The Accidental Coca Lord

Chapter 7

To catch up on previous chapters click here

For the first part of this chapter that I lopped off cos its so boring click here.

For the first part of this chapter that I lopped off cos it's so boring click here

The Fight of the Condor

If you know what’s happening, you’re not in Peru

The road to Cotabambas, at some points, is best to drive at night so you can’t see the abyss below. It bumps and winds through the Andes, up high mountains and down deep canyons. At one point the gradient is so steep that the road is forced to snake back and forth twenty-three times in a concertina of terrifyingly tight bends; these appear, from afar, more like the workings of a drunken seamstress. To look down is to stare into the barrel of a gun, so you simply don’t. You look forward and blindly put your trust in a driver you’ve only known for a a couple of hours.

El Matador. I never got his name but I assume it was Dave or Mike or something. Actually I think he was called Craig.

The journey was nonetheless stunning. Passing through a land of steep green mountainsides, whose working by peasant farmers over millennia had patterned the landscape into a vast and intricate tapestry, we came across numerous small picture-book villages, dotted with tiny adobe homes, where we stopped to let my assistant Hector squirt his guts out and puke like Regan in The Exorcist, in toilets he could barely look at, let alone sit on or put his face down. At one stop in Cinchaypucyo I kindly stood outside the window of the stinking baño and played ‘Constipation Blues’ by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on my portable speaker through the window to try and speed the poor lad up. But constipation wasn’t his problem; he’d drunk or eaten something very bad the previous night.

The road to Cotabambas

José Luis was driving the car. He seemed like a decent guy, calm and quiet, and fortunately a driver who liked to take his time. He had a basic grasp of English, mirroring my basic grasp of Spanish, so the two of us could just about converse. His boss was Dr Rob Williams, who sat in the passenger seat. I knew Rob through his father James, with whom I’d become great friends over the years as he was a fellow otter fanatic. Now in his seventies, before becoming an otter lover he’d been master of the Kendal otter hounds and had endless fascinating stories to tell.

Rob was a little older than me, and at the time was head of the Giant Otter Project of Peru for the Frankfurt Zoological Society. He was like a slightly more puffed-up version of his father, and tall and confident with it, speaking with great authority and an infectious enthusiasm on many subjects. Rob wanted to travel to Cotabambas so that we could cover a Peruvian blood festival known as the ‘Yawar Fiesta’. This apparently wasn’t a show for the tourists, it was the real deal; and foreigners probably wouldn’t have wanted to watch it anyway, as a bunch of cowboys catching a wild condor, lashing it to a bull and having a bull fight doesn’t tend to come top of most people’s bucket lists.

The village of Cotabambas itself was a six-hour drive from Cusco, and perhaps more Tibetan in feel than Peruvian, due to its altitude and remoteness. From a high mountain pass a few miles away it looked rather beautiful, like someone had emptied a box of multi-coloured Lego bricks onto the landscape, but once we reached it the place had the feel of many Andean villages, a peculiar mix of the quaint and the horrible.

Rob’s contact in Cotabambas was the mayor, whom we found after being directed to a nondescript door on the main street. Rob banged a few times, and eventually the door was opened by a small, very drunk old man wearing a wilted Stetson. He looked surprised to see three enormous gringos smiling at him. Rob introduced us politely and asked if he was the mayor. The man shrugged indifferently, which suggested that he perhaps wasn’t, and invited us in. The doorway opened onto a large courtyard with an imposing brown-walled adobe house to one side, leading to a garden of worn mud and trees, dotted with benches, chairs and tables, among which sat fifty or so people, with a beautiful black horse tied up to a wooden post.

We were welcomed with enormous warmth. Rob found the mayor and introduced us. The man was large and broad-faced, wearing a leather jacket and a white cowboy hat, and he shook our hands enthusiastically and invited us to sit down with him. He asked if we’d like some soup, pointing towards a group of plump women tending a huge cooking pot and chopping offal while fending off a pack of persistent dogs. Above them hung the freshly skinned hide of a cow, already blackened with flies. The women smiled at us, and one of them ladled soup out and brought it over in bowls. The various bits of floating offal looked slightly disturbing but it tasted pleasant enough.

