BOOK OF THE DAY: AndesBy Michael Jacobs Granta, 580pp, £25
‘NOT SINCE the beginning of history . . . has there been anything as grand as this highway. It runs through deep valleys and over mountains, through miles of snow, quagmires and living rock, along turbulent rivers . . . in some places it is smooth, paved and carefully laid out . . .”
To a travel writer, a road is often more enticing than the destination and, in Andes, Michael Jacobs finds himself in Ecuador, stumbling across a water-logged bog through which he catches sight of stones that had once been part of the great road that led from Quito to the Inca capital of Cuzco, in Peru, some 1,000km away.
His journey started in Venezuela and finished as he sailed down the channels of Tierra del Fuego – without getting permission to do so from the maritime authorities. “We have become pirates”, his companion remarked, “off the radar”.
Jacobs follows not only the infamous trajectory of the conquistador Pizarro, but also the journey made by the Prussian scientist Humboldt, who came to South America in 1799.
Along the way we bump into Bolivar, who dreamed of a united Andean state, as well as the young Che Guevara and his doctor friend, Alberto, who had their own motorcycle dreams.
But Jacobs’s main reason for coming to South America was to see the longest mountain range in the world with its volcanoes, snowy and majestic, rising like waymarks in the sky.
Humboldt had travelled with all his scientific equipment, including a hygrometer which measured humidity according to how much a strand of hair expanded. Jacobs brought a pen, notebook and a storehouse of information, having read prodigiously before setting out on his five-month Andean odyssey.
We learn that 70 years after Pizarro’s arrival in 1532 the whole of Ecuador’s once tree-covered land had been deforested. We hear about Bolivar’s scandalous affair with a married woman, Quito’s 86 baroque churches and what it’s like to eat roasted guinea pig. And because he’s here to check out the volcanoes, we climb with him almost to the top of Cotoplaxi. With a guide, he started out from the car park and scrambled upwards for a few hours before turning and making a run for it when he saw the weather closing in.
Back in the car park, there’s a coach load of English people whom he denigrates as tourists, demonstrating the silly superiority of some travel writers: “You are a tourist”, they pontificate, “while I am a traveller”. Still, his book is so good I forgive him this lapse.
Similar to Edward Said’s idea of orientalism, at the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu he seems to have ambivalent views of indigentismo whereby “South Americans could form part of an exclusive circle of Machu Picchu admirers . . .” with the Incas being portrayed as romantic and mysterious. Such uncharacteristic negativity may have been because there were so many more tourists at Machu Picchu – though thankfully they were, he notes, soon absorbed by the mist.
More interesting is his examination of the pre-Inca civilisation – those people who crossed the ice bridge from Siberia, travelled south through the central plains of America and down into South America, where some settled and others paddled their canoes back up into the Caribbean, where they are now to be found on the islands of Dominica and St Vincent.
Mary Russell is a writer with a special interest in travel. Her book Journeys of a Lifetimeis published by Simon and Schuster/TownHouse