The South African 1970

Peruvian Earthquake Relief Expedition

Introduction

At just after 15:00 on Sunday 31 May 1970, a massive earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale occurred off the coastal town of Chimbote in northern Peru. Chimbote, other coastal towns and the inland towns in the Callejon de Huaylas (the valley of the Rio Santa between the Cordilleras Blanca and Negra) were most severely affected by the earthquake. This was the worst earthquake disaster ever to be recorded in Peru – it is estimated that in total 70 000 people perished in the disaster. In the Santa valley, Huaraz the largest town was 90 percent destroyed and some 20 000 of its inhabitants were killed. One of the reported contributory factors to the high death toll in Huaraz was the fact that its houses, many of them two and three storeys high, were constructed with soft unbaked bricks, timber beams supporting wooden floors and with tiled roofs, and that these collapsed with the intense shaking of the earthquake, trapping many people inside their houses, but also causing many more fatalities when the walls fell into the town’s very narrow streets, into which many of the town’s inhabitants had fled after they realised what was happening.

In another catastrophe, the earthquake triggered a huge fall of rock and ice from the west face of Huascaran Norte (6 654m), one of the highest peaks in the valley. This tremendous avalanche collected even more ice when it impacted with the glacier below the peak, then hurtled down the valley below to obliterate the town of Ranrahirca. In addition it was so huge and was descending so fast, that a portion swept up and over an intervening ridge some 200 m high and continued down to similarly obliterate the larger town of Yungay. From the time that the fall was triggered it took only three minutes for the avalanche to reach Ranrahirca, a distance of some 14 kilometres. Because Sunday was market day in the valley, there were probably more people in Yungay than on a normal day. The speed with which the aluvion sped down to the town was such that the people there had almost no chance to flee. Nearly 18 000 people died in Yungay – the only ones who survived were some 240 who managed to flee to the high ground of the town’s cemetery.

News of the earthquake in Peru and the terrible toll it had exacted spread incredibly fast all around the world. There was an almost immediate response from many nations trying to ascertain how they could help. In South Africa the effort to provide appropriate assistance was initiated by Mr Helge Storch-Nielsen, the Peruvian Consul in Cape Town. In an amazingly short time he set up a relief fund and explored other avenues how South Africa could assist. Fortuitously at the time there was already a South African mountaineering expedition being planned to climb one of the peaks in the Cordillera Blanca and, once contact was mas made, this was rapidly converted into the South African Peruvian Earthquake Relief Expedition, Bob Reinecke and Robin Sandell with Helge Storch-Nielsen, being the prime movers to organise it. There was a heartwarming response to appeals for assistance – volunteers signing on to be members of the relief team and donations both in the form of money as well as food, equipment and clothing were made. In a remarkably short time the team of four doctors, two medical students, two Catholic sisters (who would fulfil a translating function) and four other climbers was put together, a Boeing 707 was chartered and a substantial amount of donated relief food, blankets, etc to fill it were collected. The Relief Expedition took off from Johannesburg bound for Lima just two and a half weeks after the earthquake had occurred.

The response from other nations was just as impressive. When we arrived in Peru and in the weeks that followed, we discovered that relief contingents had arrived from many of the South American countries, and the United States as well as many of the European nations. Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France and the United States provided aircraft and helicopter support.

This personal account describes the earthquake damage that the South African team witnessed in Peru, the team’s interaction with the Peruvian people living in the towns affected by the disaster as well as the assistance that the team was able to render in the earthquake affected areas.

The members of the South African Peru Earthquake Relief Team

in Cape Town shortly before departing for Lima

Back row : Harold Hill, Dr Atties Malan, Dr Colin Sinclair-Smith, Dr Anthony Keen, Herkie Sandenbergh, Johan Theron

Seated : Mr Helge Storch-Nielsen (Consul General for Peru), Dr Robin Sandell, Sister Ines Erneta, Sister Elena Garcia, Andre Schoon, Geoff Streeter, Greg Moseley

Wednesday 17 June

To start at the beginning, our flight up to Johannesburg from Cape Town was uneventful and went smoothly, the only unfortunate thing was that the plane was delayed taking off. We were met in Johannesburg by Aero Marine representatives who had arranged blankets and pillows for us to sleep in the airport transit lounge (as all other local hotel accommodation was apparently booked out due to some congress or other), which in the end was not too uncomfortable. At the same time we tried to check with SAA Freight that all the stuff despatched from Cape Town had been sent up, but as this was 01:00 in the morning, we didn’t have much joy apart from finding that the aircraft that would take us on from Johannesburg was ready for scheduled take-off at 06:00, but not yet loaded.

Thursday 18 June

After not much sleep, we woke at 04:00 and stumbled outside into a cold foggy Transvaal morning to supervise the loading. We were disappointed to find our Boeing 707 was not flying under SAA colours, rather LUXAIR (something to do with TREK), but with an SAA crew. After the tedious business ensuring everything was loaded on board, we checked out of the terminal and eventually took off at 07:30. Apart from other items of cargo, we were carrying nine tons of Pro-Nutro. All the general and medical equipment, food and personal gear was packed into the aircraft holds and inside all but 18 of the seats at the rear had been removed to allow the big cartons of blankets we were carrying to be stowed in the cabin. All the cargo in the cabin was lashed down, but fortunately, although weightwise we were filled to capacity, this still left us a lot of floor space in the cabin to walk around, lie down and sleep, etc. All the remaining seats were spaced widely apart so we could really relax in comfort – this was certainly the way to travel!

SAA had apparently loaded the plane with all their “crack” crew as Lima has the reputation of being a nasty airport to land in and no-one had been there before. Beside the normal crew we had two senior Captains, the SAA senior chief Navigation Officer, a TREK Chief Engineer and another Ground Engineer to say nothing of some 650 kg of spare parts for the plane.

Our first stop was in Luanda to refuel and pick up our Navigator – our Boeing was a 707 Type A which is fitted with an earlier engine model, so that with a full load and fully tanked up with fuel, we wouldn’t have got off the ground very easily at Jan Smuts. As it was, it seemed to take a disconcertingly long time to get off on all of our take-offs.

Flying across the Atlantic was uneventful and very smooth - 7½ hours from Luanda to Rio de Janeiro. This was an excellent opportunity to catch up on some badly needed sleep, especially as travelling West there is a five hour time difference between Johannesburg and Lima. Of course also, there being so few people on our flight was unique in so far as we were able to get to know the crew very well and probably spent as much time in the cockpit as behind – a fantastic experience to sit in one of the two pilots’ seats and gen up on the way these planes are flown!

I was up front when we came in to land at Rio, which is also a very steep and complicated descent due to the mountainous country immediately behind the city – a magnificent experience, though slightly spoiled by the very hazy conditions. Rio is obviously a very beautiful city and is most impressive when you see it from the air, though what one doesn’t realise looking at most photographs, the amount the city extends over a rather flat area behind (inland) the Copacabana, Sugarloaf, etc. This is also where the airport is situated and as we were only making a refuelling stop, we didn’t see much more of Rio than our few brief views from the air.

The total flight time between Rio and Lima is about 4½ hours. We first flew down the coast to Sao Paulo and then turned inland to cross the continent (over Baya, Campo Grande and Santa Cruz) going over the Matto Grosso swamps that form one of the tributaries of the Amazon and then on to the chain of the Andes. From the Matto Grosso the Andes foothills rise steeply in jagged ridges to the Altiplano. Here seen from the air, the truly high peaks appear only as isolated massifs of white snow-capped crowns rising out of the apparently fairly flat, but very high plateau which is not permanently snow-covered. Our route crossed almost directly over La Paz (which has the highest international airport in the world at an altitude of over 4 000 m) and Lake Titicaca, which is a huge fresh water lake at about the same altitude. Closer to Peru’s west coast, near Pisco, we headed north again, over a continuous blanket of low cloud that usually covers the coast as well as Lima. After stacking for 30 minutes we made a very hairy landing, now in darkness and through the cloud at Lima’s Jorge Chavez civil/military airport.

On the ground we could see the airport was frantically busy with civil and military aircraft from many nations landing and taking off all the time. After the official reception (by the Director of health Services of the Peruvian Military Junta) and being shown blown-up aerial photographs of some of the towns devastated by the earthquake, we were taken to the very new (though already badly cracked due to the earthquake) San Juan de Dios General Hospital in the outskirts of Lima (which we thought looked rather crummy), where we were going to stay. We went straight to bed after supper after making acquaintance with Peruvian hospital food, which seemed to be a ghastly stodge of starch, to be woken around 02:00 by a strong eight second tremor which had all the hospital patients yelling and screaming like mad! A good introduction to Peru!

Friday 19 June

Greg, Geoff, Sister Ines and I left the hospital early and went to the airport where we spent all morning unpacking the aircraft with Peruvian Airforce personnel, while Robin, Storch Nielsen, etc went into town to the office of the Health Director to see if they could sort out the plans where we would go.

Baggage being loaded at George Chavez airport in Lima

What we could see happening at the airport impressed us still further. The cargo from our aircraft (about 15 tons), was stored in an enormous hanger together with the contributions from other nations – everything under the sun from helicopters to generators, x-ray units, plastic shoes and rice. We were told that so far about 1.5 million tons of equipment, food and blankets had been landed in Lima – this seemed high but might have been true. By now all our own equipment, food, etc had been checked and seemed to have arrived safely.

There were already French, German, American, Chilean, Argentinian, etc relief crews who had arrived, the French completely self-sufficient with their own military transport aircraft, etc. Conditions in the field still seem to be totally chaotic with very little organised help reaching the people. The Americans we had seen earlier in the morning told us that some of their members were being flown across the Cordillera Blanca peaks to be dropped by parachute to the mountain villages on the eastern side of the range – no news had yet been heard from these villages and it was expected there was probably a great deal of suffering there.

From first indications it seemed likely that our destination would be one of the towns in the Huaylas valley where the greatest destruction took place, either Carhuaz or Huaraz upstream of Yungay. At this stage we had no idea what to expect other than that the conditions were likely to be pretty grim. As an airstrip had been opened at Anta, we might be flown in by military transport.

There was one feature of Peru that was brought home to us in the very early stages of our visit – that it was quite impossible to get things done at the speed one would wish them to be done, or that given the facilities one knew one could do them oneself. So our planning proved to be rather a pantomime with the utter frustration we were enduring when the lack of organisation and prodigious red tape of the Peruvian authorities ground our expedition to a halt. Of course there was the inevitable misunderstanding about the exact planned time of departure of the aircraft flying home with Storch Nielsen and the SAA crew on Friday night. Storch Nielsen, together with Robin, Colin and Anthony arrived at the airport just in time to see the LUXAIR emblem on the tail of the aircraft down at the civil side of the airport instead of the military side where we had originally disembarked and then the aircraft swooshing off into the evening sky to disappear into the clouds – Storch Nielsen hopping around like a demented puppet and the others rather enjoying the situation! Anyway after efforts to get the control tower to turn the aircraft around had proved unsuccessful, they were lucky to find the Braniff (American Airline flying to South America) flight engineer who had serviced the LUXAIR Boeing (who confirmed the plane had taken off 24 hours after its scheduled landing time rather than its later actual landing time) and he was fortunately able to organise an internal flight for Storch Nielsen to Rio from where he would be able to connect with VARIG’s inaugural flight to Johannesburg. So we consoled the Consul and packed him off the next morning!

In the afternoon, while Robin and Co were still fighting the red tape at the Ministry of Health in Lima, Sister Ines, Geoff, Greg and I spent a couple of frustrating hours trying to buy paraffin and one or two other necessary food items we would need. To a certain degree I had to retract my first impressions of the city. The centre was very impressive with many fine buildings – old Spanish style homes of great dignity and soaring modern skyscrapers of impressive size and quality of architectural design. There was no doubt either that it was a very large city (two million inhabitants), very spread out with rather drab, dirty and uninteresting looking outlying suburbs, so that one’s first impression was not fair. To buy anything in Lima seemed to us as much a performance as the other arrangements we had been trying to make. After unsuccessfully trying two places to buy our paraffin (one at which we were offered some nasty oily looking substitute that we sniffed, felt and tried to burn on the pavement), we at last discovered a place that sold “kerosene domestica”, only to be told we would have to supply our own containers and that, in any case, the shop was really only open in the mornings!

We consoled ourselves by visiting a wonderful supermarket that seemed to sell high class foods of every description – fabulous fresh shellfish, fish and other seafoods, a huge variety of beautiful fresh fruit and vegetables as well as canned foods. It also sold wine and liquor, so we were able to stock up our planned cellar with some of the local wines (price equivalent about 65 c a bottle) and PISCO, a sort of brandy with prices varying from 12.95 Sols (about 20c) a bottle to about 70 Sols (about R1,50) a bottle. There was no sugar available – instead people here evidently used a sort of raw molasses (Peru does produce sugar cane), which is either used for sweetening or for spreading on bread with margarine (ASTRA) instead of butter, which seemed to be a luxury commodity. We also found a bakery/patisserie where we bought bread after we saw a load of French loaves being taken out of the oven, the gorgeous smell almost knocking us over. It also sold beautiful pastries and other goodies – a shop we would have to visit again when we went into Lima a few days later to get fresh food supplies. What a difference from the ghastly food offered at the hospital!

We discovered that there was something different about the cars in Lima. A drive through the city was an experience not easily forgotten! Most cars were old and ALL cars were covered in dents from innumerable petty accidents. Everybody hooted, drove like hell and changed lanes without any compunction. The rule here was definitely survival of the fittest. Apparently new cars cost the earth so you hang onto your old chorrie as long as it keeps going!

When we got back to the hospital we ate another ghastly meal (meat that was 90% bone) and met Robin and Co on their way back from the airport into town to console Storch Nielsen. Harold who had been stuck in the hospital with flu (that he had had since our first night in Johannesburg), had in the meantime received a message that a bus had been organised to take us to Huaraz the next day (when he was told about this arrangement it was made clear we should first contact the Medical Superintendent at the Huaraz hospital). We decided we would believe all this when we saw it happening!

The French team that was mainly based at the Anta landing strip in the Hualyas valley were also using the hospital as a place to stay for their pilots who were ferrying cargoes of food and equipment in from Lima. Making contact with these friendly guys, it seemed their offer of a “lift” into Anta offered a far preferable alternative to the hairy twelve hour drive over the Andes to Huaraz that the bus ride would involve.

Saturday 20 June

The bus which was supposed to arrive at 08:00 eventually pitched up at 10:45 and much to our dismay appeared to be rather antique, very small and pitifully inadequate to carry the twelve of us and 2 000 kg of equipment over a 4 000 m pass to get into the Hualyas valley! A closer inspection showed us that our bus was pretty well shot to hell (as we later discovered most lorries and busses on these routes are) – one of its front springs wasn’t even tied on to the body! But, eager to see the driver’s face when confronted with our 2 000 kg of equipment, we all jumped on board to drive to the airport, after a prolonged and emotional farewell with the Hospital Director. At the airport we spent another 45 minutes persuading a rather snotty lieutenant at the gate that we wanted to collect our stored equipment. Eventually I was allowed in on my own (but cautioned for walking too fast) to see the officer in charge of the hangar where our stuff was stored.

It was patently obvious from our first glimpse of the bus that we would have to find some other way to get to Huaraz, so after a few further interpreter problems, I managed to persuade the officer at the hangar to return to the others with me where we managed to persuade him to take us to the Airforce Colonel in charge of the base. And here at last we realised that our luck was about to change. After hours of having to bugger around in this country with uncooperative officialdom, one can meet someone of the absolute opposite extreme – someone who can look you straight in the eye and give you a clear direct answer in a matter of a few words. Even more fortunate our Colonel spoke “North American”, as he called it and in a minute had organised release of our equipment and promise of a flight to Anta on the first plane to land from there on the cargo ferrying schedule.

This was not long in arriving in the form of a giant French C120 TRANSAL transport (these military aircraft together with Canadian CARIBOUS were landing every 45 minutes from Anta, then re-fueling and re-loading to take off again to return to Anta). Without any further hitch, apart from a last minute short wait for Geoff and Sister Ines, who had gone off to Petro Peru to get our 200 litre drum of Kerosene Domestica, we were able to get our equipment loaded onto the aircraft (the whole rear of the aircraft opened up so that vehicles and other large equipment could be loaded in) together with an enormous pile of American tents and we took off into the low cloud on the next stage of our journey.

Loading baggage into the Transal in Lima for the flight to Anta

The aircrews of these giant aircraft ferrying supplies and people to and from the Hualyas valley were doing a magnificent, but dangerous job. Flying to Anta we had to climb over the high chain of peaks (rising to 4 000 m) to the west of the Santa valley, all the time weaving through the connecting valleys. These air corridors are alarmingly narrow and flying through them and watching the mountain sides flash by, one could almost more easily be travelling by train rather than by air. It was quite something when we had to crane our necks to look upwards to see the peaks we were flying past – incredible vistas of snow-capped peaks on either side. Our French crew were very friendly and here again we able to spend a large amount of time in the cockpit – exciting watching one magnificent peak after another unfold and to see the tortuous mountain roads connecting the villages winding through the valleys. From the air at first it was difficult to appreciate the damage to the smaller villages, but closer to the main Hualyas valley, as we descended into it in a tight turn, we came in over Huaraz where we could easily see that large portions of the town had been virtually flattened.

