Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [35]
When the sun goes down in the Andes, the temperature plummets. Afternoon was just sliding into evening when we arrived, soaked with sweat, at Valentin’s farm in the clouds. Valentin’s wife and daughter invited John and me to dry off inside their toasty home. “Mi papá no está,” the daughter explained—Valentin was away, working. The daughter served us each a gigantic tin mug of fresh-brewed café con canchitas, strong, sweet black coffee with roasted corn kernels floating on top. The house was built with mud-brick adobe and was a marvel of compactness and efficiency. It had two rooms, each about eight by ten. There were niches in the walls for storage, like those the Incas built into their walls to display idols.
“There’s where you store your food,” John said, pointing over our heads. Removable bamboo ceiling panels allowed access to the space beneath the straw roof, which had been waterproofed by grease from the cooking fire. Guinea pigs—cuys—scurried about underfoot, eating any scraps that fell to the ground. (“Had I not been very hungry, I might never have known how delicious a roast guinea pig can be,” Bingham wrote of his introduction to this Andean delicacy. “The meat is not unlike squab.”) A cat curled up next to the wood fire, in what was evidently its regular spot. We sat in the warmth of the orange glow, smiling at Valentin’s wife, who spoke only Quechua. She sat at the doorway with stick in hand, swatting at chickens that tried to enter every couple of minutes.
On our way back out into the chilly night, we crossed paths with the killer devil goat, who was about the size of a Labrador. Juvenal was guilty of exaggerating, not lying. “Give him a wide berth,” Valentin’s daughter explained. “He’s a little aggressive around strangers.”
The coffee, unfortunately, had its usual peristaltic effects, and the contents of my abdomen churned like an industrial mixer from the moment I lay down. After staring at the ceiling of my tent for hours, I went out around midnight, opened the wooden gate that I had been told led to the designated zone for doing one’s business, and tiptoed along a mountainside trail in the dark. My headlamp revealed no discernible hole in the ground, so I finally dropped my pants and unburdened myself in what seemed to be an inconspicuous nook in the rock face. Directly in front of me was a one-thousand-foot drop. Miles off in the distance, the lights of the nearest town with electric power twinkled proudly like fireflies beneath the cloudless sky. It was a lovely view, and I was to appreciate it several times before dawn.
At daybreak, it became obvious that I had been squatting not in some hidden crevice, but in the exact middle of the only trail that led north out of the farm—the direction in which we were departing after breakfast. Had I employed a compass and sextant, I doubt I could have calculated a more conspicuous spot. Small fistfuls of blindingly white toilet paper that I had tossed, imagining them drifting into the chasm, were arranged festively in the branches of a bush.
Over breakfast tea—it seemed a good day to pass on the coffee—I told John about my trouble. He was immediately interested. He thought my problem was probably giardia that I’d picked up in Cusco. John had once suffered from a super strain of the parasite, and the episode appeared to have scarred him. “It’s highly contagious. Have your family tested when you get home.” He pulled out the medical kit and began removing various packets of pills.
It was nice to have something in common.
When we said good-bye at the wooden gate and settled the bill for camping, I slipped Valentin’s daughter an extra couple dollars and thanked her profusely for her warm hospitality. When she turned her back, I ran away.