Chapter 6
Puerto Maldonado
On the morning of February 10, we plodded back down the jungle path then ferried across the river to the landing strip. Everyone watched in silence as a plane circled overhead before descending. When it taxied across the grass successfully, we all applauded in a burst of relief. Ominously, the plane looked exactly like the first one, the fuselage bearing the same red bull’s-eye. The carcass of the original still lay lopsided off the strip like a shamed contestant.
Fitz and I settled onto the bench, once again staring at a mound of luggage tied down in the middle of the aisle. The sewing machine was absent. Everyone fell silent as the plane revved its twin engines, began its scream across the grass, then rolled slightly as it cleared the river.
I don’t recall anyone speaking for the entire two-hour trip to Puerto Maldonado. I, for one, was mostly praying as I gripped Fitz’s hand.
We continued to clasp hands as we descended into the airport, both of us making a point of not looking out the window until the plane had come to a complete stop. The tension inside the plane was matched by the suffocating heat outside. There was no fleet of taxi drivers waiting to haggle over fares into town. We said good-bye to the other passengers, who were met with embraces by family and friends. Briefly, I wanted that, too.
The curve of the road wound up a gradual hill to meet the horizon, like a vanishing point in a painting. Rio Madre de Dios lay just a mile away. We would ride her through the jungle toward the Amazon River.
Lugging our packs, we flagged a ride with a passing truck. In back were five young girls riding home from school. The presence of gringos always was a source of jubilant curiosity for children. We exchanged names and pointed out the English word for everything we passed. Giggling, the girls shouted the Spanish equivalents.
One girl, Margarita, with lovely brown eyes, led us to a cheap tavern in town with three inexpensive rooms at the rear. Rustic but clean, it cost only one dollar a night. Grateful to have a room to ourselves after three nights in the barracks, we were pleased to see that the half walls were screened to receive the tropical breeze. Behind our room was a patio rimmed by flush toilets and outdoor sinks. There was even a shade tree.
As soon as we stowed our bags, Fitz and I set out to book passage on the boat to Riberalta. Puerto Maldonado, population thirty-five hundred, was a frontier town. Capital of the Peruvian department of Madre de Dios, it was by far the least inhabited capital in the nation. Cut from the jungle, it looked to be about six square blocks of homes and shops, unpaved roads, and a small sawmill for Amazonian timber that was sent from upriver. A tall cement tower with a broken clock stood in the center of the town square. Open sewers ran down the sides of the roads to the harbor, where children swam and bathed, and where women washed clothes.
The chief port officer, the aduana, was an easy man to find in his office by the harbor. I stared at his neatly mustached lip in disbelief as he calmly informed us that no boat would sail to Riberalta for at least three months. He leaned back in his chair behind his desk as he explained there was practically no traffic between Peru and Bolivia through this frontier. Only one man, who had relatives in Riberalta, was known to make the trip every few months. He would take passengers aboard, for a minimal sum, if they were traveling in the same direction. He’d just left recently.
“But what about the commercial boats? When do they leave?” Fitz asked, shocked.
“Commercial boats?” The aduana stood up, his posture now ironing-board straight. “There are no commercial boats.”
Apparently the commercial boat route that was displayed on our map with dots did not exist. Obviously, commercial boat departure dates, written in the travel guide, did not exist either. We showed the map and the book to the port officer. He handed it to his men. They muttered and shook their heads. No one knew why the route was printed on the map, or why the dates were in the book. “A mistake,” the aduana said, shrugging, his hands uplifted. “There are no boats.”
When we remained standing in his office, not knowing what to do, the officer finally said, “Perhaps there is a plane going there sometime. Check at the airport.” He shuffled some papers to show he was a busy man.
Fitz and I looked at each other. Since no phones existed to call for an airline schedule, we would have to return to the airport.
I thanked the aduana for his time and asked how to get back to the airport.
“Go to the Plaza de Armas and wait. There will be a truck sometime today.”
At the airport we learned that no flights were scheduled out of Maldonado in any direction for three weeks, and then only back to Pucallpa. We told the officer that we were desperate to get to the Amazon River.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. No flights to Riberalta. No one goes. It’s a small place, smaller than here, and we are small. Not many people come or go at all.”
During our four and a half months traveling in South America, we’d never been so disappointed. Unless we waited three months, until someone might take a boat down the river, we would have to abandon our dream of seeing the Amazon River. Riberalta was our gateway to Brazil. From Riberalta it was only two days’ ride by truck to Puerto Velho, where all the guidebooks agreed that boats could be found to take us down Rio Madeira north to “the River Sea.” We had no sure way to go but backward, and we would need to wait weeks to do that.
We decided to go back to the hotel to think about it.
—
In the evening, some friendly people in the streets directed us to a café called La Genovesa. It had four tables, a corrugated metal roof, and a dirt floor. Low half walls of thin, plaited wooden straps allowed outside air to supplement the sulking ceiling fan.
The smell of Italian spices softened our mood. The owners’ petite teenage daughter, Eamara, had glossy black hair and smiled as she showed us to a table. She served plates of steak, boiled potatoes, fried tomatoes, and bananas. The food was not much different from the usual South American fare, but the herbs transported us to Boston’s North End, or to Julio’s, the small Italian place Fitz had taken me to in a basement near Gramercy Park.
