The Condor's Feather E-Book

Michael Webster

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

'A thrilling, deeply emotional and authentic bird-lover's travelogue.' James Lowen, author of Much Ado About Mothing 'One spring morning, as the cuckoos were arriving in England, we departed. At Tilbury Docks we slowly edged our Toyota camper into a shipping container and, like a heron scooping a frog from a marsh, our container was hoisted high over the dockside. Inside was everything we needed, our new life bound for South America.' After a vicious attack left Michael Webster in treatment for years, it was only his love of nature - in particular birds - that truly healed. Repaying this debt to nature, he and his wife embarked on their trip of a lifetime, travelling through South America; immersed in the wild, following and filming birds. For over four years Michael and Paula travelled the length of the Andes, the greatest mountain chain on Earth. From penguins in Patagonia, up beyond the hummingbirds of the equator, to the flamingos of the Caribbean. They endured dust storms, thundering gales, icy mountain tops and skin-searing heat, and tested the limits of their physical and mental strength as they lived wild, month after month, camping under galaxies of diamond stars. The Condor's Feather is testament to the possibility of new adventures, new friendships and new hope.

Leseprobe

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

First published in 2022 by September Publishing

Copyright © Michael Webster 2022

The right of Michael Webster to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

Maps by Liam Roberts

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, www.refinecatch.com

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books

TPB ISBN 9781914613005

EPUB ISBN 9781914613012

September Publishing

www.septemberpublishing.org


To Paula, the girl with the golden hair


Contents

Map of South America

Prologue

Part oneA New Life

Chapter 1Nomads in a New Land

Chapter 2Feathers

Part TwoPatagonia

Chapter 3The Penguin Show

Chapter 4The End of the World

Chapter 5Tango in the Wind

Chapter 6Chile’s Silk Road

Part ThreeCondor Country

Chapter 7Condors and a Chicken

Chapter 8Queen Ansenuza

Chapter 9The Four Great Birds of the Americas

Chapter 10Birds Change Lives

Chapter 11Ticks and a Toucan

Part FourLand of the Inca

Chapter 12Birds of the Inca

Chapter 13Two Worlds, One Planet

Chapter 14Chimborazo

Part FiveColombia

Chapter 15Coffee Country

Chapter 16The Old Road to Buenaventura

Chapter 17Searching for Buffy

Chapter 18Journey’s End

Epilogue

Photographs

Acknowledgements

Films

About the Author


Prologue

There is one week of my life that I remember extremely vividly, but it’s one that I strive daily to forget. Every important thing that followed was triggered in those few days – endings as well as beginnings.

On the Monday I was on business in Johannesburg, the richest and poorest city in Africa with the highest concentration of guard dogs per head of population in the world. The threatening sun beat down, a day hotter than molten gold in which a long sultry afternoon sagged into an eye-popping thunderstorm. Returning to my hotel bungalow the outside door was ajar. I entered, facing a wrecked room and two armed robbers. With a gun pointing at me, I was waved over to sit on the bed and keep quiet. They left quickly, each with a bag, inside which were my camera, computer, some clothes, cash and, far more dear to me than anything else, my passport.

A shock, yes, but consular officials respond automatically and efficiently to such ‘mundane’ situations, while the personnel director of the multinational food company I worked for was sympathetic.

On the Thursday night of that week I flew to Cape Town. I’d been there many times, I knew the score, the places to avoid, so I hugged my new passport close – no way was I going to lose that again. The taxi dropped me off unexpectedly on a quiet, dark street and pulled away too quickly for my liking. A man grabbed me; I struggled to get free. The savage mugging was over in what seemed like moments, but I had felt a final, vicious stab.

When my eyes opened it was quite dark. ‘Electricity cut again,’ I heard someone say. People shuffled around, attending to one part of my body or another. The hospital resembled a scrap yard. Someone held up a bloodied syringe for me to see. ‘They stuck this in you. There’s little we can do for you here.’ This was the time that HIV rates were at crisis point, out of control in a country where the disease was thought by most to be a curse from God.

The first incident had been traumatic enough; the second had much longer consequences.

My company flew my wife, Paula, over and she took me back to the UK, where immediate hospital treatment fought the virus. Weekly visits to a specialist HIV ward became an unremitting nightmare. How many blood samples did they want? I would sit in a queue of mostly young people, all with vacant, ill-looking faces – yellow, pinched and furrowed. Some were walking skeletons, others handcuffed between police. Treatment with a battery of antiretroviral drugs crushed my energy. A nurse told me, ‘This place is a zoo. The only way to prevent you coming here forever is with these,’ and handed me a week’s supply of drugs. ‘Most people can’t put up with the regime. Come back next week.’

Every week I returned without fail.

Severe panic attacks meant cities, towns and shops became places of intense distress. Cars would aim to run me down. I conjured the faces of everyone who walked by into feared people from the past. Strangers became spectres. Crowds sent me cold then hot as I floated in detached fear. I became a ship without a rudder, lost, storm-tossed and careering on an unknown ocean. Night-times were worse, the solace of sleep rent by hideous dreams of all the sadness I was inflicting on those around me. I was locked in a box of past memories. No one could do anything to help; I needed a new brain, a new head. I lost four stones in four months.

In the mornings Paula would reluctantly leave for work – running a busy maths department in an inner-city school. I would sit at home and tear up bits of paper, hour after hour, or I would wander the valley meadows around my home. Fearful of others, I would climb trees or seek out hedgerows suitable to hide in if anyone came along. I lay hidden in the long grass looking up at buzzards overhead. I watched the antics of a pair of blue tits busily feeding their young. But, twice a day, I had to return home and force drugs down my throat, knowing that they would make me retch for hours, sending me dizzy and scared.

