With my pack on my shoulders and the camera bag slung across my belly I trudged over the compressed dirt of main street Cabo Blanco until I came to the hotel.  It was by far the biggest and newest building in town, and it was locked.  I banged on the door for a while until a small man of uncertain age poked his head around the side of building.  He looked annoyed to have been disturbed, but he admitted to being Don Miguel and allowed himself to be persuaded to open up and give me a room.  He certainly didn’t have any shortage because the place was obviously empty, though it still cost me four times what I’d been paying for dorms elsewhere in Peru.  He made it clear he wasn’t going to budge on the price.

Inside, everything was stillness and silence.  Even the dust motes were taking a break, so the bright shafts of sunlight that shone through the windows were perfectly clear.  I dropped my bags on my bed.

‘Are you here to surf?’ asked Don Miguel as I handed over my money for the room.  I shook my head.  For the last few days the Pacific had been like a millpond, though I knew that sometimes the tube waves were so good at Cabo Blanco that big surfing events were occasionally held there.

‘I’m interested in Hemingway and the Cabo Blanco Fishing Club.  One of the drivers said you were the man to speak to about that.’

‘Ah, Hemingway.  Yes, the Fishing Club is looked after by my friend Oscar.  The owner has taken most of the stuff away to his place in Lima, but the building is still there.  There’s even a big stuffed marlin that was too delicate to move.’

I thanked him, beginning to suspect i'd wasted a day.

‘And,’ he added, ‘If you do go there, stand at the fence and call out to Oscar.  Say that you’re my friend and he’ll call his dogs off.  They’re really fierce.  If you just try to walk in there without getting his help they’ll definitely bite you.'  He grinned.  'Good luck.’

I strolled out into the midday sun, hoping that the only ravening dogs in town were safely inside the Fishing Club compound, and set about trying to find Oscar.  No one around the pier had seen him, but somebody said they thought he might be on the other side of town, back the way I had come in the pickup truck and past the jutting cliff that cut Cabo Blanco in two.  I left the road before it bent around the cliff and scrambled down onto a beach of fine sand that ran parallel to it.  After about 10 minutes without seeing a soul I walked up the sand towards town and saw a young man at work on a fishing boat that had been hauled far above the tideline.  He had skin the colour and texture of old leather, but he must have been several years younger than me.  The hull of his ship – he told me proudly that it belonged to him - had recently taken on a fresh coat of paint, and he was busy sanding down the wooden planks of the deck.

He looked surprised to see me, and even more so when I spoke to him in Spanish.  I wondered how few tourists came to the town each year that everyone should treat me as such a curiosity looked so curious when I spoke to them.  Unfortunately, he didn’t know where Oscar was either.  A little discouraged, I headed back the way I’d come.  I kept to the road this time, one side of which was bounded by a concrete park and a high sea wall, and the other lined with houses, one or two shuttered restaurants and the headquarters of the local socialist party whose grand red star provided the only bright colour I saw all that day.

Even those few buildings soon petered out, but as I approached the bend in the road I saw that there was a modern-looking single-storey structure beside it.  An old lady sat there with her back to me, and I realised that she was looking after a set of municipal toilets.  It seemed odd, mainly because on the other side of the cliff there had been an identical set of toilets with an almost identical old lady guarding them.  It seemed an extravagance in such a small town.  I decided to take a moment’s rest in the shade and ask if she’d seen Oscar.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘He went towards the pier earlier today on his bike and I definitely haven’t seen him come back yet.  I’m sure he’ll be along any minute.’  I sat opposite her and decided to put it to the test.

‘So,’ she said, ‘Are you just here for the day?’

‘No, I’m staying down at the hotel.  I was hoping to take a look at the Fishing Club.  That’s why I was looking for Oscar.’

‘Ah, that makes sense.  We don’t get many tourists here anymore.  There just aren’t that many big fish, so they only come for the surfing and that’s not very often.  And none of them can speak Spanish, and there’s no one here who can speak English, so we can’t talk to them and they can’t talk to us.  How come you can speak Spanish?  Where are you from?’

I told her where I was from, and about my time in Argentina.

‘Mmm, I couldn’t quite place your accent.  I thought maybe you were from Mexico.  There was another tourist from Mexico a while back, you see, and of course we could speak to him.  He and his fiancée stayed in my house for a while, actually.  He was such a nice man.  Very tall and thin, with long black hair and always dressed in black no matter how hot it was.’

It seemed that tourists outside surfing season were rare enough to be remembered in me detail.

‘But do you remember when this was a sport-fishing spot?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes.  That was a long time ago, though.  Even when I was a girl it was already dying down.  The fish stopped coming, and so did the Americans.  That was probably thirty or forty years ago now.  My father was a fisherman on the boats you can see out there,’ she waved a creased hand towards the ocean, ‘And so is my husband.  He still goes out every day.’ 