On a bench on the far side of the garden Hector and I noticed an Andean condor. It sat almost motionless, with its back to us, its head hanging low and out of sight. When we went over and sat down next to it, it lifted its head and we saw it was huge, well over three foot from its neck to its feet. It was clearly a young bird as it didn’t sport the impressive black and white plumage of adult birds; instead it wore feathers of tawny brown, and its face and neck were dark grey, almost black, instead of the distinctive turkey-neck pink of adults. A thin rope had been tied about its ankle and secured to the bench, and through its nostrils on its beak a long black shoelace had been threaded, which was secured below the rope. The bird had enormous feet, bigger than my hand, that were grey and scaled, with large, dirty talons. I took some pictures of it as it seemed oddly relaxed next to us. Rob came over and explained it was the only one they had, and they weren’t particularly happy that it was a recently fledged female, as they preferred an adult bird for the fiesta.

A while later a group of guys gathered up the condor and took it into a smaller courtyard behind the house. Here they set it down on a patch of grass and fed it beer, which it guzzled from a plastic cup. Every man in the courtyard, including us, was then bound to offer it more beer by pouring some first on its back as an offering to the goddess Pachamama, then presenting it with the cup to drink from. The condor must have consumed several glasses of beer by the time the ceremony was over.

Rob was in Cotabambas on a fact-finding mission. This festival was playing out around thirty villages across the Peruvian Andes, which meant that the number of threatened Andean condors being trapped and used in this way was significant. Being an obsessive birdwatcher, Rob saw it as a clear problem and a potential project for further investigation. From the outset, however, both of us could see this was going to be a tricky subject to navigate; it didn’t just involve people and animals, it involved culture. And the people of the Andes took their culture very seriously.

People bustled around in their hundreds as we headed up through the village to the bull ring. The fights were to start at 2pm and the condor would arrive a little while later. The whole village was abuzz with excitement. Kids were chasing each other in the streets, teenage boys were loitering in rowdy gangs, some hanging on fences, others sitting on walls, and gaggles of women wandered through the alleyways together or sat in groups tending babies. Most were dressed traditionally, wearing knitted cardigans of crimson, purple and turquoise loosely buttoned above their layered pollera skirts, some of which were adorned with intricately knitted colourful puytos. On their heads a few wore jauntily perched monteras, hats that looked like upturned jam tarts but of such delicate beauty that they looked out of place among the dirt and squalor of the village streets. Others wore brown felt trilby hats, and all had the requisite long black ponytail.

At one point a group of old women and men burst out of a side street dancing in circles together to musicians who followed behind them. This band were all clearly learning to play trumpets by repeatedly blasting the same awful tune as loudly as possible. I took photos, and they cheered and smiled and continued to dance in front of us as we all made our way up a steep cobbled hill, every balcony, door surround and lamppost of which had been adorned with strings of colourful bunting cut from rags. Hemmed in by the thin-walled streets, it was an assault of sound and colour, utterly claustrophobic and utterly delicious.

The bull ring was the town square, a large patch of earth perhaps half the size of a football pitch. It was lined to the east by five two-storey houses, a couple of which were painted bright green, the others retaining their natural mud finish. Each had a balcony overflowing with spectators who all sat in a neat line beneath the elegant terracotta-tiled roofs. On the west and south sides of the square the buildings were less quaint. They were larger but shared the characteristic adobe walls and tiled roofs. The village continued steeply up the hill to the west, where the tall eucalyptus trees that stood in dense stands between the houses swayed and shimmered in the wind.

To the north there was a rickety wooden cattle pen and only one building, much the same as the others but clearly new and unfinished. Numerous spectators had secured every available inch of space in its large empty window frames and along the edges of its outer wall. On its roof sat various small statues of horned bulls, cemented at irregular intervals along the pitch tiles, apparently to ward off evil spirits. Beyond lay a mountain range of extraordinary beauty; brown and rugged along its upper slopes and summits, and luscious green as these slopes fell into sheer canyons and fertile pastures. Around much of the village perimeter ran a shambolic wooden fence made of thick branches lashed to strainer posts, which bent and buckled under the weight of the hundreds of people that had forced a space for themselves along the top rail.

