The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  But I had a sense that the timing was right, the moment had come. Accelerating after the Amelia Earhart expedition, I’d traveled more and more; my days had become a series of flights out and back, each one leaving me ever more comfortable in strange places. Now I needed to do something huge, to jar myself out of my life—and that was what long journeys did best. There remained so much I still wanted to know and see in the world, and I hoped that I might come home with fresh eyes.

  AS THE BUS LURCHED through D.C. traffic and the industrial wasteland of far eastern D.C.’s New York Avenue, my anxiety began to lift, like the passing of a summer squall on the Chesapeake Bay. Ahead of me was possible misery and maybe danger, but also adventure, the unknown, a feeling that I was about to live deeply. I realized how lucky I was. I was bracing for anything and everything and, who knows, there was the chance a long journey on the worst conveyances might transport me to somewhere altogether new.

  I was starting slowly on a circuitous route that had me heading north before going south. I wanted to get to South America, and one airline stood out: Cubana Airlines, which had one of the worst safety records in the skies, with a “fatal event rate” almost twenty times higher than Southwest Airlines. But the closest Cubana flight took off from Toronto, and the worst option for getting there was first the so-called China bus to New York and then Greyhound to Toronto, both of which had plenty of tales of breakdown and catastrophe. And I liked the idea of starting from home on familiar highways, roads I’d taken a hundred times that would lead me from the exits of the New Jersey Turnpike to the peaks of the Andes and the plateaus of Asia, a continuous chain of machines and expanding experience and stories that would ultimately bring me back home.

  Shaking loose from home took time. I broke my first night rolling through New York State in discomfort, opening my eyes to the sun edging over the horizon above Lake Ontario, frozen solid into a sheet of white. It was fourteen degrees, the city glittering and steaming, with snow three feet deep piled along the streets and sidewalks, and pillars of steam rising from vents and buildings under a hard blue sky. We were an hour late, twelve hours from Manhattan, but I had the feeling of the world sliding past beneath me.

  My four-hour flight to Havana on one of the world’s worst airlines was surprisingly easy. An hour before landing, the stewards and stewardesses brought out their luggage and started rifling through the plane, packing anything that wasn’t screwed to the bulkheads. Fistfuls of napkins. Doggie bags of chicken and iceberg lettuce salads. Great handfuls of plastic cutlery. Rolls of toilet paper. Disposable salt and pepper shakers. Prepackaged toilettes. They went through the plane like they’d never see another plastic fork again and maybe never get another meal, which finally made sense when I emerged from the airport. A light rain was sprinkling down on Havana. Five hours before, I’d been in a frigid world of sparkling glass and escalators, but there it was hot. Steamy. Dark, the kind of darkness that only exists in the crevices of the world where there are just enough streetlights to illuminate nothing, each a weak oasis for thousands of frantic, flying insects. Giant puddles were everywhere, Havana’s streets and curbs broken and potholed. Emerging from customs, I’d accepted the hustle of a gypsy taxi driver, and he led me to a Toyota with darkly tinted windows and no door handles. I didn’t like to lose sight of my luggage, but he popped the trunk and insisted it had to be hidden. “Policia,” he said. “Eleven million Cubans, five million police!”

  I don’t know how he got the car started, but he did, amid great coughing and choking and the thick smell of oil and gas. It had no muffler and we sputtered and roared out of the lot into the dark humidity on three cylinders, past an endless line of people plodding along the pavement like zombies in the darkness and drizzle. “You like reggaeton?” he said, cranking the tape deck so high the distorted music vibrated the door panels. “You pay me now!” he said.

  “No,” I said. “When we get to the hotel, I’ll pay you.”

  “No gasoline!” he said. “Pay me now.”

  “No,” I said again. My luggage was in the trunk; now he wanted his money up front. It didn’t look good.

  “We don’t have gas!” he said. “We won’t make it!” I leaned over to look at the gauges. “Broken,” he said. They were all broken, the needles motionless. And he sounded pitiful.