Aerial view of Huaraz showing the extent of the earthquake damage

After more tummy turning rotations together with a very steep descent we finally bounced down onto the rough mud runway at Anta in a cloud of dust and with both engines reversed and all anchors out. The runway there was some distance from the village and a large tent town had been established by the Peruvians and the French. The airfield was a hive of activity with Transals, Caribous, Dakotas and enormous Chinook Helicopters landing and taking off about every 20 minutes. There were two things that immediately impressed us, the first the dust that was everywhere and second this huge snowy mountain giant called HUASCARAN SUR (6 768 m) towering to a seemingly incredible height over the opposite side of the valley. We thanked our crew, helped offload the Transal with a gang of Peruvian Indians and watched as the next group of sad looking silent refugees carrying all their remaining possessions filed into the belly of the Transal to be whisked away in a cloud of dust to what would certainly be to them an alien new world.

Robin immediately made contact with the Peruvian Commanding Officer who put an enormous truck at our disposal to take us to Huaraz. We packed the truck and ground off along the narrow dusty road going up the valley. It was by now very warm with bright sunshine and a few scattered clouds around the peaks. The valley was really beautiful – almost lush at this level (± 3 000 m) with many trees, the mountain slopes bright yellow with flowering broom and fields well cared for with good crops of barley or local equivalent. This valley’s lushness reminded me rather of parts of Switzerland or perhaps Italy, but the difference was in the scale of the surrounding mountains, which literally towered overhead.

The view of Huascaran Norte (6 654 m) and Huascaran Sur (6 768 m) from the Santa valley

This too was our introduction to the real devastation that the ‘quake had wrought. The road passed through a number of small villages, most of which had been literally annihilated – a few pathetic piles of dusty rubble alongside what were once streets. Virtually all the houses were of a sun-baked mud brick construction and strangely enough often built to two or even three storeys. Floors were constructed with wooden beams with cane-lath and mud floors, which had of course collapsed as soon as the walls crumbled. Sad to see the grim aftermath of the catastrophe – rough crosses erected where whole families had perished and endless streams of peasants either encamped in pitiful newly constructed hovels next to their crumpled homes or aimlessly trudging towards Anta or Huaraz, looking for food and shelter. The road followed the Rio Santa up to Huaraz, at first following a wide valley soon narrowing to become quite tortuous before widening again quite close to the town. In many places the high earth banks at the sides of the road had collapsed completely burying it so that the road had had to be re-built around these great piles of rubble. Bridges that had collapsed had been replaced with inadequate looking timber structures. Quite often we saw massive cracks that had opened in the road surface where the road was threatening to slide away.

Huaraz itself at first glance seemed to have fared rather better than we had expected. We stopped first at the military headquarters to contact the Commanding Officer, but found he was not there, so we continued directly to the hospital. This, being a reinforced concrete structure, though badly cracked, had withstood the shake-up reasonably well. As this was to be our destination for the night, we were allocated two rooms to sleep in and to store our equipment and after some negotiation we also managed to organise supper. There was no running water or electricity in the town, though the hospital did have its own generating plant and a German team had managed to organise a supply of chlorinated water (from a portable filtration unit in a VW Combi) for the hospital and a few of the local inhabitants. This part of the town was devastated by the earthquake and the damage amply demonstrated how some 10 000 people could have died there.

Typical scenes of devastation wreaked by the earthquake in Huaraz

The high death toll in Huaraz and other similar towns in the valley was not only due to the houses’ form of construction, but in addition the fact that the houses collapsed into the very narrow streets so that many people who did manage to flee from their houses into the streets also perished there.

Huaraz - the collapsing walls of the houses toppled into the streets

Later speaking to a doctor from Carhuaz, who had been in the school in Huaraz when the earthquake struck (where his wife and 300 of the school children had been killed and he had then been buried in the rubble for two hours), we learned that there had literally been almost no time to escape. The earthquake struck without warning and with the first impact buildings fell apart crushing those inside them or with many of the buildings’ walls toppling outwards into the streets burying those who had managed to flee into the streets. The same doctor described how even on the day after the disaster, the whole valley was covered in an enormous pall of dust so that the sun shone only dimly – less brightly even than the moon on any normal day.

At first we could scarcely comprehend the enormity of the disaster. It was only after we had wandered through what were once fine streets, now crumpled piles of rubble metres deep, without one house still standing, that we became fully aware of the terrible truth that here almost a whole town had ceased to exist within a matter of minutes. The people that had survived the earthquake and had remained in the town did not easily speak. There was an eerie silence in the town broken only by the incongruous sound of birds still singing in the trees.

Huaraz - a traumatised little boy wandering aimlessly through the streets

Huaraz - sifting through the ruins

We saw odd people picking disconsolately through the heaps of rubble looking for family possessions where once their houses stood. There was dust everywhere and all too frequently the stench of putrefying bodies still buried or freshly uncovered in the ruins. Probably about 80 percent of those who lost their lives in the disaster remained entombed in this mass grave.

Huaraz - the hopeless task of trying to find loved ones

We felt it was questionable how much could be done in a town like Huaraz. The hospital was doing a magnificent job (being helped by a team of Argentinian doctors) treating those remaining survivors who were injured or ill. But the town itself was virtually doomed to be to be totally razed and then only perhaps rebuilt one day. The heavy rains would begin in August and it would be a race against time to temporarily house survivors before the whole region was reduced to a hopeless quagmire. In any case the majority of survivors were being evacuated to alleviate the potential chaos of having to feed and shelter people who had been left homeless. Huaraz had few buildings left intact – there were a few concrete framed buildings, but most of these had been badly damaged too, so that they would probably have to be demolished to make way for new buildings.

We were sent to Huaraz because there was a possibility we might be required to assist in the hospital, but we were frankly relieved when the Medical Director suggested that our medical assistance might be more valuable in Carhuaz, on the other side of Anta (between Anta and Yungay) where there was only a temporary hospital and as yet no relief team. I say relieved, because we all felt that Huaraz was too big a project for us to tackle on our own or even working with another team. Huaraz was a big town and we could see that it already appeared to be more or less under control.

As we were certainly not going to be able to still arrange transport to take us through to Carhuaz, we made arrangements to spend the night in the hospital.

Sunday 21 June

At last, after a frustrating time waiting, becoming thoroughly depressed by a lack of action and even being shaken by another minor tremor (which prompted a bunch of locals who had been receiving Red Cross blankets and food to shout “La Pampa, La Pampa” as they fled), our projected move to Carhuaz looked more promising when the Peruvian army General from Anta, arrived in a Brazilian helicopter and, on hearing what we needed, commandeered a local lorry with a very disgruntled looking driver to take us to Carhuaz. As soon as the General had left, our driver proceeded to point out that his lorry’s brakes were very bad, opened the bonnet and fiddled with the engine and generally looked very unhappy (we suspected mainly because the World Cup football final was scheduled to take place that afternoon!)

Nothing daunted we loaded the vehicle, so that he couldn’t change his mind, and bundled him into his cab. Next he had to get his tyres pumped, trying at three garages before discovering a mate of his in another lorry with pump attached, who duly pumped his tyres, the barter price of which was a painstakingly siphoned drum of petrol drawn from our lorry’s tank in return. This was not all – we now had to get a petrol requisition form from military headquarters and with this, get petrol from the nearby military encampment - another laborious 45 minute performance with snotty soldiers playing mini-gods at the gates. However, eventually we were on our way, only to have our driver stop again a mile further on, apparently so that he could catch up on the soccer score! This time he was forcibly returned to his cab by a, by now thoroughly irate Harold, who leapt from the back of the lorry onto the cab roof and then the bonnet to grab him firmly by the collar and persuade him to continue. So we retraced our steps, our driver at first vindictively driving in the billowing dust of another lorry ahead of us so that we were all completely smothered in brown, until we reached Anta and then we were on new ground to finally reach Carhuaz.

Carhuaz was a much smaller town and, although also very severely damaged (we later estimated perhaps ninety percent of its buildings were destroyed), still retained an air of dignity. Ruins of what must once have been fine old buildings with beautiful wooden doors and windows and carved balconies and a fantastic baroque church (its four ornately decorated gable walls still standing, but its roof completely caved in), looked onto the Plaza des Armas, a charming small square with trees and statues broken and toppled by the ‘quake.

Carhuaz - the ruins of the town's once beautiful church

We ascertained that the hospital was also in ruins and that the patients had been moved up to the local school (a nursery school, if you can believe it), which was large and very well built. Here we found Dr Masana, the local doctor (already mentioned in connection with the school in Huaraz), patently overworked, assisted by a team of local nurses and a couple of French Canadian missionary workers who had come up from Lima after the earthquake to help. We could see that the town’s inhabitants were absolutely delighted to see us, as were the hospital staff, who now accepted that we should take over the complete running of the hospital and other work needing urgent attention in Carhuaz. This was exactly what we had hoped for as it presented us with a challenge more within our means. Carhuaz’s population comprised some 10 000 inhabitants. While the town was virtually completely destroyed, it had suffered a relatively low death toll apparently due to the fact that its inhabitants fortunately received some warning of the impending ‘quake.

We set up a makeshift “camp” on the covered veranda of the school, unsatisfactory in some respects (privacy, security, etc), but at least we had a roof over our heads, relatively clean water and toilets and it would be convenient for the doctors in our team. After supper a deputation of the town’s officials, including the Mayor and Prefect, officially but very sincerely welcomed us and expressed their gratitude that we had come to help.

The whole attitude of the people with whom we had come in contact, had been one of the deepest gratitude. We soon learned that were it not for the aid provided by the outside nations who had come to help, these people would probably have suffered terribly because their own government’s organisations simply could not cope. In Carhuaz the people accepted our aid almost (literally) as a divine intervention and looked to us to help them with a touching faith in our abilities (truly a great responsibility when we realised what they believed we should be capable of doing). So you could say that we had almost adopted Carhuaz as our town!

Monday 22 June

After a real battle to try to restore some semblance of order in the “new” hospital (ie the school that had been taken over for this purpose), and in our own living conditions, we finally seemed to be reasonably organised. We found it quite incredible that trained doctors and nurses could condone the public health standards prevailing in a place like this. The town was laid out with water furrows that unfortunately served only as open sewers for every conceivable item of refuse – where one of these passed close to the hospital’s rear boundary, it had been breached to provide first running water for doing the washing up in the temporary kitchen (which was the bane of our lives in the building’s backyard), and secondly to provide a “flush” toilet (two bricks and a corrugated iron pondok over the trench) for the patients in our same backyard. And yet there were two complete toilet complexes in working order inside the building that had been piled high with stored tables and chairs, simply because these seemed to be the most convenient storage places! We were slowly managing to right these and many other similar frustrations and at last the place was starting to be run as we would have it.

The doctors had put up lots of shelves, thrown out most of the useless drugs that were there (we brought most of our own drugs that we reckoned we would require) and, between them, were treating some 70 to 100 patients a day. Most of the local people who came to the hospital had psychological “earthquake pains”, but there were also many genuine cases where there were terrible wounds, also patients suffering from TB (not from the ‘quake!), typhoid, measles, pneumonia and even typhus (this last critical). Thank goodness we had all been inoculated!

On my own side I had been up to check on the town’s water supply and had been agreeably surprised to find quite a sophisticated purification plant, admittedly only partially working as it had suffered considerable damage. At that time the water was being treated, though not adequately, and that would have to be my first task to put right. That meant restoring the proper flocculation, sedimentation, filtration and chlorination operations by effecting various repairs.

In the evening with our supper, we opened one of the bottles of wine we had bought in Lima, but it turned out to be pretty “rough”.

Tuesday 23 June

We managed to track down freshly baked rolls for breakfast, finished unpacking the equipment and chased some of the locals out of our toilets.

We also met Carlos Quiveda, the town’s ex Mayor who pointed out to us that there was a real concern among the townspeople that Carhuaz might possibly be endangered in a manner similar to what Yungay was. A vast hanging glacier on the peak above the town, called Hualcan (6 125 m), could, in the event of there being further severe tremors, break away and fall into one of two glacial lakes in the Shonquel valley at an altitude of about 4 200 m and precipitate an aluvion similar to that which occurred at Yungay. While these lakes had been furnished with a means to control their water levels at their outlets, there was concern that the outlets might have been blocked or partially blocked with avalanche or landslide debris and that the water might dam up because of this and eventually lead to a lake being breached. We were told that there was evidently just such a catastrophic event several hundred years previously where a lake was breached precipitating a vast avalanche of mud and water hurtling down some 20 kilometres into the Santa valley – one could apparently still see the enormous boulders carried down by the avalanche over about a three kilometre stretch of the river frontage a short distance upstream from Carhuaz.

Following on these concerns, Carlos said an appeal might possibly be made to us to inspect the lakes to establish if these might be real threats or not and to follow up on this appeal Carlos drove Greg, Sister Elena and myself to Anta to talk to the Commandant about the possibility that a party could be flown up by helicopter to the lakes to do an inspection. This discussion was very successful and it was agreed that arrangements would be put in hand to go up to the lakes on the following Thursday. Greg and I would be flown up by helicopter and Harold and Geoff would come up with a guide on horseback to assist. After establishing a camp, we would spend a couple of days surveying the lakes to determine the level of risk they posed for Carhuaz.

This was exciting, because this could be how Greg (a geologist) and I (a civil engineer) could best put our professional knowledge to use in order to help these people. It would eventually also be an incredibly important issue for the town of Carhuaz to decide. If the investigation found there was no danger, most of the devastated buildings in the town would have to be demolished and the town rebuilt on the same site. If a careful more thorough evaluation based on our initial finding, showed that there was a real risk of the town being threatened by an aluvion similar to that which devastated Yungay, it would be likely that the existing town would have to be abandoned and then rebuilt in a safe location.

Wednesday 24 June

This was a busy day - Harold earned himself the title of “super pigcatcher”. We had all noticed and complained of the vile stench coming from the water furrow that ran behind the back wall of the hospital close to where we had organised our accommodation. Harold, who had been determined to track down the source of the problem, triumphantly produced first one dead dog, then a dead pig and lastly a dead guinea pig from the furrow amid huge hilarity and camera clicking. Incidentally guinea pigs (Cui) are reared in the region as a source of food and we saw them in all the villages – Greg pointed out that these animals originated from here and then spread around the world after the Spanish conquest of Peru.

During the day we were also visited by a “sanitary engineer” apparently stationed in Huaraz, one of the ineffectual public health types together with his crew of fumigators, who proceeded to fumigate the town, hospital etc. The sanitary conditions in Carhuaz and in fact in all the towns and villages we had seen in the valley so far were appalling. As they say in the Boland every bush is a lavatory – in this case the communal furrows with water flowing down the streets served the same purpose! The sanitary engineer, at least to his credit, promised to let us have first 20 and then another 30 specially made up latrine frames that we would be able to set up around the town to help reduce the public health hazard. This was obviously the accepted norm and not one greatly aggravated by the ‘quake.

We also paid another visit to the water purification plant to find that the person in charge wasn’t there so there would be no routine chlorination of the supply. We suspected that in any case the HTH (Calcium Hypochlorite) they were using at the plant was probably too ancient to be of any use, so we decided we should inspect the remaining HTH barrels stored in a depository in the Plaza des Armas. Although nobody was there we did manage to see the Prefect and asked him to organise the key so that we could get into the store. At the same time we asked him to please let us have a decent street map of Carhuaz.

Carlos came to visit us again and kindly brought us his copy of the Weisser Cordillera by Kinzl and Schneider – a magnificent book of photos of the Cordillera Blanca from a climbing expedition to the area in the 1930’s. He was very enthusiastic about our proposed trip to the lakes and talked about the arrangements being made for it. After lunch he accompanied us back to the Plaza des Armas, where we were able to obtain the key from the Prefect and inspect the HTH barrels in the depository, which showed that they were certainly too old to be of much use. Carlos then drove Greg, Sister Elena and myself to Anta to see the Commandant again to finalise arrangements for the helicopter flight to the lakes and to indicate to the French pilots the exact location where we should be dropped. We also asked the Commandant to try to arrange some form of transport for our doctors. This would be one of the main problems facing them, as the hospital superintendent had now returned from Lima with more supplies to run the hospital and in future our doctors’ main function would therefore be to visit the outlying villages and hold clinics there.

The Commandant (with whom we were now great buddies) instructed Carlos to commandeer a vehicle for us, the owner of the vehicle then being recompensed accordingly.

Greg Moseley and myself with Carlos Quiveda, ex Mayor of Carhuaz

As the HTH situation in Carhuaz now needed to be urgently addressed, we organised a lift for Sister Elena and myself to go to Huaraz to see if we could find the engineer co-ordinating services there to obtain fresh HTH. We drove up the valley in a monstrous lorry for about an hour and a quarter and had a long palaver first with the Prefect (who conducted his office from the stage of a local hall with the curtains drawn) and then the town’s engineer who drove us up to the town’s reservoirs (which were amazingly still intact) to see the engineer in charge of Huaraz’s water purification. This was successful – we returned to Carhuaz in a taxi without a silencer, but with a plastic fertilizer bag full of HTH (33 %) and a promise that the engineer would visit Carhuaz the next day with a 44 gallon drum of the stuff to tide us over for a couple of weeks. We got back to the hospital at about 20:45 to find the others slightly concerned about us, but busy holding a big Pisco party so that after supper we all went to bed in a Pisco haze!

Thursday 25 June

Greg woke Harold and Geoff at 03:45 to get ready for the horses which were supposed to be taking them up the mountain in time to meet the helicopter when it landed, but discovered that it was raining. The horses were due to arrive at 04:00 and Harold, Geoff and I waited until 05:00 and then finally gave them up to be woken (after crawling back into bed), ten minutes later by a hoary voice coming round the corner : “Hey gringoes!” (apparently this isn’t quite as disparaging as one might think – all foreigners are called gringoes). The horses had arrived, our gringoes mounted them and we waved goodbye to this quaint little caravan setting off in almost pitch darkness at 05:30 (two enormous climbers with packs looking thoroughly uncomfortable on their unaccustomed mounts)! Greg and I snatched a little more sleep, and left Carhuaz at 07:00 for Anta with Carlos, Sister Elena and our kit eating some breakfast on the way. Believe our dismay when on arriving at Anta we found our helicopter had already been sent out on some mission and was only expected back at 10:00. We hung around the airstrip all morning (having sent the other two back), until finally the Alouette III arrived back at 11:00. Since the horse party had left, the rain had stopped, but the mountains were unfortunately still thickly covered in cloud so that our French pilot expressed grave doubts about being able to reach Shonquel anyway.

