As I'm winding up this journey I'm getting a touch nostalgic so I thought I'd revisit some experiences from the road. I'm often asked what was the most frightening or dangerous moment during your trip. Probably, it was this one from Peru...
Footfall?
I feel muscles go taut, my whole body as tensioned and thinly tremulous as a tightrope walker inside my sleeping bag. It’s a familiar paralysis. I’m rough camping tonight, and offbeat sounds bring an anxiety that feels primal, that lives in my guts, and even if the sabre tooth tiger is now a policeman, a wandering drunk, or a curious farmer, it can’t be reasoned with, it won’t be allayed.
I stay still, dimly breathing, opening my ears and letting the sounds rush in. I hear the prickle of rain blown into my tent, and the breaths of wind, drawing, billowing the fabric. I think again about how safe spaces mutate into ominous ones when you’re sealed away, blind and sensitive only to its murmurings. I can’t hear footsteps now. Perhaps I never did. A dream maybe, or the fidgeting of trees: the innocent pretence of boughs knocking against one another in the night.
The blue glow of my watch says 3 am. I try to remember where I am. My brain zooms in like I’m moving a cursor on googlemaps : South America, Peru, somewhere in La Sierra. I’m far from a town. That’s right, it was raining. There was a house, silhouetted against a violet sky: aloof, concrete, long-shadowed and as empty as I’d hoped when I peered in through the paneless window. The roof, I saw, jutted out giving me three feet of shelter for my tent and a chance to escape the worst of the rain.
Rough camping is always haunted by stray sounds and grumbling portents, and camping in wild, unpeopled places can feel less adventurous than nights in the edgeland, in the half-light and jumbled shrubs of droning roadsides where car headlights tear strips into the night and streetlights twinkle like stars.
During these nightly detours there’s a feeling of stalking society. I’m awake to the clank and grumble of industry, the pylons that hiss like vipers, the harangue of farm dogs that have fixed my scent. It’s thrillingly outsiderish: the thief at the window. Childishly fun like a game of hide and seek. I worked out that over the last six years I’ve spent around 750 nights seeking out two metres square to make my own campsite. Like twilight, most nights have melted away and escaped from memory, though a few I recall now as glorious victories: the Jordanian cliff top, the Californian sea cave, the middle of a French roundabout, a derelict Ottoman castle. Others I remember as stonking defeats, and these I’ve catalogued under labels which invoke timeworn horror movies – The Night of the Fire Ants, The dawn of the Scorpion under my thermorest, and Midnight of the Flood. And when it doesn’t go wrong, when the footfall is not the axe murdering sociopath you know it must be, you experience a sense of escape that washes away all of that gut-buried fear and seems to make the whole process ecstatically worth it.
Crunch crunch
Shit
Crunch
I’ve been here before too, the moment when all doubt evaporates. The feet - I'm sure now - are pacing out a careful circle. I’m being considered. I’m being surveyed. Someone, perhaps, is coming to a decision about me. The feet turn backwards and move to the other side of my tent, near the door.
Nothing for it now, I’m busted. The footsteps are too close, too precise, to have escaped notice. I revive myself in a jolt and sit up, unzip my tent and peer into the shadowy shape of a man whose face I can’t see well until he kneels down and I glimpse his eyes and stop caring about what he looks like because I’m staring at his right hand and the gun clutched within it that rises up and becomes aimed at my head.
The gun is black. It gleams metallically. It looks new. It looks illusory and weird. I see the black hole of the barrel. Something inside me falls and stays falling. I’m not breathing.
Talk
I’m babbling. Spanish comes in a messy flood, words clambering over themselves and pronunciation gone to shit.
‘I’m a tourist, it was raining, I needed somewhere away from the rain. What’s your name? I’m Stephen. What do you want? Please, you don’t need the gun’
‘Fuera’ – Get out. Not angry, not calm. Just instructive. I move. It happens in a flurry, I’ve twisted out from my sleeping bag, my shorts are on, I’m scrabbling to leave my tent. I’m saying ‘fuck’ a lot. And now I’m standing in front of a man with a revolver pointed at my guts. I can see his face now, wet with rain and streaked with mud. His eyes are wide, penetrating, moonlit. I notice that I’m shaking. I notice that he’s shaking too. His gun-hand wavers.
