by John Higham
25.
Aerobatic Maneuvers Not Permitted
April 9–April 20
Bolivia Again!
After sticking our feet into the bitter cold waters of the Straits of Magellan, we said good-bye to the southern tip of South America and flew back to La Paz, Bolivia. In La Paz, we met up with September’s father, P.
He has a real name, Dale, but everyone calls him “P.” When the first grandchild came, rather than being called “Grandpa” he preferred “Aged Parent,” in honor of a smelly, crotchety old man in a Dickens novel. “Aged Parent” was a bit tricky to pronounce for a two-year-old so it got shortened to “Aged P,” which garnered a few stares so it was shortened to simply “P.”
P is a techno junkie, and when September had asked me if I thought he would bring along his handheld GPS unit, I assured her he’d remember to bring his GPS before he’d remember to bring underwear. Naturally, Katrina and Jordan greeted him at the airport by asking, “P, did you remember to bring any underwear?”
P looked a little perplexed. “I think so. At least I know I’m wearing some right now.”
The tires on P’s red-eye plane were still smoldering on the tarmac when we all hopped onto a single-engine plane to Rurrenabaque, in the northern Amazon region of Bolivia. One hour and more than eleven thousand feet lower in elevation, we were standing on a grass airstrip in one of the most untouched parts of the Amazon basin. From here we would start a six-day journey into the rain forest that would prove to be memorable not only for its beauty and remoteness but also for what we would learn about ourselves.
We checked into a small hotel in the tiny town of Rurrenabaque. The hotel courtyard sported a toucan and two macaws, and as Katrina and Jordan loved befriending the resident pets, all three birds immediately received more attention than they had in months.
To the kids’ delight, P is a walking encyclopedia of animal knowledge. However, since after staying at Dolphin Bay in Panama, Katrina and Jordan had become toucan “experts,” and were able to fill a void in P’s knowledge.
“A toucan may have a really big beak, but it can’t bite very hard, see?” Jordan demonstrated by sticking his finger out to let the toucan have a taste.
“But don’t try that with a macaw,” Katrina shot back. “It could take your finger off!” She tossed one of the macaws a large Brazil nut, which it cracked and opened with its beak as if the shell were no more than a candy wrapper.
The next morning we met our native guide, René, piled into a large canoe with an outboard motor, and began our journey into the rain forest. As I stood in the canoe, René tossed me an enormous propane tank as if it were a football. I staggered and nearly fell over the edge of the canoe into the water. “John-Rambo,” René chuckled, “not too heavy for you, is it?”
The nickname John-Rambo stuck. Unfortunately, I don’t think he referred to me as such because of my striking similarity to the movie character.
After loading our supplies, we puttered three hours up the Rio Beni, which is one of many tributaries to the mighty Rio Amazonas. P, who single-handedly keeps Duracell profitable by powering his small electronic gadgets, held his GPS unit toward the sky to receive satellite signals tracking our route. Our destination was a small jungle camp in Bolivia’s Parque Nacional Madidi.
When we arrived at our camp in the rain forest, P immediately took a GPS reading and marked the location on the GPS’s internal map. I gave him a glance with eyebrows raised.
“Just in case,” P said.
“Just in case our guide has a heart attack?” I quipped. P begs for good-natured ribbing over his obsessive GPS data collection.
As we explored our small camp we were reminded that this region of Bolivia is relatively new to visitors. Had we chosen to visit the Amazon Basin in Peru or Brazil, we would have found a well-established jungle lodge complete with electricity and running water. In Bolivia, however, our camp consisted of a rough wooden hut with cots and lights powered by candlesticks. The camp did have a real toilet, although to flush it you had to dump a bucket of river water into the bowl.
Jordan’s Journal, April 11
P brought us our books (instead of having them mailed to us). One of the books is Explorers Wanted! about the Amazon Rain forest. Some of the animals that it talks about sound scary, but the scariest are the insects. There is one that bites you and then you just drop dead 20 years later. I like to read it to Mom because it grosses her out.
