by Cahill, Tim
"Let's get out of here," Garry said. We sensed that we were in gasoline-bandit city.
I asked another group on another corner for the Pan-American north, and their directions led to another dead end. I needed to back up, then pull forward in order to turn around, and now dozens of people surrounded the truck.
"Move," Garry said. We were both very tense.
Several more sets of directions given by several more friendly people, both drunk and sober, resulted in disappointment. Mostly we found ourselves on dirt side streets facing some adobe wall that featured a faded advertisement for Inca Kola. Directions, in South America, are not meant to be taken seriously.
Perhaps local people feel it is rude to simply say, "I don't know." It is possible they may concoct false directions out of a sense of hospitality rather than any desire to mislead. Or it may be a macho trait: how embarrassing to have to admit to a stranger that you do not know your way in your own hometown. Then again, it may be the Gonzalo Pizarro effect. It was almost two hundred years after the ill-fated Pizarro expedition until the Indians of the eyebrow felt the lash of the Spanish.
At any rate, in South America, it is always best to ask directions several times, then triangulate a route based on what appears to be the best information tendered. We stopped half a dozen times until we found the road north out of town.
Garry took the wheel. This was bandit country and he had the evasive driving skills. The road ran straight through the sand and darkness.
No lights, no traffic. . . .
And there they were, half a dozen men with guns, waving us over. They didn't seem to be wearing uniforms. On the other hand—and these calculations were made in the space of about twenty seconds— there were two buildings on either side of the road and both were lit. It was close to the border with Ecuador and hence a good spot for a military or customs checkpoint.
"What do you think?" Garry asked.
"Military. I think."
It was, in fact, a military checkpoint. The tallest of the men, the officer who seemed to be in charge, wore a khaki safari suit and a foot-long knife in a leather sheath on his belt. He had a Spanish face, a crew cut, and pockmarked skin. The men serving under him were mestizos and looked like teenagers. They wore the black silky T-shirts of the Peruvian military which are emblazoned with the motto honor, discipline, loyalty. We were motioned out of the truck, and one of the teenagers held an automatic rifle at my neck. I could see that he had been trying, without much success, to grow a moustache. The safety on the rifle appeared to be off, and he had his finger on the trigger.
I smiled brilliantly, as if happy to see new friends and exchange stories. I thought: put your safety on, bozo.
Our papers were in order, and the soldiers lowered their guns, cautiously. We began handing out the flyers in Spanish, but the man with the knife simply dropped his on the ground, unread. It was a contemptuous gesture. He had the knife out of the sheath, and motioned at Garry to open the tailgate for a search.
The lights across the street came from a small bar that had apparently sprung up to serve the checkpoint. Several drunken men wandered over to watch the fun. Two of them held communal bottles of the fiery pale brandy called Pisco. They looked into the cab of the truck and muttered solemnly among themselves as Garry unlocked the camper shell. There was an anticipatory hush among the assembled drunks.
Garry fiddled with the twin padlocks, then pulled both doors open at once. A fetid smell of bad sour milk and diesel flooded out of the truck in a cloud that was almost visible. There was a loud murmuring among the drunks.
The officer thought about climbing into the back, looked at the diesel-smeared tailgate he'd have to kneel upon, regarded his spiffy safari suit, and pointed the knife at a box that, for once, did not contain milk shakes. Garry opened it for him. It was filled with cans of Argentine hashed beef.
"Bad food," I told a soldier. "I wouldn't feed Argentine hash to a dog." Peruvian food was much better, I said. Especially the seafood. And a Pisco sour was the best drink in the world.
The teenaged soldiers were warming up a bit, and several of them came over to listen to me blather on about the virtues of Peru and Peruvians. Our trip would take us through thirteen countries. We would always remember Peru. It was so beautiful. Did they want to see some letters of recommendation from the Peruvian auto club? In Spanish? Look here where it says that our trip perfectly expresses the ideal of Pan-American unity. Hey, did anyone want to ride with us to Alaska? Huh? How about you?
