Chasing phones in Huacho
On the corner of the market are two cars and their drivers stand by the roadside shouting “Vegueta!” I jump in. Minutes later a cheerful round girl squeezes in beside me with a box of tinned condensed milk, a sack of oranges, and a much older man. The driver heads through narrow streets to the edge of town, across the river, a broad expanse of cobble and gravel with thin strands of water interweaving down to the sea, and then through irrigated farmland along the Panamericana Central. The older man puts his arm round the girl and she whispers and giggles. We turn off along a small track towards the coast, along a dusty promontory rising out of the farmland. Approaching the sea, the road turns right into a collection of houses below a cerro, a low hillside, on whose slopes a dozen low mounds can be seen, half of them partially excavated, revealing low walls and terraces.
The taxi takes a long route through the town to drop the girl and her bags at a house by an irrigation canal, with a sty by its front door whose climbing vines form a shady canopy over three piglets.
The driver drops me in the market square, where I buy a bottle of water before heading uphill towards the archaeological site.
The site on the hillside by the sea at Vegueta, with its several mounds half-excavated, is the 1800 BC settlement of Vichama.
It had links to the Caral culture, the oldest civilization in the Americas. The city of Caral with eight pyramids, central plaza and circular courts is in an inland valley just 8 kilometres away. Those courts echoed to the sound of flutes made from pelican and condor bones before the pyramids of Giza or the Sumerian cities of Mesopotamia were built.
Excavations in Vegueta have revealed friezes moulded in clay, showing lightning and toads, both thought to refer to the coming of rains. A more provocative frieze shows a series of human figure with visible ribs and concave bellies. These have been interpreted, understandably, as relating to a famine, or a failure of the rains.
A couple of blocks through the silent town I check my camera is round my neck and my phone in my pocket. My phone. Not in my pocket. Or any other pocket, front or back. Not in my bag. After a moment to think I turn back to the main square. I had been looking at the map on my phone in the back seat. I had put it down to help the girl take out her tray of evaporated milk.
On the corner of the square two cars are waiting. The drivers are not my driver.
“I forgot my mobile in the back of a collectivo just five minutes ago!” I tell them. “Where has the car gone? where is the paradero for Huacho?”
“Right here” they tell me. There is no other pickup point in Vegetua. What was the colour of the car? What car company was it from? what colour shirts were the women who organised the cars wearing? If we knew which of the two car companies licensed for the Huacho-Vegetua route I had taken, we could go to the office of the car company. They would be able to tell me which driver and car had taken me, and find them both.
I do not remember the colour of the car, the type of car or the company. But I have a strong feeling that it did not belong to either company, it was an “informal”, unlicensed taxi.
The woman from the kiosk where i had bought my water joins in. The only car she can remember seeing was a white one. We should hurry or it will be too late.
“We can follow it. I will take you” says the driver. “Lets go!”
I jump in and we head off up the road, looking at all the taxis we pass. I am aware that this would be a better idea if I could remember any identifying details, other than that the driver looked like Antonio Banderas.
Half an hour later, without seeing anything recognisable, we reach the Huacho departure point, where my driver calls a couple of others waiting by the roadside.
After a brief chat, and a few shouted comments to the drivers on the opposite corner, he comes back to the car. “These drivers have not been out since early morning. But they say there will be a white car due in soon.” After 20 minutes, I move on.
Back at the the hotel, I explain the situation and ask the receptionist, a cheerful and friendly young man, to call the number of my missing mobile. No reply.
“It is going to be very difficult” he says. Some new passenger would pick up the phone and keep it.
“I know. That is how it is. But I can try.”
Back in my room I google how to find a lost mobile on my tablet. Was there not a GPS system that could tell me where it was? Could the phone company locate it? To my surprise I have an App called Find My iPhone. I tap the icon and it opens immediately “locating you iphone…..” and two minutes later “your iphone is 11 km away” and the screen displays a map showing a location a few kilometres from Vegetua. Problem solved!
Downstairs Julio takes a look at the map while I tell him my plan. I will get a taxi to track the phone down and give a reward to whoever had it.
“Well, you see this place” – he pointed at the flashing phone icon in the middle of a road free area of the map. “It is Primavera. It is on the other side of the PanAmericano. It is the mountain side. There’s nothing there. It is . . . wild.”
The “informal settlement” of Primavera, or springtime, is bounded on the east by a great hill surrounded by three walls. Within the inner wall is a rectangular building 60 metres long and 20 metres wide. Limited excavations here suggest it was a Chancay ceremonial centre, looking out over the sea, the river and the plain.