I took to the camp hammocks immediately. When René found me lying in one he said, “John-Rambo, no nap time! Hike time!”
So almost immediately after arriving at our camp we took off on one of many hikes through the jungle. As we walked along, the tree canopy over our heads was so thick that it was almost dark, and insects buzzed constantly around our faces in the sweltering heat. We followed behind René as he hacked away at the overgrown trail with his machete.
René made a detour around what I considered a natural path. I didn’t want to go out of the way to follow where he had walked, so I continued along my chosen path and blundered straight into a massive spider web. I didn’t see the spider, but I’m sure the spider heard me.
“John-Rambo,” René said patiently in his fractured English, “follow me. You don’t want to scare spiders.”
After that, I followed René’s instructions exactly. We could be hiking along, passing all manner of flora and fauna, and suddenly René would state simply, “Don’t touch that tree.” Or, “Don’t touch that plant.” Sometimes his voice took on a bit more urgency as he would direct us to “run very quickly across these ants.”
I’m not sure if he did that just to spook us. The kids were at an age where they were sure nothing in the world could harm them. September was a different story, and followed René’s instructions precisely. Whenever René’s voice took on a cautionary tone, P would say, “Oh my, yes. That’s the flesh-eating (blank) of the Amazon. You wouldn’t want to touch that!”
Katrina’s Journal, April 12
We saw a bunch of howler monkeys in the tops of the trees. They jump from branch to branch. René said that if one of them slipped and fell to the ground that they would be banished from that group and would have to find another group to live with. I thought that was really mean. Dad said, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” When I asked him what he meant, he said that after millions of years of evolution humans hadn’t learned all that much, and then started muttering to himself like grown-ups do sometimes.
As we trudged along, René pointed out animal tracks, but when he pointed out a set of jaguar tracks, September lost her cool. “What are we doing out here?” she cried. “Jaguars eat people!”
“Not you worry,” René replied, “tracks are one week old.”
This mollified September somewhat, until later that day when we found a fresh kill, which consisted of no more than a few feathers and something gizzardy. September gritted her teeth and trudged on.
During our jungle hikes we saw and heard lots of evidence of wildlife, but aside from various monkeys high in the treetops and a large herd of wild boar, we didn’t see many mammals or reptiles in the jungle. There were just too many places to hide for an animal that didn’t want to be seen.
After slogging through all manner of muck, hacking through dense undergrowth, and crossing streams and small rivers while balancing on the tiniest of log “bridges,” René did manage to get more or less, um, disoriented. “A few weeks ago, a guide got lost,” a red-faced René confessed. “He and his group had to sleep in the forest all night.”
“Ha! Not to worry!” replied September. “We have a GPS device that will show us which way back to camp!” René had never heard of such a gizmo, which was just as well. The GPS didn’t work.
“Well.” (P tends to speak monosyllabically when on stage.) “It seems that my GPS unit can’t pick up any satellites under the rain forest canopy.”
Poetic justice. Ten billion dollars in satellite infrastructure rendered
useless by about 50 feet of tree leaves! We did find our way back to camp using the low-tech method of retracing our steps, which was harder than it sounds.
René one, High Tech, zero.
The Amazon is insect heaven. Most strikingly, we constantly witnessed an immense kaleidoscope of colorful butterflies, and more ant varieties than we ever knew existed, such as the 24-hour ant.
Jordan, who had done extensive research in his Explorers Wanted! book, picked up one of the inch-long critters that was clinging to a stick. “Hey, Mom! If one of these stings you, it feels like you’re on fire for 24 hours!”
September found the leaf-cutter ants more intriguing. To know September is to understand that she can’t stand to see anyone, or anything, mindlessly go along with the crowd. Which is why the leaf-cutter ants drove her mad.