This regime lasted six months, but it was worth it. The same nurse seemed happy: ‘No need to come back here, your blood counts are back to normal.’

But I didn’t feel normal: the toll had been high. A trust in science and drugs had repaired the systems of my body, but I still felt an irrational mess. The incident had dug deeper into my soul than I realised. Slowly I realised that my career was finished, and a life that I had loved had disappeared.

A further year of cognitive behavioural therapy and a library of self-help books did help, but quick fixes are easily undone. Far more sustaining was the uplifting song of blackbirds and the joyful sight of skylarks parachuting through the air. The arrival of swallows swooping low over the garden reminded me that a new beginning was possible.

The birds had started to pull aside the hazy curtains from my mind.

All my life nature had been at my side, now I realised it was being my saviour. There was going to be a debt to repay.

Cats have nine lives; people normally have one. I was lucky – I had been given two, and a chance to learn from the previous one and try not to make the same mistakes. I decided I would now take it slower, make life more meaningful, make the most of every day. I would follow my heart, do something I’d never before thought possible. Now could be the time to become deeply immersed in the wild, to fully embrace the natural world, no longer be a mere bystander.

Could I communicate my love of nature to others? The skills Paula and I possessed as lifelong and near-professional photographers and film-makers could be put to good use. It was a dream, but still, would I grab the opportunity, take the risk?

It was over a year since I had walked out of the hospital doors for the last time. Now I felt able to step out of the contained and protected world I had built around myself. As for Paula, would she step into the unknown with me?

Paula gave the answer a few months later: early retirement from her demanding job.

Spending more time together was key to our new life plan. We went to Spain, wanting to find the heaviest flying bird in Europe – the great bustard – and make a film about the declining cork oak forests. I had been a photographer since a teenager and had made a number of films for the international company I had worked for. With the natural world flowing through our veins, we knew the warm Andalucian breeze on our cheeks and the smell of bougainvillea would be enough, even if we never found the birds we sought.

But we did find them. At a metre tall and with red neck feathers reminiscent of a Viking’s beard, they were magnificent.

Hiring a car, we stayed in rustic hostels, but therein lay a difficulty. We needed to be out early in the morning, sometimes very early, when birds were singing and shadowy light illuminated every crevice on the bark of the trees – the perfect light for filming.

Early starts meant we liked to be asleep well before midnight, the time many tavernas were still taking diners in.

‘Can we eat early this evening?’ we would ask.

‘Si, si. What time?’

‘Eight?’

‘Oh. Maybe a little later,’ the owner would suggest.

‘How about nine, then?’

‘Umm, you come, we will try,’ and they would disappear into the kitchen.

We would go out for the day and, returning to the dining room at nine in the evening, would find the lights out and no one yet in the kitchen. Around nine-thirty we would hear shuffling. Dinner was served at ten, often later. This is the norm in Spain but to us, who had never dreamt of taking a siesta, it seemed extraordinarily late. But there was nothing we could do.

In fact, this experience was helping shape our future, for we had plans germinating inside us, plans that would shape the direction of our new life. We wanted to fly, to live free as birds, close to nature, supporting bird conservation, but to do that we would need to be our own masters.

To be truly independent, we would need our own home on wheels.

For bird lovers, there is nowhere like South America. Nearly a third of all the bird species on the planet are to be found in this moderately sized continent. It has the largest remaining stands of primary forest, it has one of the smallest populations of people, and most of the countries speak the same language ­– Spanish. That’s where our new life would take us. Friends told us it was crazy, but that’s what dreams are.

We would travel the length of the Andes, a smouldering series of active volcanoes scattered between peaks and plains for 7,000 kilometres. We would seek out its exciting birdlife. The Andes split the continent in two. ‘Divide and conquer’ is the mantra of a destroyer, but for the Andes it’s ‘divide and create’ – these mountains are givers of life and represent one of the significant reasons why South America is home to so many bird species. One of the main aims of our journey, too, was to support bird conservation organisations by making films for them, an undertaking far too expensive for small conservation NGOs on their own. We would travel wild, and savour every moment. We would make the most of every day.

Life was starting to look up. We had a purpose, as well as the time.

A year later we were ready to go back to Spain again, this time for a practice run. Now we were driving our own Toyota Hilux truck on top of which we had fitted a tiny camper, shipped over especially from California. We removed the back seat from the truck, giving us space to store essentials like five tripods, half a dozen cameras, lights, binoculars and laptops, and luxuries like clothes and food.

Having penetrated the icy Pyrenees, it took us a few weeks to explore them fully. Like a cork in a bottle, we successfully pulled ourselves through the narrowest alleys of medieval hilltop villages. Following ancient equine paths across Europe’s only true desert, we eventually returned through France over rippling lavender hillsides. Travelling wild, we ate and slept when and where we wanted, watching the sun rise and set. Following animal trails and living at the behest of nature grounded us in reality, and brought freedom and joy to our souls.

The other reality was that we returned to England with two broken leaf springs, leaking shock absorbers and a list of engineering tasks urgently needed to make us ‘Andes ready’.

Our son Richard, who lived in Canada, now realised we were deadly serious about leaving for South America and, in a parent–child role reversal, told us: ‘I want to know where you are, who you’re with, and if you’re all right. I insist you get a Yellowbrick.’

‘A what?’

‘It’s a global satellite tracking system. If you can see the sky it’ll send my computer a message with your exact location. It’s even got an emergency button which sends out a distress signal.’

We were ready.