I’m reassured then in a wave. He’s scared. Scared enough to do something rash? I feel myself spiraling again. He angles the gun up a little, I judge the trajectory to meet my chest. My lungs, my heart, my aorta, my trachea, my spinal cord.
‘Get into my house’. There’s a tremble in that voice too.
OK, it’s his house. Think, think. But I’m numb, my mind’s snagged, insensate like my skin, unaffected by the cold and slicking rain.
Who is this? The infamous Ladrones perhaps, one of the bandits I’ve been warned of. There’s a flash of a conversation I had with a biker three weeks ago who’d been shot at, he’d showed me where a bullet had grazed his bicycle frame, it had sounded so fantastical I’d chosen not to believe him. Or maybe he’s one of the Rondas Campesinas, the local vigilantes who patrol rural Peru and fill in for the police, that would be better.
I walk towards the front door of the house, too fast, and he follows shortly behind me, the timbre of the footfall somehow worse than before. I feel the tendons in my neck in tension as I listen for a shot and wait for my back to explode, and blood to soak the front of my chest, movie-style. No shot comes by the time I reach the wooden door which creaks open under my shove.
‘Sit down. Who are you?’
A light comes on. I sit on a wooden chair by a table. I see a small stove in the corner that I must have missed when I peered in the window, but there’s little else to suggest this is anyone’s home.
‘What do you want?’ he says
My mind races to explain the rapidity of his questions, the flustered zip of his eyes, that catch in his voice. But something strange is happening: his fear has stopped precipitating more of my own. I start to wonder if it holds some key to getting out of this.
‘I’m just a tourist, from England. I’m travelling by bicycle. It was raining. I needed somewhere to camp’
He eyes fall away from me, to the side, he scrunches up his dirty face, he seems to be thinking. And with a small backwards lean, the gun falls down to his side.
‘It’s cold tonight’
‘Si señor’
‘Would you like some soup?’
Soup. Right. That would be wonderful. It wasn’t high on my list, but I’ll take it. I nod.
I'm still vigorously nodding as he moves to the stove and fiddles, his back to me. The gun is on the counter now: it’s unheld, it's beyond an intrepid lunge away, I notice. He turns back to me.
‘Some men came to my home last month. They had guns. They took everything’ he says, explaining my impression that the place was derelict.
‘I bought this for protection. I thought you were one of them’
He smiles for the first time, and I realise I’m doing the same, but in a wildly exaggerated way.
‘Why are you back so late?’ I ask
‘Oro’ he says. Gold.
Of course, the muddy face, and all those holes I’d seen cut into the hillsides. This opportunistic mining is illegal, but local men ignore the rules and make nocturnal forays. Some have died when their holes cave in. They make pennies. The multinationals take it away in trucks.
‘Look what I found’ he walks over to me, digs into his pocket and brings out a wad of tissue paper. Opening it up two nuggets of gold glint in the yellowy dance of the electric light.
‘Wow. How much will you sell them for?’
‘112 soles per gram’; he says with pride. Thirty quid. Probably it’s nothing compared to their worth.
We talk, Vancho and I. He tells me about his family, a wife and three children, a few hundred kilometres away in a poor industrial town on the coast, high in crime and transient, dislocated people. He tells me of how he’s struggling to look after them.
Finally he says ‘Well if you need anything, you can knock. Buenas noches, Señor.’
‘Muchas gracias’ It's for the soup, for the not killing me, but mostly for not toying with my impression that the world is not the chilling, calculated one of the TV news.
I return to my tent, the rain has stopped and a few stars are out. I fall asleep slowly next to Vancho’s home, listening again to the night. There’s a lulling, reassuring whisper to the wind, and in a few hours the sun will rise.
Footfall?
