Diaries 3: South American Echoes

I am surely not alone in being an off-and-on diarist – if diarist is the word.  I would say conditions for writing a diary include not just having the time to do it but, obviously an interesting situation: interesting to you, the writer at any rate, and then that added emotional charge to fire you up and convince you that this has to be recorded: ‘This set down – This’!

I’ll spare you my Paris diary; it is full of  heights of enthusiasm and troughs of home-sickness,  with a generous lacing of self-doubt; as may be expected from the last  stages of teenage diaries.

Obviously after that I was either too busy to keep a diary or the necessary conditions did not prevail for several years: years which included university, a London job and a year teaching in Spain and Portugal.  The next notable effort was when I arrived to take up a teaching post in South America.  Cali, in Colombia, did not thrill me on arrival (‘I wonder if there is any chance at all of getting to like it?’) and I was love-sick again having met someone shortly before leaving London (‘Oh how I miss X…..Dying for a letter from him’) – so not much change there.  

But during the Christmas holidays, three months into the job, a round trip from Cali, via Bogota, Leticia and Manaus on the Amazon, to Rio de Janeiro for Christmas, then back via Lima, Cuzco and Machupichu, most definitely did fire me up and for parts of that journey I kept a diary which brings it vividly to life.  Although some entries record events, incidents and people that have simply been wiped from my memory, other passages, particularly the flight over the rain forest and the nights spent near the Amazon river are engraved in memory and I have used them in my first novel, Blade of Light.  They deserve a longer quote than the snippets from my teenage diary, so here goes, with a word of explanation first:- 

The flight to Manaus from Bogota was on a DC4.  Bogota’s altitude is some 8600 feet above sea level and our plane would not be able to take off  whilst carrying a full load of fuel.  We hopped over the cordillera to the little lowland town of Vilavicencio  to fuel up for the long trip which would include a stop at Leticia, Colombia’s tiny point of access on the Amazon river system. From Vilavicencio there would be several hours of flying over the rainforest.  On 19th December I wrote:-

  ‘………….  We could surely not be more than a few hundred feet above the tree tops as down below I could make out their patterns distinctly – some light green trees, others shedding their leaves – some of them pink or orange, obviously bearing different coloured flowers some pointing upward, stark and bare, were quite dead.  No clearings, nothing broke the monotony except patches and wisps of cloud where moisture seems to be sucked up from the forest.  Suddenly a huge river curling and looping in the most improbable curves and meanders across the green carpet of trees below us, not the Amazon yet but the Putumayo……………….

Word had gone round the plane that we were not to fly on to Manaus that day and someone was  busy making a list of transit passengers who would have to be put up for the night in Leticia.  Now we were coming in to land – crossing the broad river then curling back and banking in a steep circle over the water – levelling out low over the wide river so that I wondered if our DC4 had developed floats on the journey and we were to land on the water, but no – we skimmed the muddy edge of the river and landed perfectly on the  slightly bumpy runway of Leticia.’

Later that evening, with lodgings arranged,  there was time to take in the scene:-

‘Across the river, broad and low on the horizon, the opposite shore I am told is Peru.  All I can see is a low broad horizon and trees and a beautiful expanse of sky barred with immense lines of clouds changing colour as the sun sets behind them.  We stand there quietly for some time and I reflect that my whole trip to S. America would be worth it simply for this.'

That diary came in useful, as diaries can do, providing both inspiration and detail for chapters of a novel I wrote later.  It is moreover more than a bald recital of dates and facts, flights taken, places stayed at etc. it goes further and records the writer’s reactions to the sights and sounds she is experiencing, as the last sentence of that extract illustrates, and that also makes it invaluable as a bridge to the past.  Having time to reflect and write during the various long flights undoubtedly helped.  I have said that while some of the places and people are vivid in my memory there are others that I find I have no recollection of at all.  But wait a bit, they begin to come alive off the page:  am I gradually remembering them?  Or just thinking I do, like memories of early childhood which we have been told about so often that we think those are our actual memories.  Memory, as I have been forced to admit on several occasions, plays strange tricks.

A bridge to the past, even a time machine: my diaries take me back in time to relive experiences, emotions and sensations, almost like an out-of-body experience – although I am not really qualified to make that comparison – or maybe a dream sequence which, on waking is hard to dispel.  I think that is not a bad thing to do but it raises a question about continuity and of how far is that person who wrote those lines the person who is reading them today?

After Leticia and Manaus the diary becomes sketchy:

‘Arr. Rio, 22/12, flight via Belem… temp 34 degrees.   Hotel Novo Mundo, took a room (with bath!) for 40 cruzeiros. Left Rio, 2/1,  in violent storm    .Lima, Hotel Savoy.   Left Lima…. 4/1  To Cuzco.  Cuzco, Continental Hotel’

Then  ‘by train to Machu Pichu’  (this last gets a slightly longer mention.)                                                                                                                    

But Rio was the place that captured my heart:-

‘Compared with Rio all the other countries, in spite of their marvels of ancient civilisations etc, paleinto insignificance.Rio is bouncing, ebullient and happy and cheerful and full of life and such fun to be there.  It’s really beautiful – a lovely setting, a jewel of a city.  After Colombia it is so civilised and awake, one feels that the people and the country are on the move, life is getting better and the future looks quite bright and whoever you are and whatever you do, life is worth living.’

As the plane took off from Rio I felt a real and sorrowful tug of ‘saudades’ (a combination of sadness, nostalgia and longing that only exists in the Portuguese language).  I still wonder if I will ever go back.

My next diary of interest is less about sights, sounds and sensations as about events, historical and political.   When, some thirty years after those events I re-read its seven thousand words I was impressed enough to transcribe them.  I will take a look at the Teheran Diary in my next post.