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Socorro Answers a Cry for Help.

#Brazil, Brazil, Säo Paulo, Socorro, South America, Travel, travelogue

Made ancient by granitic bedrock jutting through in megalithic outcrops, while at the same time made new by the accelerated growth rate of vegetation rampaging over every sod of this Capricorn earth, the topography takes a sideways glance at normality. It’s a split personality of rural France and equatorial South America: piebald cows grazing upland pastures that border dense strips of Atlantic rainforest. Nobbled hilltops, a punk mohican of Atlantic rainforest on one flank, scalped green on the other. If ever Gondwana had an affair with Occitanie, the hills around Socorro is where the child was raised.

There’s nothing quite like a great view to soothe frayed nerves. We left the madhouse of Säo Paulo later than expected on Friday. Wanting to escape the quantum chaos of Friday rush hour traffic, instead the invisible threads that bind millions to the city’s ailing physiology – with its high cholesterol and hypertension – took us into its sickly hold. A passing thunderstorm brought rain not in drops but in globules. Five minutes of deluge had the streets funnelling a torrent of water. As the afternoon wore on, I feared being held hostage to fortune in what would be a million-man race out of the city before dark. And so it went. Swerving hither and thither, we dodged four-wheel bullet after four-wheel bullet in our haste to pull off a spectacular jailbreak. And we almost made it the 25-odd miles to the city limits without incident. That is, until some inconsiderate arsehole (cuzaö in Portuguese – my new favourite, adopted insult) decided to cut us up by swerving violently off the middle lane to reach the exit (saída) and clipping the flank of our car which was motoring along on the inside lane.

Bang! Time stopped momentarily while fate decided whether to flip the car onto its roof and under the 18 wheels of a trundling road train, or to spare us with a mere metallic slap. Fate chose the latter. Stopped in the central reservation of a 6-lane highway from hell, cars flew past us as we remonstrated with the intransigent old fool, who blamed us for being in the slow lane, and therefore causing considerable inconvenience to his plans to make a sudden and spectacularly boneheaded exit off the expressway. ‘Sua culpa’ I said, which maddened him all the more. Meanwhile, I could see the red mist come down on my girlfriend. The offending driver refused to exchange insurance details, stating he didn’t bother buying any for his €15,000 car. Having given up trying to make him see reason, he fled. Karine snapped at the injustice, and an emotional catharsis ensued. Despairing, she insisted on going home. I said no way, so took the wheel and tried to make a dignified escape into the thickly-forested mountains at the natural delimitation of this red giant of a town.

Catharses often end in a profound sense of inner peace. And so it was with Karine. I placed a reassuring hand on hers, and reminded her that we were uninjured and the car, while pranged, was driving well enough. And best of all, we had escaped Säo Paulo’s potent clutches and were now under a tranquil blanket of night in rural Brazil.

We made Socorro by 9pm. The surrounding hills were just about discernible as an inky staircase climbing into the unsullied night. The town, now just a cluster of lamplight in the saddle of a distant valley, looked inviting in a way that only a boy from the provinces could understand. Our little love shack was waiting for us along the Rio de Peixe (Fish River) tourist valley, off the asphalt and down a red oxide dirt track. Old derelict outhouses that once served the Fazenda Fartura loomed in the shadow. Other than weak porch light from the few farm dwellings dotted around the meadows and beside lone arboreal survivors from a disappearing world of giants, we arrived to nought but bliss, and the sound of Earth spinning soundlessly through the void.

TITICACA: Afterlife Vacation Spot #1

#adventure, Lakes, Perú, Reincarnation, South America, Titicaca, Titicaca, Travel

Did You Find Me, or Did I Find You?

For now that blue eye in the sky between Peru and Bolivia still exudes magic. Where others struggled to point, as a kid obsessed with the physical world I faced down that map of the world and prodded right at the X. Titicaca, there’s no hiding from my beady eye. In hindsight, it was my way of saying,


‘Don’t you go evaporating because one of these days I’m coming for you.’

It only took nearing thirty years of travelling to other Titicacas before the real thing found me wandering life’s lost highway. And now Titicaca is gone from sight, tucked away behind that annular world of rock and sky, she hasn’t really gone anywhere other than shrink inch by inch. As the lake was with me from the start, so she shall be to the end. And beyond. Maybe so far beyond that my ashes will linger longer than her vapours.

Early Onset Titicaca Syndrome

I might have mentioned, There’s not a time i can recall not knowing of the lake. Maybe it was the name itself banded around like M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i in the corridors of primary school. The hee-hee and ka-ka onomatopoeia of a laughing jackass, the repetition of the phonemes -ti and -ca, so alien to my English mother tongue. And the familiarity just deepened, breeding not contempt but a certain fascination. Ferocious battles of Trivial Pursuit at the tender age of ten taught me that Titicaca was Earth’s highest navigable body of water. That cool factoid stayed lodged in my hippocampus, planting some seed in the drifting dunes of the mind that would one day bring ephemeral rain enough to germinate that seed into an apparition of the lake itself. I could have sworn it was the real thing, though these days you never can tell.