We tried to see as many friends and family before we left, knowing it would be a couple of years before we saw them again. Paula’s brother was to collect our post and look after the house. A myriad of jobs bombarded us in the final few weeks. We had never realised how difficult it would be to separate ourselves from the hi-tech world in which we lived. Freeing ourselves to travel wild sometimes seemed unattainable; the reality of achieving it was almost impossible.

It was another reminder to us of our disconnect from the natural world.

One spring morning in 2014, as the cuckoos were arriving in England, we were departing. At Tilbury docks we slowly edged our Toyota camper into a shipping container, chains and straps securing and locking it down. Like a heron scooping a frog from a marsh, our container was hoisted high over the dockside. Inside was everything we needed, our new life bound for Montevideo, Uruguay.

As for us, we put out of the safe harbour at last, and set sail to follow a dream.

Part one

A New Life


Chapter 1

Nomads in a New Land

It was June, winter in Argentina, when the great adventure started. Our new life was a blank sheet ready for writing on. We had little knowledge of what we would find or when it might end. If we found somewhere we liked we’d stay for days, even weeks; in forests, on beaches and mountaintops, on the outskirts of villages among cultures new to us; perhaps with people but, we thought, more likely with birds.

Time and governance had not been kind to what was once called the Paris of South America, Buenos Aires. Peeling stucco, rusting balconies and graffiti scarred the graceful neo-Classical buildings. Concrete pillars thrust urban motorways high in the air between apartment blocks – residents’ washing waving on balconies alongside speeding trucks.

All of my life I have lived in the shade of an oak wood. I don’t really enjoy city life, so we gave ourselves two weeks to clear the truck through Customs, change our money and make the necessary contacts. After all, we had the greatest mountain chain in the world to traverse.

We rented a small apartment above the Café Manolo in San Telmo. Its stone balustrade was brushed by jacaranda trees. Each day the menú del día was written on a chalkboard which stood on the cobbled street. The local policeman visited throughout the day, eating, sipping coffee and shuffling his papers. I never saw him pay for anything. The restaurant closed at half past two every afternoon, and the streets became quiet. It was siesta time.

At five in the afternoon the shops, cafés and restaurants reopened. At ten in the evening, a side door below our balcony opened and a hallway led people down stone steps into a dim cellar under the restaurant. There was a bar and a stage for musicians: a double bass, a piano, three violinists and three others sitting down, each with a small concertina called a bandoneón. The resident band of young musicians was the well-known Orquesta Típica Andariega. This was a milonga, intense, musical and magnetic, where locals came for one thing: to dance the tango, as traditional in Buenos Aires as a folk session in a wave-lashed pub on the coast of Donegal.

We timed our early morning walks to be after the city streets had been washed but before the demonstrations in the main square started. Scattered between the spreading buttress roots of rubber trees was a group of disgruntled veterans from the Falklands War of the 1980s, their banners and placards leaning against trees. We didn’t want them to catch sight of a lone English couple chatting away. Decades after the end of the war, it remained a very sore point in some sections of Argentinian society.

On quieter streets I made my first friends. A brown, thrush-sized bird, the rufous hornero, Argentina’s national bird. The bird goose-stepped along the edges of the flowing gutters like a fascist general and made its ostentatious nest, looking like an oven of mud, on the elaborate buildings, cocking a snoot at passers-by. In complete contrast was the monk parakeet, a small, bright green rascal of a parrot, groups of which squawked loudly at the ragged families who collected the mountains of city rubbish for recycling, stuffing it into great white plastic bags piled onto rickety handcarts. Later in the day, the monk parakeets would hang out with gangs of street pigeons, raiding picnickers on park benches.

BirdLife International is the global agency that partners with passionate yet often underfunded national bird conservation organisations. In Argentina, the partner organisation is Aves Argentinas, and on our third day we had a meeting with its director, Hernan Casañas.

‘How can we help you?’ asked Hernan, a tall, laconic figure with an engaging smile, who fortunately spoke English well, as my Spanish was limited.

‘Thank you, but really it’s how can we help you.’ We explained that we had always worked as volunteers for wildlife conservation back home and wanted to do the same in South America. We were birdwatchers, photographers and film-makers and could help them if they needed these skills.

Hernan seemed a little lost for words, understandably perhaps. Strangers don’t often turn up on your doorstep from the other end of the world with ambitious offers of assistance. He cleared his throat, thought for a moment and finally smiled. We could come back to the office the next week, he said, and give a talk to members of their local Buenos Aires group.

In fact, the talk was videoed and the event transmitted live to all the other eighty clubs that the organisation had throughout Argentina. In doing so, we were introduced to the thousands of nature conservationists and birdwatchers spread throughout the eighth biggest country in the world. By the time we were back at our hotel, our Facebook page was filling with messages of welcome, offers of help and people to meet. Now it wasn’t just the two of us against the mighty Andes. We had a nationwide support team.

As we had left the talk, Hernan had come to say goodbye. ‘Where will you start?’ he asked.

‘We have a family friend who lives in Tucumán. That’s where we’re heading tomorrow.’

‘Then travel safe, and I will remember your kind offer.’

We ought to have noticed the flashing lights earlier. Instead, we drove along the earth road until the thought of turning around occurred to us too late. With a barricade in front of us and a dark figure waving at us to slow down, there was no going back.

As we were used to living in a country where people never encounter road blocks, this was more than a little unsettling and my thoughts immediately filled with the endless, dire warnings that had been pressed on us when we told people we were planning to travel the length of the Andes, northwards to the Caribbean.

‘Are you crazy?’

‘Of all places, why South America?’

‘Beware of the people, they’re all crooks.’