“We would have made that man’s boat if it hadn’t been for the damn plane crash,” Fitz grumbled.
“What about the commercial boat that was supposed to leave tomorrow? We would have made that if it existed.”
“Ha!” Fitz grunted.
“Well, what are we going to do now? We’re stuck here with no boat and no plane.”
Fitz began scraping his dish. “That was damn good. I could have another.”
I laughed, agreeing and enjoying his pleasure. I watched his curly head ponder his plate as his fork stabbed a small red pepper. “Be careful of those brutal seeds,” I warned, recalling that Fitz had eaten some red pepper seeds in La Paz. They’d been so hot he’d jumped onto the table between the dishes then leapt off the other side to run around the block, his jaws open, trying to cool his mouth.
“You can bet I won’t forget those!” he said, rolling his eyes. We both started laughing.
When there was nothing left on his plate but the pepper seeds, Fitz leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and shook his head as he inhaled. He exhaled slowly then rubbed his neck.
“So what else can we do but wait for a plane back to Pucallpa?” It seemed he was posing a rhetorical question, but a scowl crossed his face as what he’d just said seemed to sink in. “No way.” He lowered his voice. “So here we are, stuck again.”
“I think we can forget Carnaval.” I paused for a minute. We were right back to complaining. “We were lucky, you know. We could have been killed in that plane crash.”
“Yeah, we’re lucky all right,” Fitz said, sighing. “But I don’t see what that has to do with this.”
“Nothing. I’m just trying to look at the bright side. I can’t think of what to do. I don’t want to stay here forever, but I don’t want to go backward either.” I swirled the last of my Coke in the bottom of the glass.<
br />
“Want some more?” Fitz stubbed his cigarette out and turned to look for Eamara.
“Excuse me, please,” a voice came from behind me. I turned to see a distinguished man with salt-and-pepper hair getting up from a table nearby. “My name is Juan Nevanschwander. I am Peruvian, but I understand English well. I can’t help but overhear your difficulty.”
The man appeared to be in his fifties, with an air of well-polished Europe about him. He approached us, his white tailored suit in startling juxtaposition to the mud and sewers of Maldonado. A statement of hope, I thought, civilization in the frontier.
Fitz and I looked from him to each other, surprised that we’d been overheard. We had been so immersed in our conversation, we hadn’t noticed anyone was listening.
“We rarely see travelers here,” Juan continued. “Unless you’re exploring for gold, I can understand why you want to move on.”
“Well…,” I said, my mind whirling, wondering what we’d said about feeling stuck in Maldonado. “It’s a nice town. It’s just that we had plans to get to the Amazon River, and now no boats are going there for months.”
Juan asked the other patrons in Spanish if they knew of any boats going to Bolivia. “It’s true,” he said. “There are no boats.” He nodded to an empty seat at our table. “Perhaps I can help you. May I?”
“Sure,” said Fitz, popping up to pull out the chair.
Juan called Eamara for three glasses and a quart of beer. “I learned English when I worked in a Chicago bank for three years. I’m a mining engineer.”
“Really? What brings you here?” I asked.
“Gold.”
“You’re a prospector? That sounds like the old days. They still do that kind of thing here?”
“I work for a Bolivian bank that hired me to explore precious metal deposits.” He pulled a tobacco pouch and pipe from his suit pocket and smiled at them. “It’s nice to get back to civilization. I just returned from two months upriver. Have to go out again next week, after I get more supplies.”
My eyes widened. He thought this town was civilization? After living in Chicago?
“This place has had booms in its past—rubber, timber—but nothing for a long time. It’s poor,” Juan said, taking a sip of beer. “People leave. There’s no work. Just prospecting for the next thing the jungle may have to offer.”
“This really is the frontier,” I said.
“Yes. You’ve come a long way to see it.”
He wanted to hear our story. We told him about our plan to travel around the world. “Ambitious,” he said, nodding, “but how did you pick here? There’s nothing to see that you haven’t already seen in Pucallpa and other river towns.”
We explained about trying to meet a boat to Riberalta via Puerto Maldonado and the crash landing that had thrown us off.
Juan raised his eyebrow. “You still want to keep going?”
Fitz and I looked at each other. “Why, yes,” we both said, surprised that he had asked.
Juan tapped tobacco into his pipe as he observed us curiously. His right eyebrow arched higher than his left.
Fitz said, “You mentioned you might be able to help. Do you know of a way?”
“To tell you the truth, there’s not much traffic between Peru and Bolivia at any time of year. It’s just not a popular place to visit.” He sipped his beer then rubbed his bronze jaw back and forth as if it ached. “But you know…,” he said, pausing to place his glass back on the table.
I leaned forward in my chair. “Yes?”
“Have you thought of taking a raft? People here use rafts more than boats. We call them balsas. That’s the real means of transportation.”
I looked at Fitz. We had noticed a number of log rafts, both large and small, coming downriver into the harbor. A lightbulb clicked on behind my eyes. I knew Fitz saw the light in my eyes, too, because he shook his head quickly.
