by Maggie Downs
“Good enough,” he says.
It is everything my travel doctor has warned me about—medicine that looks like candy; an open package of pills; a pharmacist in a sketchy store who doesn’t speak the same language—so I am skeptical, but I don’t have much choice.
This village has five internet cafés and several bars, but only one pharmacy. It would take many hours by bus on dirt roads to reach the next town of any size. In addition, labor protests have shut down the major roads, and it is uncertain if anyone can get through. I am stranded in this town.
The drugs in my pocket still don’t change the fact that I need stitches, and the hospital is sketchy. I hurry back to the animal sanctuary and find the staff veterinarian.
The vet is a small, sweaty man with a mild command of English. He tugs a black thread in a zigzag pattern through my skin, ties a knot, and trims the excess. Then he dabs purple fluid on the wound. It looks terrible.
“Better,” he says. “Come back if hand becomes pus.”
I suppose there’s a wildness to everything in our lives; we just don’t realize it. I think about how Reno’s behavior shifted swiftly, how even the mighty tree line was ravaged in a matter of minutes. It’s the same way my mother’s disease seemed to strike from nowhere and caught my family by surprise. One day you’re surrounded by jungle bliss; the next day the trees fall.
One thing I have trouble admitting, even to myself, is that I’m terrified of what happens if the disease comes for me. I don’t want Jason to have to live with the wreckage of my mind. I don’t want my family and friends to witness my erasure. Part of the reason I embarked on this trip was to complete my mom’s goals, but this is also a battle against the disease itself, cramming myself full of my own memories, hoarding them and holding them tight, before anything is taken.
I know that’s not the way things work. The only reliable thing is unpredictability, and diseases strike when you least expect them, as do animals. But I have to try.
That’s why I decide to stay at the sanctuary for a few more days. It is an act of courage to be here. It is an act of courage to exist in the world at all.
I tell myself I can handle this, even though it’s hard to work when I feel threatened and unsafe. I am hot and hungry and tired of eating bananas. I smell terrible. My body is caked with three days’ worth of sweat, dirt, monkey piss. Now blood. Even the monkeys are turning against me. If I hadn’t given up so much to be in this place right now, I would buy a ticket and fly home. But what kind of person would I be if I gave up now? The whole reason I wanted to travel was to see what I was made of, to discover how strong I could really be, to live out the dreams of my mother.
I give myself three days before I plan to return to La Paz—cutting short my volunteer stint by just two days—and I’ll continue to my mom’s next life-list item from there. I’ll be at the sanctuary long enough to do more of the work I have loved, long enough to challenge myself, long enough to prove I’m not running away from anything.
Sweetness Remains
A FEW DAYS AFTER RENO’S ATTACK, I TAKE A MINIBUS TO A bigger city and purchase another bus ticket to head to the southern part of the country. I’m aiming for Sucre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site made up of white colonial buildings, magnificent churches, and leafy plazas.
It is dark when the bus finally crawls out of Cochabamba, a city shaped like a soup bowl, where dirt and pollution hang in the air. The elevation coupled with the air quality leaves me breathless, and I’m happy to keep moving.
My large backpack has been stuffed in the luggage compartment under the bus, but I have another, smaller backpack that contains my valuables and a handful of necessities under my seat.
I am dirty. I am worn. I am cold. My hand throbs from monkey bites.
I shove the broken bus window as far shut as it will go. When it won’t budge the final inch, I plug an extra pair of socks into the gaping hole. Even with that insulation the air is still frigid. I stuff the earbuds of my iPhone into my ears and crank up George Harrison, which has become the soundtrack for my trip. “My Sweet Lord” provides such tremendous comfort, listening to it becomes its own kind of prayer. Sometimes I wonder if my mom listened to it while she was pregnant, but there’s nobody who can answer that question.
I’m wearing my thickest fleece jacket, and I use the other one like a blanket, pulled tight over my body like a mummy wrap. I stretch my hat down over my ears as far as it will go, then wedge a couple of T-shirts between the side of my head and the window. I scrunch my eyes shut and try to sleep, but the vehicle has different plans.