‘After all you’ve been through?’

‘Colombia is full of drug smugglers.’

‘Don’t trust the police.’

‘Never stop for people waving you down at the side of the road.’

‘South America? The spiders are as big as footballs.’

‘Dream on, you’ll never go.’

After a while we had begun to wonder if anyone had travelled to South America and returned alive. Was Gandalf correct when he warned Frodo that going outside his front door and stepping into the road was a dangerous idea; one that could lead to all sorts of unwanted adventures?

We were fast approaching the man.

Paula whispered, ‘It might be the police.’

I slowed down.

‘He’s got a machine gun.’ We’d never seen a traffic cop with a gun, ever.

‘Quickly,’ I said, my heart racing. ‘Hide the binoculars on the floor. Where’s that emergency distress gadget that we bought?’

With the truck slowing to a halt a camouflage-wearing, machine-gun-toting man walked towards us. I gulped, my throat dry.

The man moved the gun off his shoulder. A shiver ran down my neck, sweat on my forehead feeling cold. Deeply hidden and unwanted memories flooded back, and my fingers trembled. Years of planning, and we were at gunpoint before we’d even started.

Of course, we had discussed and planned for situations such as this, as much as you can ever plan for an armed robbery. Cut into the floor of the truck, under the carpet behind the driving seat, we had fitted a small safe the size of a robin’s nest. This metal box held our most important papers: passports, vehicle ownership documents, vaccination certificates, a list of our camera equipment with serial numbers, insurance documents, credit cards and thick wads of cash. Lastly, in a waterproof envelope was a list of next of kin and emergency phone numbers. And we had a plan B. Underneath the front passenger seat, readily available, was a cash box containing $500, old passports, a watch, two phones, a selection of Paula’s less desirable but very glittery jewellery, and photos of our nearest and dearest. We were ever ready to hand this over at a robbery without quibbling, hoping it would satisfy the average bandit.

Was this the time to do it, just six hours into our journey?

Our British vehicle was right-hand drive, a rare and bizarre sight in South America, so as the man approached us, he did so from our left, where Paula sat as the passenger. I realised this would leave me, as the driver, free to drive off in an emergency.

The last element of our plan was to speak in English, though Paula’s Spanish was good.

The man, camo-peaked cap low over his eyes and gun levelled from the waist, stepped nearer, his knee-length black boots scraping the gravel. He walked slowly up to our white truck camper, not quite sure what to make of it. Across the side doors were decals of mountains and flying Andean condors.

‘Abran, abran! Open, open,’ the man commanded, tapping on the window.

I nudged Paula. ‘He needs a shave.’

She hissed at me to be quiet and lowered the window. He looked surprised at there being no steering wheel.

My foot hovered over the accelerator.

‘Documentación!’

Taking our papers, he disappeared to a large unmarked truck parked under a tree. We waited.

Some minutes later a tall, confident-looking man in a dark green uniform with medals and pips all over the place approached us. He held our papers in one hand, a baton tucked under the other arm. ‘Good morning, my name is Major Xavier Hernandez,’ he said in BBC English. He looked at us keenly, his eyes flicking from us to our equipment stacked high in the back.

Only then did I turn off the ignition and relax a little. This was no robbery: it was our first brush with the military.

‘I see you are British. Why are you here?’ he asked.

A little affronted by the directness of the question, I leaned over to Paula’s window. ‘We’re visitors.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘We’re going to Tucumán, we have a friend there. We took this back road to watch for birds.’

The officer paused for a moment, glancing at the papers again. ‘My father fought in the Falklands war.’

My heart sank. There was nothing we could say in reply to that. We had seen plaques at every village we had passed through: ‘The Malvinas are, were and always will be Argentinian.’ It seemed the 1982 war against the British had not been forgotten.

‘He was captured by the British and held prisoner,’ the officer continued slowly.

I feared the worst and wished I hadn’t switched off the ignition.

‘He was held by the Scots Guards. They treated him really well. He and his men hadn’t had decent food in months.’

We sighed with relief.

‘You’re the first British visitors I’ve met. On behalf of my father, thank you very much. Please enjoy our country.’

‘Thank you,’ we both said, quickly.

The major continued, ‘We have a situation ahead, so you will have to turn back. In a few kilometres there is a right-hand track, take that, it will be safer.’ He saluted us, passed the papers back to Paula and turned away.

I started the truck and started to drive off, slowly.

‘Well!’ Paula said. ‘Perhaps we might return home alive after all.’

We both laughed, nervously.


Chapter 2

Feathers

We had left the Argentinian capital at last, following route 9 through foggy marshlands by the River Paraná. After 500 kilometres and with the road block well behind us we looked for our first camp for the night. There had been fewer villages or towns along our route than we were used to at home, and we had seen hardly any shops. Though we had plenty of food, we had no fresh bread.

On a narrow minor road between fields of maize we stopped by a bridge over a stream where an area of dried mud allowed us to park safely. Eventually, a small blue van came slowly along and we waved it down.

Paula hesitantly tried out her Spanish: ‘Hi, is there anywhere nearby to camp?’

The driver looked thoughtful. ‘Go back towards the main road. In a few kilometres, look for a track, a sign that says “Museo”. Go down there.’

‘Thanks. And is there a shop nearby, somewhere to get bread?’

‘No need!’ He reached behind him and handed Paula two baguettes, flour sprinkled along their crusty brown length. Surprised and not knowing what to say, we stood and watched the van disappear.

Taking the golden gift in her arms, Paula smiled. ‘Welcome to Argentina!’