“You can only go downriver,” Juan continued, “but there’s plenty of wood, so people take rafts as far down as they wish then leave them for others.”
I wondered how people got back upriver, but since we were only going downriver I didn’t want to get off track by asking.
“I just came on a raft from upriver myself,” Juan said. “I do it all the time.” His black eyes snapped.
“Are you saying that we should take one of those banana-laden rafts?” Fitz asked. “They don’t look very sturdy.” A frown played on his forehead.
“No. I’m suggesting you make a raft to fit your needs. There are lots of people who have big ones that you can use. You don’t want it so big that you can’t handle it, or too small either. You can make it comfortable. Put a tent on it…and a cookstove.” He smiled. “A floating home.”
“Wait a minute,” Fitz said. “We take it down the river ourselves? We know nothing about rafts…”
“There’s nothing to it. A raft just goes with the current once you get started, until you want to pull in.”
This was beyond my wildest imaginings. It was a way to get out of here and move on to the Amazon. It could be fun. I began asking Juan every question I could think of without looking at Fitz to see his reaction. “Is it safe for people like us, who don’t know the river or the jungle?”
“Absolutely. It’s the same for anyone. You go with the river.”
It sounded preposterous. “Are you sure people do this for long trips?”
“Of course. That is how they do it. I’ve traveled these rivers many times. People use rafts. That’s why there are so few boats.”
“But we’ve never done it before.” My heart was skipping. I wanted to believe, but I needed reassurance.
Even though I asked the same questions over and over, our new friend assured us that the river would do the work. Juan lit his pipe again.
“How far to Riberalta?” I asked.
“As the river turns, perhaps eight hundred kilometers.”
I glanced at Fitz. “That’s about five hundred miles.” I turned back to Juan. “How many days would it take to get there?”
“The river is high and fast right now.” Juan exhaled a swirl of blue smoke. “No more than ten days. If you go night and day you should make it in five.”
“Go at night? We’d crash into something we couldn’t see!”
“No, there’ll be nothing as big as you on the river. No harm can come to you.”
“Could we get lost?” I persisted. “What about tributaries?”
“There are no rivers flowing off the Madre between here and Riberalta.” Juan puffed on his pipe thoughtfully. “Just stay in the main current and you won’t go off on a detour. Such detours always return to the main channel, but they take you longer. If you stay in the middle of the river, you’ll get there faster.”
I paused, trying to think of other questions. “How will we know when we’re at Riberalta? Don’t the towns look the same on the river?”
“No towns. Only fincas”—farms—“and the compounds at the border crossing. That’s it, jungle all the way.” He smiled. “You’ll see the real thing, no fake setup for tourists.”
After a minute of silence Juan said, “Another thing. You don’t need to worry about fresh fruit and bread. Just call out and people from the fincas will boat out and bring it to you.”
Fitz, who hadn’t said anything while I’d fired off my questions, finally spoke up. “Say we were to do it, how do we go about building a raft?”
“Best thing is to find one already built. Go down to the river and ask around. I can’t go with you tomorrow, but if you don’t find one, I’ll go with you the next day.”
—
“Well, what do you think?” I asked on our way back to our room.
“I think he’s crazy.” Fitz kicked the dirt in the road.
“But what else can we do? Wait here in this godforsaken town for three months for a boat? It could be a real adventure! Juan said nothing could go wrong…” My mood was flying as I talked, my feet barely touching the earth.
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br /> “And you believe him? We just met him for God’s sake. We don’t know him from a hole in the wall. Do you think because he sounds like he has all the answers that he couldn’t be wrong?”
“Oh, Fitz, he says he’s rafted hundreds of times. You even asked him how to make a raft. You’re interested, too.” I saw no risks.
“Look, we can stay right here for three months and wait for a boat,” Fitz said. “In fact, I’m surprised after what we’ve been through that you’re not voting for that, or even to turn back.”
“Oh, come on. You don’t think I’d want that, do you? You need to let loose and not be so cautious. We’ll be Huck and Jim. You just want me to talk you into it.”
Fitz didn’t say anything. Now I’d done it.
“I just don’t want to be foolish,” he finally said.
I saw there was an opening. He might really want to do it. I pushed the limit.
By the time we reached the hotel Fitz was talking about looking for a raft.
Chapter 7
Finding a Raft
At breakfast the next morning everyone at La Genovesa was excited about our expedition and was offering us advice about where to find a raft. Juan, who ate every meal there when he was in town, said he’d show us the path leading to the Tambopata River, a tributary feeding the Madre de Dios. I swallowed the last of my toast and downed my coffee. Fitz paid the bill then pinned his jeans pocket closed so he couldn’t lose his wallet to chance or thieves.
We followed Juan through town to where a narrow path paralleled the river and a bank dense with vegetation. Banana trees rose around us, the individual leaves up to six or seven feet long. There Juan left us, agreeing to meet for lunch.
The path took us to a clearing where a shack on stilts was surrounded by a small field of corn. A little raft was moored to a stake in the bank, too small for us. No one was around.
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