But at last the clouds lifted and we were able to pack our kit into the helicopter. An amazing flight especially climbing from about 2 700 m to 3 800 m over the most fantastic country – remarkable deeply fissured, cultivated hillsides steepening as they soared up into the cloud. We were worried as neither of us knew the exact location of Shonquel and we knew that with this dicey weather and the helicopter’s near limit ceiling, we wouldn’t be able to spend too long looking for the others. After some searching, we decided we were trying to look too high up in the valley and veered off to the left where to our great relief we picked up the support party on the vast expanse of an ancient lake bed, their location marked with two enormous white crosses they had painted to show us where to land. We made a wide circle losing height and landed as indicated, the support party’s horses taking fright and stampeding off across the lake bed. We unloaded our kit and hunched down under the rotors, thanked our benefactors (who were all set to lift us higher if we wished) and watched the helicopter take off and climb up and out of the valley leaving us standing rather forlornly next to our kit. It had been good flying with these French guys – they were really tops and there is no doubt they certainly knew what they were doing!

Deploying from the French Alouette at Shonquel

Harold and Geoff said that they had enjoyed an excellent ride. They had been able to ride all the way and had found it very interesting – it had taken them about three hours fast riding to reach Shonquel. Waiting at the lake they had almost given us up reckoning the helicopter probably wasn’t flying because of the weather. While they were waiting they had feasted on the local special runny mealie-meal type porridge and boiled potatoes, which they declared were sumptuous. They had been received by an impressive reception committee consisting of the headman from a nearby village together with a band of some 15 men, all dressed alike in traditional woollen cloth shirts, coarsely woven waistcoats and trousers and thick woollen ponchos, felt hats and crude-looking tyre-sole sandals (with great hairy toes protruding). This warm welcome was so typical of that which we received everywhere we went – the people were all incredibly concerned about the dangers posed by the lakes. Later, everywhere that we went we would be asked what sort of real danger we thought they posed. These chaps had walked more than five kilometres to see us and we would later find them during the next couple of days inquisitively taking in all that we were doing.

The high altitude up to which these people cultivated was impressive – mostly potatoes (every variety imaginable) and okra. Often on very steep hillsides where one couldn’t imagine anything would successfully grow and in very stony soils. Perhaps most impressive of all were the incredibly long irrigation furrows often cutting across very steep hillsides, obviously laid to very precise falls.

The headman ordered his minions around with quiet authority and we quickly had our kit carried off and camp set up with an impressive pile of wood collected for us to make tea. We had brought up one of our 3-man tents so it was quite cramped with the four of us in it. We arranged with our headman for two guides to go with us the following day and after thanking and waving goodbye to this intriguing band, watched the men wander off across the hillside to tend their herds of cattle. While having lunch we made the awful discovery that Harold, in the heat of the morning’s departure, had left half our food behind – a catastrophe made worse because we discovered we had no sugar! We managed to ask our friends, who were now setting off down the mountain with the horses, to please organise some potatoes for us and to get a message to Robin telling the hospital party what we are doing, when we intended returning and the time we hoped to contact them by radio (we had two small Motorola radios with us). Harold was quite weak from the thought of a lack of food and our feigned great ire!

After lunch (sugarless tea and dry biscuits) we decided to walk down onto one of the dry ridges that bounded the Shonquel valley and from there perhaps to try to find some herders who might be able to supply us with potatoes.

Shonquel camp and sugarless tea !

Perhaps I should explain that the Shonquel valley was the (almost) dry bed of a lake that had emptied several hundred years previously, probably when an enormous ice avalanche fell into it, breaching its natural wall and precipitating a gigantic mud avalanche, which must have devastated the lower valley (I have already mentioned the evidence of this that one could still see in the large boulders and debris along a stretch of the road outside Carhuaz). When we were there this ex-lake bed was a beautiful flat marshy plain more than a kilometre long by 400 metres wide with a busy little glacial stream winding down it. The whole grassy expanse was a field of flowers - lots of tiny yellow flowers that were growing with very short stems right down on the ground. There were quite a lot of small trees, a profusion of flowering bushes and an abundance of different sorts of birds (even plovers close to our camp). It was a joy to stroll across the lake bed and see this all though we did have to be a bit careful – Geoff managed to fall full length into a nasty sticky black bog!

On the ridge we found the vegetation to be equally interesting – strange prickly succulents with beautiful red flowers, thorny aloes and small bushes that looked similar to our protea, but withclusters of pale orangey/pink flowers. On the ridge we also came across some interesting ruins – what looked like a crude fortress with great walls of dry-packed stone now partially destroyed by this and probably earlier ‘quakes. I imagined they must be very old, but probably not dating as far back as the Inca civilization.

From the ridge we could see a fascinating patchwork of small cultivated fields stretching down the slopes of the tributaries of the river to the main Santa valley. Huge moraine ridges with large boulders left behind by the fast-retreating glaciers. We could see some evidence of the most recent earthquake too – mostly small landslides , strangely nearly always starting from the crests of the moraine ridges. And another strange small landslide which had triggered a small spring causing an ominous looking black flow of mud nearly 200 metres long.

View up the Shonquel valley dominated by Hualcan

From our ridge, looking back at our blue tent perhaps about three quarters of a mile distant, we suddenly spied a couple of furtive figures darting backwards and forwards apparently in and out of our tent. Aghast at the thought of losing our essential kit and possibly our last remaining crumbs of food, Greg and I dashed back along our ridge towards the tent, while Geoff and Harold headed down into the valley to cut the presumed miscreants off. Of course they had disappeared by the time we reached the tent, just adding to our embarrassment and feeling of shame when we found our “intruders” had only come to deliver a huge pile of the most beautiful looking small potatoes for us! This made us feel pretty bad – here were people who had virtually nothing, yet they could be so generous to share their food with us. We came across it all the time – in the villages where the doctors were conducting their vaccination programme, even what were obviously the poorest of families insisted on preparing dishes of food for our lunch, even though this was probably sourced from their own meal.

Shortly after we got back to the tent the rain set in in real earnest so we made ourselves as comfortable as possible and cooked supper on the Primus. Our efforts to make contact with the others by radio weren’t successful, so, even though the inside of the tent was a bit of a shambles, it was warm and dry so that we could crawl into our bags and sleep.

Friday 26 June

We woke fairly early and were pleased to find that, although it was still pretty cloudy, the rain had at least stopped. We could now see more of Hualcan, the towering giant above us, the lower slopes and glaciers visible below the cloud, dusted with fresh snow. On the other side of the Santa valley we could for the first time see the peaks of the Cordillera Negra.

Shonquel camp - preparing to set off on the recce of the Shonquel lakes

Our guides arrived full of good cheer despite the wet and cold (ice had formed overnight in our mugs!) They helped us to make breakfast on the fire and then, when we had packed for the day, led us across Shonquel’s marshy flat to take us up to the lakes. Almost straight away after leaving our camp, the valley rose very steeply, closed in by sheer rock walls on its sides with a lot of evidence of recent large rockfalls. Here too it was a veritable garden, a profusion of flowering shrubs, quite large Quena trees (similar to the Natal Chichi bush) and mossy boulders with the stream broken up into several swiftly-flowing branches. We followed a path climbing out up one side of the valley towards a series of earthy shelves between granodiorite slabs, all the time with fresh views of spiky rock outcrops sprinkled with snow emerging. After a 1½ hour slog rather out of breath we arrived at Laguna Rajupequina, about 400 m above our camp. The lake a green jewel set in among the rock slabs with a fine thread of a waterfall cascading into it, flanked on one side by the blue green snout of a small branch glacier descending from the main icefall.

Rockfall debris from the earthquake on the way up to the Shonquel lakes

Here we were already at about 4 200 m and, having risen so quickly from the valley, were all starting to feel the effect of the altitude – great puffing and shortness of breath!

Harold, Geoff and Greg taking strain on the way up to the Shonquel lakes

It was pleasantly warm climbing up the granodiorite slabs above the first lake, smooth sheets of rock worn down by the glacier. At this level the last of the larger flowering shrubs gave way to small individual flowering plants. And a little higher to our dismay we came to the first very wet soggy melting snow. At this stage Harold, who had only just got over his bout of flu, decided to bow out and looking quite grey from exhaustion, collapsed on a rocky ledge. The remaining three of us plodded on up a moraine ridge still on a clearly marked path (we later discovered built to facilitate access for the construction of the artificial outlet channels for the upper lakes). Our guides who had earlier been full of cheek, weren’t at all keen pressing on in the snow and, when we met four workmen (who had been cleaning the lake outlet channels) descending, they grabbed the opportunity to go down too, later waiting at the first lake for us to descend. These were really “hard” men, though I suspected some of their toughness could be attributed to the coca leaves they were constantly chewing. This addiction makes them quite dopey so that their movements are slow and almost slightly drunken. To gain the greatest “effect” from the coca leaves, they keep a wad of the leaves in their mouths and add a small amount of an alkaline solution to their chewing by regularly sucking (usually) a silver “needle that is dipped into the solution in a small calabash. Geoff was given some of the leaves but was in two minds whether to sample them or not!

Greg, Geoff and I pressed on going slower and slower and getting more and more tired (like a lot of pathetic old men!) and climbing quite a lot higher than we had at first thought we would have to. We eventually breasted a neck in the moraine wall that encloses the top Laguna Cocha and its smaller satellite downstream at approximately 4 500 m, the same height as the summit of Mont Blanc and almost at the snow line! Amazingly the trees extended in patches almost to this level - we also saw a lot of strange “lobelia-type” plants on the moraine slopes similar to those that one encounters on Mount Kenya.

We learned that these lakes are quite a recent phenomenon and have appeared as the glaciers retreat (more rapidly in recent times at a rate of about two and a half metres per year). In many instances the potential failure of one of these lakes would be likely to pose a very real danger to mountain villages and even the main towns in the valley below them. This failure could arise from large rock or ice masses being dislodged by an earthquake and falling into the lake or blocking the outlet causing the lake to rise to a dangerous level and breaching the often very unstable moraine walls. We learned that there are numerous examples where this had happened in the Santa valley with many people losing their lives in the resulting catastrophic aluvions.

In order to control the water level in Laguna Cocha (which was by far the largest of the three Shonquel lakes and the only one seriously exposed to rock or ice fall), its outlet channel had been partly cut out of solid rock. The volume of water impounded in Laguna Cocha was also relatively much smaller than in cases where such catastrophic failures have occurred. From these factors together with the fact that much of the energy of the water suddenly released from the lake if such an event did occur, would largely be dissipated when the aluvion flowed out onto the wide expanse of Shonquel’s very wide and flat valley, we concluded that the lakes did not constitute a serious threat for the town of Carhuaz, though any such event would undoubtedly still cause considerable havoc.

With these conclusions we felt that our inspection had been very worthwhile. In addition it had brought us to a hugely impressive and very beautiful place – the lakes being situated in a magnificent setting, right below the towering icy summit of Hualcan, rising to 6 125 m, and with the peak’s chaotic jumbled icefall cascading down to the lower lake.

As the clouds were coming in again it was getting cold and we were worried about the time. Also since we had accomplished what we had been tasked to do, we retraced our steps, Harold rejoining us on the way, to enjoy a lazy lunch on a warm ledge on the slabs. Then a very enjoyable descent down the path past Laguna Rajupaquina to the Shonquel valley savouring the warm sun, together with the views of the trees, grass and flowers on the way. We were astonished to see lots of cow pats all the way up to the upper lakes, obviously these are quite tough animals! I was rather pleased to see how fit I felt after our climb to the top and also on the descent.

We paid off our guides (with unsweetened tea and cigarettes(!), then spent a pleasantly lazy afternoon back in camp drinking lots of tea (unsweetened) and then cooking (guess what – delicious potatoes) for our supper on a wood fire. Geoff had somehow also managed to conjure up a minute bottle of whisky that was scrupulously divided up between us!

This had been a fabulous day of sheer pleasure being in the mountains, after the frustrations trying to get things done down below! Because it turned out to be such a beautiful evening, I decided to sleep out – cold but wonderful to wake in the middle of the night and see the great ice wall of Hualcan glistening in the light of a waning moon.

Down in Carhuaz, all the others were woken at 04:30 by a short, but very strong tremor which rocked the hospital and got them out of bed in record time! At Shonquel we felt nothing. One sad note to end the day – I lost a plastic filling to one of my teeth chewing iced-up chocolate after supper. Fortunately the tooth’s nerve had been removed after I split it about two years previously. I thought it might potentially pose an interesting challenge for the doctors!

Saturday 27 June

Saturday dawned an absolute peach of a day for our planned return to Carhuaz – we were supposed to be picked up by the Alouette at 10:00, so woke reasonably early and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast (of Provita dipped in Milo), while watching the intricate ice lacework of the beautiful peak above us miraculously change in the light of the rising sun. There was a fresh frosty nip in the air and it was a real joy to be alive in such lovely surroundings. We packed up all our kit, struck and packed the tent and then carried everything back to the helicopter LZ. There was time for us to take some more photos of Huascaran’s southern aspect and of Hualcan, both now bathed in full sunlight, before we collapsed in the soft grass and snoozed waiting for the chopper to arrive. We had decided Geoff should accompany the kit flying back down to Anta while the three of us would walk down to Carhuaz, so we were quite taken aback when, not one, but two Alouettes came whizzing down to pick us up about 1¾ hours late! Our French friends apologised for their lateness (due to the arrival of the French Ambassador in Peru plus his wife, who had now come up with the Alos for the ride to fetch us). After packing two of us plus kit into each of the choppers, they tried to fly up to see the upper lakes, but with the full loads and the near ceiling of the Alos this didn’t work, so we turned back and literally within a few minutes landed at Anta.

It was a smooth and relatively quiet ride so we could fully appreciate the seemingly unending panorama of the Cordillera Blanca’s magnificent high peaks stretching down the east side of the Santa valley – lots of photos. There must have been ten or fifteen peaks over 6 000 m that we could see from our flight, a very good experience.

We thanked our French friends and were loaded with our kit into a French jeep and driven to the Commandant’s office a few hundred yards away. He welcomed us with open arms and great chest-beating (we were back in South America) when we told him Carhuaz was not in danger and promptly organised a Jeep Wagoneer with a driver to take us all back to Carhuaz. Back along the dusty and by now quite familiar road to Carhuaz and the hospital where Sister Inez warmly welcomed us and told us the doctors had gone off to another village to do a clinic for the day. We immediately had a big wash (now all mod cons – that is basins, but cold water), then had a big lunch and spent the afternoon writing up our report on the lakes, meeting a deputation from the town, telling them our whole story and helping work out a possible draft action plan for rebuilding Carhuaz.

French Alouette crew back at Antar with the French Ambassador's wife after flying back from Shonquel

Pleased to see all the others again, to hear what they had been doing and to tell them our own story over a gargantuan supper with Pisco sours (one bottle of Pisco, 15 lemons, 5 eggs (whites only) with sugar to taste and a dash of angostura bitters, all whisked up for fifteen minutes – wha wha!!!)

A very jolly evening and a big sleep, this time without disturbance, though we were told the next day that there were in fact two further small tremors felt in Carhuaz during the night.

Some comments on Peruvian food : there are such fabulous new fruits we are discovering here, all grown in the valley – huge granadillas, pears, oranges and a sort of melon-like fruit shaped like a banana. Here guinea pigs are called CUI and are a great delicacy when roasted, especially the head which provides the piece-de-resistance when tackled in a special way so as to suck out the brain!

Sunday 28 June

Today was a very frustrating day and not one to comment on at length! In essence virtually all the arrangements we had made and the promises for the delivery of goods, had not been fulfilled and transport had still not been organised. Nothing, but nothing ever seemed to get done unless you personally saw to it. It was depressingly evident that, if the many nations that had stepped in to help, had not done so, this devastated part of the country would have remained almost untouched! As it was our doctors were visiting small villages off the beaten track where help was so desperately needed, yet they were seeing that the Peruvian officials had not yet even paid them a visit.

Sunday was market day and a very colourful occasion. Hundreds of peasants, mainly women, many of them from outlying villages, came into the valley’s towns for market day (bringing their own fresh produce with them to sell at the market). They set up crude stalls to sell a multitude of different articles – clothes, shoes, materials, dyes, pottery, calabashes, hats and of course, fruit, vegetables and food of all descriptions. It was very colourful, all the women wearing their brightly coloured heavy woven woollen dresses. Perhaps most intriguingly, there was an iced lolly vendor who of course was incredibly popular. He sold iced lollies made from very thin flavoured shavings cut with a tool like a plane from great big ice blocks that were cut from the glacier, many kilometres away, and brought down to the town on mules. Most picturesque, but beware, the ice creams might also offer you instant enteritis!