From the ‘Museo’ sign we found ourselves on a dead straight track, short grass down the middle. After a while a building appeared in the distance, and as it neared we realised it was a disused railway station – the grassy track we were driving on was where the railway lines would have been. We stopped in front of the station, a sandy-coloured, craftsman-built, rectangular stone building with big windows. We clambered up onto the platform. It felt strangely familiar. Ornate ironwork supported by meaningful pillars held up a wooden veranda roof decorated with crenulated edges. The clean but otherwise aged and riven slabs of the platform were in contrast to the unkempt grass stretching either side, and several large trees were drooping their boughs low over the abandoned building. A large round double-faced clock hung from a rafter. A couple of benches faced the empty track, and a small wooden hand-cart held a collection of old boxes. If it hadn’t been for our truck neatly parked where the carriages would once have stood, we might have been waiting for a train at a Cotswolds village station.

‘Hola!’

We jumped. Standing behind us was a couple. A tall, burly man with an open shirt revealing a hairy chest was accompanied by a smaller woman in a purple T-shirt, her black hair tied back in a ponytail.

‘Can we help you?’

I said that we had been told we might camp there and that we were British. On hearing that, the man relaxed, with a beaming smile. ‘Ah, the British built this station; not been used for years, though. Italians put the tracks in.’ He waved his arm around. ‘We look after the place – live opposite in that house through the trees.’

We glanced across to a small, single-storey building.

‘This is a museum. Want to look inside?’

His wife unlocked the door. Inside looked like a second-hand shop of train memorabilia, lamps, fire buckets, badges and ticket machines. The walls had photographs pinned to boards as well as oval brass plates off trains, each with the name ‘Ferrocarril Nacional’ and a number. A rack of clothing contained uniforms, caps and coats. One corner was a library of books, documents and maps; the other end of the room, looking like a café, had three small tables set with damask table cloths, bentwood chairs forlornly tucked underneath.

The couple told us that everything had been donated by people who lived in the area. ‘It keeps the place looking alive, though few people visit these days.’

I walked over to the books and was surprised to see two whose spines were decorated with a gilt title and inlaid bird motifs: Idle Days in Patagonia and, next to it, The Naturalist in La Plata. Both were by W.H. Hudson, one of the earliest writers to publish tales about the natural history of Argentina. The books were first editions from the 1890s.

‘They were donated by a local man. If we’re given stuff we feel we have to accept their generosity,’ the man said.

‘I’ve read them,’ I said. ‘We’re interested in birds and wildlife, that’s why we’re in Argentina.’

‘Oh?’ the woman said. ‘The man used to work in Buenos Aires. He sent us all sorts of stuff, even some feathers. Want to see them?’

She disappeared off to a back room, returning with a roll of newspaper that she laid out on a table. Sticking out of the end we could see three long, dark brown spikes; unwrapping the yellowing pages, more feathers appeared.

Drawing out the largest was like unsheathing an Arabian scimitar. Longer than my arm and almost black, its curving bow shape gave it elegance; its weightlessness gave it power, a supernatural feel. I knew instantly that it could only belong to one bird ­– the Andean condor. I stroked its vanes reverently.

The vanes lie either side of feathers’ stiff hollow midrib. Each vane is made up of hundreds, and in the case of the condor feather thousands, of hair-like strands, the culmination of 150 million years of trial and error. Each of these strands has aligned along its length a multitude of tiny hooklets that zip it tight to the strand next to it. When a bird like the condor is cutting through air currents four miles high, it’s this gloriously simple design that enables the bird to control the astral vibrations of the air. When the bird is not flying or feeding, the rest of the time it’s tending its feather vanes, zipping them back and lubricating those that have come undone. The one I held was a primary feather that had no doubt carried the bird to the edge of our troposphere and back. Would we see this legend of a bird? We hardly believed it possible.

Two other feathers were in perfect condition: one as long as my hand, its colour a deep red gently fading to pale salmon, like an evening sky; the other being a diminutive finger length, the colour of a beech leaf tipped by autumn’s first blush.

‘You can have them if you want, they’re just gathering dust here,’ the man said.

As we left the building it was locked up again, its memories from the past secure and quiet once more. The couple showed us where we could get water then returned to their house.

Finding a bench on the deserted platform, we sat and quietly looked around us. It seemed eerily auspicious that we found ourselves at a place built to help move people across the country, as we were doing ourselves. Years before there would have been a great train here, belching smoke, steam swirling, the smell of burning coal and hot metal. Crowds of people would have been hurrying, shouting goodbyes, carrying baggage, slamming doors. Argentina is a country built on immigration; the passengers who had sat on this seat would have been adventurous souls seeking a new life, just like us.

We had left behind us a comfortable home. Family and friends had teased us we wouldn’t leave, but we did. I had certainly never expected to ever leave our beloved oak wood, but we had. Since time immemorial, people have always journeyed on personal searches for truth and meaning. They’ve gone to mountain tops, caves, islands, the extremities of land and sea. This was my own pilgrimage into the wild, to live close to nature.

Beyond the platform, where our truck stood, the shadows of a long-departed train taking the last passengers had gone. I looked at the gently swinging clock, its delicate hands frozen. Not us, though – this was our time to move on, and we were raring to go.

One thing was for sure: there was no going back. Nothing in life is constant; perhaps that’s its meaning. If we didn’t change now we’d risk being left behind, chained like prisoners to diminishing certainties. That was not going to happen to us.

Still in my lap lay the bulky rolled-up newspaper. I gently placed my hands on top as if to warm the feathers from their long sleep.

‘What are we going to do with those? We’ve hardly got room,’ Paula said, ever practical.