The bus groans up each hill with high-pitched, metallic shrieks, then moans when it reaches the top. This happens often. Bolivia is a hilly country. Once in a while the weak headlights illuminate the landscape, showcasing a world of sheer drop-offs and streets that crumble down the sides of mountains.
Occasionally the driver pulls over to the general vicinity of the side of the road, where he opens the wheezy doors to let more people board the vehicle in exchange for a palmful of coins. Every time I think we can’t squeeze another passenger on the bus, we add ten more. The passengers carry burlap sacks—some grain, some potatoes—and pile them high in between the seats. They perch on top of the mountainous lumps like possessive hens.
Then there are the potholes. Nearly every rotation of the tires means another hard thunk of the bus and another thwack of my head against the window.
After an hour, the bus feels like a hostage situation, and I am miserable. I can’t recall a life without hairy arms on my neck, bags of bananas on my lap, chaotic bus noise, and strange, fermented smells. I no longer remember what it feels like to sleep without my head smacking a window. Of course, comfort is one of those things that you don’t fully appreciate until it’s gone.
I knew that backpacking wouldn’t be a string of stays at fancy hotels, but somehow I didn’t think about hours of numb thighs and teeth-rattling rides along treacherous roads and the feeling that what I am doing is utterly pointless. My mother’s disease has brought me here, and for what? She doesn’t even know where or who I am.
I could be at home. At home I have a hypoallergenic mattress with a Tempur-Pedic foam top. I have a husband who fits the shape of my body inside his long, warm arms. I have a pillow. And I don’t have a hairy stranger in the seat behind me, trying to cop a feel under the guise of dropping his sack of bananas.
I close my eyes, breathe deeply, and tell myself this is all part of the experience. This isn’t about staying comfortable. Discomfort was the goal. I just need to change my attitude—one person’s bone-jarring bus seat is someone else’s vibrating massage chair, after all. Another deep breath. Then I open my eyes.
There, in the seat in front of me, a hefty Bolivian woman hoists her skirt to her waist as she squats to the floor.
I rub my eyes, the way cartoon animals do when they want to wake up. Yep. The woman is still there. Still squatting. How peculiar.
Over the roar of the bus squeaking, the metal heaving, the people snoring, I hear an unmistakable hiss.
“Oh no,” I say.
I try to catch the attention of the men seated behind me.
“Oh no.”
I point to the woman for anyone who will bother to look.
The bus begins its ascent up another hill.
That’s when I remember my backpack.
I reach under the seat for my black bag.
It is slick with wetness and stinks of fresh pee. Thankfully, my backpack has a waterproof lining, so my passport, laptop, and other items inside remain unscathed, even while the backpack itself is soppy with warm fluid. I am too shocked to say anything to the woman, who has settled back into her seat and already appears to be asleep.
After a total of eleven hours, the bus drops us off in the center of Sucre. My muscles ache, my shoulders are bruised, and pins and needles shoot up my legs. My backpack is wet, and I hold it at an arm’s length. I’m as grouchy and sour as I’ve ever been.
The one solace is this place where I’ve landed, one of the most gorgeous cities I’ve ever seen. The buildings are sculpted and buttery, like gingerbread slathered in white frosting. It reminds me of the miniature village my mom used to display on the fireplace mantle at Christmastime.
The morning light is golden and diffuse, and the delicate blue of the sky is embroidered with clouds. The lack of congestion and pulsing music gives the town a sensuous, slow-paced feel.
I know I’m supposed to be on a journey for adventure, but I can’t find it within me to seek it out today. So I check into a hotel instead of a hostel, even though it’s going to cost more money. I just want to unpack.
My room contains a private bathroom, and I fill the tub with water. I scrub myself thoroughly with a rough washcloth and heavily perfumed soap. When I’m clean, I drain the tub and fill it again with water so hot it steams up the entire room, and then I submerge my backpack. As it soaks, the water grows dark, like a sooty tea. I rinse and rinse until the water runs pure.
