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Miracle in the Andes - 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

Miracle in the Andes - 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

by Nando Parrado with Vincent Rause

Orion, HK$177

A week after the plane crash, Nando Parrado stood outside the wrecked fuselage and examined his chocolate-covered peanut. This was the last food he would get so it had to last. He sucked the chocolate off the nut. The next day he split it in two and ate half. The second part he swallowed on the third day.

We know what's coming next: the awful realisation that, to survive, Parrado and his companions must eat the flesh of fellow passengers who died after their plane slammed into a 3,300-metre mountain on the Argentina-Chile border during a storm in October 1972.

But before we get to that point there are 16 pages of photos to show, as the text has already done, that Parrado and his fellow survivors aren't monsters but ordinary young men. There are none of the photos of human bones and rotting body parts strewn across the snow that would later adorn newspaper pages across the world. Instead, we see fit young men on a rugby pitch, a besuited Parrado at home in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo, shots of the survivors in the snow outside the wrecked plane and photos of the emaciated author when, after 21/2 months in the mountains, he finally reaches a valley and brings back a rescue team.

Of the 45 people on the plane, 16 came out alive. Their survival, Parrado is at pains to point out,

was largely due to rugby and faith. The sport was imported into Uruguay by Irish Christian Brothers who raised it to the level of a moral discipline that taught boys that the team matters more than the individual. The young men on this flight - on their way, with relatives and friends, to Chile to play a match - were mostly graduates of the Brothers.

They had, thus, along with the rigorous physical training required for rugby, been imbued with Catholicism.

The first cannibalistic thought crossed Nando's mind when he looked at a cut on an injured companion's leg and felt his appetite rising. But these young men, being good Catholics, first debated whether it was moral to munch on one's dead friends. They concluded that God would think it acceptable if there was no other way to survive. So they set about slicing flesh off the bodies they had lined up in the snow. Initially, their revulsion was so strong that they could eat only skin, muscle and fat. After a couple of weeks, however, hearts, lungs and other internal organs were also digested. But they knew that even this food would eventually run out. They had heard on the radio that the search for them had been called off. After much procrastination, Parrado, Roberto Canessa and Antonio Vizintin, shod in battered rugby boots, set off to get help. After Vizintin turned back, Parrado and Canessa trekked for seven days across mountains, sustaining themselves on strips of human meat, before spotting a peasant.

Piers Paul Read published a best-selling account of this story in 1974. English novelist Graham Greene said of the book, titled Alive (the same title was used for a 1993 movie in which Ethan Hawke plays Parrado), that he couldn't imagine how the tale could have been better told. He was probably right.

Parrado, who agreed to write this book only after countless people told him that his story inspired them, does a decent job. He evokes the splendour and desolation of the mountains, and he captures the gruesome daily grind of life in the fuselage. We learn that he went on to become a race car driver and television show host, and a happily married father of two. And that all 16 survivors have remained friends, occasionally returning to the crash site to visit the graves of those who didn't make it, including the author's mother and his sister.

But Parrado, or rather his American ghostwriter, doesn't quite have the narrative edge or the descriptive powers of Read. Miracle in the Andes, a grim but uplifting tale of rugby, Catholicism and high-altitude cannibalism, is nevertheless a compelling read.

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