Meanwhile, Garry was dealing with the officer who, having decided against a search of the reeking camper shell, now wanted us to drive the truck back behind the building. Garry looked at me. We didn't like the idea of being pulled off the road, out of sight, where anything could happen. I motioned for Joe to follow me as I walked behind the truck. We didn't want them to split us up.
The drunks followed in a merry band. I hated them.
In back there was a narrow pit dug into the ground and Garry, as instructed, drove the truck over it. The officer lowered himself under the truck, and Garry followed him down so no contraband could be planted. The pit, it seemed, wasn't used much. It was filled, calf-deep, with garbage. Using a flashlight and flexible file, the officer poked around for ten minutes.
I was in full joke mode with the drunks and teenagers. What a pleasure it was to talk with such honorable and witty men. Would anyone like a lapel pin? This is a maple leaf; this one is a replica of the truck. Well, yes, the truck is very dirty now, so it's hard to see the markings, and the pin isn't exactly the same, but who would want a very dirty lapel pin? Ho ho, it was to laugh, such a joke of humor.
Oh, and had anyone ever drunk sweet milk from a box? Here, try a couple of these. Take a dozen for the wife and kids.
The officer came out of the pit and walked into the ramshackle checkpoint shack without a word. One of the teenagers followed him in, then came out a second later and said we could pass.
It had all taken an hour and had been a very bad search, a Psalm-91 stop all the way.
Joe Skorupa was impressed. "It was grim at first," he said, "but by the time you left, they were all laughing."
"What we try to do," Garry said, "is sell them on the trip itself
Make them feel that they're part of it, that they're helping set the record. We're dream merchants. And these guys were a hard sell."
"Tim," Joe said, "was going back and forth with this guy, and I don't know Spanish, but all of a sudden he says, 'You need to wear a jacket,' in English. It sounded funny."
"And you laughed out loud there," I said, "which was good, because we want them to see us as funny, happy guys. I think I was trying to tell the guy what the weather was like on Tierra del Fuego, and I kept looking down and seeing that he had the safety off on his rifle. It affected my ability to speak Spanish."
The road ahead was mostly gravel, but other roads, equally well traveled, led out into the black desert night where praying mantis-type oil rigs bobbed moronically. These distant rigs were illuminated with security lights and looked like ships afloat on a dark sea.
It was ambush country, according to the Lima papers. Garry wondered if the military might be in league with bandits. Stop us for an hour, let a bunch of civilians from the bar across the way case the truck, then delay us until the ambush party could get into position, probably under one of the washed-out bridges over a dry riverbed.
"They were drinking Pisoo," I said.
Garry had noticed. Pisco is expensive. Where would a desert drunk get the money to buy Pisco?
It was a long dark drive through Psalm-91 country.
BUS-PLUNGE FOLLIES
October 5-8, 1987
T
he border with Ecuador was closed and we slept for six hours in a hotel at Tumbes, the most northerly Peruvian town. We were the first in line at the customs shed at Aguas Verde, a squalid, bustling border town with a bad reputation for thievery. A handsome man with curly blond hair saw the truck and int
roduced himself. Alejandro Penaher-rera, who worked with service and repairs for General Motors Ecuador, had been sent to meet us, help us through customs, and would escort us to the capital of Quito, where the truck would be serviced.
Aguas Verde was jammed with people. There were makeshift wooden stands lining the street and people sold Capris vegetable oil, sunglasses, canned milk, and T-shirts. One man sold nothing but spoons of all sizes. An Indian woman presided over a pile of men's jockey sorts, all of which had a banana stenciled over the fly. People sold watermelons, shoes, chickens, and guinea pigs.
Men wore sunglasses and baseball-type hats with honda or fiat written on them, and they carried sacks of oranges on their backs. A fat man, very drunk at eight in the morning, pedaled a bicycle unsteadily through the throng of vendors and shoppers. His shirt was too short and his belly bulged over his pants. When he passed the church (Our Lady of Everlasting Customs?), he tried to cross himself, lost control of the bicycle, and crashed into an umbrella stand. There was much yelling and confusion.
