Chapter 22

"The Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed, T
he Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.”

W.B. Yeats

I was at home, wandering from room to room, opening drawers, searching for something. It seemed a little strange that I didn’t know what exactly it was that I was looking for but I expected that I’d know it when I saw it. I walked into my study and pulled open a drawer in the bureau. The contents were unfamiliar. One at a time I took various objects out but I couldn’t work out what they were. Nothing seemed to have a shape or form that I could understand. It wasn’t simply that these things weren’t mine, they weren’t even comprehensible to me. I put everything back and closed the drawer. Downstairs in the living room I found my father watching television. I looked at it but the images were random kaleidoscopes of colour, the sounds meaningless jumbles that sounded maddeningly like words but without any sense of order or structure. It seemed to be making sense to my father though.
My mother came in from the kitchen and handed me a cup of tea. I sipped it slowly and she asked.
“Did you find it?”
I still had no idea what exactly it was that I had been seeking but the right reply seemed to be
“No, I’m still looking.”
She said something else and I replied but there was a growing sense that something was wrong. Something here was making me uneasy. It was a ‘what is wrong with this picture’ puzzle. It nagged at the edges of my memory, something important that I was missing.
“Mom?” I asked quietly.
She turned to look at me.
“Aren’t you...?”
I asked.

I awoke from the dream and lay still and quiet in the oppressive humid darkness, listening to the creaking of the hut and the small sounds of things scurrying and slithering about in the thatch. I was overcome with a sense of shame, the dream had just been my guilt at forgetting. How could I have forgotten. How could two days have passed without my thinking of it. It was one year and two days since the worst day of my life, the day Mom died. How could I have gone to bed content, happy even. I felt awful but as I lay there I knew that what I was feeling was as wrong as forgetting had been. She certainly wouldn’t have wanted me to be unhappy. In all my previous travels she had only ever been concerned that I should be enjoying myself. I felt a little better and resolved to reserve some private moments for myself in the coming days, to remember and mourn.

When I managed to fall asleep again it was deep and dreamless until five O'clock when a crowing cockerel woke me sharply and continued until I had no option but to rise.

Personal moments proved to be hard to come by. The day was full. There was a whole morning of exploring the jungle on foot, guided by Adonis, an afternoon where those of us not taking the chance to build a raft and sail down river were occupied at camp, meeting with the locals, tied up with our guides and interpreters who wanted to practice their language skills as much as they could. The evening was to be filled with a ‘local entertainment’ of the kind for which I inevitably reserve my most scathing barbs.

The morning walk saw us split into two groups. Ours was led by Adonis. We headed out from the camp across a field towards the local school which, he told us, had fewer than a dozen pupils. Lessons were in Qechua, although Spanish was taught as a subject to prepare them for higher education. Behind the building we turned onto a track that went down through a field of tall corn-like stalks, as high as our shoulders and followed the line of a stand of trees to the river. Whenever anyone passed us going the other way, and it was quite a busy trail, they brushed their fingertips against ours in a fleeting touch that was their traditional greeting. The river looked wide but it was also shallow. We waded across with the water never even nearing the tops of our borrowed Wellington boots. On the opposite side the trees crowded down to the rivers edge becoming a proper jungle instead of the cultivated land we had seen so far. A few yards in there was a clearing and a house very like the one I had seen on the last jungle trip. We paused to chat to the family, a young woman and her two infant children, and eat some of the slices of watermelon that they offered us before continuing along the narrow muddy path which only occasionally became steep and if it had been dry would have been very easy. In the wet conditions it was a little trickier, the ground sliding away beneath our steps. Adonis pointed out various features as we went. Some, such as the Dragon’s Blood Tree - Sangria Del Draco - were familiar to me from the earlier excursion. Others, the kapok for example with it’s huge triangular sectioned trunk and root system, I had seen before but Adonis descriptions revealed new details. It was, he said, a useless tree with wood was too soft and light to be of use in building and too porous to be useful for use as boats. Still others were completely new to me - the Chicken Blood tree which could be used for plywood or powdered as a nasal stimulant. Plywood and ‘coke’ from one tree, the versatility of nature never ceases to astound me.

Further round the trail we took turns at swinging Tarzan-like on the ‘vines’ - air roots really - and ate the soft candy floss like insides of a fruit that Adonis stripped from one of the trees. Chances for stranger fare were mostly refused. Only Lizzie, who was already showing signs of being unhappy with the trip - she would leave us soon completely - was prepared to eat the lemon ants that Adonis scraped from the inside of a broken twig, although she did report that they had a strong citrus flavour and deserved their name. Gradually we swung back round towards the river and camp for lunch. I chose not to go rafting and stayed in camp hoping for time to myself but as one after another of our hosts came by to chat I found that the time vanished and before I knew it we were eating dinner and preparing to be entertained.