As the first bull entered the ring the crowd of hundreds erupted in cheers and shouts, and the accompanying bands of trumpeters and musicians seemed to get ever louder as they battled each other in the fervour. The bull, however, was small and unimpressive. It ran in a circle around the ring while three men who stood in the middle attempted to catch its attention with large magenta and gold capes. It ran at one of them to rapturous applause, but seemed more terrified than aggressive, and it was soon lassoed and forced out of the ring, to be immediately replaced by another, which did much the same.

The next bull was more aggressive, bolting out of the stall and immediately running straight at one of the men holding a cape. He dodged it with amateur prowess, leaping out the way while swirling a large sheet over the bull’s head. The other men did the same; they lacked the delicate footwork and elegant body shapes of a matador but were clearly brave – or stupid (I couldn’t figure out which). A moment later a man staggered into the ring so drunk he could barely walk. The crowd cheered him on as he wobbled and shuffled slowly out into the middle, where he began trying to entice the bull with his hat, which he waved in its face enough times that it eventually ran at him and sent him flying backwards into the mud. Everyone found this extremely funny.

A few more bulls made the rounds and then the whole thing descended into a very Peruvian kind of chaos as more and more people entered the ring to have a go. Many of the guys were drunk and stumbled as they attempted to dodge the bulls, attracting them with sheets, hats and ponchos – whatever they had. Others simply ran around like lunatics, trying to entice a bull to chase them. When one did, they’d sprint to the edge and leap to safety on the perimeter fence to great applause if they managed to leap clear before the bull gored them, and to even greater applause if they didn’t. The whole scene, despite being a bizarre orgy of drunkenness, stupidity and cruelty towards animals, was quite spectacular.

I was impressed that nobody attempted to stick a sword in any of the bulls. It seemed that the act of dodging them was entertainment enough. The fights lasted perhaps three minutes each, usually until the bull got bored or someone got sufficiently injured, and then the bull was led out of the ring to be replaced by another, or several more. It was exciting to watch and photograph, and the atmosphere of a crowd so large and rowdy was infectious and fun to be part of.

The bull fighting stopped after an hour, the crowd returned to their seats and everyone turned towards the entrance to the ring as a procession marched in. First came a posse of elaborately dressed riders, whose horses strutted proudly around the edge of the square, then a tightly packed group of people, all singing and shouting. I could barely make out what was happening at first, but caught a glimpse of the condor among them. Rob and I leapt the fence we’d been shooting through and ran in to get some closer shots of it as it was paraded across the bull ring. It was being forced to walk by two men who held it at the extremities of each of its outstretched wings, which spanned perhaps eleven feet. It was a wretched sight – the world’s largest flying bird, a creature designed so perfectly to soar among the magnificent peaks of the Andes, reduced by the villagers to a slave in chains.

Getting in as low and as close as I could, running to stay ahead of the procession and then kneeling and shuffling in the dust, I frantically took shot after shot, trying to find frames in the chaos as the mayor strode with a swagger in front of the condor. Next to him walked a short but magnificent-looking matador. He was devilishly handsome and dressed neck to knee in a brilliant red traje de luces that clung tight to his lithe figure, while exaggerating the important parts. The costume was adorned across his chest with dozens of emeralds, each stitched into silver nests and arranged above lines of gold tassels. Across his arms and legs intricate patterns wove around emblem flowers and leaves in stitched gold gilt that shimmered as he walked. On his shoulders he wore elaborate epaulettes of white and yellow stitching surrounded by more emeralds. Beneath his coat a simple white shirt and a green tie, and on his feet slight black slip-ons and bright pink socks that vanished above his knees. His groin was heavily stitched across the front and he had clearly shoved a couple of socks down it.

The caravan of condor and men stopped on the north side of the ring while other men wrangled a bull into position, then tied its head and horns to the edge of the cattle pen. There was a scrum to be involved and a deafening sound of men shouting instructions over each other. I forced myself to ignore my inhibitions and pushed into the scrum to cover it; being tall allowed me to get a clear view above everyone’s heads. One guy grabbed the skin of the bull around the back of the thigh, enabling another to stab a dirty sharpened section of angle iron roughly through the hide and out the other side; the bull convulsed in agony as it was pierced and continued in spasms, men then threaded a short length of rope through the hole, while others attempted to restrain it. The two men then forced their way around the bull to the other side to repeat the process. While they did, other men hoisted the condor onto the back of the bull, its legs splayed painfully across the rump, and began tying one of its legs to the rope threaded through the bull. The condor flapped its enormous wings in growing panic as it was lashed down, with the bull convulsing again and again as it was pierced on its other side and threaded with the second rope.