  “OK,” I said, “half now, half when we get there.” He swerved into a desolate-looking gas station, poured ten dollars in the tank, and off we roared into the wet blackness of a city that shocked me. It wasn’t the Spanish colonial buildings of the old city turning to dust and being eaten by mold. It wasn’t poverty or people’s lack of material possessions; it was their lust for them, a lust so powerful they’d turned Havana into a city of pimps and prostitutes, a hustler on every corner.

  “Hello,” said a young girl named Martha, who appeared next to me on the street in front of the Parque Central the next morning. The sidewalks were crowded, shoulder-to-shoulder, with people stepping gingerly over broken curbs as ’57 Chevys and late-model Chinese motorcycles swirled past. “Where are you from?” she said. “Is this your first time in Cuba?” She was twenty-one and could have been my daughter. In her modest T-shirt and shorts and clean white running shoes, she looked more wholesome and innocent than ninety percent of the women her age on prime-time television. “I teach dancing at a hotel,” she said, “and I like to practice my English. Do you like salsa?”

  I said I did.

  “There is a most important salsa festival at a famous place, the Rosario Castro, nearby. Would you like to see it?”

  “Absolutely!” I said. I followed her around the corner, down a block, and around another corner to an ornate colonial building with a wooden doorway big enough to drive a truck through. We skipped up a broad flight of stone stairs into a bright, airy atrium balcony overlooking a courtyard, with a few plastic tables and a bar. It was noon. Behind a set of glass doors lay an open room, perfect for dancing. But it was empty, the doors locked. “The salsa has not started yet,” she said. “Want a mojito? They’re the best here.”

  A woman appeared out of the bathroom. She was short and shaped like a barrel, with a prominent gold tooth and a jagged scar on her wrist. “My friend!” Martha said. The girls hugged and kissed each other’s cheeks. “Buy us a mojito!” Juliana said. “Please!”

  We sat down at a table and Martha ordered three mojitos. “Don’t worry,” she said, “since it’s so early I’ll order them weak.”

  “You think Martha is pretty?” Juliana said, pinching Martha’s cheek as the mojitos arrived. I wasn’t quite sure what to say, so I said nothing and took a sip; the sweet icy lime and mint was delicious, but the drink contained enough rum to satiate a Marine after a tour of duty in Iraq.

  “You want to fuck her?”

  Martha smiled. Juliana smiled. “Fucky-fucky!” Juliana said. “Um, no thanks,” I stuttered, suddenly feeling a little cornered.

  They both frowned. “But don’t you think Martha is pretty?” Juliana said.

  I nodded; I shook my head. “Yes, she’s very pretty,” I said, “but no thanks.”

  “OK, but we’re hungry!” Martha said, sucking air from the rapidly depleted mojito through her straw and ordering another round.

  I was curious about them, so I bought them a plate of grilled fish and rice to share. They wolfed it down like they hadn’t eaten since last week. Juliana rolled cigars—one hundred a day—and earned 240 pesos a month, ten dollars at the official exchange rate.

  “America is great!” they said, shoveling spoonfuls of rice into their mouths. “How about another mojito!”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but you get free health care.”

  “Ha!” They both almost spit their food out. “Nada free! My baby needs an operation,” Martha said. “You gotta give the doctor perfume, shampoo, souvenirs, or else you’ll wait on a list for years. The list is long! There are always people on the list! And the police! They make eight hundred pesos a month and another forty in convertible
pesos, twice what a doctor earns.” They wanted more. More money. More mojitos. And: “You sure you don’t want any fucky-fucky?”

  In the land of free health care and free education and Che and Fidel on every wall, the Cubans were bobbing and weaving around the system in a desperate quest for convertible currency. I couldn’t relax; if I paused at a bench in a park or slowed my pace along the street, someone tried to sell me her body. Or their sister or girlfriend, or a box of cigars. I couldn’t make sense of Cuba, couldn’t even really see it, and the problem was home and time and the magic of the airplane. Cubana Airlines had plucked me from the icy streets of Canada and plopped me down in Havana a day after leaving home. My body was there but my mind wasn’t. That was the trouble with the typical one- or two-week vacation, especially to anywhere foreign: it took time to wear away that protective sheath, and it was something other people could sense, intuit, in the way I walked, moved, looked, talked. It was like I had a neon sign on my forehead that said DAZED AND CONFUSED. It was why, careful and alert to the world as I thought I was, it was only in Cuba that I got suckered into a currency exchange that left me suddenly standing alone in a market holding a wad of useless Cuban pesos. Which was okay; to get into the world, to meet it, didn’t happen overnight. It required a transition of time and space, and in Cuba I was just sort of simmering on the stove.

