Travels in a Thin Country by Sara Wheeler Read Free Book Online Page B

coming out of it, and struck an angular pose, with a creature like a monkey at its side. Nobody knows what these geoglyphs were for, or if they had a function at all. Matthew, a utilitarian at heart, was adamant that the drawings in the soil once had a purpose. It seemed to me perfectly plausible that they were simply aesthetic, and that the hills were a kind of early art gallery. It didn’t strike me as an odd concept, having grown up in the English west country where there are plenty of images carved in the chalk. Those white horses galloping through my childhood seemed as appropriate to the benign English hills as this sinister alien-man did to the harsh and spooky desert.
    The hot wind which had been blowing through the jeep all day picked up speed in the late afternoon as we took a loop of road to a high village called Chusmiza where, our Chilean guidebook told us with a descriptive flourish, we would find a delightful hotel near a warm mineral spring. This seemed as likely as finding a French restaurant, but we had learnt to keep an open mind. At a small water-bottling plant a man jogged across a yard and flagged us down.
    ‘Hello’, he said.
    ‘Hello’, we answered.
    There was a pause. The three of us smiled inanely.
    ‘Is this the right way to the hotel?’ Matthew eventually asked.
    The man pulled a key out of his pocket with the figure seven carved on it.
    ‘Yes’, he said, holding out the key. ‘One thousand pesos.Just follow the road and you’ll come to it.’ He smiled again. ‘It’s a very quiet hotel. There aren’t any staff. Haven’t had any guests for quite a while now, either.’
    We drove on, each constructing this Marie Céleste in our imagination. The track ended at a long thin building on a spur of land above a shallow valley. We left the jeep on a small forecourt and let ourselves into the hotel through the door painted with a red seven. It led into a high-ceilinged room with three single beds, and in the
en suite
bathroom we found a five-foot deep white-tiled bath fed by hot sulphur springs and occupied by a wooden stopper and a family of salamanders. The toilet flushed with hot water too, and it ran from the single tap in the basin. We had discovered a hotel without cold water.
    The village was so poor that the roofs of the shacks were made of orange crates. We met a priest called Father Miguel outside the water-bottling plant later, and he took us to a truckers’ café. A man disappeared into the back and returned suggesting roast llama and rice. Father Miguel enthusiastically explained that llama is cholesterol-free.
    We made another attempt to reach the Isluga National Park. It was a hard three-hour drive to 12,000 feet, the tracks so corrugated and pitted by Bolivian juggernauts that we were frequently obliged to slow down to ten miles an hour. We had bought some packets of strawberry wafers for breakfast from the roast llama man. They were a scientific triumph, as they had absolutely no taste at all. We were thirsty all the time. The jarring discomfort and the heat made us both irritable. Matthew made his hundredth joke about women drivers, and I snapped at him. Underneath a cosmopolitan and right-on exterior he was deeply conservative. He freely admitted to what he referred to as a ‘fundamentally right-wing perspective on life’; he thought having a liberated attitude towards womenmeant feeling okay if I poured the petrol while he held the funnel. While we were driving along one day he asked me what impression I had got, in general, of Australian men when I was down there for a couple of months earlier that year. After I told him he didn’t speak to me for two hours.
    In Isluga itself, a typical altiplano village and the eastern gateway to the park, narrow streets of thatched adobe cottages formed a semi-circle around a church painted white with marsh lime. At the top of the uneven stairway of the belltower I rang the angelus on two copper-green bells. Next to the church they