The skin around her eyes crinkled gently as she smiled at the memory.  Her face was deeply browned by the sun, and her black hair was pulled back from it in a long ponytail.  She was short, much shorter than me, and wore a long dress with tiny flowers printed on it and an apron even in the summer heat.  Her dark brown eyes were almost black.  She returned the hand to one of the apron pockets.

‘I remember there was a system they had, little flags on the ships in different colours.  We used to watch for them from the old pier, the wooden one that was blown away in a storm a few years ago.  You could tell what kind of fish they'd caught by the flag they were flying, and it was a different colour for every fish.  We used to get so excited when we saw them come in with the flags up.’

‘Don’t they catch them at all anymore, then?’

‘Oh yes.  But only sometimes.’

‘When was the last time someone caught a big one?’

‘Well, what day is it?  It’s Wednesday, so the last one was...’ She paused to think.  ‘Thursday.  Last Thursday a man caught a big swordfish with rosy-coloured meat.  He could get between ten and twelve soles for that, so his family are really happy.  But no, people don’t catch that much now, and a lot of people have left the village recently as well.  There were floods a few years ago that washed a lot of people’s houses away and people are scared it’ll happen again so they moved away.’ 

 ‘And what about you, what do you do?’

‘I mostly look after my home and my family, up on the ridge above here.  But we share out the job of looking after these facilities among the women so that everyone gets a bit more money.  I do this once a month.  There aren’t many jobs otherwise, and tourists don’t come very often.  Like I said, the Mexican and his fiancée are the only ones I got to know recently.’

As she said this I thought again about how rare tourists must be for this one Mexican to have been so memorable, however recently it had been.

‘When did the Mexican come to visit?’

‘Well, I named my daughter after his fiancée, you see, because everyone said she had such a nice name.  She was called Claudia, and my Claudia is just about to finish school, isn't she?  She’s sixteen years old.  So I suppose it must have been sixteen years ago.’  She shook her head and smiled at me, showing a couple of lonely, eroded teeth in her gums.  ‘Isn’t it amazing how time can run away with you?’

If you want to get a ride to Cabo Blanco in northern Peru you have to wait in the small park beside the bus station in El Alto.  I saw a few pickup trucks waiting in a line and knew I was in the right place.  They were covered in dust, and had iron frames welded to the backs over which canvas hoods were strteched to provide shade for their passengers.  A few men clustered around the bonnet of one of the pickups, and they waved me over.  They said they were waiting to get enough passengers together to make a trip worthwhile, so we chatted to pass the time.  As usual this started with a comparison of the UK and Peru, but we quickly moved on to more sensitive geopolitical issues, like recent disputes over the Peru-Ecuador border, and another subject that had recently become very familiar to me.

‘So,’ said one of the drivers, the skin around his eyes creasing with amusement as I applied sunscreen to my face, ‘When are you giving the Malvinas back to Argentina?’

I smiled back.  I had been asked this question many times in Bolivia and Peru and I was getting pretty good at answering it.  At first I was surprised that the subject came up so much more often than in Argentina, but I'd come to realise a lot of Argentines cared too much to be able to talk about it, even when they said they didn’t. 

We talked around the issues for a while, and then at some unseen signal one of the drivers decided that it was time to head to Cabo Blanco.  A couple of people had already climbed into the cab, so I sat on one of the narrow wooden planks that ran like a bench around the inside of the back of the pickup.  Opposite was a small man in his fifties with white hair and a shy smile.  He lifted his feet up and put them on a stack of newspapers wrapped up in blue nylon twine.  I didn’t feel like talking to him, so I just smiled and didn't say anything. 

The broad, winding tarmac road fell away steeply from the outskirts of El Alto, and the pickup shuddered and roared down towards the deep blue of the Pacific.  Cabo Blanco marks the point where warm ecuatorial waters from the north meet the chilly Humboldt Current from the south.  You can surf in Mancora, just up the road, in a pair of shorts, but you wouldn’t want to get in the sea below Cabo Blanco without a wetsuit on.  The intersection creates a rich marine environment, and the town used to be a mecca for sport fishermen.  The rich and famous of America in the mid-20^th Century came to catch bigeye tuna and black marlin, including the biggest fish ever landed with a rod.

I’d heard Hemingway used to visit the Cabo Blanco Fishing club, and according to my copy of Rough Guide Peru he had written The Old Man and the Sea while staying there.  I didn’t think there’d be a huge amount to see these days, but the previous day among the drinking parties and cocaine dealers at Mancora had driven me to look for something more substantial to do, and tracking down any remaining traces of Hemingway or his book seemed just the thing.