  After four days I was antsy to move, to get deeper in. I was happy to board the Cubana Ilyushin Il-62 bound for Bogotá. Which was crazy: three of the eight Cubana crashes had occurred on flights to Central and South America, one of them on an Il-62 that crashed on takeoff into a Havana neighborhood two miles from the airport, killing all 126 passengers and crew as well as fourteen people on the ground. Not to worry, though, as Cubana’s in-flight magazine addressed the issue head-on, in English. Sort of. “It is like a corollary, which does not have to be demonstrated, for it is deduced from experience: before a plane flight you were concerned … Perhaps you heard that a hurricane is crossing this or that region has put you on guard and fired the mechanism of the silenced, discreet fear that does not show before others but makes you tense. So it is clear that safety is the issue of concern. However that concern is due to your lack of knowledge about the means of transportation you are using and the crew in charge.” Relax, the article said. Cubana’s crews had “been duly certified by prestigious aeronautical institutions,” and the plane itself was “a novel mechanical gadget equipped with … the best systems developed by the human mind, able to laugh at hurricanes or any other atmospheric disturbances.” Never mind that I was heading to a country the very mention of which brought gasps to my family and friends. Guerrillas. Narcos. Kidnappings. But just as flying on the world’s most dangerous airline was oddly pleasant, I suspected the dangers of Colombia were overblown. Americans always thought of their country as the richest, freest, safest place on earth, and of the rest of the world, especially the developing world, as a miasma of despair and crime, a Hobbesian universe of poverty and assaults and bombings and kidnappings and people eking out a living in garbage dumps. I believed it was an exaggerated worry, which was the point, I thought, as I settled into my seat on the Ilyushin, of traveling as I was.

  The old Soviet-made airplane’s armrests were cracked and peeling, and my seat-back wouldn’t go forward. The flight attendants weren’t svelte and beautiful like they’d been on the marquee Toronto flight; half were bald and overweight men, and they didn’t give a safety briefing. A guy in back fired up a cigarette before we left the ground. But the Soviets had designed airplanes without profit in mind, and I couldn’t complain: every seat had three feet of legroom, the aisles were wide, and the galley in the center of the plane was twenty feet long. Even better, it was almost empty. The pilot hammered the throttles forward, an overhead bin popped open and a pile of first-aid kits crashed to the floor, and three hours later we slammed onto the pavement of Bogotá. A minute early—and time, I felt, for the real journey to begin.

  LIMA, Peru—At least forty-five people died when a packed passenger bus plunged into a ravine in Peru’s southern Andes despite a new campaign by President Alan Garcia to reduce fatal road accidents, police said on Tuesday.

  The bus skidded off a mountain road in Peru’s border region with Bolivia late on Monday night and crashed into a 1,640-foot-deep gorge, probably because the driver was speeding, police officer Julio Apaza said.

  —Reuters, December 5, 2006

  TWO

  Hope for Buena Suerte

  THERE IS NO PLACE like a South American bus terminal; they feel like the town square because, in a way, they are. At Bogotá’s Terminal Terrestre, I slipped through a metal detector, showed my passport to soldiers in combat fatigues, and passed into a model of low-cost efficiency. Modern, big-city airports always felt sterile, generic, unconnected to place. But here, boys were zooming toy cars across the floor. Short, dark campesinos in cowboy hats looked shy and mystified, and women in heels clicked imperiously across the tile, under the gaze of soldiers and private security guards fingering submachine guns as ticket sellers poked their heads out of little windows touting buses and destinations in rapid-fire, singsong voices. “Ipiales! Ipiales! Ipiales!” they shouted, so fast it was one slurred phrase.

