Conquistadors: Mike's Diary
Mexico: Episode One: The Fall of the Aztecs:
Historian spoiling another perfectly good shot... Mike in the upper Coca river jungle.
Camp underneath Perote mountain. The clouds are down over our heads now; tremendous rolls of thunder; rain coming down in stair rods. I can hardly write, I'm so wet and cold. We are following Cortes journey from the coast. No matter how often you hear it, its an unbelievable tale: Like an episode of Star Trek, a Close Encounter of the Third Kind. A few hundred Spanish adventurers go into a hitherto undiscovered civilisation: an empire of millions: into what really was an unknown world: for no one yet knows in 1519 whether the New World is a continent, or just a few islands off China. The Aztecs under their leader Montezuma are unsure how to respond to these aliens: Are they humans? Demons? Or gods? On this question events will hinge. But Aztec civilisation, for all its beauties, has terror at its heart: human sacrifice on a scale unknown in history. Hearts cut out on top of pyramids: the stuff of nightmares. Cortes and his men know what will happen if they lose.
Cortes leaves the coast having scuttled his ships. So there's no way out. Victory or death. To get to the Aztec capital in the Valley of Mexico, they have to cross two great ranges of volcanoes. We are camped on the first tonight. To the south, coming in and out of cloud, is the snow capped 20,000 foot peak of Orizaba, from where bitter winds have been buffeting us all day. Cortes' route cut between Orizaba and Perote, up into a dank bleak landscape of pines, ferns, and spongy moorland. We decided to follow him on the ground with pack animals carrying our gear. But no sooner were we out of contact with our support vehicle, than monsoon-like rains deluged the mountain, just as they did when the conquistadors came through. We have trecked for several hours now, soaked to the skin, our path turned into a stream. Before nightfall our sound mixer packed up; then the camera; the last shots we snatched on our small back-up digi-beta. The rain is till drumming on the kitchen tent, but we've got hot water on the stove now, and tortillas on the griddle. Some compensation for what will surely be a miserable night.
I find the terrible events of the fall of the Aztec empire as tragic and powerful as the tale of Troy: the destruction of the vast city on its islands in a great blue lake: a dream to the Europeans who first saw it... 'It seemed like an enchanted vision' said one of Cortes men: 'Indeed some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream. It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen, or dreamed of before.' Thats what fascinates me about the tale: its the meeting of two worlds: It gives us the best idea of what it would be like to meet people from another planet. And the Aztec attempt to understand the Europeans surely is one of the most moving tales in history.
Peru: Episode Two: Conquest of the Incas: (Rescued by the coca leaf)
Peter and Chris demonstrate their unique ability to discuss framing without speaking... Mike, Peter (camera) and Chris Duncan-Brown (sound) in the upper Coca river jungle
We are a week into our Peru shoot, tracing the story of the fall of the Incas: the amazing tale of how Francisco Pizarro with less than two hundred Spanish troops captured the Inca Atahuallpa; how Atahuallpa tried to buy his freedom with a roomful of gold; but how Pizarro double-crossed and murdered him, and eventually overthrew his vast empire which extended all the way from Ecuador to Chile..
First impressions of the uplands of Peru: heavenly weather in the Sacred valley at Ollantaytambo: crystalline light, blue sky, snow capped peaks up the valley; the steel blue river Urubamba rushing along its stony bed; plumes of smoke from the old houses of the Inca town; terra cotta tiled roofs: the sound of water rushing down from the gorge to the east where an Inca road clings to the cliff, and ancient granaries stand roofless beetling high above the town. Rugged brown mountain slopes covered with manmade terraces all the way up, to well over 4000 metres: Up here the poor peasantry is still the Quechua speaking descendents of the Inca peasantry. They still till their maize fields in rows with the old foot hoes, just as their ancestors did, the women wearing Spanish hats and Inca dresses- bright reds and purples in dyed lama wool: all the colours are dazzling up here.
Machu Picchu at dusk; Mike, Peter and Judi having narrowly missed magic hour.
Tonight we have Macchu Picchu to ourselves. All the tourists have gone, and we watch the sun set over the sacred stone, in a wintry blue light with thrilling vistas out to the south west: jagged snow peaks wreathed in cloud with translucent blue behind. Then down to the town for a cup of mate, coca tea. A strange sharp taste, not bitter, not smoky, more like green tea...or nettles?Coca has a bad name in the outside world because of cocaine, but as they say here: 'the coca leaf is not a drug'. Here mama coca is a staple, as it has been since Inca times. You use it in your religious rituals, you drink it in tea; you chew it with scrapings of a black ball of lime and ash (which acts as a catalyst to release the enzymes and proteins in the leaf). At high altitude it helps you breathe easier, your appetite diminishes, your blood pressure falls; you generally feel better, and working is much less of an effort. From now on I travel with a neatly strung cotton bag of coca leaves. Soon I look like those gold statues of the Incas: cheek bulging like a squirrel's with my little wad of leaves, and that familiar tingling sensation in the mouth.