The Peruvian customs building featured a large poster that read, say no to drugs, say yes to life. Below the poster, a cloud of flies was buzzing around a large burlap sack full of confiscated bananas. The Ecuadorian side had a poster of a young man taken through a series of about ten pictures. In the first, the man looks clean-cut and eager.
He becomes sad. Then depressed. His hair gets longer. Then it gets messy and dirty. Finally he's unwashed, there are great dark circles around his eyes, and it's plain that his life is consigned to the scrap heap of society.
The caption read, drugs destroy your mind.
Garry and I stared at that last picture and said, in unison: "Roto."
The Ecuadorian maps were different than the Peruvian ones. In 1942, after a short war, the Rio de Janeiro Protocol of Peace, Friendship, and Boundaries awarded Peru a fifty-mile stretch of land which consisted mostly of Amazon forest and certain areas of the eastern foothills of the Andes. One of Ecuador's essential foreign policy objectives is to redraw the border and obtain possession of the Marahon River.
In 1981 there were border skirmishes over this issue. In order to thwart any planned Peruvian invasion, Ecuador has let the Pan-American Highway out of Aguas Verde fall into something close to ruin. Every ten miles or so there was another military checkpoint, five of them in fifty miles. These were usually placed in a canyon and we could see gun emplacements above. Fifty-caliber machine guns were trained on the road. These weapons have a range of about one mile and can knock out an armored personnel carrier.
When we left the checkpoints, papers stamped and authorized, we did so slowly, waving at the officers and crawling along at about ten miles an hour for half a mile or more. It is bad form to go squealing out of any military checkpoint. We did not want to look as if we were escaping.
On the other hand, if we were to be captured by terrorists anywhere, Ecuador was the place. The previous month, during a wildly vitriolic campaign for president, one candidate, Abdala Bucaram, claimed he had been abducted by terrorists for a time. Bucaram, who opposed the government's ties with the United States, had made his reputation as mayor of Guayaquil, where he campaigned vigorously against pornography.
Bucaram, in fact, claimed that he had been abducted secretly, and he had told no one of the kidnapping. The videotape released by his opponents, Bucaram said, had been filmed during his captivity. He had been forced, at gunpoint, to have sex with the three women in the video. The evil terrorists who had subjected him to this appalling torture intended to destroy his campaign. And, okay, sure, he appeared to enjoy it, but you had to understand, his life was at stake.
"Never a dull moment," Garry offered.
"From gasoline bandits to pornography terrorists," I said.
"Frying pan into the fire," Garry agreed.
We were following Alejandro, who was driving a Chevrolet Aska, which looked like a version of the North American Chevy Monza. About fifty miles into the country, the desert gave way to a lush, flat land of banana groves and waist-high grasses. The dirty-gray fog that had deviled us since the Atacama was gone. The Pan-American Highway here was in good repair and wider than anything we had seen in Peru. It was, in fact, so wide that traffic often formed a third lane, in the middle of the road, which was populated by adventuresome souls traveling at high speeds in both directions. The width of the highway provided drivers the opportunity to pull out into the middle lane, evaluate their chances of success or death, then swerve back into their own lane, cutting off other drivers who leaned bitterly on their horns.
It was like a video-arcade car-crash game.
Worse, the electrical short in the auxiliary-tank fuel pump had reasserted itself. Since we had no auxiliary tank, this would not have been a problem at all, except that the people who had put in the tank had rewired the truck. Our windshield wipers were connected into the short. Which wouldn't have been a problem if it weren't raining. But it was and because we were doing seventy-five miles an hour, a moving shimmer of water on the wiperless windshield distorted the highway ahead. Looking through the glass in front of my face made me feel as if we were driving underwater.