I often claim to hate ‘cultural entertainments’ which are so rarely either cultural or entertaining. At best they are sincere but naive evocations of a way of life that has long passed, a lip service to history reminiscent of the Sealed Knot’s weekend war games. At worst they are a cynical attempt to cash in on that history by separating gullible tourists from their money in return for a piece of mock culture that fools no-one. The one we were presented with here was the former rather than the latter as five men in grass skirts and a variety of instruments that resembled guitars, violins and drums in appearance if not in sound, played, sang and danced and we drank cups of a hot punch prepared from local fruits. I tired of it quickly. Every song sounded in every way identical to the previous one with no variety of tone, tempo or rhythm to enliven it. They were the Ecuadorian Indian equivalent of Status Quo. I slipped away to lie down in one of the hammocks and have some of that reflective time that I had promised myself. This, I discovered later, was simply more proof of my antisocial nature, one more heinous crime added to the growing list. It just shows what a perilous business it can be judging actions without understanding motives.

The other major visit of my jungle excursion was to a place with a toe-curlingly twee name - AmaZOOnias. This was not, as it sounds some Disney style theme park but a working animal sanctuary on the banks of the River Arajuno. Mostly the animals it looks after are ‘rescued’, that is to say they are wild animals that people have inappropriately taken as pets and later discarded or animals that the authorities have confiscated from illegal traders. It’s a privately funded venture staffed by mostly foreign volunteers on ninety day work permits so the staff turnover is quite high. We were shown around by one of the current batch, a tall blonde Austrian girl who explained the set up. The animals that were taken in had one of three fates awaiting them, in roughly equal proportions. About a third would be released into the wild, about a third would have been rendered unfit for release by their experiences in captivity and remain at the centre. The remainder were likely to die.

We walked around the large site examining at the current inhabitants. The first was in the unwanted pet category. An ocelot kitten may look sweet but once it turns into a full grown metre-and-a-half psychopath and starts tearing up the furniture its cuteness value diminishes rapidly. It was, she said, one of the ones that would have a permanent home at the centre. In the next cage we were told there were three kinkajou, cute little arboreal mammals, but as they are nocturnal all we could see of them were odd glimpses of brown fur as we peered into the hollow log where they were sleeping.

On the other hand the toucan, who shared his cage with an unblinking, unmoving caiman, performed like a trouper. Flying around, posing shamelessly for photographs and begging for food. Toucans are beautiful brightly coloured birds and therein lies the source of their particular problem. The feathers are extremely decorative and highly prized. The fact the feathers decorate a toucan rather better than they decorate a head dress is not something the trappers normally consider.

There were other animals - a cage full of assorted monkeys, another with parrots and peccaries. It had clearly been laid out as a sanctuary though and there was nothing of the feel of a zoo about it. It was all the better for that.

When we left Mishaualli it was immediately obvious that we had problems. The gearbox on the truck had been due for an overhaul in Quito before the trip began but the spare parts, like some of the passengers, had been trying to get in by air and were - last we had heard of them - stuck in Dallas, or possible New York, or somewhere. The airline hadn’t seemed to be very sure. Now the temporary repair that Gnomes had done to get us through was starting to break down. At our lunch stop Fi caught a bus to go back to Quito and find out if there were spares yet. We would drive on with the faulty gears to our overnight camp at Papallacta and wait there for news.

I hadn’t been sure what to expect of Papallacta. It was the thermal springs that we had passed on our way to Mishaualli but that could mean anything from a lukewarm puddle to an elaborate full blown spa complex with multiple pools filled with waters of varying temperatures and bars and a gymnasium. While Papallacta wasn’t quite that it certainly had multiple pools scattered around a large site. The water in them ranged from pleasantly warm to almost unbearable There wasn’t a bar but we did have our own supplies so I grabbed a beer and headed for the largest which was quite large enough and deep enough to swim in. After a quick cold shower to make sure I was ready for it an jumped in. There is nothing quite like sitting in a steaming pool of hot water with the cold air stinging your shoulders even as the water makes your limbs tingle unless it is doing it with a beer in your hand.

Soon everyone was there and the beer can mountain at the side of the pool was growing at an alarming rate. Every time I went for another beer I also took another cold shower. Your body gets used to the temperature and a cold shower is a great way to get the most out of the experience. Some of the others went over to the next pool for a game of volleyball but I was happy just floating around and relaxing.

As the evening wore on the air temperature was dropping. Attempts to build a fire were largely futile, hampered by the fact that we had possibly the only non-combustible wood in South America in our wood rack. Carl tried to get it going and failed, Michele tried and failed, Mark tried and failed. We all tried hacking the wood into smaller pieces with an axe but it was no use, the damned stuff just wouldn’t burn. As the evening grew colder and the stuff still wouldn’t catch fire people started to drift off to their tents and the warmth of their sleeping bags. At around eleven I gave up and did the same. My tent was pitched only a few yards away from where the fire starting efforts were being made so I could hear the continuing struggle as I drifted off to sleep. Later, disturbed by voices I woke and from the flickering patterns of light on the canvas could tell that they had finally succeeded. There were voices out there that I didn’t recognise and I guessed that the other truck had arrived with our spare parts and perhaps our missing passenger. I could have got up and joined them but the green numbers glowing on my watch told me that it was already after two so instead I ignored the low voices and rolled over and went back to sleep. Plenty of time to find out what was going on tomorrow.

I had been right. It was the spares truck and our final passenger, Maria who was a pilot with Air Malta. Fi was also back, having come from Quito with Steve on one of the other Dragoman trucks. They had all worked through the night to fix our gear box and now, problem solved, we were ready to continue on our way with a functioning truck and a full compliment of passengers. With everybody now there it felt as if we were underway at last.