by Carl Hoffman
IT WAS TIME to move on. From Cusco, my plan had always been to travel by bus to La Paz, Bolivia, there to ride the World’s Most Dangerous Road and then take a train to the Brazilian border, known as the Train of Death. Both sounded tempting. But a new road had been built, bypassing the World’s Most Dangerous Road, which had become a staple of tourist mountain bikers who wanted to experience a taste of danger in an organized package. And in Cusco, Lily and I had run into a stringy-haired British computer programmer who’d just taken the Train of Death. “It was sweet, dude,” he said. “No problems at all and there was a great bunch of other backpackers on it.” It wasn’t that I was a snob about backpackers; I had been one, too. Authenticity was a buzzword in travel, but what exactly did that mean? At its purest form you could make the argument that the only really authentic places were ones that had never seen contact with the outside world at all. There were still a few of those left—in the Amazon, perhaps in Indonesian New Guinea. But they were hardly representative; they were freakish vestiges of a changed world, and authenticity was simply everywhere; it was all authentic in one way or another. But if you were on a train with a lot of backpackers, it got too easy not to meet locals, not to get lonely, not to feel scared, and I wanted all of those things.
Which made the road to Puerto Maldonado, in the Peruvian Amazon, sound like heaven: “According to Peruvian road engineers, this is Peru’s worst road between two major cities,” warned my guidebook. “It takes two and a half days in the dry season and longer in the wet. Don’t take the trip lightly; the journey requires hardiness, self-sufficiency and loads of good luck. Fatal accidents are not uncommon.” The book was outdated. Immigrants were pouring into Puerto Maldonado to seek their fortunes, so of course a bus company had stepped into the void and Expreso los Chankas didn’t seem worried. Seventeen hours if it didn’t rain; twenty dollars; buses left daily at 3:00 p.m.
The road was the last key piece of the Carretera Transoceanica—a 6,000-kilometer highway linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from Brazil to Peru. More important, though, it would tie one of the last great remaining pristine rain forests of the Amazon basin to ports on the Pacific coast. Gold. Mahogany. Uncontacted tribes. Puerto Maldonado was said to be a seething boomtown on the banks of the Madre de Dios River; only two weeks before, a researcher had been shot there after reporting on an illegal load of old-growth mahogany.
ALL STARTED WELL. The bus was old, with cracked armrests, and it smelled of urine, but was freshly swept, and I had an aisle seat with no one next to me. And the road, it turned out, had been paved in December, two lanes of smooth blacktop snaking up the Andes into a cold, largely treeless world of llamas and adobe houses, with smoke pouring from chimneys in thatch roofs.
The clouds were ominous, though. And a couple of hours out, as we started descending the Andes’ eastern flanks, everything changed: the pavement ended. Harsh white lightning ripped through the skies and torrential rains poured down. The bus filled; the air turned humid and thick. The seat next to me was taken by a peasant in rubber boots and thick sweaters. His three-year-old son coughed like a wounded guinea pig and puked into a plastic bag and pissed out of the window throughout the long night. The rain fell in heavy, big drops and the driver, thirty-two-year-old Juan Luis, fought to keep us on the road. All through the night we jerked and bumped and slid, big blobs of water leaking onto my head. We forded dark frothing rivers so deep I thought we’d get swept away. We stopped, backed up, waited, inched past trucks and cliffs so close I could touch them out of the window. “It is heavy,” Luis confessed to me on a bathroom break, during which forty people pissed on the side of the road in the rain, and a trillion frogs croaked. “And very tiring. The road is clay and very slippery.”
The journey was twenty hours of torture. But hardship brings rewards: as dawn broke in pouring rain, we bounced and jerked into a wet and glistening terrarium. Sopping jungle and red mud roads and one-room wooden shacks from which candles flickered—I had, at last, passed into a new set of arteries, smaller, more remote; the world I was entering felt fertile and fresh.
Puerto Maldonado might be the beginning of the end of Peru’s rain forest, but I liked it the minute I stepped off the bus. It was all frontier prosperity and dynamism: dirt and mud streets filled with motorcycles and Indian auto rickshaws right off the lot, and wooden clapboard gold-buying houses and open-air restaurants dishing out thick soups, against the banks of two big, khaki-colored rivers half a mile across. I spent hours walking through its muddy streets, just soaking up the energy. Houses were springing up, new mud streets reaching ever farther into the bush. Immigrants were pouring in from the Andes to work its timber and gold; when the road was paved and the Madre de Dios River bridged, the place would explode. Which could happen tomorrow or never—two concrete pilings stood on either side of the river for a steel bridge that had been stored in a nearby warehouse for the past decade.
Along the muddy shores of the river, fifty-foot longboats jostled for passengers and wooden one-car ferries with outboard motors pulled in and out. Lumberyards with rusty cranes unloaded stacks of jungle hardwood; it was along this river that the artist Tobias Schneebaum had walked naked into the forest, where he found tribes that still practiced ritual cannibalism. Even now, some of the Amazon’s last uncontacted people lived up the river’s tributaries in Peru, and just five hours downstream lay Bolivia. I wanted to know more, and found Joseline Vizcarra tending her newly opened Internet café. She agreed to take me down the river.