Garry, who was at the wheel, stopped to find his motorcycle goggles. We had purchased a pair for each of us after Graham Maddocks had asked us what we'd do if someone broke the windscreen. Dropped a rock from a bridge, for instance.
So Garry was doing seventy-five on the crowded highway, with his head stuck out the driver's window in a tropical rainstorm. Alejandro, in the light gasoline-powered vehicle ahead, fancied himself a race-car driver and he pushed the Chevy at top speed through a moving braid of traffic. "The Pan-American," Alejandro had said, "is war."
For some reason that wasn't immediately apparent, Alejandro wanted to push on at top speed for Quito.
"He doesn't brake for oncoming cars," Joe observed.
Out in the middle lane, it was a game of chicken, with a new opponent every two minutes.
Garry was staying right with Alejandro in a virtuoso exhibition of
Third World driving. He used the horn more than the brakes. Running down the middle lane, with a bus headed directly for us, Garry would just keep pushing for the pass, then pull in at the last moment.
He seldom used the brakes because he felt there was a greater danger of being back ended than in suffering a head-on crash. In his opinion, drivers on the Pan-American were very good indeed, and he thought that most of them possessed better skills than the typical North American driver.
Joe and I objected to this. Drivers would consistently pull out to pass in the face of an oncoming car or truck. Sometimes both vehicles pulled back into their own lane simultaneously, inches away from death. Bumpers missed bumpers by feet, sometimes inches.
"People grew up driving like this," Garry shouted. It seemed strange to carry on a high-volume conversation with a man wearing goggles and driving a truck through the rain with his head out the window. "It's what they know," he bellowed, "this kind of driving is all they know, and they're good at it. North American rules don't apply. They've got people driving vehicles at twenty miles an hour here, and if they passed safely—what we'd call safely—they'd never get anywhere. So everyone passes everyone, at any time. That bus back there? When we were coming at each other? He saw that I needed more room than he did and feathered back on the throttle. He was good. Different rules here, and if you know the rules, you can see how good the drivers are."
Garry, I could see, was in a kind of esctasy, his teeth bared against the sting of rain on his face.
"Yeah," I shouted, "but how do you know that someone isn't drunk, or crazy macho, or suicidal?"
"Well," Garry screamed, "you usually have about ten seconds to decide."
Through the inch or so of moving water on the glass in front of me I could see the looming grill of a large truck as it peeled off into its own lane.
"These people," Garry howled, "are either good drivers or they're dead."
Late that afte
rnoon we turned out of the banana plantations of the coastal lowlands and headed east, into the mountains and Quito. Ecuador's capital city is set in a mountain basin 9,350 feet high. The city is only about twenty miles south of the equator.
The road into the city wound its way upward through a lush moun-
tainous jungle. The highway was a narrow black ribbon of asphalt, in very good repair, but the logistics of the mountains sent it spinning into loops and switchbacks and various Mobius strip variations that would have been dizzying if we hadn't been crawling along behind creeping diesel belchers at four miles an hour for most of the way.
There was no passing and depending on the other guy to feather back on the throttle here. Trucks and buses, barreling downhill, could literally not stop, even using their brakes, because the road was steep and slick with rain.
The thick columns of trees that lined the road were alive with parasitic flowers. A waterfall four or five hundred feet high poured through the greenery above. At the bottom, near the road, the waters fell as a fine mist which glittered in a strange lunar manner. Green hanging vines brushed the windshield and roof of the truck.
There were thick pockets of silvery fog hanging in the hollows, the kind of ethereal mists that inspire German philosophers and Japanese Zen masters. We were, I thought, ascending into realms of the spirit. Ahead, through the purely spiritual fog, I could see a looming, giant form. A revelation, no doubt.
It was, of course, a large truck doing five miles an hour, and, through the fog, I could barely make out some markings on this erstwhile celestial apparition: the markings read, coca-cola. The truck was belching diesel and we were nearing the ten-thousand-foot mark on the hump that would take us into Quito.