Carhuaz Sunday market

Carhuaz Sunday market - the iced lolly vendor

Anyway we spent the morning perhaps more profitably finalising our report on the lakes and typing it in English, ready for translation into Spanish. A young student doctor from Lima called Caesar, son of one of the hospital staff who was visiting Carhuaz, had offered to translate it into Spanish and type it out for us. I made a start building a new constant flow chlorinator for the town’s water supply and also visited the Prefect to establish how we should liaise with the village action committee, to arrange a meeting with this committee and to determine how we should report back to the people of the town. Robin, Greg, Sisters Ines and Elena and I together with the local RC father were treated by sister Irma, the nursing sister at the hospital, to lunch at the local convent, now housed in tents alongside the hospital. All the others had gone for a long walk to a high point in the foothills above the town to get a good view of the mountains. We were served a sort of stuffed pastry made with cornflour and stuffed with olives and meat, chicken soup with egg beaten into it, chicken cooked in a spicy sauce with rice and ending with lovely fresh fruit and coffee – all very tasty. We had beer (which is called cerveza here – rather lighter than our South African beer and a very pleasant drink) with our lunch. CHICHA the local beer is made from fermented maize and is quaffed in large quantities by the Peruvian peasants.

In one of our hosts’ tents there was a rather nice watercolour painted by Carlos of the town’s church, a nice looking building with twin towers and steps leading down into the Plaza des Armas. Of course this was now all in almost total ruins. The towers had gone and the walls only remained partially standing – a sad sight as the walls’ internal decoration was in an ornate baroque style. Strangely much of this was still intact standing open to the sky in the midst of all the rubble. The old church bell dated 1893 was also still there, but was badly cracked and sadly wouldn’t toll any more.

Back at the hospital we found Robin very fed up because he had had to spend a couple of hours dealing with a drunken road accident victim (a pedestrian full of Chicha who had been knocked down) with broken ribs and who was vomiting and bleeding and spitting out broken teeth everywhere! He was eventually flown off to Huaraz by helicopter.

I spent a fruitless afternoon in the Prefect’s office once again trying to organise transport for our party – it was all so absolutely demoralising, and time wasting! I finished my chlorine applicator in the evening and had a good supper with the others.

The others were back from their walk when we returned. They had enjoyed a most successful day, especially the wonderful views of the mountains. They had also startled a local village family that had caught them by surprise bathing starkers in the bitterly cold stream flowing past Shilla, just downvalley from Carhuaz.

Monday 29 June

The day we decided we must do our damnest to get our transport arranged with General Freyre at Anta (the Peruvian military officer commanding the whole disaster area). Carlos had promised to give us a lift, but as this fell through, we asked one of the RC priests to take us (the convent has an International Travelall). We got through to Anta to find all the big shots from the Peruvian army and airforce as well as the American army and airforce rushing around making frantic last-minute preparations for a visit to the disaster area by Mrs Pat Nixon and the Peruvian President’s wife. All the brass was there including our Peruvian Commandant and General (who were obviously not going to be very interested in our problems, but promised to fix us up manyana), who gave us a great welcome and insisted that the SA team must be present to meet Mrs Nixon too. You should have seen all the brass getting into a true Peruvian muddle. Anyway we decided we had better drive back to Carhuaz to get our camera gear (the plane was only due in at 12:50) and change into a clean shirt for this notable occasion! On the way back to Carhuaz we gave a lift to a Peruvian major with whom we were friendly, dropping him off some distance from the main Carhuaz/Huaraz road at a little village called Chancos, now partially destroyed, but which has the marvellous attribute of a spring of boiling hot water that simply bubbles out of the ground at 88⁰ C (which is virtually boiling at this altitude). The spring was obviously a great tourist attraction and there were several small hotels and various public and private baths as well as a fabulous cave with a closing door, pitch black inside with a hot steamy sulphurous interior where you could perhaps sit for 15 minutes before plunging into a stone tub filled with lukewarm water next door. It cost five soles (about 8 cents) to have the full treatment. We earmarked this marvellous facility for some of the dirtier members of our party in a few day’s time.

We picked up our cameras and with some more members of the team (Robin, Harold, Ines, Geoff Greg and myself) and decently spruced up with our South African armbands (Flag insignia with AFRIQUE DEL SUD underneath), set off to pick up our major and impress Mrs Nixon! We had nicknamed Harold PUMA because pumas like to eat pigs and dogs (going back to the river episode at the hospital) and consequently the Chancos cavern had now become known as the Puma’s Lair! The valley in which Chancos was situated was very beautiful with glades of trees that could almost be set somewhere in Switzerland and rising above all and dominating the valley, the pristine white summit of Nevado Copa (6 188m). We arrived back in Anta to witness even more frenzied last minute preparations and hadn’t to wait long before the US and Peruvian First Ladies arrived in an American C130 Hercules transport (direct from Lima where Mrs Nixon had arrived the previous afternoon). As the aircraft taxied in it was absolutely besieged by news and TV cameramen, so that we could hardly see what was going on. The First Ladies were presented with bouquets of flowers by two Peruvian mountain girls and were then introduced to the brass standing in a long line with the helicopter and other pilots and the members of the different volunteer teams. All the while there was this overwhelming frenzy of clicking cameras and flashes and huge microphones thrust up the First Ladies’ nose – there must have been a swarm of fifty or more of these cameramen rushing around clicking madly, resting their cameras on peoples’ shoulders and taking other ridiculous liberties!

When Mrs Nixon neared our party she stopped for a long chat with one of the German doctors standing next to us so we were able to take some nice close-up shots. She shook everyone by the hand, talked for some time to Sister Ines and Geoff and said how proud she felt we must be doing this voluntary work! She looked very gracious and spoke to nearly everyone, so much the centre of attraction that Mrs Velasquez, the Peruvian First Lady, hardly got a show in (we at first mistook her for one of the reporters). Immediately after this performance, the two ladies were escorted into a large flashy-looking green US Army helicopter and whisked away first to see Yungay and then to Huaraz where they were to be shown the damage to the town and taken to some of the relief camps.

The whole operation was carried out with remarkable efficiency (due entirely to the Americans organising it) and provided us with great interest (in part seeing some of these fantastic long-haired American wonders wandering around) especially Robin who was nearly beside himself because he had been able to film and tape virtually the whole performance.

Anta - US First Lady Pat Nixon talking to relief workers

With all the excitement over we jumped back into our car and went home for lunch, then after lunch I was able to complete my chlorinating plant, which, when tested, appeared to be working satisfactorily. Later in the afternoon we took it up to the filtration plant to see if we could get it to work with the HTH powder that we had collected from Huaraz, but were disappointed to find it was extremely difficult to get the powder to dissolve – we realised that we would rather have to see if we could find some liquid HTH solution in Huaraz.

When we drove back to the hospital we met two Red Cross chaps in the Plaza des Armas and invited them up for lunch. One of them was a Venezuelan and spoke quite good English and the other a Peruvian, so that we soon discovered (over excellent Venezuelan sardines) that the Venezuelan was a GM employee (as was Geoff) so, after a long natter, he promised to try to get us a vehicle from GM in Lima. He also produced and gave us some of the old letters he had picked up in the aluvion debris in Yungay. After a big supper and more Pisco we went to bed.

All of us were woken at 01:30 by a very strong tremor lasting about ten seconds – time enough for there to be a great stampede from everyone’s beds – a spectacle I appreciated because I realised the tremor had stopped when I was halfway out of bed and could watch the others still running! This was perhaps about the same strength as the small earthquake experienced in the Ceres/Tulbagh event in September 1969.

Tuesday 30 July

We woke to find all the water in the town had been shut off, so Harold and I rushed off to the purification works to see what was happening, only to find that someone had shut the water off during the night (for some inexplicable reason) and had forgotten to turn it on again. When filling their cooking pots or containers for ordinary drinking water, the villagers didn’t think anything of using the filthy sewer water if the taps weren’t working!

The transport problem was causing us the biggest headache and disappointment of the whole trip. Without some means of getting to the remoter villages, our doctors had been forced to walk many kilometres. Sometimes they had been lucky enough to get a lift, but in most cases had had to use a whole day to inoculate say 200 people in one of the more remote villages. Our efficacy was cut to about 30% without transport and it was absolutely incredible to us that we could ask and ask again, but nothing ever seemed to happen to resolve the problem – but this was Peru! So this day we’d decided must be our final supreme effort to fix the problem. Carlos, who had again promised to pick Robin, Ines, Greg and myself up at 08:00, did arrive, but as he had to take the convent sisters in to Anta to catch a plane to Lima, could only give a lift to one additional person – no good, so we messed around for a while before managing to organise our lift with Dr Tolentino from the hospital in his bright shiny new Toyota Corona. In Anta we met General Freyre, who promised to take us through to Huaraz, where he said our transport was already waiting for us! However, we had to wait some time for him to leave, and with the uncertainty of getting to Huaraz, Greg managed to loan a Land Rover from some American missionaries, which had to have the stuff it was carrying offloaded in a nearby village, so that we nearly missed the General when he returned. But, with everything on track again, we set off with the General, his aide and a wild Irish padre/missionary who had asked for a lift, leaving the Land Rover behind.

When we reached Huaraz we made what was probably for me the most fortunate contact of our trip and one I had been trying to make for a long time. Right at the beginning when we arrived in the Santa valley we had heard about a team of resident engineers and geologists based in Huaraz and had several times tried to make contact with them, but had been frustrated in our attempts to do so. When we arrived in Huaraz with the General, we were lucky in arriving at a time when these people were all in their office ready to start a meeting with the General, among them Benjamin Morales who was the chief glaciologist in Peru, but also the chief geologist/engineer co-ordinating all the engineering work in the valley. Therefor imagine my surprise and delight discovering this was Benjamin who I had met and indeed climbed with in Chamonix, France when we both attended the Rassemblement International (International Climbing Meet) organised by the French Mountaineering Federation in 1963, Benjamin as one of two Peruvian delegates. I had in fact tried to find him when we were in Lima, but had not been able to do so with the very limited time available. Here his position was an incredibly responsible one – having to assess the damage caused by the earthquake and make critical decisions about the re-building or re-siting of the badly damaged towns in the Callejon de Huaylas, the associated planning for the rebuilding, provision of services, etc for the towns. He was having to do this with a team of only three qualified assistants (he later told us that he had asked the government for a far larger number of trained engineering assistants, but admitted that he had virtually no chance of getting them). Anyway, as the scheduled meeting was just starting, we made an arrangement to meet at 14:30. The General told us that he would now be too busy to discuss our transport further, but assured us it would all be fixed up later in the afternoon!

When the Red Cross chap from Venezuela had visited us in Carhuaz, he had suggested that, if at any stage we did need to go to Lima by road, it might be possible to do so on one of the Red Cross lorries that were continually ferrying supplies between Lima and Huaraz, so we decided we should visit the Red Cross camp near the entrance to Huaraz to try to find him. Walking down through a different part of town we saw that here many of the shops had escaped relatively unscathed with business going on more or less as usual. The people in the streets appeared less apathetic than those we had seen in the more devastated parts of the town. They curiously watched the “gringoes”. It was fascinating to see a way of life so different from our own – the shops were dark and dingy and had strangely different sights, smells and sounds from what we were used to.

When we reached the Red Cross camp we found it a shambles of tents, stores and people loading and offloading lorries, supervised by a podgy Peruvian lady in long trousers and full of bonhomie and an American supervisor called David C Claude, who we very soon learned was a bit of a lineshooter and appeared not to know the first thing about what was going on in the camp! While he was nominally in charge of the camp, we read between the lines that the running of the camp was virtually entirely done by unpaid Peruvian staff (though some of the administration staff were apparently paid). So we had at first to sit in the sunshine in the middle of a dusty clearing and drink fruit juice and then coffee with the American while he held forth. We made our enquiries about a possible lift into Lima and were assured it would be possible to go into Lima on one of the lorries, (there were four under contract that ran approximately every other day). We finished our discussion under a vast awning/tent that seemed to be held up by a band of local peasants!

As we still had time to spare we nosed around and found the Hotel Huaraz for lunch – very with it with a picture of John and Jacky Kennedy on the wall and a mural depicting the moon landing. We ate Lomos, which are pieces of steak braised with onion served with a separate scorching-hot chilli salad. Halfway through our meal Benjamin Morales also arrived to have lunch, so when we were all finished we left together and drove back to his office in his Toyota Landcruiser. He explained that he was basically a glaciologist – after three years working as a glaciologist in Switzerland, he had returned to Peru and had since done a tremendous amount of research on the country’s many glaciers. His office, in a concrete framed building, which had been damaged by the quake and was presently being repaired, turned out to be a mine of information for us. Benjamin explained that the immediate most urgent need was to inspect and assess the damage suffered at the lakes and their control works where their catastrophic failure might pose a risk for the villages and towns in the valley. There were some 160 lakes in total, most of them created in geologically quite recent times due to the melting and retreat of the region’s glaciers. There had already been a number of terrible disasters due to the lakes being breached, sending huge aluvions of mud and water cascading down into the valley. One third of Huaraz was destroyed by such a catastrophic event in 1941 and similar events had occurred from breached lakes in the Quebrada Ulta in 1938 and the Cordillera Huayhuash in 1932.

Quite recently a commission had been appointed to inspect the lakes and, for those that posed obvious dangers, to make recommendations what precautionary measures should be implemented to make them safe. So at the present time most of the larger lakes and those that posed a definite danger, had been provided with special artificial outlets so that the water levels in the lakes could be controlled. With the recent earthquake many of the lakes were damaged by large falls of rock and ice, in some cases their moraine containing walls were cracked and in many of them the control works suffered damage. Benjamin had already been able to carry out some cursory inspections of the more severely damaged lakes, but asked if we could please assist him by visiting and inspecting various other lakes that might pose risks and by preparing full reports on our findings (particularly identifying any cases where the damage suffered might place the safety of a lake in immediate jeopardy) together with our recommendations for repairs or additional works to provide greater safety. With Benjamin we identified a number of inspections to tackle first – the amount of work we would eventually be able to do would of course depend on the time available. We made arrangements for the first project with Benjamin – an inspection of lake Querococha right down in the south beyond Recuay on the road across the Cordillera Blanca to Hauri and Chavin. We accordingly arranged to meet with Benjamin’s lorry driver in Carhuaz at 06:00 the next morning.

Being able to look forward to these positive developments, we walked back towards the Prefect’s office to try to get some finality on our transport arrangements, but stopped en-route to look at some of the prototype temporary houses the American Peace Corps was building as a proposal for temporarily re-housing Huaraz’s homeless inhabitants during the rainy season (which was due to start in September).

Huaraz - Americal Peace Corps temporary housing prototype

A number of young Americans were working there – very hippie-looking with anti-Vietnam and ban the bomb slogans pasted up everywhere in their living quarters. One young girl with them voiced some concern to us because one of their team was a bit feverish, so Robin did a quick check up on him and while he was doing that we had a look at the houses. Their construction simply comprised five frames of curved ⅝" diameter high tensile reinforcing bars welded together with horizontal and diagonal ⅜" diameter rods. The bottom ends of the frames were buried 12 inches deep into the ground and the frames were then covered with woven reed matting tied to the frames with wire. Heavy gauge plastic sheeting was glued onto the reed matting with bitumen. With a pair of welders the Peace Corps team reckoned they could finish about 20 of the houses (one per family) every day, but the project was being held up because of the typical Peruvian tardiness giving approval to anything! From what we saw it seemed these temporary houses should answer their purpose ie be reasonably weather and quake proof. The ones in which the Peace Corps were living had adobe walls at the front and back and in some they had even incorporated a stove and chimney. In the development of the prototype they said they had tried plastering the matting with cement mortar but this had not been successful due to the mortar cracking with the relatively large temperature movements.

After saying goodbye to the Americans we walked on to the Prefect’s office, arriving rather later than we had intended, to find that absolutely nothing had been done about our transport. We made such a fuss that the Prefect eventually, on his own initiative and after keeping us waiting for another 1½ hours (during which time I saw Robin very nearly go off “pop” for the first time on the trip) produced a veritable antique of a “bakkie”, which however we readily accepted and before he could change his mind drove off in a cacophony of sound – no silencer and the body rattling fit to bust. First down the road to the military camp to fill up with their evil-smelling petrol (poured directly from a 44 gallon drum into a dirty bucket and from there into the tank) and then crawling cautiously all the way home to Carhuaz. A celebratory supper with these new developments and an early bed for our sparrow-chirp start the next morning.

Wednesday 1 July

Benjamin Morales’ driver arrived on time at 06:00 but had to go on further down the valley to drop passengers at Ranrahirca near Yungay, so he did that first and then picked us up on the way back. Then in this nearly new Ford bakkie we sped back to Huaraz, which was already alive with activity, the morning market filled with milling throngs of mountain folk bargaining for produce, a startlingly colourful scene with the dust rising all around. We were again impressed by the incredible variety as well as the high quality and obvious freshness of the fruit and vegetables of all kinds on sale – paw paws, granadillas, bananas, limes, lemons, oranges, melons, watermelons, figs, peppers, potatoes (myriad varieties), chillies of all descriptions, onions carrots, cabbages, mealies, spring onions, butter lettuce, parsley, tomatoes, apples, etc, etc – too numerous to mention. I imagined that this fresh produce must all come from the reasonably close environs of Huaraz.

After some further discussions with Benjamin in his office we drove on up the valley with another driver, this time in an enormous tip-truck with a load of equipment destined for the glacial research station on the Yanamarey glacier above Laguna Querococha. The valley above Huaraz narrowed considerably and the road soon started to climb steadily as we approached Recuay. It was also very narrow and our driver gave a huge klaxon blast at every tight corner (all the lorries had very powerful double klaxons fitted which were operated with a sort of pull-cord on the roof, besides their normal hooters). He also showed great skill reversing, pulling to the side, etc when we had to pass another car or truck.