  “Cuenca! Cuenca! Cuenca!”

  In South America there wasn’t much middle ground: few owned cars and only the rich flew. Buses were king. In Bogotá alone, dozens of private companies offered service to every town and village on the continent, a travel network cheaper, more efficient—and far more dangerous—than anything in America.

  I felt impatient. I was still on Washington time, still on a fast-paced, get-it-done ethos, used to calls and e-mails and texts, a constant stream of problems and invitations and other people’s needs. It was always like that, I knew, when you set out on a long journey; the classic two-week vacation was never enough time to slough off the dead skin of regular life. In some ways, I’d discovered during years of traveling, home life was like an insulating callus you had to wear off before you could even properly see and absorb the new world around you. I knew that would happen eventually, but meanwhile I had the idea I just wanted to make tracks, to knock back the miles, to go without stopping straight into the heart of the world.

  Quito, Ecuador, sounded good, and getting there would take me straight through Colombia to the border of Ecuador, a twenty-hour ride to Ipiales across the Andes and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla country. Avoid traveling at night, the Lonely Planet guide warned, which made traveling at night seem more interesting—and how could you avoid it on a twenty-hour journey? A complex war had been raging for years in Colombia involving leftist guerrillas, right-wing death squads, narcos, and American contractors, but things had rapidly improved and the country was blossoming. Just the week before, soldiers had stormed into Ecuador near where I’d be crossing to attack a FARC base, killing one of its senior commanders. Though six tourists had been kidnapped a few months before on the Pacific coast, the guerrillas were on the defensive. And my sense was that when it came to political disruptions and danger, the crowd knew best—the buses were leaving, people were traveling, and it was a big country.

  Worse than guerrillas, though, was the possibility of crashing. The World Health Organization rated Latin American roads the most dangerous anywhere, with 1.2 million people a year killed in road accidents—nearly 3,000 a day. The buses of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia were particularly legendary for horrific crashes, often involving coaches plunging off cliffs, like the one in Peru in December 2006 in which a packed bus plunged into a 1,640-foot gorge, killing forty-five of the forty-seven passengers. At least Colombia had been making an effort: since 2004, its bus companies were required to post accident and fatality statistics in public view, supposedly making its riders informed consumers. Continental SA, the operators of my bus, had, in the first three months of the year, suffered eighteen accidents with eight injured and six dead. That seemed a lot. I bought a ticket and settled down with
a plate of steaming curried chicken and rice and cornmeal wrapped in a banana leaf.

  My seatmate out of Bogotá was a round-faced girl named Maria, wearing a white hair band and dangling silver earrings, so shy she could barely look at me. She’d traveled twenty-four hours for work, spent two days in Bogotá, and was now repeating the twenty-four-hour journey home. “I couldn’t fly,” she squeaked, “too much money.”

  We rose and fell and swirled through green, rugged, and steep mountains under gray skies that dribbled rain, on well-paved two-lane roads full of curvas peligrosas—dangerous curves—and every once in a while I’d catch Maria squeezed against the window staring up at me with as much fright and wonder as if she were sitting next to the Easter Bunny. Between my bad Spanish and her shyness, my attempts at conversation went nowhere. In the middle of the night the rain came harder, pelting down in pitch blackness, and I figured any guerrillas out there in the cold jungle, on land so steep you could barely stand, would be hunkered down. But what if we did hit a roadblock? The FARC had a long habit of taking hostages, from local politicians like Ingrid Betancourt to American contractors to tourists. The thought stuck in my head as we passed an army patrol fanned out along the winding road, armed with M-16s. Maybe I could hide behind luggage in the overhead rack. Would the other passengers rat me out? What if the guerrillas set the bus on fire, as they had done before?

  At 4:00 a.m., Maria slipped away, and as it got light I noticed the man across the aisle staring at me. And then, just as we passed another curva peligrosa, I saw his hand vigorously moving up and down over his crotch. I turned my head. Guerrillas, mudslides, accidents—it seemed like sex was the only real threat.