I feel muscles go taut, my whole body as tensioned and thinly tremulous as a tightrope walker inside my sleeping bag. It’s a familiar paralysis. I’m rough camping tonight, and offbeat sounds bring an anxiety that feels primal, that lives in my guts, and even if the sabre tooth tiger is now a policeman, a wandering drunk, or a curious farmer, it can’t be reasoned with, it won’t be allayed.
I stay still, dimly breathing, opening my ears and letting the sounds rush in. I hear the prickle of rain blown into my tent, and the breaths of wind, drawing, billowing the fabric. I think again about how safe spaces mutate into ominous ones when you’re sealed away, blind and sensitive only to its murmurings. I can’t hear footsteps now. Perhaps I never did. A dream maybe, or the fidgeting of trees: the innocent pretence of boughs knocking against one another in the night.
The blue glow of my watch says 3 am. I try to remember where I am. My brain zooms in like I’m moving a cursor on googlemaps : South America, Peru, somewhere in La Sierra. I’m far from a town. That’s right, it was raining. There was a house, silhouetted against a violet sky: aloof, concrete, long-shadowed and as empty as I’d hoped when I peered in through the paneless window. The roof, I saw, jutted out giving me three feet of shelter for my tent and a chance to escape the worst of the rain.
Rough camping is always haunted by stray sounds and grumbling portents, and camping in wild, unpeopled places can feel less adventurous than nights in the edgeland, in the half-light and jumbled shrubs of droning roadsides where car headlights tear strips into the night and streetlights twinkle like stars.
During these nightly detours there’s a feeling of stalking society. I’m awake to the clank and grumble of industry, the pylons that hiss like vipers, the harangue of farm dogs that have fixed my scent. It’s thrillingly outsiderish: the thief at the window. Childishly fun like a game of hide and seek. I worked out that over the last six years I’ve spent around 750 nights seeking out two metres square to make my own campsite. Like twilight, most nights have melted away and escaped from memory, though a few I recall now as glorious victories: the Jordanian cliff top, the Californian sea cave, the middle of a French roundabout, a derelict Ottoman castle. Others I remember as stonking defeats, and these I’ve catalogued under labels which invoke timeworn horror movies – The Night of the Fire Ants, The dawn of the Scorpion under my thermorest, and Midnight of the Flood. And when it doesn’t go wrong, when the footfall is not the axe murdering sociopath you know it must be, you experience a sense of escape that washes away all of that gut-buried fear and seems to make the whole process ecstatically worth it.
Crunch crunch
Shit
Crunch
I’ve been here before too, the moment when all doubt evaporates. The feet - I'm sure now - are pacing out a careful circle. I’m being considered. I’m being surveyed. Someone, perhaps, is coming to a decision about me. The feet turn backwards and move to the other side of my tent, near the door.
Nothing for it now, I’m busted. The footsteps are too close, too precise, to have escaped notice. I revive myself in a jolt and sit up, unzip my tent and peer into the shadowy shape of a man whose face I can’t see well until he kneels down and I glimpse his eyes and stop caring about what he looks like because I’m staring at his right hand and the gun clutched within it that rises up and becomes aimed at my head.
The gun is black. It gleams metallically. It looks new. It looks illusory and weird. I see the black hole of the barrel. Something inside me falls and stays falling. I’m not breathing.
Talk
I’m babbling. Spanish comes in a messy flood, words clambering over themselves and pronunciation gone to shit.
‘I’m a tourist, it was raining, I needed somewhere away from the rain. What’s your name? I’m Stephen. What do you want? Please, you don’t need the gun’
‘Fuera’ – Get out. Not angry, not calm. Just instructive. I move. It happens in a flurry, I’ve twisted out from my sleeping bag, my shorts are on, I’m scrabbling to leave my tent. I’m saying ‘fuck’ a lot. And now I’m standing in front of a man with a revolver pointed at my guts. I can see his face now, wet with rain and streaked with mud. His eyes are wide, penetrating, moonlit. I notice that I’m shaking. I notice that he’s shaking too. His gun-hand wavers.
I’m reassured then in a wave. He’s scared. Scared enough to do something rash? I feel myself spiraling again. He angles the gun up a little, I judge the trajectory to meet my chest. My lungs, my heart, my aorta, my trachea, my spinal cord.