Leaf-cutter ants are farmers. With one mind and one purpose they cut large bits of leaves off a particular variety of tree and carry the leaf fragments back to their colony. The leaves then decay and grow a fungus that feeds the colony.
In the rain forest we could see leaf-cutter ant highways everywhere. These paths were three to four inches wide and hundreds of yards long. The bumper-to-bumper traffic flowing in one direction was of empty-handed ants heading to the tree. Flowing the other direction was an endless procession of huge chunks of leaves, each being carried by a tiny ant. Each ant was working for the collective good of the colony, complaining about neither working conditions, nor the lack of days off, nor that the Internet connection is basic dial-up.
September took it as her personal mission to try to get an individual leaf-cutter ant to assert its own personality. She started by using a stick to pick up an ant that was heading back to the colony with its leaf.
“You don’t have to do this!” she said to the ant. “The rest of the colony won’t notice if you don’t deliver your leaf! Take the rest of the day off and go to the beach.”
With those simple instructions, she gave the ant a 180 degree about-face. In every case, the ant would figure out that it had been turned around and that it had to head back toward the colony and deliver its payload.
September has never given up easily. If she couldn’t get one ant to take a mental health day, she would see if she could drive the entire column of ants off to ant Disneyland. She built an off-ramp from their little highway.
This started small—she placed just a single stick across their path. The empty-handed ants milled around, confused, on one side of the stick, and the leaf-carrying ants congregated on the other side. The ants ultimately prevailed and found a way around the stick. September’s diversionary tactics grew until she had built a trench across their path several inches deep, lined with aluminum foil and filled with water.
It took the poor little critters quite a while to figure out what was going on, but eventually they were able to get around every diversion that September put in their way.
Her attempt at transforming a conformist ant into an individualist ant is the only thing I have known September to have failed at. That and getting me to like classical music. An ant is an ant, and will always be an ant.
Three days later we left our rain forest dwelling and made our way via canoe to the “pampas” region of the Bolivian Amazon, to the aptly named Mosquito Camp Number 3.
Mosquito Camp was not in the jungle, but in the grasslands on the edge of a slow-moving river, a tributary to the Rio Beni. We arrived at the very beginning of the dry season. The river was subsiding from its seasonal highs, but the water was still at the level of many of the tree-tops. Mosquito Camp was supposed to give us better wildlife viewing opportunities. It did just that, even before we arrived.
As René guided our canoe up the river, he maneuvered it next to a tree that had only its very topmost branches extending out of the water. In a few weeks the tree would be several yards away from the water’s edge. The tree branches seemed to come alive. As if on cue, dozens of small, bright yellow monkeys came scurrying to the canoe. Clearly this wasn’t René’s first visit to this tree.
“John-Rambo, catch!” René threw an overripe banana to me as the monkeys came storming aboard. I broke it in half and gave the pieces to Katrina and Jordan. The monkeys swarmed all over Katrina and Jordan, jockeying into position to get a free handout.
An hour later, Mosquito Camp Number 3 came into view. René called out, “John-Rambo, hop out and pull the boat to shore and tie it up. Plastico, he may be lonely. Just scratch him behind the ears.”
I had no idea what René was talking about, other than that he wanted me to tie up the canoe. Grabbing the rope that was fixed to the stern, I hopped into the water.
Something in the water moved. I saw a pair of eyes coming toward me. As the eyes came closer it was clear that they were attached to an eight-foot-long alligator.
I don’t really know what happened next. Somehow I was hovering somewhere about four feet above the surface of the water looking down. “John-Rambo,” René was laughing so hard he could hardly speak, “meet Plastico, the flesh-eating alligator of the Amazon. He just wants a scratch behind the ears. And maybe some spaghetti.” I was four feet above the water, the hovering made possible by the balcony I was standing on; I just don’t recall scrambling onto it.
Plastico was the resident alligator who had chosen to make Mosquito Camp Number 3 his home. We found over the next few days every camp in the area had its own resident alligator who hung out by the kitchen waiting for table scraps.