‘They’ll be OK. The feathers will fit somewhere.’

The small ones I popped into a pocket at the back of my red notebook. The condor’s feathers I slid behind the windscreen visor, trapped for the time being, but close to us both.

I’ve always loved feathers. As a young child walking home from school one day with my mother, I saw a flash of colour when kicking a heap of leaves high into the air. A glint caught my eye. Diving my hands into the crispy golden pile I pulled out a tiny feather, the length of my little finger. Turning the feather over, one vane was blue, finely barred with black. Blue, black, blue, black, blue, black – a bird’s ladder into the sky. It had belonged to that wary woodland bird, the jay. I taped it into a book, a captive memory.

Since then I always turn over feathers that I find, in the hope of seeing another flash of magic.

In Tucumán we stayed with Leigh Cotton, an old family friend, who taught English in the city. The only other contact we had in Tucumán was Ada Echevarria. We had emailed her out of the blue some months before leaving the UK, having located her name on the Aves Argentinas website – one of those enquiries you think will come to nothing, a shot in the dark.

A rapid, helpful reply to such an email tells you a lot about a person. It was efficient and professional, interested and kind. Ada was just the sort of contact we needed.

Tucumán has a renowned university with a long-established natural sciences institute named after Argentina’s most famous naturalist and scientist, Miguel Lillo. The institute has one of the finest bird collections in the whole of South America and that’s where Ada worked as an ornithologist.

We met Ada in the calm precincts of the institute, a lush rectangular botanic garden in the heart of the city. For us it could have been a tropical forest. She came down the steps leading from wide, glass entrance doors and, smiling, held out both hands to us. She was a slim, dark-haired woman, dressed as you might expect for a field biologist, in a green gilet, jeans and trainers. ‘Great to meet you. Welcome to Argentina. Come up to my office.’

We followed her, up several flights of stairs and past an imposing bronze bust of Miguel Lillo in a recessed alcove. At the end of the hallway, Ada thrust open heavy wooden double doors, ushering us into a large, high ceilinged room with windows looking out over the green precinct. A woman in a vividly coloured dress, giving her the appearance more of an artist rather than a scientist, was in the room, and Ada introduced her as her friend and colleague Valeria Martinez, the curator of the institute’s bird collection.

Polished, chest-high antique cabinets were positioned along one wall and also back to back in three rows down the middle of the room. Each cabinet had ten drawers and each drawer a shining brass handle. On top of the cabinets, looking down at us, were stuffed birds in large, dusty glass cases: herons with dagger-like bills, an eagle clutching its bloodied prey, and a brilliant red and green macaw. The room was solemn, churchlike, the fragrance of incense replaced by the faint whiff of chemicals from nearby laboratories.

At the end of one row, a particular bird awaited us. ‘Come, look at this one,’ said Ada, following the line of my gaze.

The specimen was not in a case but perched on a log, its huge black wings outstretched. It was a condor, dull-eyed, its spirit gone, a wizened creature from which I had to look away.

We walked back down the middle aisle and Ada pulled out a glass-topped drawer. Nestled inside was a row of black-throated trogons, exquisite yellow and green forest birds, now just fading rainbows. With cotton wool for eyes, the sun had disappeared from their lives long ago. ‘We have over ten thousand bird skins here. They get sent to scientists all over the world.’

‘Migrating across the skies in a box,’ I said, and Valeria smiled.

We opened another drawer, this time of meadowlarks, starling-sized birds, black and scarlet. Gently I passed a hand across the glass, as if to wake and bring the birds beneath back to life. They just lay still, line after line, neatly arranged like paired socks in a drawer.

Ada turned to us. ‘They’re used for research. But these days we get more information from taking a sample of blood from birds we catch and then release.’

‘DNA analysis, isotopes and that sort of stuff?’ I replied.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve got this feather,’ I said, and taking my red notebook from my pocket, I slid from it the finger-length green feather with the red tip we had been given in the train station. ‘Any ideas what sort of bird this is from?’

Valeria moved closer. ‘Why, yes, I think so.’ She passed it to Ada, who put it on a bench, the better to view it. ‘See this scarlet tip, it’s from a parrot,’ Valeria added. ‘Yes, a special one, the alder parrot. No other parrot has such red-tipped feathers.’

We told them the story of the feathers from the railway museum.

‘You’re lucky. Condor feathers are considered sacred by some. Seeing the birds, though, is difficult, as most often they are just specks in the sky.’

‘We haven’t got much room in the truck. Would you like them?’ I said.

‘No!’ Ada and Valeria said together. ‘The feathers have found you,’ Ada said. ‘They will be talismans for your journey.’

The next day Leigh introduced us to one of her friends, Guillermo Aceñolaza, a professor of geology at the university. Lithe and looking younger than his years, he welcomed us and over dinner eagerly wanted to know our plans.

‘To travel the Andes and support bird conservation.’

‘And how do you expect to do that? Argentina’s in an economic crisis. People are more interested in putting food on the table.’ He said this in a pleasant but challenging tone.

‘Then that’s even more reason why we can help. We will find the people who care. We can make films for them. We will talk to schools.’

‘And where will you start?’

‘In the wildest place we can think of – Patagonia. Then travel the length of the Andes, north all the way to Colombia. Who knows?’

‘How will you travel? The Andes are tough. I know, it’s where I work. Have you got oxygen?’

I explained about our pick-up truck with a small sleeping cabin mounted on the back. But then asked nervously: ‘Why do we need oxygen?’ I pulled out my red notebook in which we had made our plans for the next few months, reeling them off one at a time. None of them included oxygen, however.