As we climbed higher out of the valley the larger fertile fields we had seen below changed to smaller patches of maize and wheat growing on sloping terraces cut out of the hillsides. Here the hills also became barer, the dramatic snowy summits of the Cordillera Blanca peaks starting to appear. Next to the road we frequently saw little crosses erected on the verge, mute testimony, as our driver told us with great satisfaction, of vehicles that came to grief tumbling down into one of the deep kloofs below! Lower down we had seen several of these crosses where we had had to cross a simply ghastly looking temporary bridge over a big drop into the foaming upper reaches of the Santa river, the original bridge destroyed by the ‘quake, a twisted mass of metal lying in the river. It made us especially appreciate the temporary notice that had been erected stipulating a maximum 6 ton load on the bridge, whereas we knew ours was a 10 ton lorry!

We passed through first Recuay and then Ticapampa, the latter a small mining village from which the silver, lead and nickel ore brought down on a narrow gauge rail from the mines in the mountains, is trucked out. Both these villages were very badly hit by the ‘quake with most houses knocked flat and those left standing so badly damaged it was doubtful whether they could be successfully rebuilt. The road to Chavin de Huantar (a small town with an important archeological site) which we then followed, turned off just beyond Ticapampa easily crossing the Santa river which was much wider and shallower here (looking back down the Santa valley, an ethereal view of Huascaran unfolding). Close by we saw the local peasants threshing grain with donkeys and mules on a circular floor, then the chaff being separated from the grain by throwing it up into the wind. The road continued winding up the far more sparsely inhabited and cultivated Yanayacu valley with gently sloping hillsides and stones as far as we could see, together with fantastic views of Nevados Huantsan (6 395 m) and Kashan (5 723 m) as well as Uruashraju (5 735 m).

View of the Cordillera Blanca peaks from near Ticapampa

At last we topped a rise and saw Laguna Querococha ahead of us framed in a narrow valley with a magnificent view of Nevado Yanamarey (5 262 m) and several other snowy peaks beyond partially obscured by cloud blowing in from the Amazon basin to the east. We drove up to the meteorological station and adjacent hut, which was slightly higher than the lake (the lake was at 4 000 m and the road to Chavin crossed a col in the Quebrada Conde a few kilometres further on at 4 550 m) and walked down to do our inspection. The lake had formed in a very shallow and gently sloping glacial valley which was blocked by two huge alluvial cones of moraine material that had slid down the sides of the valley. We found that the northern cone was in a saturated condition and had been severely cracked (cracks about one point five metres wide and more than one point six metres deep) by the ‘quake. However, from a close inspection of the cracks, the downstream face of the cone and the lake edge closest to the cracking, we were satisfied that the cracking could be ascribed to local slumping of the layered material in the cone and that a larger scale collapse would be unlikely.

Cracking in the northern slump cone at the downstream bank of Laguna Querococha

After a gorgeous quiet lunch in the shelter of some Quena bushes next to a small stream gurgling into the lake, we walked back to the lake outlet where our driver and some of his assistants were catching trout (many of the lakes are stocked with trout and we were told they can grow up to four or five pounds in weight, though the ones they had caught here were rather tiddlers in comparison). After returning to the truck, we drove down to Huaraz and went back to Benjamin’s office. We were somewhat puzzled by the large number of helicopters buzzing around the town, and on enquiring, Benjamin said that he had been told that one of the aircraft ferrying supplies to Anta had crashed in the mountains (fortunately it later transpired that this was only a rumour and no such crash had occurred). We waited in Benjamin’s office while he finished the business he had been dealing with and then studied the aerial photographs of the lakes we must still visit, before climbing into his Landcruiser and, after picking up his girlfriend and Benjamin’s brother and his girlfriend, headed back to Carhuaz. They were all going on to Ranrahirca and possibly Caras to assess how the work on the Llanganuco lakes was progressing (a 70 man team was busy cutting new outlet channels to the two lakes through the debris of a subsidiary avalanche that was also precipitated from Huascaran Norte during the ‘quake and which had already caused a dangerous eight metre build-up of water from melting ice). They then wanted to pick up his brother’s car from Caras, but had to turn around in Ranrahirca due to an increase in the water pouring down from the Llanganuco lakes closing the road. This was however a nice surprise for us because we had already extended an invitation to them to come and have supper with us in Carhuaz, an invitation that they were then pleased to accept. So in the end we all had a most enjoyable evening.

Thursday 2 July

Greg, Harold, Geoff, Atties, Tony and I woke early and, after final packing, jumped into the tip truck that our local Prefect had organised to take us up to Shilla at the mouth of the Quebrada Ulta (05:20). This was the first of the trips organised by Benjamin Morales for us to inspect two lakes high up in the valley – Lagunas Hualcacocha and Artesa. It was still dark when we left Carhuaz, bitterly cold and uncomfortable as we were bounced around in the back of the truck, alternately trying to either stand or sit to stop being thrown around, as the truck negotiated the bumpy road. The road we followed went directly up behind the Carhuaz hospital climbing quite steeply and zig zagging up the hillside until we could turn to the north into a subsidiary valley (just as it was getting light) and drive up the valley for some sixteen kilometres to reach Shilla, where we stopped to meet the porters and riding horses that had been organised for us. There was great bartering and persuasion here on the part of our headman to motivate the porters because they had already looked at our kit and realised what heavy loads they would be carrying! There was also another fabulous looking character who had arrived at the same time as the porters who was obviously on his way to work on the road or the irrigation channel, equipped with an ENORMOUS sledge hammer, a spade and a plastic sack that we could see contained sticks of dynamite together with detonators and fuses, all rattling around together! We were quite relieved when he strode off up the hillside! At last the porters were organised – rough mountain peasants with gnarled features, dressed in traditional coarsely woven ponchos and with thick felt hats and open-toed tyresole sandals, all them steadily chewing their coca leaf wads!

We couldn’t drive any further because the road had been blocked by enormous boulders that had rolled down from the slope above onto it. We unpacked the lorry and set off up the ridge on the south side of the valley, Harold and myself on rather unhappy looking horses followed by a long line of porters carrying our kit. The valley here was quite beautiful with meadows of corn, wheat and barley bounded by rows of eucalyptus trees. The stones that had been cleared from the fields had been used to build crude walls between which the stony path wandered. Where there was no cultivation the hillsides and verges beside the walls were a profusion of the most beautiful flowering shrubs. Above us towered the breathtakingly beautiful south summit of Huascaran.

South face of Huascaran Sur

There were quite a few slides and cracks from the ‘quake we had to avoid on the way up – nasty for the horses. We had a big laugh when Harold’s horse crossed a furrow and missed its footing on the other side, delicately, but quite firmly, depositing him head over heels in the mud.

As we continued up the ridge I became concerned because it was obvious that we were bypassing the giant rock pillars that flank the entrance to the upper Ulta valley and on questioning the headman found that the Prefect had issued instructions to him that he had to take us to a completely different lake called Aquiscocha to the south of the Quebrada Ulta. After a lot of consternation and parleying between the headman and the porters we eventually resolved the problem by writing out an instruction which we gave to the headman as well as a letter to be delivered to the Prefect by Robin explaining the reason for the change in our plans. We left the horses and descended the side of the ridge into the kloof proper (discovering that the reason for everyone’s concern was that the normal approach to the Quebrada Ulta lies up the other side of the valley). The valley was very deep here with steep thickly vegetated side slopes, but progress was made fairly easy by the presence of a huge irrigation channel that had been carved into the side of the valley, except of course where the channel had been carried away by landslides. These irrigation channels were incredibly impressive, they were laid with very even gradients for many kilometres often traversing very difficult terrain.

Once beyond the entrance pillars the kloof was at first narrow with immense rock walls at its sides (with some tremendous rock slides that had almost blocked the bottom, boulders the size of houses scattered everywhere and trees and bushes ripped to shreds, everything covered in a thick layer of rock dust). A fast flowing stream, about the size of the Molenaars in Du Toits Kloof, but much faster flowing, tumbled down over the blocks in its steep bed.

Quebrada Ulta rock slide debris

Amazingly there was still a profusion of flowers in the undisturbed ground here, but also as we discovered to our horror, swarms of very hungry mosquitoes flying around in the broad daylight, intent on devouring us. This was rather disturbing because we knew there was a malarial type mosquito here that could infect you with a very nasty fever called Varrucha (literally “Warts”). A little higher up the kloof, though still climbing and still bounded by steep rock walls, started to widen with soft green grassy meadows, Quena forests and to our utter surprise lots of very contented looking cows curiously observing our progress. We had come a long way and with the heavy loads the porters were carrying and then on top of that had made the change in plan, so we could see that they were starting to get rather mutinous! As Greg and Atties had gone on ahead with the intention of finding a good campsite, we persuaded the porters to carry on and soon emerged onto an enormous flat vlakte dotted with grazing cows, horses and donkeys – a beautiful grassy place with a meandering stream and enclosed by less forbidding rock walls rising at the top of the valley into the smooth white glistening snowy flanks of Nevado Contrahierbas (6 036 m). We chose a place to camp some distance away from the valley sides and when our porters, headman and interpreter joined us quickly quelled any remaining mutinous thoughts they might have had by applying pisco and cigarettes (which wrought wonderful changes).

As Tony had been feeling the altitude (we were already above 4 000 m)and had been moving very slowly, Atties and I walked back to meet him while the others set up camp, but were disappointed to find he had left a note saying that he was feeling the altitude too much and had decided to turn back. Passing the porters on the way back to camp (now all laughing and a whole lot happier), we arranged for them to return to carry our kit down on Saturday. After lunch we went up the valley for a short afternoon walk to photograph a beautiful Matterhorn-like peak to the south, but were rather frustrated by cloud coming in (as soon as we had left camp for our walk we were amused to see a swarm of inquisitive cows had moved in to check it out!) We cooked an early supper and retired to bed at the ridiculous hour of 19:15! We were looking forward to a good night’s rest after a very tiring day – we had walked a long way.

Quebrada Ulta camp

Friday 3 July

We woke early and left camp after breakfast at 07:00, walking up the valley to where the path climbed up onto a large spur and zig zagged up to a high pass used by the locals to move from one side of the range to the other. These paths were quite amazing, they were cut right out of the mountainside and built up with boulders where necessary. Again there was a garden all the way, especially on one small vlakte, when we were already on the ridge – grassy meadows with thick Quena forest behind and, as we discovered when we climbed higher, a small gem of a lakelet slightly above it. On the way we passed a caravan of mountain people bringing their donkeys across the pass – a whole family from the smallest children being carried by dad, to the oldest guiding the animals. Everything went across these passes – cattle, donkeys, horses and goats, and the people who must certainly be tough, for in this party that we saw there were children of about five years old walking all by themselves (and the pass is just under 5 000 m). The little girls were clothed like their mothers from a very early age ie wearing three or four of these heavy home-woven woollen skirts (our doctors complain bitterly about trying to conduct examinations and it must be hell being a teenager!) The very small babies were usually carried by their mothers in a shawl slung across the back and when it was feeding time the mums whipped out the necessary without much ado, sitting down and feeding the baby, all too often in the middle of a crowded street!

We felt a small tremor as we sat in the warm sun among the rocks on the ridge enjoying the most superb view of the gigantic east face of Huascaran and the delicate fluted ice pyramid of Nevado Chopikalki (6 345 m) behind it. It was our intention to first inspect lake Artesa, but when we crossed the valley to the moraine behind which we thought it should be, we found a lake much smaller than we had expected. Greg, Harold and I descended the moraine ridge for about a hundred metres as we guessed we had climbed too high and at last caught sight of it very much further down than we had expected. In fact it looked such a long way down that we decided rather to return to the pass and then go to the lake on the way down. We climbed back up the moraine ridge to its crest again (puffing a bit with the altitude) and then went along it, deviating around the many dangerous looking cracks on its crest where sections of the ridge have started to fall away into the valley below. These unstable moraines were rather frightening – their 70 degree slopes were made up of loose boulders and soil with pebbles and we could see frequent small falls occurring each in a cloud of dust. We re-joined the others again below a small waterfall with lovely icicles in the grass and ate our lunch (hot chilli pilchards, provita, cheese and canned grapefruit segments), before setting out on the final 300 m to reach the pass, the path zig sagging monotonously upwards – hard work at the best of times but excruciating here with the path more than half covered in rubble from the slides of scree and rockfalls from the cliffs above. We were all terribly tired by now and simply crept up to the col that the path crossed finding a rude rock shelter just below the crest. We were already well above the snowline here (though we had not been on any snow) and the views were simply fantastic – the peaks with their glaciers and the ridges simply bristling with cornices.

We took some photos and then, as Greg and I still had to inspect the lake, raced down the screes in a fraction of the time it had taken us to climb them. We picked up our packs at the lunch spot and set off again down the valley, Greg and I retracing our steps back along the moraine ridge we’d followed earlier and the others going back down the path we had followed when we left our camp. Greg and I traversed a stable moraine slope to a level where we guessed we should be able to get a good view of the lake, passing through a forest of giant Quena trees (you couldn’t get your arms around some of them they were so big) on the way. Although we had miscalculated slightly, on descending some more, we were delighted to find we could get down the relatively stable slope on the inside face of the moraine wall and from there could quite easily get onto Laguna Artesa’s artificial containing wall. We found the lake itself was terribly muddy, clearly due to the constant slides of earth and rocks that had fallen into it. It was not too large in size, but was still very impressive with the ghastly hanging walls of unstable rocks and mud at the sides. It was even more impressive when one looked down into the valley below where some really large rockfalls had taken place and the valley floor was littered with boulders the size of my lounge!

At the top of the pass at the head of the Quebrada Ulta

But, notwithstanding these concerns, the artificial wall, the outlet tunnel through the wall and the outlet control works constructed to safeguard the lake (although partially blocked by large boulders that had fallen from above), all appeared to be in good condition. After we had made our notes, we descended the kloof below Laguna Artesa, going as fast as we could, because the intermittent rattle of pebbles from the walls above gave possible promise of much more exciting fare if we dared to linger. The walls here were nearly a hundred metres high and we felt this was no place to hang around waiting for the next tremor. Further down the valley where the Artesa stream joined the pass stream and the valley opened out to form a wide stony plain, we were amazed to see that an enormous mud slide from the pass stream had inundated the whole valley floor. There just seemed to be so much evidence of this sort of immense devastation wrought by the ‘quake!

We had to climb up again to meet the path where it finally descended on the other side of the spur and, by now quite tired, followed the path again in the direction of our camp. We hadn’t realised that we had travelled so far in the morning so when we finally arrived in camp to greet the others, we were absolutely on our knees. To be welcomed with huge mugs of sweet lemon tea! We had only just got in before dark – but in time to help Greg prepare supper. We ate it and then gratefully crept into our tents to sleep the sleep of the just!

Saturday 4 July

We started at the same time in the morning as the previous day and grumbled our way up a zig zag path to Laguna Hualcacocha, which was in the side Kloof exiting directly alongside our camp. Here again the path had been largely obliterated by slides and we were pleased to find our lake at a slightly lower level than we had expected – it was really exhausting picking our way through the rubble of the large slides, everything was loose and dusty and it was difficult to imagine that a path was once there!

We could see that quite a lot of work had been done on both the lake’s main containing wall and the outlet tunnel through the wall as well as evidence that the work must have stretched over a significant time, because we could still see the remains of quite a large settlement below the large moraine wall below the lake, lots of circular stone walls still standing from what must have been “Zulu” type huts set in a shady glen of huge Quena trees. These trees were particularly attractive with the sun highlighting the contrast between the paper-thin reddish bark and the dark green of their leaves.

Typical unstable moraine conditions

Further on a large rockfall had plummeted down almost the full height of a 250 m high cliff to land in the middle of a Quena forest splintering the trees into matchwood. Climbing to the top of the moraine (which was also unstable on its inside face, like Laguna Artesa), we managed to quite easily traverse back towards the outlet and descend onto the lake’s artificial wall. In this case it appeared that the control works had suffered more damage than at Laguna Artesa – here there were quite large cracks that have developed on the inside face of the moraine wall and also several large cracks in the outlet tunnel on the upstream side (I inspected these by crouching in the tunnel in near darkness with the water rushing past, coming over my ankles and a definite numb feeling quickly creeping up my legs!) Nevertheless, after we had as far as possible looked at everything and had discussed what we had seen, despite these rather alarming findings we decided there was little imminent danger of a catastrophic failure. However, we decided to make a strong recommendation that repairs should be carried out as a matter of urgency, as we felt that in the long term there could be the risk of a large scale failure taking place if the moraine wall was subjected to the sudden shock of a large scale tremor and at the same time was in a completely saturated condition.

We ran down the path we had followed in the morning and straight through the zig zags to arrive at our camp and find that only four of our porters had arrived to help carry our kit down. However, not too dismayed we ate a huge lunch and fed the porters with all the excess food too (tea, Milo, Pro Nutro, Weetbix and corn flakes all mixed together in a billy!) preparing them for the hard work they would have to do on the way down. After striking the tents and packing everything up, we set off down the valley (13:30) – this a rather exhausting journey after the past few days exertion. A short distance below the rock pillars at the entrance to the kloof, we crossed the river over a bridge of tree trunks and stones and followed the correct path down the north side of the valley, at first again following a large irrigation channel and then crossing over a neck in the ridge to descend among the fertile looking cultivated fields and past the first farm dwellings to the lower valley. The path just seemed to go on and on along a never ending trail of stones and mud (from the overflowing or leaking irrigation channels), until we re-crossed the river again and joined the road close to where the lorry had originally dropped us off. We could hardly believe that our driver was actually there on time to meet us (16:00) as we had arranged – Peruvians are never on time and one has to adapt to everything being a few hours behind normal time! We gladly dropped our packs and took leave of our four rather forlorn looking porters, who had I think hoped to get a lift to Carhuaz - we were very glad ourselves that we didn’t have to walk the 25 odd kilometres back to the hospital!