The pickup grumbled on, closer and closer to the shore, until it rounded a corner and I saw a small harbour of sail-powered fishing boats at rest.  On the horizon I could see the elegant canvas sails of the rest of the fleet, and a squat black oil rig crouching above them.  Before we reached the main street of the village the newspaperman got out, untied his bundle and started delivering them to the ramshackle single-storey houses.  He nodded at me and waved to the driver as we left.  

When we halted again I stepped onto a dusty road close to the entrance of the pier, which had market stalls on either side.  I bought a slice of cake and a couple of bananas for breakfast and looked around.  The driver got out and strolled over to me.

‘So what are you going to do now you’re here?’

‘Well, I need a place to stay.  My guide says you can stay at the Fishing Club.  Is that right?’

‘No idea, but that’s way back on the road, more than a kilometre.  You should have said you wanted to go there.  You’d be better off staying at the hotel over there on the corner.  Don Miguel runs it, and he knows the caretaker of the Fishing Club too, if you’re planning to go and have a look.’

‘Alright,’ I said, wishing I’d talked to him earlier about my plans.  I had assumed that there wouldn’t be much besides the Fishing Club, and they’d be bound to take me there.  ‘I’ll head that way later.  I’m here because I’d heard this was a big fishing spot, years ago, and that Hemingway stayed here for a while.’

‘Oh yes,’ he replied.  ‘You should have talked to the guy with the newspapers about it.  He actually went out fishing with Hemingway a few times, when he was a boy.  You won’t see him again today, though.’  He strolled off to chat to someone else and I hoisted by backpack onto my shoulder and walked towards the hotel, wishing I’d been in a friendlier mood during the drive from El Alto.

David walked away to wash his hands.  I stood around uncertainly, still a little unsteady with alcohol, watched by two small, grimy children who had appeared out of a service building.  I had no idea whether the tour was over or not.  As I was considering this, Crispin approached, smiling and mumbling.  He stuck his right hand down the front of his jumper.  It emerged at last holding a key, which he waved at me triumphantly.  He walked to a door in the building opposite the one I’d been in earlier and clicked open a heavy metal padlock.  He entered, emerging around half a minute later to ask why I hadn’t followed him.  I stood my ground, wanting David to at least know where I had gone, but my guide put his newly clean hand on my shoulder and ushered me in , following closely behind with Ivan.

David nodded at me meaningfully and handed the spare fuse and detonator to Ivan, who smiled even wider than usual.  I produced the coca leaves and gave them to Crispin, feeling annoyed that David had not told me I’d be handing this stuff over at the end of the day.  If I’d known it wasn’t just for me, I’d have been a more generous in what I’d bought.  Crispin seemed happy enough to have more leaves to add to the massive pouch in his right cheek, but David obviously still felt there was some explaining to do.

‘And of course there’s the remains of the bottle he brought.  We’ll leave that too.’

Nothing could have compelled me to take it with me, but they both seemed very pleased. 

‘One last drink?’

The empty mixing bottle was still empty and the mixers were in the other building, but to my horror David was already pouring himself a shot of unadulterated white alcohol.  He tipped a little on the ground and then threw his head back.  He came up and looked at me through eyes shining with tears.  He poured measures for the other two, both of whom drank without any sign of discomfort.  I saw him pour a bare half shot for me and nodded in silent thanks.  He grinned and asked a question to cover me as I poured about half of it on the floor.  I hoped Tio appreciated it. 

Slowly I raised the glass, but even as it touched my lips I was bringing my left hand up.  I made as though to wipe my lips, covering for the fact that the drink ended up on my hand and not down my throat.  Even so my lips stung and the parts of my mouth that the alcohol had touched were tender and painful for the rest of the day.  Even the skin on the palm of my left hand was tingling, and I was very glad that I hadn’t tried to swallow it.  As I shook hands with my newest friends and we took a couple of very dark photos to commemorate the occasion, I felt relief that I had cheated my way past the final test.

Outside a small crowd had formed, young miners who had just finished their last shift of the week.  Grey figures chatted, smoked and swigged out of familiar-looking plastic bottles of orange liquid.  Two lads of about 18 or 19 stood close by, stripped to the waist, showing wiry torsos with visible sinews and taut, lean muscles.

‘Hey you!’ shouted one of them, waving a hand to me.  I waved back, in what I hoped was a friendly sort of a way.  ‘Hey!’ he shouted again, ‘Come over here and fight me!’  He flexed his muscles like a bodybuilder and his friend gave one of the biceps an appreciative squeeze.  I waved again, this time hoping they accepted my decision to decline the contest. 

‘Come on!  Fight me!’ he repeated, stepping towards me.

I turned around and walked quickly after David, ignoring the jeers.