Guillermo looked amused. ‘Throw your notebook away, free yourself! Listen to people and trust them,’ he said, with a flurry of his arms. ‘Take each day as it comes, you’re in South America now. But you must have oxygen. You’ll be going high. I never travel without oxygen, neither do my students. Don’t worry, I’ll organise it.’

Paula and I looked at each other. Despite our meticulous planning, there were clearly things we hadn’t thought of.

A few days later, still doubting we would ever need it, we collected a huge cylinder of oxygen, together with a bag of face masks and tubes, from Guillermo, and took the road south, to Patagonia.

The distance from Tucumán to Tierra del Fuego is nearly 4,000 kilometres, a journey longer than driving from London across Europe to Istanbul. A daunting prospect, but for once in our lives we had time.

One of our first stops was at Belen, a small town in the Argentine province of Catamarca. Tired and with a pounding headache, I wanted to find a chemist. The streets were lined with small shops whose collections of multi-coloured ponchos and blankets spilled onto pavement tables. As lunchtime beckoned, the displays were taken in, doors and shutters starting to close. Argentinians take their midday meal seriously, their afternoons commencing with the main meal of the day, followed by a siesta. Soon the streets were deserted and, with no chemist in sight, we returned to the truck.

There, we found a tall man leaning against the bonnet. He was muscular, in his forties with a tanned, healthy complexion, and dark hair with the first tinges of grey. ‘This truck yours?’ he asked, pointing to the condor logo on the vehicle.

I nodded warily and with a little apprehension. My head still throbbed and, facing this big man now, I started to tremble with feelings and thoughts I had not had for a long time.

‘Are you interested in condors?’ he added.

‘Of course! We’ve not seen one yet but we have got some feathers.’

At this the man looked surprised but smiled, highlighting a number of missing teeth. ‘Condors only show themselves to you when they’re ready. If you have feathers, it’s a good omen. How did you get them?’

‘It’s a long story, but from a railway museum.’

The man gave us a strange look. ‘I’m Claudio. Come into the café, let’s have lunch and tell me about it.’

The meal was a hesitant, disorderly affair as Paula wrestled with Claudio’s thick accent – rapid village Spanish was difficult to grasp.

I was wrestling too, but with the food in front of me. ‘What are we eating?’ I asked.

‘Locro,’ Claudio said, surprised we had never heard of it.

Looking down at the thick, yellow and glutinous soup in front of me, which contained a range of strange, indistinguishable objects floating in it, I decided this wasn’t going to be in my collection of favourite recipes.

Claudio, it turned out, had a passion for protecting the local population of Andean condors. He was a warden in the nearby provincial park and, together with some young people from the town, ran a small ecological group looking after injured animals. The result of this hastily convened meeting was that he would find us a chemist, and we would then all return to his house where he would show us an injured condor.

Paula turned to me. ‘At least, I think that’s what he said.’

Leaving the café, Claudio jumped into a vehicle resembling a child’s homemade motorised go-kart and sped off down a series of quiet streets with us following. Everything had happened so quickly. We had no idea what Claudio’s surname was, where he lived or, for that matter, whether he was the local axe murderer.

Claudio apparently knew the chemist but, to open up the shop, had to rattle hard on the door and shout up to the man’s top-floor window to wake him from his siesta. We sheepishly entered, and bought our few small items.

The shop owner and Claudio parted shouting excited and happy goodbyes to each other, and the worry we had of being enticed off to the woods by a serial killer receded. Claudio was a man obviously well known and liked.

Sitting astride a garden chair, holding a steering column jutting from his large wooden box of a car, the wheels spinning, Claudio continued off down the road to where he lived. He pulled into a side street littered with rubbish, typical of most Argentinian villages. We followed him through a gap in a fence and parked in tall grass. His home was a small, grey-block building amid a tangle of trees and large ramshackle pens and cages. Claudio pushed open the door to the house and a chorus of voices shouted a greeting, ‘Hola, hola!’

Claudio beckoned to us. ‘Come in, sit down,’ and he introduced us to his friends.

Most of the room was taken up with a huge heavy table around which sat four others: two young men and two women. In front of them lay an assortment of large knives on a rough block of wood, and stacks of papers, posters and wildlife books.

‘Maté?’ asked one of the women. We nodded and she opened a flask and poured hot water into an apple-sized calabash gourd, passing it to one of the young men sitting next to me.

For the English, the etiquette of drinking tea has been finely honed over generations but fundamental to the occasion has been the desire to sit down and talk. In Argentina, the ritual of drinking yerba maté (pronounced ‘jerba mattay’) is similar. Historically, it was the indigenous Guaraní people, found in Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, who picked the leaves of the native yerba bush from the forest undergrowth to brew a strong, bitter but sustaining drink; it was the Argentinian gaucho who turned the brew into the mainstay of their diet. A gaucho’s life is hard and maté is the drink that enables them to endure the privations of months in the saddle, following their cattle across the windblown pampas and sunburnt, thorny prairie. Now, three centuries since the gaucho made his appearance, the culture of maté is an integral part of everyday life in Argentina. The calabash is passed around from person to person, each of whom sucks up the drink through a shared, finely crafted silver straw, a bombilla. The calabash is refilled between each person and resumes its circuit. This close act of communal drinking helps develop a sense of deep intimacy and friendship among the circle of drinkers – crucial to gauchos working together in a harsh environment, or to immigrants freshly arrived in a foreign country.