To our surprise and joy we found Dr Tolentino at the hospital when we arrived (he was the Supervisor at the hospital and by now we had become a good friends), offering to run us through to the Puma’s lair in Chancos to have a hot bath (there was no one from our party at the hospital as they were all out on a clinic). How absolutely fabulous to be able to strip off all our filthy sweaty clothes and “take the waters” in the Puma’s lair – in the cave very hot water (45⁰C) from the spring drips down the rocks and over cut eucalyptus twigs so that you sit in this fragrant steamy atmosphere sweating like a pig! When you have had enough you jump into a rough-hewn rock bath at a normal bath temperature to do the soap thing and really get rid of the dirt, before finally rinsing off in much cooler water and climbing into those amazing CLEAN clothes! This treatment even soaked the dirt out of what was becoming my magnificent beard.

On the way home we relaxed in Dr Tolentino’s Toyota Corona for the first time in weeks it seemed, listening to pop music broadcast from Lima! Then to round it all off when we got back to the hospital, Dr Tolentino treated us to a feast supper of Cui and white Chicha. And then to glorious bed!

Sunday 5 July

There had been talk about our plans for the immediate future and the mooted possibility that Greg and I might be asked to stay on for a time after the others left Carhuaz on 15 July. Our doctors had been quite frustrated by the fact that the hospital administration had been taken over by the Peruvians again (which appeared to change from week to week) and they were finding there was little for them to do in the hospital apart from sorting out a few patients. As a result their main focus had changed to going out to do clinics and immunisations in the outlying villages, where they had found that this work had been quite restricted too (but at least it has been facilitated by them now having their own transport). For these reasons we were doubtful whether there would be justification for sending out another full team of doctors to replace our doctors when they left (as we believed had been proposed). In comparison, considering the amount of work that remained to be done inspecting and reporting on the earthquake damage suffered by the lakes, both Greg and I felt it would be more appropriate to rather provide some more engineering assistance (the work that we had done and still had to do was really more than we could cope with).

In virtually everything we had been involved in in the valley, the Peruvians’ attitude about time had nearly driven us to distraction. At the same time we simply couldn’t help but like them so much. The ordinary people were so genuinely helpless in the situation they found themselves in and so immensely grateful for everything that was done for them. Their gratitude and often amazing generosity had been quite overwhelming (I remember one remarkable incident when a Peruvian peasant lady had come to the hospital to express her gratitude for what we were doing, by making us the gift of a single egg that she certainly must have carried a long way – that was all that she had that she could give us and it would certainly have been something of value for her to give away).

Anyway, we woke up to find that Carhuaz was still suffering from water problems! The water had apparently been turned off for most of the previous day and had only been on for about an hour during the day, because they had apparently been digging up the pipes in the streets to carry out repairs. We all used the precious hour that the water was available to catch up on the washing of our by now rather odorous clothes, the clean variety of which have been getting critically short.

Benjamin had arranged for our next inspection trip to be to a very high altitude lake called Safuna Alta close to Nevado Allpamayo (5 947 m) in the north of the range. Because the lake was very difficult to access, he had written a letter for us to present to General Freyre requesting helicopter transport. As the letter had been delivered to the hospital, Robin had already contacted the General to make the necessary arrangements, but to be sure everything was in order Greg and I set off after breakfast in the truck to confirm them. And to our amazement the staff at Anta did already know all about it and everything had been set up for us to take off at 07:00 on Monday! Too easy to be true!

We returned to the hospital before lunch to find our American Peace Corps friends being entertained by the others. We were pleased to see them - we had a long chat and then set off to the Plaza des Armas to see the market and take some more photos there, before also paying a visit to the “Street of the Amazons” to make some other small purchases there.

Our Peace Corps friends stayed for lunch and then Harold, Atties, Geoff, Greg and I set off in the truck to visit Yungay, because we had not yet seen the town and felt it was high time that we did so. The main road became a tarred road (albeit with some very impressive cracks and holes in it )when we neared the small town of Toma, which we found to our complete surprise had some remarkable examples of topiary (in this case the trimming and sculpturing of small trees into ornamental shapes to depict living statues of birds, dogs, etc) – not what one would expect to find in such a faraway place! All appeared normal as we continued along the road until we reached Ranrahirca, or more correctly what was now left of the town, once a vibrant and attractive small town that was now no more than a pitiful ruin of collapsed houses engulfed in mud and an encampment of dusty tents.

In 1962 Ranrahirca was devastated by a gigantic aluvion of mud and ice similar to that which obliterated Yungay now and for this reason it is interesting to read the account given by one of the survivors of the Ranrahirca calamity which Benjamin Morales quoted in a paper he presented at the International Symposium on the Scientific Aspects of Snow and Ice Avalanches in April 1975 :

“On January 9^th Mr Rodriguez bought 32 sacks of potatoes to bring them to the market in Huaraz. On the 10^th he took the sacks from Pongor to the main road at Ranrahirca to wait for a truck to take him and his load to Huaraz. At about 6 pm he heard a strange noise, like that of many airplanes flying over Huascaran. When he looked towards the snowy mountain, he first saw the ice falling toward the first elbow at Acraranco ravine. Then he observed a white cotton-like foam ascending very high and covering Huascaran. At this moment he decided to run for safety and advanced about 100 m towards Huarascuchu. He passed the alarm telling the people that an “aluvion” was coming. Some did not pay attention to him. Two women told him that the snow of Huascaran always fell that way. The rest of the people started running towards their houses, trying to save some valuables. Some followed him while others remained behind attributing no importance to what was happening. Rodiguez kept running almost exhausted,until he saw some horses tethered on the other side of the road. He hastily removed the rope from the neck of one of the horses and grasped its mane. The frightened horse dragged him several metres before he was able to mount it and gallop towards Huarascuchu. Shortly afterwards he looked back to see a great mass of ice blocks of mountainous proportions, roaring past at fantastic speed in front of the avalanche, which completely wiped out the village of Ranrahirca and projecting ice splinters like a “dilluvial hail”. Then came dust followed by rocks, thick mud and water forming an enormous area of waste.”

4 000 people perished then and Morales estimated “a total of 13 000 000 m³ of material was deposited by that avalanche not counting the considerable volume removed by the Santa river.”

According to reports the May 31 1970 disaster was many times the size of that which destroyed Ranrahirca then, ie perhaps some 80 000 000 tons of earth, rock, water and ice precipitated into this valley. The implications of just saying this are too vast to be at first appreciated. The avalanche was again caused by a huge (±15 000 000 cubic metre) fall of ice and rock from the face of Huascaran Norte, falling free for nearly a thousand metres and then gathering mud and earth in its path and gaining more and more impetus, travelling at a speed of more than 300 kilometres per hour speeding down the side valley along the path of the 1962 avalanche towards Ranrahirca. The size of the avalanche was so vast that at a slight curve in the valley it climbed more than 200 m over the intervening ridge which separates Yungay from Ranrahirca – the main body hurtling down to re-cover Ranrahirca and an enormous branch, large enough to fling boulders the size of houses into the Yungay valley, destroying the town and nearly 20 000 people. This vast volume of mud rock and ice spread out across the valley, lapped up onto the opposite bank of the Santa river for a height of about 60 m, spread up the valley (which is very wide) for 2 kilometres and down towards Caraz for another 17 kilometres.

What remained of Yungay for us to see? It was described before as “the most beautiful of the valley’s towns”, but it was impossible to imagine what it was like before! All that was left for us to see was a desolation of crazed and cracked dried mud, boulders covered in a sludge of dried mud and only here and there the very pitiful remains of houses, where by some freak coincidence everyday family belongings had been buoyed to the surface.

Memorial to those who lost their lives - site of Yungay's buried cathedral

Yungay Plaza des Armas - what was once the bustling centre of the town

Yungay - aerial view of the path of the aluvion - the circular shaped cemetry left of centre where a few of Yungay's citizens were spared

The path of the aluvion with its source, the great scar on the face of Huascaran Norte, some 14 km away

There were letters and sheets of official paper that fluttered in the dismal breeze that sighed across the desolate wasteland. Here and there broken cups, vases, stuffing from mattresses, a shoe, broken beds and beams and reeds from the houses that were once beautiful. Pathetic scratchings in the dried surface where relatives or friends had tried to retrieve family belongings.

A huge tip truck caught up and tumbled along like a toy by the aluvion

There were the mud caked wheels of vehicles tumbled along by the avalanche, dead animals on the verge covered in clouds of flies and worst of all of course, the knowledge and the smell of death that thousands of people were still lying there entombed under tons of mud. We could see that a town had once stood here – the incongruous sight of the Plaza des Armas palm trees fluttering their dead leaves in the wind, saved by the solid brick bastions of the now crumpled cathedral.

And seemingly symbolically stretching out his arms towards the mountain from which this hell was unleashed, a giant figure of Christ on top of the cemetry hill (which can clearly be seen in the aerial photograph of the aluvion’s path through the town), around which the aluvion flowed almost like the prow of a ship. This was almost an apt simile because the hill does resemble a storm wracked vessel, half drowned, battered and broken, yet still afloat and as such, a haven that harboured many of the Yungay disaster’s survivors.

Here were the contrasts of the flowering shrubs and trees standing almost untouched, whilst behind them many of the graves lay shattered with bits of bones and wreaths and marble carvings mixed with the tumbled blocks and tiles of what once must have been a proud and orderly cemetery. Now only soldiers stood a lonely guard against the looters, among the crude scattered crosses that the people were bringing to Yungay to pay homage to the town and their loved ones. This must truly rank as one of the greatest disasters of this nature in our living memory.

Suitably sobered by these dreadful sights, we drove back to Carhuaz and after supper were invited to attend a camp fire at the Convent, in the right frame of mind to appreciate the beautiful singing of Spanish/South American songs and the guitar accompaniment.

Two classic books which may be of interest :

A very old book about Pizarro’s conquest of Peru – a classic today which can be traced through its author PRESCOTT

The “Weisser Cordillera” (the Cordillera Blanca, Peru) by KINZL and SCHNEIDER

Monday 6 July

Robin had an emergency he had to deal with during the night when a man was brought into the hospital who had been badly burned when his tent caught fire. Consequently Harold and Geoff drove us to Anta to catch our helicopter at 07:00 and to make contact with Commandant Vasquez to arrange for another helicopter to fly the burned patient with Robin and Ines to Anta so that he could be evacuated to Lima in one of the transport aircraft (Robin also wanted to go to Lima to start making arrangements for getting our party out when it was time to go home).

Our 07:00 departure turned out to be Peruvian time and we eventually only got away at 07:30 in an FAP (Fuerza Aerea Peruana) Alouette III with the pilot, Commandant Vasquez, and the engineer (who had spent the last half hour scraping the ice off the cockpit perspex bubble) - our French friends had already pulled out of Anta which was the reason we used the FAP helicopter. We all enjoyed the great amusement at Anta with the French celebrating their departure in their inimitable crazy style “blowing up” their hospital tent and each other with fumigation “bombs”, filling the whole valley with acrid smoke!

Even though it was still early and the sun wasn’t yet in the valley, the flight over Yungay was impressive – only from the air could we appreciate the full extent of the aluvion’s devastation. We flew on past Caraz to Huaylas on the Cordillera Negra side of the valley close to the start of the Canon del Pato, the tortuous narrow canyon that closes the valley at its bottom end (with an incredible road that cuts through the mountain with some 35 tunnels).

We landed at Huaylas and dropped the engineer and Commandant there, then continued our flight, now back across the valley, at first climbing high over the Canon del Pato (brown and dusty looking after the ‘quake, which of course created havoc in the canyon with all the landslides, broken tunnels and river blockages that it caused), to get back to the Rio Santa and then swung to the north past the Quebrada de los Cedros to get into the Quebrada Quitaracsa, a fantastic gorge closed in by huge rock walls at its entrance. As we flew into the ravine we noticed vast clouds of dust rising from further rockfalls obviously due to another tremor rocking the mountains. Further on, now flying east and still climbing, the valley opened out and there were signs of cultivation and the odd ruined dwelling. Towards the head of the valley we passed some magnificent high waterfalls tumbling in from the Nevado Millwaqocha (5 480 m), before swinging back to the south to climb over the heavily crevassed glacier on Nevado Pilanco (5 300m) and seeing our first breathtaking view of Nevado Allpamayo (5 947m) on our right and ahead the vast cirque of the Nevados Pukajirka (6 046m).

Peaks of the Nevados Pukajirka group

Flying in by helicopter over these awesome icy peaks was one of those supreme experiences of a lifetime. The views were so breathtaking it was almost impossible to capture their majesty on film or even to do them justice just describing them – serried ranks of snowcapped summits, fluted ice peaks as delicate as lacework, rock peaks soaring skywards in vast unbroken spires and ever-changing blue-green then glistening silvery white glaciers. Emerald green valleys of lush vegetation dotted with jewels that were sparkling lakes woven together by a glittering network of streams, feathery waterfalls cascading over polished rocks and above all, the indescribably intense blue sky that is only found at these high altitudes.

At first we were uncertain which was Laguna Safuna Alta, our destination, and made a false approach to what we later discovered was Laguna Pukaqocha (which also had a built-up spillway/outlet tunnel, hovered briefly over the shimmering lake surface, then broke away into the next valley where we immediately realised that the two lakes we could see ahead were Safuna Alta and Baja, the Alta spillway spewing forth from a huge moraine blocking the valley. There were some huts at this level and a zig zag path above leading to an adjacent moraine ridge with some quite civilized looking huts also clustered together on its crest.

We swung round in a tummy-sinking turn and dropped like a stone to the edge of the lower lake, before moving up slightly again to drier ground and landing gently on the spongy turf. We leapt out and, crouching low under the whirling rotors, hauled our kit out, thanked our fine Peruvian pilot and, slamming the door watched as our “beautiful bird” thrashed upwards and then away in a rush of downdraught, with leaves and grass whirling around us. The Alo swept down the valley, an insignificant speck in this vast world of rock and snow, and eventually disappeared with a final whisper of its rotors over a glacial neck low down in the valley.

Laguna Safuna Alta Alta with ice floes dotted around the lake surface

We had hardly come back to earth when we spied a couple of wild-looking men racing towards us down the slope. As they came closer we shouted “Buenos dias”, and nearly collapsed when one of them drawled “Hey these guys shouldn’t be speaking that language (we didn’t know our Spanish was so bad!) There were three of them in all – two really wild-looking guys with their hair down over their ears, stubbly looking beards, ponchos and very tatty-looking obviously climbing clothes! In next to no time their speech belied them as New Zealanders and we soon also learned they were members of a New Zealand climbing expedition to the Cordillera Blanca - young guys, John Glasgow and Pete Gough just finishing their studies at university. The third character was a genuine Peruvian called Victor who we learned was Benjamin Morales’ man who looked after these lakes, sending out radio reports on their status from the nearby meteorological station.

Greg with the New Zealanders and Victor, Benjamin Morales' "Lake Minder"

It was really amazing meeting these climbers. They looked incredibly uncouth, dirty and hippy-looking (shades of Chamonix!), but at the same time their unmistakeable delight at seeing real people who could speak English and their obviously sincere friendliness immediately won us over, as chattering excitedly they helped us carry our gear up the path to the huts (we left some of the equipment we wouldn’t be needing, like the tent, down below and later found it was being investigated by the local herd of cows, so had to go and rescue it). It didn’t take long over a steaming brew of lemon tea for us all to compare notes. The NZ party had been based in the Pukaqocha basin next door, for nearly six weeks and hadn’t been out at all (except for one sortie which three of the party had made to the small town of Pomabamba to the east, where they told us with some relish that they were nick named “the good, the bad and the ugly”!) The earthquake had shaken them up quite a bit, but fortunately nobody had been hurt. Being so isolated they had only heard about the Yungay disaster and the damage sustained in the Santa valley more than a week after the earthquake.

They described the terrifying rock and ice falls they witnessed on the peaks surrounding them during the earthquake – whole summits of the mountains crashing down, while at the same time they tried to cope with what was happening where they were in their wildly gyrating camp site, thrown to the ground by the huge initial shock wave. Their party’s leader had been delayed in Huaraz because he had been ill and was there during the “terra moto”, very lucky to survive as he just happened to be in the open in one of the town’s squares and had to watch whole buildings collapsing and crashing down all around him. Somehow a report had reached the British Embassy in Lima that the whole expedition had been wiped out. Their families in New Zealand were informed and they had a difficult job persuading the Embassy that they really were alright.

Displacement of the walls at the entrance to the Safuna Alta outlet tunnel

This situation was not surprising since all fourteen members of a Czechoslovakian expedition had perished when another massive rock fall triggered by the earthquake, falling from Huascaran Norte into the Llanganuco valley had obliterated their base camp.

After organising the hut, the four of us climbed up the outside face of the moraine to the Laguna Safuna Alta spillway and tunnel and made a thorough inspection of these structures so far as was possible, as well as of the lake’s containing wall, all of which were pretty badly damaged. Parts of the lake’s wall had fallen away on its inside face and the reinforced concrete tunnel displayed a marked kink and in places was very severely cracked. Fortunately the tunnel was dry and when we walked through it to reach the lake it appeared that there was no immediate danger of it failing, though it was obvious that extensive repairs would have to be carried out.

It was quite interesting that some of the worst cracking we saw in the moraine walls was right at the top, possibly due to accentuation of the movement induced by the earthquake at the top of the wall. The lake itself was quite fascinating. It was bounded on three sides by high unstable moraine walls (which showed evidence of constant small slides) and on its upper side by the snout of quite a large glacier, so that the surface of the lake was partially frozen with a thin layer of ice on it and there were “icebergs” or floes of all sizes floating around in the lake. While we were doing our inspection the New Zealanders spent a happy half hour leaping around on these ice floes as they made prodigious leaps from one to another!