After I hang the bag to dry, I walk downstairs to the hotel’s breakfast buffet. I tear through eggs, fresh fruit, and toast. When the employees aren’t looking, I wrap buñuelos—fried dough balls—in napkins and slip them into the cargo pockets of my hiking pants. They taste better dipped in honey, but the plain pastry will suffice later today when I’m hungry and alone.
My afternoon is spent walking the historic center of Sucre, where the buildings gleam confection-white, my pockets heavy with Bolivian doughnuts. These pastries are not remarkable, but even so I wish I could share them with my mom, who has developed a fierce craving for sugar over the past couple of years.
Alzheimer’s disease tampers with everything inside a body, even the taste buds. One theory is that dementia causes a patient to lose the ability to remember flavor. Others say the distortion of taste buds is a normal side effect of an aging body.
Whatever the cause, the effect is like eating when you have a terrible cold, one of my mom’s doctors explained. There’s a barrier to the flavors you once knew. When taste is impaired, the only flavors that can break through the barrier are the strongest ones, like salty, fatty, or syrupy sweet.
For my mom, a longtime enthusiast of mint chocolate chip ice cream and red licorice, her tastes always leaned heavily on the sweet side. Now, ten years into dementia, even more so. These days her food pyramid is constructed on a foundation of applesauce and chocolate pudding. When she refuses to eat the overdone vegetables on her dinner plate at the nursing home, a sprinkle of sugar makes them palatable.
I appreciate this. It’s the one minor kindness of a horrific disease. When the road stretches long and dark and ragged, it’s sweetness that remains at the end of it.
Life Is Worth Celebrating
THERE’S A TV SHOW I WATCHED IN PREPARATION FOR MY trip, a documentary series called I Shouldn’t Be Alive that features near-death experiences and stories of survival.
“Why are you watching that show again?” Jason would ask. “It’s creepy.”
“It could save my life,” I’d say. “I’m learning what not to do.”
I was joking, of course. Though I’d heard plenty of stories about backpackers getting mugged or having their ATM cards stolen, I didn’t think my backpacking trip would be a risky endeavor.
My incident with the snake in the rainforest taught me better, and then I was attacked by a monkey in Bolivia. But it’s not until I get to Tupiza that I realize just how easily I could have my very own episode of I Shouldn’t Be Alive.
Tupiza is Bolivia’s version of the Wild West, a small town of red dirt and tumbleweeds, horses and broken liquor bottles. I arrive about a week after leaving the animal sanctuary and cleaning up in Sucre, the stitches from the monkey bite still violet and throbbing.
I book a four-day trek of Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia’s great salt flats, with the tour agency that has the best online reviews. This is a place that my mom once showed me either in a book or a magazine, I can’t remember anymore. What I do recall is that the photograph of the otherworldly terrain made her gasp as soon as she turned the page and saw it. Blue sky and ground as flat and smooth and white as notebook paper.
“That’s salt, Margaret,” she said, visibly excited, poking her index finger at the vast expanse of white. It looked like the earth before anything was created for it; a blank slate. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
I hadn’t. But I’m about to.
The tour leaves from Tupiza with a driver, a cook, four other travelers, and myself, taking us through some of the most remote spots of Bolivia before returning to Tupiza.
Right away, the tour goes wrong.
Our mode of transportation is a Land Cruiser that has logged well over 250,000 miles. As it climbs craggy mountain roads, we have one flat tire and some engine problems. We wander the mountain road on foot, taking photos while Carlos, our driver, changes the tire and tinkers under the hood. I don’t have a lot of faith in this vehicle.
Though I paid extra for an English-speaking guide, the driver and cook speak only a few words of English. Luckily, one of the tourists is Argentinian, and she offers to translate the driver’s words for the rest of us. It is through her that I learn the cook brought only meat-based foods, even though the tour office said it would be no problem that I’m a vegetarian.
