This is the second part of a serialized post about an assignment to find Don Benigno Añasco in Peru. It comes up every Monday.
The writer and I flew to Chachapoyas on an old Soviet prop airplane, loud, slow, scary. Chacha, though is a lovely town. It sits at 7000 feet in the foothills of the Andes. There we met the German ethnohistorian who was responsible for the trip and our 2 “guides” and a friend of the German who would act as both guide and bodyguard.
Now a confession, my Spanish has always been pretty weak (sort of ironic now that I sometimes do commercials in Spanish). I thought though that with a month in Peru it would at least get better. Sadly, it didn’t. The Chacha accent was too strong for me to understand and as time went on I understood less and less of what people were saying.
The German had proposed this trip to track down Don Beni and asked the writer to find a magazine to support the effort. We negotiated prices with the guides and the driver who would take us down the Maranon Canyon to Bolivar. At the German’s request I had brought down lots of freeze dried food for our trek into the cloud forest. We couldn’t count on people along the way to have food we could buy, in fact we couldn’t even count on finding Don Beni. His whereabouts were hard to pin down. Some people thought he was a hero, some a criminal. Rumors in this part of Peru are rampant. The German explained, he told one about himself. Apparently when he first came to Chachapoyas people thought he was there at the vanguard of a German immigrant movement. They were going to take over land and start a potato farm...
We set out for Bolivar in the back of a pickup truck. The writer, the German, the Bodyguard, 2 guides and me. Yes we needed a bodyguard, and we had guns, things were pretty dicey where we were going. Remember the start of the first Indiana Jones movie, the one where the treacherous guides try to kill Harrison Ford and take his gold monkey head? Well that is set near Chachapoyas, again I should have done more research...
It was a beautiful, harrowing ride. At times the road was simply a dirt track headed over the cloud shrouded pampas, at times the single lane hung to the side of the river canyon -rock wall on one side, shear drop on the other. Every now and then we’d pass a nest of crosses, one for each person killed when a truck like our plunged over the edge.
After 2 days of driving we pulled into Bolivar. From there we’d hire horse to carry our packs to the top of pass above town and after that we were on our own, retracing Don Beni’s route into the cloud forest.
The story that we heard about Don Beni around Bolivar was that as a very young man he looked out into the unending jungle that you can see from the pass above town and spied a flat piece of land in the hills below. He then traded one of his grandmother’s cows to the government for the land and then spent the next 40 years getting to it. Don Beni and his family would hack through the jungle for a time, then find a little piece of land for a farm clinging to a hillside. They’d farm for a while then in a few years move on always toward the flat land in the distance.
No one, of course knew where Don Beni was, we heard a rumor he was dead, we heard another that he was by his rice farm near Mendoza.
With things as clear as mud we set out in the morning.
Bolivar is high, 10,000 feet. The pass is much higher. Having horses to make the journey up was a lifesaver but at the pass the horses and horse driver turned and headed back down the mountain.
We’d hoped to glimpse the cloud forest below, but it was all enveloped in -well- clouds.
We made camp high above tree line by the ruins of an Inca rest house. There were houses like this across the Inca Roads that Don Beni had discovered and followed into the jungle. I spent the first night out throwing up from altitude sickness in the fog and rain. But once outside the tent the clouds parted and the stars were bright like diamonds in the sky. It gave me hope that the weather was clearing, we were after all there in the dry season.
Dry season or not, we packed camp in the rain and walked downhill all day in a constant downpour. The dense cloud-forest jungle rose up and encircled us it grew darker and darker. We finally walked into a farm around nightfall, not really knowing where we were.
Next week: Mummies