We went back to the hut again and had lunch, the NZ guys revelling in the unexpected luxury of being able to enjoy different food! As we had asked them to spend the night with us at the lake, we all went across to their base camp in the Pukaqocha basin, calling by to collect Victor (where we had to try a plate of his chicken soup and some freshly roasted popcorn) with his shotgun (to see if he could bag a Viscacha or two on the screes) at his hut further down the moraine ridge that bounded Laguna Safuna Alta. It was more than an hour’s walk to their base camp and, although we reckoned we were by now reasonably fit, we had our time cut out to keep up with the others, who were obviously all fantastically fit after staying at this altitude (4 500 m) for such a long time. Their base camp valley was quite beautiful – bubbling streams running through lush green valleys dotted with several exquisite small lakes and bounded by huge rock faces.

The New Zealanders playing on the Safuna Alta ice floes leaping from one to another

At the camp we met some of the other members of the party, including a weird character called Steve, an American Peace Corps type turned “Chilean bum”, who didn’t have much good to say about the States (nor for that matter did the New Zealanders who felt pretty bitter about Vietnam). They pointed out two members of their party who had just completed their second day trying to put a new route up the northeast face of Nevado Allpamayo. We could just pick them out descending a short way down the north ridge, two minute specks lost on the mountain’s vast face of ice and snow, preparing for their third bivouac. We also had a look at Pukaqocha lake which had a fantastic setting too. We discovered that John Glasgow was also a geologist, so he and Greg went into a huddle over the rock samples they had collected. They told us the area was quite interesting because this was where the dividing plane between the granodiorites and the schists occured.

After coffee in one of the tumble down thatched huts which the NZ guys were using as their base, (originally put up during the construction of the outlet weir at Pukaqocha lake) we sped down the valley in the gathering evening and walked back up our valley, stopping along the way to look at a stream that flowed out of the face of the moraine wall bounding Laguna Safuna Alta. The stream did not emerge over a wide area on the moraine wall as one might imagine, but was rather concentrated as a single jet spouting out between the rocks. Finally in the semi-darkness we climbed back to our hut. John fiddled around trying to get the hut’s water supply to work (the hut had all mod cons, but even after John’s running repairs, we still had black-looking water!). Then after a huge supper, we chatted ‘til late in the night by candle light and sustained by numerous cups of lemon tea and finally settled down to sleep on real beds! Even though sleeping in a house like this was a rare occurrence for us, I slept rather badly because we were disturbed several times during the night by more tremors!

Tuesday 7 July

We woke early and after breakfast with the others, packed our kits and descended to the lower lake to meet the helicopter which was due to pick us up at 08:00. This was however the usual myth and we waited anxiously wondering when it would arrive, watching the clouds roll in from the east and chatting and trying to get warm in the sun. After watching three geese swimming around in Laguna Safuna Baja, another of Benjamin’s men called Octavio arrived to see us off and at last, just as we were getting a little desperate wondering whether the chopper would get in at all with the lowering cloud ceiling, we first heard it and then saw the welcome speck increasing in size to swoop in in a tight turn, hover just above the ground and then gently sink to rest. This time the pilot who had originally brought us in had another senior officer with him, who was flying the Alo. Very relieved to see the chopper, we lifted our kit into it and after a final warm hand shake with the others jumped aboard, slammed the door and took off watching our two NZ friends wildly waving beside the lake – two incongruous looking figures in their ponchos looking rather down at the mouth on our departure after their unexpected day and night of social contact.

This time we flew down the valley itself and not over the glacier as we had done previously. We again had superb views of the mountains and the valley, though the summits were partially obscured by the cloud that had moved in, which in its own way was quite alluring as parts of the peaks and glaciers appeared out of the shifting mists as we flew down the valley. Again our route took us down the Quebrada Quitaracsa and Canon del Pato, then up the Santa valley over Caras and the tail end of the Yungay aluvion, the pathetic sight of orange orchards half drowned in a sea of mud. Further, on flying over what was left of Yungay and Ranrahirca, we could see the whole path of deadly destruction wrought by the aluvion, from its origin on the scarred rocky face of Huascaran Norte, all the way down the valley it followed, the ridge it slopped over and then the vast fan of grey-brown mud dotted with the huge boulders where Yungay once stood.

To save having to make the tedious trip back from Anta, we had arranged for the Alo to drop us at the hospital in Carhuaz and were soon skimming over the roof tops to land there in an enormous cloud of dust.

'Quake damage in Carhuaz seen from the air coming in to land at the hospital

This much to Harold’s disgust, as he had already had to organise the hospital minions to do a clear up the previous day when Robin had taken off with the burn patient. When we unloaded our kit, our bags were pounced on and carted off by an excited swarm of small children who then watched the Alo take off again in another enormous cloud of dust! We spent the rest of the morning re-organising and also getting everything ready for our next trip to the Quebrada Paron , which we had arranged for Tuesday afternoon. Greg, Geoff, Colin, Tony, Herkie, Johan and myself were going to do the trip.

We had arranged for Harold to drive us as far as we would be able to go up the road into the Quebrada Paron and then to bring the bakkie back to Carhuaz. The first part of the road was tarred, but soon after Toma it reverted to dirt at a deviation past a rock slide where the original road was obliterated. With it being quite impossible to pass other trucks ahead of us, the chaps in the back of our bakkie were very soon covered in dust – grey hair, dust in your eyes, ears and mouth and, worst of all if you wear glasses, perpetual blurred vision! Our bakkie seemed to travel in its own pall of dust.

The orange groves we passed through close to Caras, where a new deviation had been cut through the orchards, were a pitiful sight – everything was covered in dust, both the grey brown trees and the oranges still hanging from the branches. We stopped briefly in Caras to pay our respects to the Prefect and to provide him with the details of our mission – a rather lengthier process than we had anticipated, because he turned out to be a somewhat officious little man! However we were pleased that we had called, because he provided us with a guide to show us the first part of the way we had to go, which turned out to be rather complicated.

Getting ready to set off in the bakkie for the Quebrada Paron inspection

It was quite a fantastic road that we followed, not so much at first where it went through small villages and farmlands, but soon climbing ever higher in long zig zags, before it broke out onto a great ridge where the valley branched, and after negotiating more zig zags, went up to the giant pillars of rock that guarded the entrance to the Quebrada Paron.

The road going up into the Quebrada Paron

Here the zig zags become even more tightly spaced on the steep slope, hairpin bend after hairpin bend, in many cases built up with stone walls. At the entrance we came across the first severe rockfalls (about 20 kilometres from Caras) and it wasn’t long before we found the road blocked at one of the hairpin bends by a giant pile of rocks and earth. We offloaded all our gear, our initial intention in the gathering dusk being to pitch camp close by, but very soon discovered that this was also terrible mosquito country, so waved Harold goodbye on his homeward journey and slogged on for another hour tripping over the boulders in the rockfalls and slithering through the mud in the earth slides to set up a higher camp, this one less troubled by mosquitoes. We made supper on a fire and went to bed.

Wednesday 8 July

We set off up the Quebrada Paron after an early breakfast, continuing along the road to where the valley became very narrow with huge quite sheer rock spires (300 to 450 m high) rising on either side. Here there was an absolute shambles of landslides and rockfalls with much of the road completely obliterated, so it was quite a relief to discover the original trail that must have provided access into the valley before the road was built (the road went all the way up to Laguna Paron which was about 32 Kilometres from Caras).

Consulting the map on the way up to the Laguna Paron

Weatherwise, this was another absolutely perfect day. We were told that this sort of weather is almost assured at this time of year. The apparently reasonable guarantee of good weather from June to the end of July, coupled with the attraction of these exceptionally high mountains, which amazingly are almost as accessible as the major alpine peaks, make the Blanca a very attractive destination for climbing.

We had heard Laguna Paron described as possibly one of the most beautiful lakes in the Cordillera Blanca and therefore, from what we had already seen of the other lakes in the parts of the range we had already visited, had high expectations of what we would see at the top of the valley. So it did come as rather an anti-climax when we rounded the bottom of the huge final moraine wall (really to be correct one should rather call it a “rock glacier”) at the lower end of the lake where the road terminated and the Peruvians were constructing a reinforced concrete framed building (possibly a tourist complex), to find the view of the lake did not entirely live up to our expectations!

Laguna Paron with the beautiful summit of Piramide (5 885 m) beyond

Perhaps this was partly because it had by now become partly cloudy and many of the high peaks surrounding the lake were obscured and perhaps also because, after seeing so many other beautiful lakes, we had come to expect too much! From the map we could see that the lake was indeed surrounded by an impressive cirque of very high mountains – Aguja Nevado (5 840 m - several summits), Artesonraju (6 025 m), Chacraraju (6 112 m), Nevado Huandoy (6 395 m), and Piramide (5 885 m), an especially beautiful peak just beyond the top end of the lake.

We stopped on the shore at the bottom end of the lake and after a brew of tea, hauled out a rather battered looking boat that Benjamin had told us about and which he had said we could use. The boat was frantically heavy and it took all seven of us to move it to the water’s edge (obviously with all the bumping and scraping over the rocks it had been decided to sheath the boat’s hull with a heavy gauge sheet metal). It was a real hoot to watch our first boatmen paddle (using planks, because we couldn’t find any oars) through a scum of aloe leaves (that must have fallen into the lake with one of the stonefalls from the lake’s steep rocky sides) to the clear greeny-white glacier water further out and then take a turn ourselves, baling frantically with an empty pilchard can and our billy, to keep pace with the inflowing water. Most definitely a record for the highest South African rowing team!

After putting the boat away, in order to carry out our inspection of the lake, we walked along the edge of the moraine retaining wall and where it terminated against the lake’s true left bank, climbed up its very steep and shockingly loose side for about 100 m to its top. There were two very interesting features that we noted about this wall :

Firstly as already, mentioned, it was what is called a “rock glacier”, which means it had an underlying ice core overburdened with moraine material, from fairly fine particles of granodiorite to vast blocks of it. For this reason it was extremely unstable and with the great shake-up that had occurred, the top of wall was a chaos of new valleys, cracks and ridges.

Secondly, possibly because of the wall’s ice core, we found a number of very strong streams issuing from very high up in the wall.

By now it was already fairly late, so after recording the important details needed for our report, we dropped down to the neck at the top of the road where we had left our packs and then walked back to camp, mostly along the road. On the way we passed a very lovely waterfall that cascaded over some large rock slabs below the impressive snow apex of Nevado Huandoy (6 395 m). This upper part of the valley was very beautiful, but of a slightly different character from the larger valleys we had previously visited, because it was narrower and with steeper side walls. It was also more thickly vegetated with smaller Quena bushes than we had previously seen, so when one left the path or road, progress could be quite difficult. Back in camp we saw war looming with the mosquitoes, so having collected a whole big pile of dry wood, made a huge campfire to drive them off. Greg as usual cooked a huge meal of bully with rice, sweetcorn, baked beans, etc – our standard fare, of course with soup as well. After sitting and chatting in front of our fire for a while longer, we crept into bed.

Thursday 9 July

According to the previous arrangement we had made to return to Carhuaz, we packed up camp and carried everything down the road to meet Atties and Elena who had come to fetch us with the bakkie at about 08:45. When he arrived, Atties told us that he and Harold had spoken to Robin on the radio (after moving the burn patient to the hospital in Lima, Robin and Ines had stayed on there, specifically to clarify the situation about the South African party returning home) and that Robin had told him that arrangements had been made to fly five of our original team home from Lima on 18 July and that Greg and I had been granted extra leave by our firms to stay on and return on 1 August. Colin’s name had not been mentioned in the conversation (much to his consternation as he had to write an exam quite soon), which later proved to be only an omission as his name had in fact been included in the group that was flying out on 18 July. Apparently Herkie and Johan had similarly been granted special leave by Pretoria University to stay on, also Ines and Elena would stay to assist a further team of seven South African doctors who were arriving in Lima in a week’s time and would be staying until 6 August. This information was received with somewhat mixed feelings by us all – it did seem a bit off that none of us had been consulted to see if we might wish to stay on. However, as it turned out afterwards, we learned that the extra time that had been mentioned was available time and that a final decision whether to stay on and, if so, for how long would be our own.

Driving back down the road from Laguna Paron, we felt obliged to call in again to see the Sub-Prefect and tell him that we had inspected the lake and were reasonably satisfied about its immediate safety. As we rather expected, this all took rather longer than we anticipated, he had to hear all about it, write down all our names as well as his and the Mayor’s names and tell us about half the history of Caras, before we almost rudely had to take our leave, because we were all completely choked up with dust and desperately wanted to have a bath at Chancos. We stopped by at Carhuaz hospital to pick up clean clothes, then at Chancos dived into the Puma’s lair to fully savour our 5 soles (8 cents) worth of steam, hot water and soap (plus hair shampoo) before returning to Carhuaz. We thought we would be returning to a roast pig for lunch at the hospital (Dr Tolentino had promised us this feast and had specially bought a pig for this purpose at the Plaza des Armas market), but learned when we got there that our feast had been postponed until evening! So instead we enjoyed our more usual delightful repast of dry Pro Vita spread with pilchards in hot chilli sauce (!!) and slept it off for a couple of hours afterwards in preparation for a fancy tea party we had been invited to at the grand town house of two sisters, Beatrice (an advocate) and Victoria. The two lovely ladies walked to the hospital to fetch us and were terribly disappointed when Elena, Tony and Herkie had to cry off because they had been asked to go to the near-side Yungay encampment to attend to a number of apparently very sick children. The request for urgent assistance had come from Dick Koch, an American doctor, originally off the US Gaum (a helicopter carrier that had been stationed off Chimbote to provide medical assistance to victims of the earthquake), who was now working at one of the hospitals in Huaraz with Dr Rwaldi, a Peruvian supervisor co-ordinating medical services in the Santa valley.

The rest of us went down with Beatrice and Victoria to their home which occupied a whole block of the town close to the Plaza des Armas. These sisters, two of a very large family of Spanish descent, were obviously very well off because this was only one of their homes - their other homes were in Lima, Huaraz and Tana and were apparently on a similar scale. Certainly the home where we had tea must have been quite magnificent (in its way), before the ‘quake. It was made up of a number of buildings in the block, the most important and impressive being the family residence – a very large single storey house built along typical Spanish (or more correctly local Peruvian Spanish) lines around a large courtyard planted with lemon trees. Apparently the bedrooms in the house were allocated to the family members according to seniority by age. The main reception room lead off the courtyard with beautiful wooden doors (we saw many similar doors, as well as beautiful windows and shutters in the older homes, sadly in many cases badly ravaged by beetle). The room was large with mainly Victorian style furniture, ornate drapes and lots of old family portraits and really served as an antechamber to what must have been a living room with a sort of special guest room leading off it with a hideously ornate Victorian brass bedstead in the centre (in which we were told, Simon Bolivar was reputed to have slept) and gaudy wallpaper and hangings. The adjacent living room was in slightly more restrained taste with heavy carved Victorian furniture, locally woven woollen carpets and rather fine lace curtains and two very nice light cane rocking chairs. This room also had many family pictures in it, which were interesting because they showed to some extent how these people lived and dressed in those days (lots of servants and little limit on expense). By today’s standards it seemed to be on quite a grand scale in comparison with the average Peruvian family home.

Of course the house looked very sad when we were there, largely due to the earthquake, but also from neglect – the walls were crumbling, many of the ceilings were down and crystal chandeliers and ornaments lay shattered on the floors. The outside wall of “Simon Bolivar’s bedroom” was no more and his grand bed was standing open to the street (which was one of the first sights that caught my eye when we arrived and first walked around Carhuaz). The sisters also explained that the family had always patronised a local festival in honour of the village saint Senora Nostra Mercedes. This feast lasted perhaps a week in September/October and the statue was dressed in the most ornate vestments made especially for the occasion by the family (or at least at their expense). Beatrice and Victoria showed us the statue and the very fine adorned vestments – silk and embroidered with gold thread so that in the end our lady must be carrying an extra 20 kg of vestments!

Then we were shown into the back garden where they had specially arranged a table for us under a pergola with sweet smelling jasmine and with agapanthus petals on the table arranged to read “SA”. We were given the choice of a sweet quince conserve, cheese, home bake biscuits and a non-alcoholic drink called Chicha Morala made by boiling the black maize kernels and adding lemon juice and sugar – quite a refreshing drink. They ended the party by giving us each one of those quaint colourful knitted woollen Peruvian balaclavas that are typical of these parts, with a motif of a man and a woman around them. We wore them walking back to the hospital and these, together with our shorts (which were clearly considered exceedingly strange here) received incredulous stares from all the locals!

We thanked and said goodbye to our hostesses and went back for our pig supper with Dr Tolentino, which was a huge success (though it is quite impossible to eat very much of this locally prepared meat because it is so rich and fatty).

We learned that there were apparently several versions of Chicha. The sisters told us that the white Chicha (ie the alcoholic drink made from white maize) was difficult to make as the cobs had to be buried for quite a long time then dried and boiled before the resulting brew was matured for as long as desired (or as long as one could hold out). The longer the Chicha is kept, the greater the alcohol content so that bottles kept for a couple of years can have as much “kick” as Pisco!