We arrive in the rural town of San Antonio de Lipez just as a gray dusk settles. The arid landscape seems barely fit for humans. There are supposedly 250 inhabitants in this place, but I see no farms, no livestock, no people. The mountains are dotted with scrub brushes and crumbling walls.
Our home for the night is a compact structure made of stone and brown clay. The roof is nothing more than a patchy tarp, and snow falls inside the room. There is no heater or running water. When I exhale, my breath forms little clouds. Another tour group joins us—this one with three British men and one British woman, all doing a gap year of travel between high school and college.
I wrap myself in wool blankets, then wiggle into my sleeping bag, cursing the fact that it was made for summer camping. Ali, one of the youngest Brits, dons the sleeping bag he rented from his tour company. The bag is shaped vaguely like a human but comes to a point at each end, giving him the appearance of a giant orange starfish.
“Do you guys think I’m sexy?” he says, posing for us.
“Unbelievably,” says Gemma, the British woman. “I can hardly resist you.”
We were scheduled to be much farther along the trail by now, but the bad tire and engine problems delayed us a few hours. Also snow is on the horizon, and Carlos says we shouldn’t push the vehicle through a storm at night.
Unfortunately, this means we didn’t make it to a stop where we could obtain necessary supplies. Instead of dinner, the cook hands over bologna sandwiches and packages of crackers. Gemma pulls a huge bottle of Bolivian whiskey from her backpack. And that’s when we are told the bad news.
The British group’s guide says the storm is expected to be the worst they’ve ever seen. With grim faces, the guides give us two options:
1. Ride out the storm in San Antonio de Lipez. The risk, however, is that the storm will linger too long, and we will either freeze to death or run out of food.
2. Find an alternate route through the mountains on rugged, abandoned roads in a vehicle that could potentially break down, far beyond cell phone range or emergency service. We run the risk of getting stranded in the storm, but we’ll have a chance of making it to our next stop.
Carlos leaves the decision to us. He disappears with the cook and the other guides outside, where they smoke cigarettes and sip from flasks.
Gemma’s whiskey bottle is passed around the table, and each of us takes a hefty nip to stay warm. We breathe on our mittened hands and discuss the pros and cons of each option. Ride out the snowstorm in an uninhabited place with no access to food or heat? Or find an alternate route through the mountains on abandoned roads during a storm in a vehicle that has already proven to be un
reliable? Either one is terrible.
We all came here looking for something beautiful and special. Now the landscape is nothing but grim. The frigidness of the air makes me nervous. My bones ache from cold. Will these brown, crumbling walls frame my last memories?
Eventually the discussion takes an even darker turn: with little food left, which one of us should be eaten first?
“I’m out, you guys,” I say. “I’m a vegetarian.”
“That just means your flesh will be the most tender,” Ali jokes. “Like grass-fed beef.”
“Maggie it is!” cheers Gemma. “Let’s eat Maggie!”
“No!” I laugh, and it is a laugh tinged with fear. We could actually die here. As a tourist, you like to think you’re immune to the trouble of the real world, separated from actual hardship and turmoil. It can feel like entering a movie set where everything is picture-perfect and happy endings are guaranteed. The world is not a set, though, and life doesn’t play out like a script. Sometimes journeys take a bad turn.
It’s what I’ve seen on every episode of I Shouldn’t Be Alive. It’s never one decision that brings people to the brink of death—it’s a series of little, confusing moments that snowball into catastrophe.
That’s what I never realized when I was safe at home watching the show: anything can happen at any time. The featured stories aren’t about daredevils or extreme risk takers. They are normal people who go for a hike and don’t bring enough water. People who take a weekend yachting trip and misread their maps. People just like me and my new friends. Traveling is not a detour from reality. It’s simply reality.
By the time the whiskey bottle is empty, we’ve decided to see what weather conditions are like in the morning before we make a final decision. We sleep, uneasy and shivering on thin mattresses in small rooms.
At 5 a.m., there is a significant layer of snow on the ground. The group gathers at the table and takes a vote. We unanimously decide the better option is to press on, even if it’s the last choice we ever make.