My mountain cough though is still racking: and my hands are now badly swollen around neat little punctures which trickle blood: Pepe our driver has a look: 'Ah: This is from the pumawakachi.'
'The what?'
'It is a tiny fly: you dont feel it until it has bitten you. Its name means: 'The one that makes even the puma cry!'
He beamed with inexplicable enthusiasm:
'There are many more where you are going.'
Peru: The Trek to the Lost City of the Incas:
Up at 4.30. Our guide, Don Juvenal, is already saddling the horses. A bracing wash in the icy river. Hot water bubbling on the stove. I delve into my precious supply of best English tea bags as a change from the tasteless stock we usually have.
'Today we must treck' says Juvenal sternly.
'My God, What have we been doing so far?' I ask.
Juvenal is worried we wont do the march in three days. Today we must treck at top speed , to make sure that by sunset tomorrow we reach Espiritu Pampa: the site of the final Inca refuge, only finally captured by the Spanish in 1572. 'We can do it if you don't film', he says, helpfully.
'Unfortunately we'll look a bit silly if we go back with no pictures, Juvenal.' I reply: 'Thats the whole point of putting ourselves through this'
Juvenal shrugs his shoulders and looks at the sky. These gringos!
We leave at six, ford the river, and march on through thick jungle. We soon see the remains of Inca roads and stairways, roughly placed blocks: part of the amazing network which linked the three thousand mile long empire. All afternoon we press on down the river, and towards dusk we come to a small clearing in the forest. Its a lovely spot, about fifty feet above the river: there we make our night camp to the sound of the river's roar, surrounded by thick jungle, in a space only just big enough for our tents. We are all, to put it bluntly, knackered. Juvenal, however, who is old enough to be my father, does not yet appear to have broken sweat:
'That was easy. Tomorrow the terrain will be much harder'.
2am woke up to heavy rain. Got up at 5: ground and forest sodden, trees dripping all around us. Black tea and porridge: bliss! We leave soon after 6. The landscape is now soaking, with deep mud everywhere. Thick forest all along the route, and we cross several dangerous log bridges on steep hillsides where mudslides have swept the trees and much of the path away: two of the horses fall through to their chests in ouzing mud, but no broken legs, thank goodness.
The next few hours take us up lung-busting paths, through thick mud and frequent landslides, water everywhere. Finally we ascend the ridge on our left: through the trees on top, past a ruined building with ancient stonework (an Inca shrine, or a watchtower?) and soon after four come out into the open to see a wonderful vista stretching out below us: To the left, towards Amazonia, the setting sun is lighting up the cloud cover: the taller peaks beyond disappear then emerge again as wisps of cloud envelop them; the silver ribbon of the river far below winds through the green of the valley; dotted through the forest on the valley floor a few small clearings with the odd house. Juvenal points ahead up the river :
'That's where the ruins are: under the forest: that is the 'Plain of Ghosts': the Lost city of the Incas
Peru: Marooned in the Forest
The helicopter arrives to collect crew from the Lost City moments before the scheduled return match against Vilcabamba juniors five-aside.
Day three waiting in our clearing. Our satellite phone batteries are almost gone. The helicopter still can't find us. We phone Cuzco and I confirm our coordinates from our GPS: With those they should have been able to get within earshot.
'Freddy its a known site...how could you go to a place 20 miles away? What map is the pilot using?
(throat clearing at the other end)
'Freddy: does anyone there know where Vilcabamba the Old actually is?'
(embarrassed pause)
'But you've sent us there!'
(Silence)
'Look, we know where it is... we're in it!'
Battery has gone on the sat phone. We hook it to a camera battery.
Almost out of food now. Mid afternoon Porphyrio and I make a fishing line out of the hooks and twine in my, and he goes off to fish. Then the sat phone starts to show a continuous 'antenna link down.' We are out of contact.
Ecuador: Rafting down the Coca river:
The Coca is a fabulously beautiful river: it turns east and south in great curve as it threads the gorges and rushes from the Andes foothills. Then it widens out: over a hundred yards wide with long sandbars, and a glittering strand of whitened boulders along the northern shore where the current races down from the mountains. Our morning swim in the icy blue water is just heaven. The sandflies though are murder. We were warned about the mosquitoes: but the sandflies! I counted sixty bites on one forearm this morning..... And there are others more vicious: sabre flies with long wings which fly in in clusters; and a tiny fly the size of a pinhead which leaves swollen festering bites which can become badly infected.
The landscape is sparsely inhabited today, just a few isolated Quechua speakers: and the chief sensation on the early part of the journey is provided by the wonderful green forest, the blue river, and the immense skies, pale china blue in the mornings; daffodil yellow in the heat of afternoon, with towering bluffs of dazzling white cloud. Exhilerating for us, especially at first light and in the early hours, before the sun rises over the forest tops and the heat of the day begins.