Friday 10 July

We had to go through to Anta and Huaraz to make arrangements for our party’s departure back to Lima. As we needed the truck to do this, we first took the doctors through to the small village of Amacha in the lower valley of the Quebrada Ulta to do a clinic. The villages were always notified the day or evening before that the doctors were coming, so that the people were there when the doctors arrived. Those that weren’t were called by the village children ringing a bell madly as our truck arrived. After dropping the doctors, Greg and I drove on to Anta, only to find that both the General and the Commandant were away out of the office. We spoke to the Major who we were also friendly with and explained what our forthcoming transport needs would be, viz that the SA team of new doctors coming in would need transport both to get to Carhuaz when they arrived and also for conducting the clinics they would do when they were settled in at the Carhuaz hospital and then also for the members of the first SA team who were scheduled to fly out from Anta on the 15^th. We tried to contact Benjamin at his Huaraz office on the radio, but found he had apparently gone to Lima. However we decided we would go on to Huaraz anyway in the hope that we might be able to radio through to him from his Huaraz office to discuss plans for additional inspections he might want us to do, which would determine whether we should stay on for the extra time as proposed, or not.

Before leaving, we filled up with petrol at Anta, a laborious process when you consider how many vehicles they must have refueled every day – first having to siphon the petrol out of the 44 gallon drum into a miserable dirty bucket (that leaked profusely) and then again from there decanting the petrol into the vehicle’s fuel tank. Driving through to Huaraz we were pleased to see how much they had improved the road. Many of the worst slides and blocked cuttings had already been cleared so that there were fewer detours one had to take.

In Huaraz we first stopped at Benjamin’s office and speaking to one of his engineers were able to make an arrangement to talk to him on the radio at 14:00. We spent the rest of the morning rather frustrated, still trying to organise the liquid chlorine for the purification works in Carhuaz and to find out what had happened to the fifty latrines that were supposed to have been delivered in Carhuaz two weeks previously, to be told that in both instances the people involved were not available as they were away from Huaraz – Peru!! We commiserated with each other over this non-event by having a “bifstek” at the restaurant we had been to previously – not bad, but beaten absolutely flat! With a few minutes to spare before 14:00, we tried to find some postcards we could buy and send home and did discover a photographic shop which was selling photographs of the disaster area after the ‘quake, but after selecting some photos, gave up when the shopkeeper tried to charge us four times what he had originally said they would cost! Then imagine our increasing frustration when we arrived at Benjamin’s office and had to wait 30 minutes for the radio operator to arrive and another 30 minutes for him to eventually get through to Benjamin in Lima. At least Benjamin sounded quite excited about the possibility that we might be able to stay longer and was very interested to hear our news about the lakes we had visited and the reports we had written about our inspections. We agreed we would have these finalised and ready to hand over to him on Wednesday afternoon 15^th July when we had arranged to meet him in Huaraz to discuss possible plans. The radio reception was terrible and with his rather uncertain English it was impossible to discuss any detailed proposals over the radio.

We tried again after that to hunt down the chlorine we had been trying to find and eventually had some success making contact with an engineer called Alyza and a young most un-Peruvian looking man called Julio Mena, who both worked for a firm in Lima importing specialised purification equipment and were now helping in Huaraz. These two were most helpful, including phoning from Huaraz’s antique looking telephone exchange, to their firm in Lima (just before it closed for business at 16:00) to arrange for another chlorine applicator to be sent out, which they promised they would be able to help install.

Relieved to be getting out of Huaraz after the day’s frustrations, on the way home we dropped off at Monterrey, a small village off the main road, where there was probably the valley’s most fancy hotel, boasting natural thermal baths, originally started by a Yugoslav couple, but presently run by the government. The hotel was not too badly damaged during the earthquake. Over a cool Cristal beer we admired the amazing collection of dolls exhibited in the hotel and then drove on to Carhuaz arriving there at last light, discovering that we had all been invited to another “do” at the Convent – supper and a campfire. A pleasant meal of vermicelli soup, a main chicken dish with potatoes and a sort of trifle pudding followed by Pisco sours and beer! Good singing again sitting around a fire of broken reeds gathered from the local houses’ shattered ceilings. After some emotional farewell speeches we had a quiet walk home to the hospital through the deserted and rather poorly lit streets – we enjoyed electricity of a sort at night only. The others who had spent the day in Carhuaz told us that they had felt several quite sharp tremors during the course of the day, at least one of which was strong enough to knock down some of the remaining unstable walls which had somehow partly survived the original ‘quake.

Saturday 11 July

I spent the morning with Greg writing up our Querococha lake report. We then went up to the purification plant with Alyza and Mena (who had surprisingly arrived when they said they would) and watched them start to fiddle with the existing plant, from which it soon became painfully clear that they didn’t know the first thing about the apparatus they were trying to repair. And of course we had never been able to find any of the plant’s handbooks or instructions. We eventually gave them up when they broke one of the main feed tubes, trying to connect it differently from the way it had been designed!

Our day didn’t get any better when we went down to have a belated lunch and the others told us we had missed another of Dr Tolentino’s champagne lunches! We continued to work on our reports in the afternoon and then at about 17:00 went to pick up the doctors from the new South African contingent who had just arrived, and got them organised in the hospital. Robin and Ines who had returned with them, looked quite exhausted from their stay in Lima. Obviously trying to get our party’s return trip organised had caused Robin a great deal of worry. He told us later that there was a stage when it was simply quite impossible to make contact with us or with South Africa.

The composition of the new South African team was rather different from what we had expected. There were only two qualified doctors in the team and the rest of the members in the team appeared to be medical students (I think studying in their final year at UCT). Their leader Vic Knudsen who seemed to be very capable and pleasant, was apparently the only member who had been sent out by the Relief Fund. We were told that the other qualified doctor was paying his own way and that the students had been granted a generous travel allowance by the University and were covering the shortfall in funds themselves. The arrival of the members of the new party, none of whom I nor any of the rest of our party seemed to know, accentuated the feeling we had that we really did want to return home soon to a reasonably normal life and to be with our families again.

What was nicest for us seeing Robin again was receiving the post that he had collected and to hear news of our families and friends at home. Some of the others had received cuttings from the Cape newspapers with the most incredibly exaggerated reports of our activities in Peru, all of which was a great cause for mirth. The new arrivals also described how Storch-Nielsen had read them extracts from my first letter home, including my description of his performance when he saw his SAA aircraft taking off from Lima without him!!!! I didn’t really regret what I had written as I felt sure that he had a good sense of humour and in any case it may have helped prepare the members of the new party to know what they should expect on their arrival. Notwithstanding this, we were all rather surprised to see that the new guys had all brought climbing equipment (boots, gloves, etc) with them, after our letters had made it pretty clear that we were living in a reasonably civilised place with a roof over our heads and not at some remote location deep in the mountains.

Greg had to cook an enormous supper for nearly all of us - Robin, Ines and two of the new arrivals weren’t there as they had driven on to Caras to bring back some drugs they wanted to deliver via an American called Larry, who operated a radio network to village stations and some of the trucks plying up and down the valley. He had also helped to bring Robin, Ines and the members of the new party through to Carhuaz from Anta after they landed there. Robin also wanted to know more about a suggestion apparently emanating from the medical authorities in Lima, that the new team would be stationed in Caras!

Sunday 12 July

Our eager beaver new arrivals got up horribly early and woke us up! While the doctors organised and set off to do a clinic in Carhuaz market (this being market Sunday), Greg and I plodded on doing our lake reports.

Writing up the reports for the inspections carried out at the moraine lakes

We were doing so now especially for Robin’s sake for the reason that, while all the other doctors had been on one of our trips, so far, Robin had not, and, as we had arranged to go back to Laguna Querococha for a day’s climbing, we wanted him to come with us - out of the rut he seemed to have slipped into following the obvious frustration he had had to endure in Lima. So we were disappointed when, what seemed like a half-baked plan he had mentioned had been proposed to him by the officials in Lima, was now thrust on him. The plan was for him together with Ines and another doctor to be flown across the Cordillera Blanca by helicopter to the town of Piscobamba to deal with a reported epidemic of whooping cough among the town’s children and some typhus among the adults. The arrangement had seemed so tentative, that at first we took it with some degree of scepticism and were rather surprised when Robin was told quite a bit later that the chopper was already waiting. So he and Ines had to go off to Anta in a truck that had been arranged to collect them (with the rather vague arrangement mentioned to them that they would be able to return on Tuesday morning). When Greg happened to go to Anta about an hour and a half later, he found that they were still sitting in Anta!

Anyway, despite Robin not being able to accompany us, Harold, Greg and I decided to continue with our plan to go climbing and packed up and left in the truck at 14:30 together with Atties and Colin who had kindly volunteered to bring the truck back to Carhuaz that evening and also to fetch us the following evening. On the way we called by Anta to discover that the Piscobamba helicopter had in fact just left, so continued on our way through Huaraz, Recuay, and Ticapampa into the really high country beyond. This time we drove past Laguna Querococha climbing higher up into the Quebrada Conde on a rough and terribly twisty road (dozens of hairpin bends), finally reaching the top of the pass (at 4 500 m) giving access to the towns of Chavin and Huari. Right at the top of the pass one had to drive through a tunnel some 100 m long cut through solid rock. To the consternation of the others, as I was driving, I had had to simply fly up this last section as we realised it was getting rather late for Atties and Colin to drive home - when we reached the top we very quickly jumped out and offloaded our gear so that they would have as much daylight as possible returning.

We pitched our tent in a little grassy clearing between the broken down stone walls of the houses that were built there for the tunnel construction and went for a quick walk through the tunnel – awfully dark and wet, we couldn’t brush aside the uncomfortable notion that it was quite possible that there might be a tremor while we were walking through it! On the other side of the tunnel we hardly had time to appreciate the spectacular view of more green hills and valleys and the road going on past a small tarn through a beautiful little village, before a HUGE truck pitched up going back through the tunnel towards Ticapampa. We half ran and half hung on the truck’s tailboard going back through the tunnel – quite scary as it touched the tunnel sides on the way through and Harold fell off when one of the cows it was carrying lost its footing and lurched back against the tailboard. Relieved to get back into the light, we bartered a few cigarettes for a great pile of beautiful small potatoes when they stopped for a moment by our camp.

We made an early supper of the potatoes boiled in our packet soup – we didn’t even have to wash them, they were so clean! When we had eaten the soup the next course was more potatoes in a vast stew of bully mixed with other vegetables! Early to bed, a bitterly cold night and crystal clear outside. We were surprised by the large number of buses and large vehicles grinding their way on to Huari on their return from the market day in Huaraz.

Monday 13 July

We were woken at 05:00 by Greg’s watch alarm – horrible memories of early alpine starts! Bitterly cold and icy outside and just the first glimmer of a new day. Unfortunately Harold was feeling rather poorly, after a bad night with indigestion, so we were delayed starting until we had had a good breakfast, cheered him up and packed our bags, finally leaving about 06:30. We left the tent but carried our big rucksacks some distance up the path so that they would not be tampered with, and set off up this same path to the crest of the old foot pass. From there we continued up a saw-toothed rock/snow ridge which connected with a high transverse ridge which we intended following. Our saw-toothed ridge provided us with delightful climbing, crisp hard steep snow slopes interspersed with rock steps, all quite steep and exposed, but quite easy. It was a really exquisite day, clear at first then with a few clouds building up but dispersing again in the afternoon leaving us with fantastic views. We pushed on upwards, grateful for the warm sun, negotiating one tricky passage to make a short descent past a great blade of rock and then traversing left to get onto the main ridge.

From there our view was quite magnificent – to the north the satellite peaks of the Cordillera Blanca dominated the green foothills spreading out to the east of the range (the main peaks were still obscured from here) and to the south the Nevados Pongos (ca 5 700 m) reared their snowy summits. But, most exciting of all, straight in front of us and separated from us by a narrow rock ridge leading first left and then up past a broad snow col, was our goal, the great icing sugar confectionary of Nevado Yanamarey.

On the approach ridge leading to Nevado Yanamarey (5 262 m)

We simply gazed and drank it all in while we enjoyed a second breakfast on a small sunny platform.

After climbing another small peak on the ridge, and descending a nasty loose rock gully we got to a notch in our ridge from where we could see that we would have the choice of one of two routes that would enable us to reach the snow col just below the summit of Nevado Yanamarey. Firstly a very long descent down a horribly loose looking gully on the sunny northern side of our ridge and a very long climb up the snow gully on the other side of the notch to reach the col, which we didn’t think would be a good idea with Harold still feeling under the weather, or a very long complicated and rather more difficult looking climb up a steep rock and snow ridge beyond the notch to reach the next subsidiary summit, beyond which we couldn’t see how feasible it would be to descend from there to get to the col. As neither of these options appealed, we finally decided to turn around and consoled ourselves by retracing our steps for a short distance along the ridge to climb the highest subsidiary summit (a little over 5 000 m) on the way back to our camp. We stopped there to enjoy a gorgeously lazy lunch in the sun and just to take in the wonderful panoramic view, before regretfully donning the rope (only the second time we had had to use it) to make almost a plumb line descent down the steep snow slope directly below the summit to reach the scree and take a leisurely stroll from there back to our camp (14:30), picking up our rucksacks along the way.

Nevado Yanamarey summit

The descent had taken much less time than we had anticipated (1¼ hours), so we gratefully used the extra time lying in the sun writing and drinking cup after cup of lemon tea. This whole trip had been a most welcome easy-going rest after the rush of our previous trips and the chaos of trying to write our reports in the hospital where we had to contend with a lot of gabbling students! We had arranged for the others to pick us up at 17:00, so we had everything organised to leave by that time (when we had also been abandoned by the sun), and when our pick-up time came and went, a nasty sneaky unease began to creep up on us that maybe through no fault of their own they might not come at all! How nearly we were right – when Atties, Geoff, Herkie and Colin eventually arrived after 18:00, they told us that they had had a puncture ten minutes after they left us the previous evening, that at midnight they had had to rush a little boy to Huaraz who had been scalped (when a bull he was leading ran away and the halter he was holding, caught around him) and that at 02:00 on the way back home after making the delivery, they had had a second puncture (this time with no spare wheel) near Anta. They had tried desperately to get the tyres fixed at a garage in Huaraz in the morning, but discovered it was only supposed to open at 15:00. They had finally succeeded in getting the tyre fixed, but only after some blatant bribery plying the garage owner with ice cream!

We had a snack of bully and dried fruit, jumped onto the back of the bakkie and with Geoff driving, slowly made our way home, most of it in the dark, which wasn’t very pleasant, because it seems Peruvians don’t really believe in dipping their headlights and have a blind faith in their judgement when it comes to passing in the dark. Cold and full of dust (more so the passengers in the back) we gladly jumped off when we reached Monterrey to have a beer and then seeing the menu when we got inside, couldn’t resist staying on to eat a real live “bifstek” as well. Trying not to look to well fed or too pleased with ourselves we drove the remaining distance back to Carhuaz and were quite glad to find the others hadn’t made supper for us!

Tuesday 14 July

We spent the whole day desperately trying to get our reports finalised, which to my surprise we somehow seemed to just about manage to do. The others spent most of the day packing and getting ready to leave. In the afternoon they went off to Chancos to enjoy a last hot bath, which they relished, and to Anta to confirm the arrangements for flying them all out to Lima. As we expected, the arrangement for Robin and Ines to return from Piscobamba by helicopter during the morning didn’t materialise. The Colonel at Anta didn’t seem to know anything about the arrangement and was all set to send his helicopter down to Chimbote for a week! They fortunately did come back but only much later on the 15th.

Atties had been very busy in Robin’s absence getting the team of new doctors organised. His efforts appeared to have been very worthwhile and the arrangements for their team had worked out very well.

To bring our team’s time in Carhuaz to a fitting conclusion, we organised a farewell party for the last night at the hospital, inviting all our Peruvian friends. Greg made pots and pots of soup while Herkie and Johan must have used most of our remaining Pro Vita supply to make the most appetising-looking snacks. Colin and Harold took over the enormous hospital steriliser to concoct a punch of vast proportions and suspected lethal strength! It was all a huge success – we must have had about 40 people in all who started arriving around 19:00 and stayed on until nearly 22:30, so we had quite a job getting rid of them! It was certainly the best party to date especially as there was a band of about six or eight of the town’s best guitar players/singers who sang quite beautifully, many of their songs Quecha songs. These people are born singers – their guitar playing and harmonising was a really moving experience.

Conclusion

This was in the end also the conclusion of my own and Greg’s contribution, as I think we both were terribly keen to go home. When we went to speak to Benjamin, he said how much he appreciated the work that we had done – he felt that we had made a tremendous contribution to the peace of mind of the people in the Santa valley knowing that the lakes we had inspected did not present any immediate threat to their safety.

Also, knowing how we felt, he said he clearly did not wish to influence us unduly in reaching a decision whether to stay or go home.

Without any real motivation for us to stay, there was never any question what our decision would be.

All the others in our party flew out from Anta on the 15^th. Greg and I spent some more time writing up our outstanding reports and then did the rounds to say goodbye to all these wonderful people who had helped us in what we had been trying to do and who had gone so out of their way to make our stay so memorable.

We flew out from Anta on the 16^th to rejoin the others and had a final meeting in Lima with Benjamin to hand over the last of our reports, to express our thanks and to say goodbye to him. After saying our final goodbyes to the other people who had done so much to help us in Lima, we flew to Rio on the 18^th and then back to Johannesburg on the 19^th.

The end of a very special experience.

The following references may also be of interest :

Publications.americanalpineclub.org The Earthquake in Peru

Preliminary Report on the Geologic Events associated with the May 31 1970 Peru Earthquake

George Edward Ericksen, George Plafker, US Geological Survey and Jaime Fernandez Concha

Members of the 1970 Peru Earthquake Relief Team arriving back in Cape Town

Dr Atties Malan, Andre Schoon, Dr Anthony Keen, Dr Robin Sandell, Geoff Streeter, Harold Hill,

Greg Moseley and Dr Colin Sinclair-Smith

Map of the Santa valley