With the canoe tied up to one of the legs of the building, I called down to the kids, “An alligator can’t climb up onto the balcony, so you’ll be safe up here. Just step directly from the canoe to the balcony.” After the kids scurried from the canoe to the balcony and were safe beside me, I continued, “as long as you’re in one of the buildings or on the balcony, you’re safe. You are to never come off the balcony without an adult.”
This was the wrong thing to say. The kids are always drawn to a building’s resident pets, such as the toucan and the macaws at our hotel in Rurrenabaque. Now that we had stumbled onto a resident alligator, they were immediately drawn to it.
It didn’t help that René went up to the alligator and scratched the thing behind its… ears? Where does an alligator keep its ears? Anyway, you could tell by the way René moved that he respected Plastico, but was still comfortable approaching him, feeding him, and even scratching the thing behind the ears.
We had dinner a couple of hours later. Spaghetti. After dinner, René fed Plastico the table scraps. Somehow, Plastico didn’t look as threatening with spaghetti dangling from his teeth. If it were possible, I became somewhat “adjusted” to life in camp with a resident alligator.
If Plastico had been a bear, he would have come right into the kitchen and torn the place apart, claiming every scrap of food for himself. But Plastico was content to sit outside the kitchen door with his mouth open, waiting for a handout. There he would sit, not moving or even, it would seem, breathing, for hours. Just waiting.
Now that we were in the pampas we went out on many sorties exploring and looking for wildlife. But unlike the jungle where our legs did the trekking, here we let the canoe take us on our expeditions.
We were looking for anacondas, piranhas, capybaras, pink river dolphins, and caimans, a kind of small crocodile. All these we found, in addition to a monkey for every branch. We even spotted a quetzal, a rare bird that symbolizes freedom throughout Latin America.
We went out looking for alligators that first night. We all piled into the canoe with our flashlights. After a few minutes, I couldn’t help but think that this was futile. The river was so wide and black our puny flashlights were no match for the darkness. I shined my flashlight down river, but its light was swallowed by the blackness. As there was nothing to reflect back the light, all we could see were the fireflies dancing in the treetops.
René knew that was the point.
It took us about half an hour of searching before we found something that would reflect the l
ight. In the distance, just breaking the surface of the water, a pair of glowing orange eyes shone in the blackness, waiting patiently—just like Plastico—for something to underestimate the blackness and venture within striking distance.
René had a genuine fondness for Plastico. But he kept several boat lengths between us and this pair of orange glowing eyes.
It was fitting that both Katrina and Jordan both asked about this later: why we didn’t get any closer. “You need to know what is dangerous and keep your distance,” P admonished. “And if you don’t know, bring someone along who does.” Useful advice for any jungle, concrete or otherwise.
• • •
“Today, we must catch our dinner!” René announced.
René passed out some loose fishing line and hooks, and prepared a small bowl with scraps of bloody raw beef. “Tonight we will be dining on the flesh-eating piranha of the Amazon.”
We took the canoe to a promising spot, baited our hooks, and without benefit of poles, dropped our lines into the water. Immediately I could feel action on the end of my line, but when I tried to hook the fish, I missed. I pulled in the line and found just the bait dangling off the hook, looking forlorn.
From my database of playground folklore, my expectation was that I would pull my baited hook from the water and there would be a half dozen piranhas tearing at the bait like pit bulls.
René, on the other hand, was pulling in piranhas one after the other. The piranhas were tiny: Each would yield no more than a forkful. But the piranhas also had massive teeth for their size, and those teeth were very sharp.
“John-Rambo!” René was tweaking me again. “You no catch piranha? You need to learn first how they eat.” He then demonstrated something that shocked me. He stuck his bare arm into the water.
“Unless the piranha smells blood,” René blithely advised, “it will not feed. Don’t try this with a cut on your arm.”