The buildings of plywood and cardboard which cover the plain are sitting on an area of desert land four kilometres long and two kilometres wide, bounded by sea to the east and an irrigation canal to the north. This is the largest cemetery on the south coast, the burial site for the inhabitants of the Huarua valley over five hundred years. The Chancay culture is famed for its black and white pottery, painted fabrics and gauze weavings. Black and white ceramic fragments litter the roadways between houses in Primavera.
The hotel receptionist goes to google maps on his computer and shows me the Street View. A dusty track leads off the main highway, through a walled gateway, and into the hills.
You can’t go in there” he concludes.
So, what if I go to the police?
He thinks for a minute then shakes his head slowly. “Not really. Where are you from?”
“England.”
“The police here are different. There is nothing useful to be gained from them.”
The best option, he suggests, is to wait till they move.
“They will probably come back to Huacho, to sell it, or to unblock it. If you can find them here on the street in Huacho we can do something.”
It is now about 2 pm. The taxi driver could have gone home for lunch, and now he will be sleeping. The phone still hidden down the side of the back seat. Or a passenger could have picked it up, taken it to the badlands of Primavera to talk it over with a friend, to get it unblocked and to make some expensive overseas calls on my account.
The Find My iPhone app, I discover, also allowed me to block the phone. And I can put a message on the front screen. “Please return this phone I am a tourist I need it urgently and will pay a 100 soles reward. Bring to the hotel Punta Rocas or call 933 6229.”
Two hours pass. There is no reply to my message, but I know it has been read. And then the phone begins to move. Back on the main road to Huacho. Seven kilometres away it stops again.
I went to reception, where the hotel manager has now taken over.
“The phone is still on. If they knew what they were doing they would turn it off, take out the battery.”
“Yes, and if they don’t know what they are doing they might find it easier to bring it back for 100 soles than get it unblocked, and sell it for five hundred soles. Less complicated.”
The tracking shows the mobile enter the edge of town and then take a right.
“They have turned off. Most taxis will come along here,” he draws a line on the map “and then turn down this way. They have gone the other way.”
“Maybe they are dropping a passenger off.”
We wait. The car waits. Six, seven minutes.
“That place where he has stopped, Hualmay, it is not a good place. Maybe he has stopped to sell it. We have to hope he comes into the centre of town.”
Hualmay, the settlement visited by my phone-finding friend, is the site of sixteen raised mounds, though some say fifty mounds. These are thought to cover ramped pyramids and other buildings made with adobe bricks five hundred years before the coming of the Inca. These ceremonial centres of the Chancay lie surrounded by irrigated farmland. They have not been excavated.
Five minutes later they are on the move again, to stop at the side of the main market. The manager calls his assistant.
“I am going to ask the boy to watch this and call us on the phone to tell us if they move. We will drive down to the market and get them!”
A few anxious minutes waiting for the boy and then we are driving in the evening traffic, stopping at red lights, calling from the car.
” They have not moved – they are on the corner of Atahualpa . . .”
“…They are outside the juice bar . . .”
“They are moving. But they are still there, they went inside the market . . .”
” But they are in a car . . .”
“they are carrying the phone. they are trying to sell it. They are outside the bakery.”
We got out of the car close to the market by two technical centres offering unblocking. I walk into one, Stefano takes the other. Nothing.
Outside on the street are two taxis from Vegetua.
Two people in the front playing with their mobile phones.
I lean in the window and ask. “I lost my mobile. In a taxi to Vegueta. I am looking for it. “
He smiles. “Yes. I saw the message. I am Marco. 150 soles.”
“Do you have my phone, Marco?”
“Someone in the car picked it up, but I told them it was mine and they gave it to me. I want 150 soles. I have done a lot of work to bring your phone back.”
“The man is a poor tourist. He does not have any money,” says Stefano.
“I also do not have any money,” Marco replies, smiling.
“but you have my phone?” I ask.
“Yes, it is here.” He picks it up from the side of its seat and shows it me.
“Let’s do it – 150 soles.”
I hand him a fistful of notes through the window, he counts them carefully then hands over the phone. I thank him and shake his hand. The hotel owner shakes his hand. And we both walk back to the manager’s car.
“That was an adventure Stefano!”
“Si por cierto. VivaPeru!”
Go forward to 98b – Watering the Desert . . .