By the time the condor was lashed on the other leg, both animals were extremely agitated, and the condor flapped hopelessly as the bull thrashed and fought with the ropes that held its head. I leant in and grabbed a few more frames of the distressed animals before backing out and running across the bull ring to the safety of a fence line, where I changed lenses and reset my camera.

From behind the bars of the cattle pen a man then stretched out and cut the rope that held the bull with a knife, while another released the tension on a rope that bound its back legs. The bull immediately reared backwards, before turning and furiously charging straight into the matador, who was waiting for him. With a dramatic swish, the matador deflected the bull with his bright pink muleta and stepped aside to let it brush past, while the condor struggled hopelessly to find balance. The bull then turned immediately and came back at the matador, who ran in to entice it by dropping to his knees and throwing the muleta out, which the bull lunged into as the matador swung it elaborately over his head.

This back and forth went on for a few minutes and I desperately tried to keep the action correctly composed and in focus. I was so engrossed in the action that I’d forgotten to check my camera settings, though – I was just firing constantly and indiscriminately at the action. Other men entered the arena to try their luck against the bull, some sporting bright capes, other with just sheets. But the bull only had eyes for the matador, who played it effortlessly to a continuously erupting audience. As the bull became angrier and more frenzied, and the distressed condor flapped increasingly frantically, the two seemed to become one, and for a minute or so it was as if the ring were inhabited by a mythological winged beast whose wretched body thrashed and lunged at whatever moved in front of it.

This was the moment this whole festival was about – the blood festival had reached its bizarre and epic climax in a brief moment of frenzy. The might of the Spanish bull burdened and beaten by the Andean condor in a ludicrous re-enactment of Inca liberation from Spanish rule; steeped, like much in the Andes, in tradition and symbolism so utterly Peruvian it defied logic. It was a spectacle both incredible and awful in equal measure; a genuine expression of culture. The only problem was, the culture wasn’t actually very old, perhaps only a hundred years, perhaps a little more; it certainly didn’t date back to 1821, when Spain finally let Peru go. In my view, the lack of history robbed the spectacle of its integrity and laid clear any argument for protection of the condor, over the tradition.

As the bull, finally exhausted, made its last run, it stumbled in the dust and collapsed at the feet of the matador, thrusting its face into the dirt. The condor, wretched and broken, threw out its wings for the balance it couldn’t maintain, and I hit the shutter button. The crowd erupted and the matador spun in triumph, before turning back in to entice the bull once more. But by then both bird and bull were exhausted and ignored him; instead the bull, beaten and broken, hobbled slowly across the ring to the gate at the northern end, where it stood up against the fence, waiting to be set free.

We never managed to find out what happened to the condor but suspect she died. Rob later estimated a fifty percent mortality rate from stress and injury at the Yawar Fiesta, based on his continuing research into the practice. Whether he could navigate a way to mitigate the deaths or stop the practice was anyone’s guess. Rob was treading lightly, because he could see a problem that I was only just starting to learn though, one that plays out over and over again in conservation – white people coming in telling other people what they are doing is wrong. Of course it’s based on privilege not race but it’s one that appears to be both arrogant and virtuous in equal measure and one which, more often than not, never finds an answer. To this day the Yawar Fiesta lives on, and will, I suspect, until there are no condors left to catch.

As I scrolled through the photos on the tiny screen of my camera during the long journey home, I was horrified to see that I’d set my shutter speed far too slow – around 1/200th of a second; not fast enough to freeze the action. I was so pissed off. Although the capture of the bull finally falling at the feet of the matador was perfect, I could see blur in it. I cursed, knowing that I’d fucked it up and wasted the opportunity. But late that night when I put the pictures up on my computer screen I realised I’d been wrong. The slow shutter speed was exactly what the image needed. There was the emotion, in the blurred face of the bull and the dust it kicked out as it fell, and in the face of the matador as he spun. It needed its imperfection. The slight blur of my fuck-up made the image ugly, brutal, powerful and most importantly – emotional. That understanding, of working on a level beyond just considering the technical, was new to me.

In the next instalment I go Kenya to meet a legend.