From the last foothills of the Andes you see an immense flat horizon, green forest stretching like an ocean, shading in the far distance into a blue haze. Even with their limited geographical knowledge the Spanish conquistadors must have understood at once that this stretched all the way to the Atlantic. But what lay in between? And how far was it? In 1541 no one knew. After months of fruitless searching for El Dorado they launched their gerry-built boat here on the Coca in early November. Francisco Orellana and his survivors reached the Atlantic on August 26th of the following year having been the first outsiders to see the interior of Amazonia, and the first people to sail the river; it was one of the great voyages of exploration.
Mike, Dr John Collee and crew nullify their production insurance by riding several pieces of balsa down the Coca River, Ecuador.
We have built a balsa raft to follow Orellana down the Coca river to the Napo. We used Indian tools stones as hammers, with nails of hard wood; and bark ropes. The crew are in lifejackets and on inflatables, we are on the raft in T shirts and pants. But the raft is proving amazingly stable and durable: taking Grade 3 rapids in its' stride. In the early hours we sail along under an overhanging cliff of green forest; shooting past great levees of pebbles, littered with the wrecks of fallen trees. The forest is now well over 100 feet high, with splashes of red leaf in a riot of vermilion: palm trees with towering shaggy heads, rosewood, brazil, orchids, clumps of tree ferns, canes in groves with festoons of pale-spiked leaves. And the animal life: cormorants, ducks and egrets indolently flap away as we pass. At dusk a racket of howling monkeys, screeching parrots, and hooting frogs takes over and almost drowns speech. Total exhileration. Just don't tell the BBC insurance people - they'll never pay up if we are killed!
Cabeza de Vaca: magic moments on 'the great Comanche Trail':
Cabeza de Vaca lived with the Indians for eight years and walked from the Texas coast to the Pacific-the first person to see the interior. Following his route south of Big Bend through the Mexican desert, on what used to be called the 'Great Comanche Trail', the only way to track him comfortably was on horseback, so we stripped our gear down to a light kit; took three packhorses, sleeping bags, some food and a calor gas stove, and set off on horseback from Texas into North Mexico.
Soon after dawn we saddle up, and push our horses chest deep through the Rio Grande and up the sandy bluffs the other side into Mexico; what 19th century US army maps call the Grand Indian Crossing is an idyllic silent spot framed by orange bluffs. With us is archaeologist Bob Malouf, with a wide cowboy hat, a warm Texan burr, and a droll turn of phrase.
And what a landscape: weirdly eroded gullies, rosy in the dawn, burnt out in the heat of day, lightening into soft reds purples and pinks towards sunset. These trails have been used since prehistory. Cabeza de Vacatells us that the food he was offered by the nomadic peoples in this wild region was austere in the extreme: Bob agrees:
'Yup, these people lived a life as hard as you could imagine.'
He narrows his eyes.
'Just how hard you can see in their faeces.'
'In what?'
'In their shit. They ate Insects.'
Along the route are ancient waterholes, still brimful of water in the winter, and always close by there are cave sites with pictographs. In one place the red daubed images of people and animals - complete with artists' finger marks- are as clear as the day they were painted. It's a fantastic insight into the lives of the natives who once lived here, the world the first Spanish saw. So too is the landscape itself: especially at sunset, when the great brown whalebacks of the sierras stretch away into the distance. And the silence! Only broken by a distant coyote.
Our first night's camp is at a spectacular location, a terrace high over an immense plain with a magnificent view looking towards the sunrise. Behind the campsite, is a spring under a spreading cottonwood tree which shines emerald green in the last golden light. On the flat knoll where we have put our sleeping bags are two abandoned rubble houses and a group of grinding holes in the bedrock: These are prehistoric : Bob thinks the site has been inhabited on and off for 5 or 6000 years! What a feeling,camping under the stars in a place where people have lived for so long in the history of the Americas.
Tonight we try cooking the ancient way. The Indians here had no pottery, and Cabeza de Vaca describes them cooking by heating stones in a fire and then dropping them into awooden bowl full of water. It works! Within seconds the water is boiling.I bring out the last of my precious store of teabags:
'English Breakfast, or Earl Grey?' I ask, as if we were taking tea at Henley.
Mocking groans from the Yanks.
'Well, look.' I retort, 'Everyone knows you cant get a good cup of tea anywhere in the Americas.'
Loud jeers at the Brit's expense.
'I think I'll just take it black,' drawls Bob, sipping on a steaming cup of carbonised bits.
More laughter.
We unroll our sleeping bags on a five thousand year old rubbish tip under a magical starry sky.
As Shakespeare says, travellers must be content.
And on nights like this, so are filmmakers.