The Old Ones Are The Best

Hands down, Lake Titicaca is stocked with knockout trivia the way Lake Malawi is stocked with cichlids. Off the bat, it’s where the supreme god Viracocha created the first man (and presumably woman, given that we’re all still here). But more importantly for their selfless service to all life on Earth compared with selfish man and woman, he sent up the sun and the moon from the dark waters. The sun, who went by the name of Inti, then ordered forth his two little suns, Manco Copac and Mama Ocllo (presumably more daughter than sun) to put Man, who was not only selfish but wayward, on the righteous path to Inca-dom. So they set forth over the primordial Altiplano to found Cusco, on a now well worn – if sublime – route covered by both the tourist bus and train between Puno and the aforesaid capital of the Inca’s Pan-Andean empire.

But Titicaca doesn’t even start with the same waist measurements, nor with those time-lost legends of Gods and monsters. Too many of us start skinny and move ever outward around the girth; the lake did the opposite. I read that about 12,000 years ago, when Göbekle Tepe was wowing forager crowds and ice was on the retreat from gigantic Andean glaciers, what now covers 8,370km2 between the modern political constructs we call Peru and Bolivia drowned a much larger area, was at least a hundred feet deeper, creating a liquid landscape bigger than my imagination. Think of it as a rooftop pool not just for Viracocha, but an infinity rooftop (of the world) pool for all the Incan pantheon. Now that’s a big pool of meltwater, all consecrated, it goes without saying.

But alas! Things ain’t what they used to be. In today’s balmy Holocene, all that’s left is a slow-disappearing puddle a few hundred feet deep about the size of Puerto Rico. Still, not to be sniffed at.

 

Ticking off the Ash Bucket List

Ever asked yourself where you’d like those ashes scattered when you are no more? I’ve roamed around looking for ideal ‘eternity’ spots rather like first-time buyers viewing properties in the housing market. In fact, I’ve been crying, ‘this must be the place!’, since the first time I crossed the Oakland Bridge as a greenhorn globetrotter of tender twenty-two and saw San Francisco shimmering like Oz before my very eyes. I was in love with it then and I’m in love with it now. There’s eternity spot #1. But who’s to say one’s vial of earthly remains have to be tipped out in the same place?

Why not entrust a dear friend, or maybe a kindly stranger, to sprinkle a little bit of yourself in more than one hotspot you visited and fell head over heels for? Call it a breadcrumbs trail of your brief appearance on this beautiful blue planet, there for your reincarnate self to rediscover on the great wheel of time.

 

Leave A Little Piece of You Wherever You’ve Gone

In Puno, Peru’s port town on the shore’s of Titicaca, I got the idea for this grand post-mortal plan. On the bus from Cusco i met two of the very few Englishman I found in three months of travelling this land north to south. Affable Liverpudlians, they too were heading to Titicaca for a special reason. One of them, the one not married to the Peruvian girl, was carrying valuable cargo. So priceless it could fit in his pocket; so symbolic it brought him all the way to the Southern Hemisphere.

His dad had died a couple of years prior. The man’s dying wish was that his son would ration his ashes, setting aside enough to be able to scatter in a number of his favourite locations around the world. One such spot was Titicaca, though strangely i don’t think he had ever been there himself. Rather, he died with this long-harboured dream unfulfilled. So his son grasped the initiative. He and his friend took a boat from Puno to Isla Taquille – Avalon in the middle of the lake – and on the way there tipped the vial into inky waters of Titicaca. It was there he could say a final farewell to his father. It was there his father’s 21-gramme soul could say an initial hello to this lake so big and so mystical it could be a freshwater sea sailed by the sky people. There was something truly Arthurian about this tale. A power that never left me.

 

Beaches Where Clouds Ought To Be

Picture yourself on a beach, but no ordinary beach. Picture yourself instead on a soft, sandy beach on an isle ringed with clouds in the middle of Lake Titicaca, at 12,507ft above the bigger cousin of this sea way down there where the world’s intractable problems are deepening by the day. Imagine mountaintops in plain sight, yet so distant I’m not even going to guess how. Visualise a dirty storm front gathering over starboard waters on your Titicaca vessel when on the port side hills are bathed in pure sunlight. Stop and consider for a moment sleeping on a double bed in a floating lodge atop a huge, anchored raft of totora reeds 15ft thick. Being essentially grass this mythical totora, with which the proto-Inca built their distinctive canoes with their curlicue prow, is continuously waterlogged. If the Uro people, who have presumably lived this way since time immemorial, are to avoid a sailor’s death by sinking into 50ft of water, these totora reed mats need re-thatching every fortnight. Can you imagine having to re-thatch a Cotswolds cottage roof every two weeks? I’ve seen the sea peoples of the Andaman. I’ve seen the Junk-dwellers of Canton. Hell, I live on a boat myself. But I’ve seen nothing like this. No, the lake doesn’t add up. And that’s precisely why it does. And that’s why I want my ashes scattered there. Or at least a pinch of them.