunately my tent was a sturdy, yet light one, only using one tent pole to make what was almost a blade shape. This was therefore up in ten minutes. The bad side to this design was that it was reliant on the pegs holding its shape. I positioned the door to the incline and put my pack in. Next I contemplated my plans for the next day, such as I could make them.

I’d spent most of the afternoon ascending and deduced that this couldn’t continue for much longer. Was I, therefore, near my goal? I had no estimate on time; it could’ve been a day or a week trek for all I knew. I decided it was best not to dwell on the path to come, I would arrive when I arrived. Assuming, said a dark voice in my head, that I managed to arrive at all. I quickly shut down these thoughts of distress and instead replaced them with thoughts of fame and triumph: Announcing my discovery to the news stations of the world; returning to the UK in triumph; writing books on the subject; being known as an ‘academic’, someone whose thoughts are actually listened to. As I got bored of this it crossed my mind that of all the things I’d brought with me I’d neglected to bring a book, which was really uncharacteristic of me,. Figuring I had nothing better to do I thought I may as well look at cooking dinner.

I had with me a trangia, a small stove running on ethanol, and so I pulled out one of my packets of dehydrated food, ripped the top off and dumped the contents into the small pan. I then added the required amount of water but nearly choked having done this when I realised that minus a dribble left in the bottom of the bottle that was