‘What was all that about?’

‘Oh, he wants to fight everybody.  He does it whenever he sees someone new.  Forget about it.  Let’s go down here to the next mine entrance.  Some of my friends should be there celebrating the end of the week.’

We strolled along, enjoying the warmth of mid afternoon.

‘So, it’s been six hours on this tour already.  Your friends that went down the mine only got three or four.  What do you think about that?’

‘Great’ I said, seeing that he was looking for some kind of reassurance.  ‘It was nice to be able to spend time with those guys.’

‘Yeah, it was good.  I’m glad you got on well with them.  Sometimes I take people there and they don’t really go with it.  They don’t drink, and they don’t want to talk, and it just doesn’t work.  It’s a pity, because I think it’s really interesting to spend time with them.’

‘And how do they live?  None of them really look up to mining anymore.’

‘Yeah, they mostly hang around for the social side.  In this city you’re either a miner or you aren’t.’

He looked thoughtful.

We approached a set of larger, more modern buildings.  Behind them I could see a crowd of miners.  They stood in circles, drinking, and I could hear that some of them were playing musical instruments and singing.  I wasn’t sure I could take another round of drinks, so I was relieved when David returned after a few moments and told me that he couldn’t see any of his friends.  He looked disappointed.

‘They must be down in town.  The bus leaves from here.  We’ll look for them in some of the miners’ clubs and have a few beers with them.’

David was very quiet on the bus, but I knew I wasn’t going to get another chance to ask the question that had been bothering me since he’d tried to return to the mine after his operation.  I still couldn’t believe he’d choose to work in that environment, knowing it would probably knock decades off his life.  I thought that perhaps that had been before he started working in tourism.

‘So if you could go back to working in the mine today, would you do it?’

‘Of course.’

I raised my eyebrows.  He hadn’t hesitated for a second.  I asked him if he’d really take the extra money over a safer, almost certainly longer life.

‘Of course,’ he repeated, looking at me steadily.  He rubbed the thumb and forefingers of his damaged left hand together.  ‘Money is all that matters here.  What’s the point of living longer without it?’ 

I didn’t know what to say to that.

‘The miners can buy cars, and houses.  They can have as many children as they like and feed them all.  They have wives and usually three or four mistresses.’  He turned and stared out of the window, perhaps imagining the seraglio that could have been his.  David had told me earlier that he didn’t have a girlfriend, and that he felt lucky because being in a relationship was like being in jail.  He didn’t look so happy about it now. ‘They can have all the women they want,’ he said, glumly.  ‘Of course I’d go back down there.’

I asked him if he’d ever thought about leaving Potosí.  He nodded.

‘All the time, but I have to stay here.  My brothers and sisters are away working or studying in La Paz, Sucre or Santa Cruz.’  He sighed.  ‘But I can’t join them because my parents are really sick and someone has to look after them.’  He fell silent.

We stopped at the bottom of the miner’s supplies street and David led me to a small canteen.  We had a greasy dish of fried chicken with rice and fried potatoes, accompanied by a herby green broth in which floated a long, white, ghostly chicken’s foot.  My guide looked a little surprised when I started gnawing the glutinous flesh away from the little spool shaped bones, but he was obviously pleased.

‘See?’  he said grandly, brightening a little.  ‘The tourists spend their money in expensive restaurants,’ but I know where he good cheap food is.’  He insisted on paying, so I said I’d buy whatever beers we ended up drinking.

We walked down the hill, and after a few minutes he stopped and pushed open the door of one of the terraced buildings.

‘This is a miner’s club.  Maybe my friends will be in here and we can drink with them.’  Upstairs was a small bar, dark and faded.  Only two of the little square tables were occupied by miners and they glared at me over their Potosina beers, blooming with the dense froth you get at altitude.  David looked around, frowning, but it was obvious his friends weren’t there.  As we descended he pulled out his mobile phone and dialled a number.  He waited, but there was no answer.  He bit his lip.

‘There’s another place down the road.  We’ll try that.’

His friends weren’t there either, and the crowd was even less friendly. 

‘Let’s try one more place.’

He carried on making phone calls as we walked, but never got through.  When he saw the third bar was completely empty he sighed, defeated.  It was the same look I’d seen on his face after his attempted conversation with Etcheverria, but now he didn’t try to hide it.  I imagined his friends, grey as ghosts, huddled in a bar or standing and singing in a group on the mountain with the other miners. They’d be gossiping, telling stories of the week’s near misses, counting up the money they’d hacked out of the rock and drinking to another Friday payday.  David, who didn’t have a speck of dust on him, slumped a little.

‘Sorry, but it’s not going to happen.  Let’s go back to the hostel.  Just buy me a beer there.’