Sitting immediately to my right was a tall, stocky young man who introduced himself as Miguel. A more distinctive person I’ve rarely seen. He was big, had a large, tanned, oval face strikingly framed by jet-black silky hair, a neatly trimmed moustache and a wispy beard. His demeanour was quiet. It was like sitting next to a gentle bear. Tapping my arm, he smiled and passed me the maté. I sipped and passed it on to Paula. The gourd continued its procession to Claudio. Sure enough, the passage of the maté around the group extended the hand of friendship and widened the conversation.

At one end of the room a curtain discreetly hid a very basic bathroom. Next to it, a rickety wooden ladder disappeared into a hole in the ceiling. From his humble home, it appeared Claudio masterminded the surveillance and protection of the province’s condor population as well as other wildlife that came his way. The other people in the room were part of his village team of helpers.

After some time, Claudio disappeared into a corner, opened a fridge and hoicked out two large pieces of meat, slapping them down on the table.

‘Why do you watch birds?’ Miguel asked me quietly, sipping through the bombilla.

At that moment Claudio brought down a machete with a resounding thump on the table. As he chopped the meat I tried to explain that birds bring colour and music to the world. No matter where you go – any country, any city – there will always be birds close by, often ones you’ve never seen before. I told Miguel I was never lonely, never bored, when watching birds. Looking more directly at him I emphasised: ‘Birds have changed my life in many ways. They are my touchstone to nature.’

At that point Claudio stopped chopping and glanced at me.

‘I’d love to go out birdwatching with you one day,’ Miguel replied, thoughtfully.

Claudio, having dealt with the meat and put it into a large bowl, now asked Paula and me to follow him. At last, I thought. Our first encounter with an Andean condor.

Round the back of the house was a shed. Claudio opened a rusty metal door and ushered us in quietly. Inside was a chaos of stacked wood, buckets and wire. We could hear what sounded like a series of low growls. Cameras at the ready, we were pushed through another, much smaller door.

We found ourselves in a large wire enclosure with small bushes. We heard the door shut behind us.

Once inside, to our horror it dawned on us that Paula’s comprehension of Claudio’s Spanish had let us down, and that in fact he was not looking after a condor at all – but two young pumas.

The two cats crouched low, snarling. Their dark ears, each with a white patch on the back, were pressed flat down on their necks. Submissive or fierce, we couldn’t decide.

We opted for the latter, backing off instinctively and whispering to each other how ridiculous this was, finding ourselves inside a cage with a pair of some of the most savage animals on the planet. We could hear Claudio whispering assurances to us from behind the door, but we were more intent on watching the wild cats – it was time for their meal, and they looked hungry. Seconds later, a hatch in the door behind us opened and Claudio slid the bowl of meat between our legs and then slammed the hatch closed.

As the two pumas, the colour of wheat, moved cautiously forwards, their eyes only on us, we moved slowly away from the food bowl, edging around the cage’s sides to the wall furthest from them. But now we had no means of escape.

The pumas started to eat. Crouching low so as not to intimidate them, we gradually moved closer and closer to watch. Completely awed by what we were seeing, we didn’t speak, not even a whisper, instead listening to the crunching and gnawing as they ate. The larger male puma was more dominant and aggressive, constantly snarling at us. The smaller female was hesitant and cautious, eventually taking some meat, turning away from us and eating it out of our sight – she didn’t even want to look at us. Seeing that the male’s claws were retracted, we crept even closer, but his hypnotic topaz eyes watched our every move.

Having eaten the meat, the two siblings bounded across the enclosure, played a little, then retreated under a bush and watched us, their upright ears twitching. Now more relaxed, each lifted its huge sandy-coloured paws one at a time, gently licking clean the five leathery pads, just like a domestic cat.

Back in the house, Claudio told us the sad story of how he had come by the pumas. An out-of-town hunter had tracked the mother and shot her, taking the two cubs. When he had tried to sell the cubs he was arrested by the police and the animals were sent to Claudio for safekeeping. ‘We’re hoping the cats are going to be released back into the wild,’ he said.

I had my doubts – I knew the animals would need to be taught how to fend for themselves by their parents.

Later that evening, Claudio asked to see our condor feathers. The big man cradled the longest feather as he would a young child, then slowly held it up, closely peering along its length. ‘This feather has a story to tell.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘These pale parts are where the strong sunlight has taken its colour.’ He pointed out small patches on the vanes to us. ‘This bird has flown high, close to the sun.’ Then he drew his hand carefully along an edge. ‘See how perfect this is, very little wear. It’s new.’

‘So?’ said Paula.

‘Birds don’t drop feathers like this, without reason.’

‘Such as?’

‘Don’t know, but you must keep it. It was meant for you, no one else.’

We camped overnight in Claudio’s garden and prepared to continue our journey south towards Patagonia the next day. Before we left, he mentioned that if we really wanted to understand more about condors we ought to attend a condor liberation, when a bird, either recovered from injury or bred at Buenos Aires zoo, was released into the wild. ‘They’re special, but don’t happen often.’

Before leaving we swapped email addresses and phone numbers. Travelling wild and alone in a whole new continent, we needed as many contacts as we could find.

Energetically waving goodbye, we pulled into the village road. From behind us, Claudio shouted, ‘See you soon. Look after the feathers!’

Some time later, we understood that the pumas had been transferred to Buenos Aires zoo and, on a visit to the city a year on, we went to see them. I wished we hadn’t. It nearly broke my heart to see them as adults padding up and down in a cage smaller and dirtier than the one where we had spent a marvellous hour with them as energetic youngsters. As we stood watching the cats, the now huge muscular male, whose eyes seemed to have lost their sparkle, paced closer and stared at us for a few magical moments.

Perhaps early memories are the most meaningful for us all.

Part Two

Patagonia


Chapter 3

The Penguin Show