‘Get into my house’. There’s a tremble in that voice too.
OK, it’s his house. Think, think. But I’m numb, my mind’s snagged, insensate like my skin, unaffected by the cold and slicking rain.
Who is this? The infamous Ladrones perhaps, one of the bandits I’ve been warned of. There’s a flash of a conversation I had with a biker three weeks ago who’d been shot at, he’d showed me where a bullet had grazed his bicycle frame, it had sounded so fantastical I’d chosen not to believe him. Or maybe he’s one of the Rondas Campesinas, the local vigilantes who patrol rural Peru and fill in for the police, that would be better.
I walk towards the front door of the house, too fast, and he follows shortly behind me, the timbre of the footfall somehow worse than before. I feel the tendons in my neck in tension as I listen for a shot and wait for my back to explode, and blood to soak the front of my chest, movie-style. No shot comes by the time I reach the wooden door which creaks open under my shove.
‘Sit down. Who are you?’
A light comes on. I sit on a wooden chair by a table. I see a small stove in the corner that I must have missed when I peered in the window, but there’s little else to suggest this is anyone’s home.
‘What do you want?’ he says
My mind races to explain the rapidity of his questions, the flustered zip of his eyes, that catch in his voice. But something strange is happening: his fear has stopped precipitating more of my own. I start to wonder if it holds some key to getting out of this.
‘I’m just a tourist, from England. I’m travelling by bicycle. It was raining. I needed somewhere to camp’
He eyes fall away from me, to the side, he scrunches up his dirty face, he seems to be thinking. And with a small backwards lean, the gun falls down to his side.
‘It’s cold tonight’
‘Si señor’
‘Would you like some soup?’
Soup. Right. That would be wonderful. It wasn’t high on my list, but I’ll take it. I nod.
I'm still vigorously nodding as he moves to the stove and fiddles, his back to me. The gun is on the counter now: it’s unheld, it's beyond an intrepid lunge away, I notice. He turns back to me.
‘Some men came to my home last month. They had guns. They took everything’ he says, explaining my impression that the place was derelict.
‘I bought this for protection. I thought you were one of them’
He smiles for the first time, and I realise I’m doing the same, but in a wildly exaggerated way.
‘Why are you back so late?’ I ask
‘Oro’ he says. Gold.
Of course, the muddy face, and all those holes I’d seen cut into the hillsides. This opportunistic mining is illegal, but local men ignore the rules and make nocturnal forays. Some have died when their holes cave in. They make pennies. The multinationals take it away in trucks.
‘Look what I found’ he walks over to me, digs into his pocket and brings out a wad of tissue paper. Opening it up two nuggets of gold glint in the yellowy dance of the electric light.
‘Wow. How much will you sell them for?’
‘112 soles per gram’; he says with pride. Thirty quid. Probably it’s nothing compared to their worth.
We talk, Vancho and I. He tells me about his family, a wife and three children, a few hundred kilometres away in a poor industrial town on the coast, high in crime and transient, dislocated people. He tells me of how he’s struggling to look after them.
Finally he says ‘Well if you need anything, you can knock. Buenas noches, Señor.’
‘Muchas gracias’ It's for the soup, for the not killing me, but mostly for not toying with my impression that the world is not the chilling, calculated one of the TV news.
I return to my tent, the rain has stopped and a few stars are out. I fall asleep slowly next to Vancho’s home, listening again to the night. There’s a lulling, reassuring whisper to the wind, and in a few hours the sun will rise.
Two more blog posts to come: the next on Europe, the last one on thoughts of coming home.A new blog will rise from the ashes from this one.
I’ve been very lucky to receive regular donations from the public over the last three years of this trip since I ran out of money, first through a crowdfunding campaign and then through the ‘donate/ buy me some noodles’ button on this website. Along with income from travel writing and giving presentations, this has been essential for me to continue. I’m seriously running on empty in the final weeks of my trip, so if you’ve enjoyed this blog and would like to make a small contribution so that I can sneak into a café and buy myself a coffee, or sleep in a hostel to escape the snow, I would be immensely grateful. Here’s the link...