“I don’t know what all these people will do when the bridge is built,” said Vizcarra, dickering for a boat and captain. A pretty, brown-haired woman wearing Teva sandals (a mark of her travels outside of Puerto Maldonado), she waved her hand over the ferries and longboats as we slid into the current of the swollen river, the air heavy with humidity and the smell of smoke. The daughter of a high-school principal, she’d grown up in a village twenty-five miles east of Puerto Maldonado, but had been shipped off to live with an aunt in Lima for high school and college. “When I was little,” she said, “there was nothing here. It was a wild town and the road was terrible; it took us five hours to travel the twenty-five miles from our village to town.” We were going downstream and stayed where the current was strongest, right in the middle. The river was high, flooding banks tangled and overhanging with scrub, full of tree limbs and whirlpools. “Now, every day, more people come. We call them colones. All this, when I was little, was still primary forest cut with little trails where native people came to fish.” It was a disappearing world; loggers had taken the trees, and cattle ranchers had moved in afterwards. “There’s no mahogany left,” she said, as heavy, widely spaced drops of rain fell. “When I was little my father and I would walk through the forest looking for Brazil nuts, but now you’ve got to go seven hours upriver to find primary forest.”
We ground down the river, the engine roaring, for two hours. After so much time on buses, the river felt free, open, a wide, silvery brown pathway under a huge gray sky. But I was seeing it at its fullest in the rainy season; during the long, hot, dry summer, Vizcarra said, “it will be covered with miner’s dredges. Like a city at night.” The river divided around a flat, forested island. “It is full of black spider monkeys,” she said. “A man used to live on it and feed them and you could go and see them,” Vizcarra said, “but then he died and now it’s dangerous. The monkeys are aggressive and wild; they’ll bite you. It’s horrible!”
We swept around a bend, and ahead lay five gold-mining dredges rafted together, hard against the banks of the fast-moving river. Rodolfo Muñoz waved us aboard, glad, I think, for a distraction. Small and wiry and leprechaun-like, with green eyes and a helmet of black hair, Muñoz was a Bolivian who’d been going after gold for twenty-four years, since he was sixteen. The five boats shared a single cook, a woman in cutoff blue jeans, and his colleagues were from Brazil and Bolivia, all illegally in the country. His boat was sun-bleached, bare wood on two hulls—two simple beds, a one-b
urner gas stove and enamel basin, an outhouse, and a grinding, burning-hot, eight-cylinder diesel engine inhaling sediment from as deep as forty-five feet into the riverbed up onto a king-bed-sized sluice covered with gray carpet.
Six days a week, twenty hours a day, Muñoz worked the river, sucking up sediment and water that poured over the carpet, leaving a fine mud behind. He stopped at 4:00 p.m. on Sundays until nine on Monday morning. “On a good day,” he said in Spanish, scooping up a day’s sediment from a blue bucket into a rounded gold pan, “we get one gram an hour.” He swirled the mud and flicked water into the pan and pointed: a speck of gold so small I would never have noticed it. “A bad day is eight grams in twenty hours. Now, gold is eighty-four soles ($31) a gram; in a good week I get 120 to 140 grams.”
As big-headed and long-beaked banded kingfishers dived overhead, the sluices sparkled with round balls of mercury the size of skateboard wheel ball bearings. Muñoz brought out a plastic jug of the toxic metal and showed how he poured it into the bucket, mixed it with the mud, and squeezed it all through a cotton sieve—the water and mercury washing out into the river, leaving gold behind. His was one barge; it was hard to imagine how much mercury was washing into the river every day during the busy dry season. From his bunk, curtained by a sheet of blue plastic, he fished out a small piece of paper wrapped around a silvery ball: five grams of gold.
Two men worked each boat; someone else owned the mining concessions for every section of the river. “Every day is for us,” he said, “except Saturday, and that day’s gold goes to the men who own the concessions.” Sometimes Muñoz had to dive into the underwater hole, sucking on an oxygen hose. “It’s dangerous,” he said, “because the hole is not wide and sometimes it collapses and you die. Only the pipe comes out, not the man. I’ve lost men in Bolivia, but not here.” He shrugged, grew quiet, looked down at his feet.
“Ever been robbed?” I said, imagining a wild-west scene of highway—or river—robbery.
“Only once,” Muñoz said. “A man stole my boat, but my friend saw it and we jumped in his boat and followed him, and I took it back.”
“What did you do to him?”
Muñoz smiled. “Nothing. I knew he did it because he was poor, and I felt his shame.”
The engine was deafening, and the humidity and heat were as heavy as a wool blanket. This was his life. “What else can I do?” he said. “It is peaceful here and I make eight hundred soles a week instead of eight hundred soles a month like I would if I had a job in town. We take a risk,” he said, “and hope for buena suerte.”
When the road was finished, whenever that would be, Puerto Maldonado would roar louder. More timber. More gold. More tourists to see the rapidly disappearing jungle and its monkeys. I liked it now, I thought, as we pushed back upriver in the hot sun back to town. Soon it would need all the luck it could get.
A ferryboat carrying more than 100 passengers collided with a barge loaded with fuel tanks and sank to the bottom of the Amazon River on Thursday, officials said …
Rescue teams recovered the bodies of four children, five women and one man … and a check of the boat’s passenger manifest indicated nine people were still missing.
—Los Angeles Times, February 22, 2008
THREE
Your Time Comes or It Doesn’t
THE DEEPER INTO THE AMAZON Basin you go, the fewer roads there are, until they give out entirely; rivers take over, and buses are replaced by boats. According to my map, if I headed due east from Puerto Maldonado I’d hit Rio Branco, Brazil, and then Puerto Velho, on the banks of the Madeira River, from which I hoped to catch a ferry 660 miles northeast to the jungle metropolis of Manaus. Amazon ferries sank with regularity; in the first three months of the year more than two dozen people had died in two separate incidents. But to get to the Madeira I had to cut a hundred miles east through the Peruvian Amazon, and there was only one option for getting there: shared taxis on roads that looked none too impressive on my map.
Tiptoeing around the mud of Puerto Maldonado, I caught a three-wheeled auto rickshaw to the Imperial Car Service. Inapari, the Peruvian border crossing, was supposed to be three hours away, but “the roads are horrible,” said the driver, a short fellow in a Buffalo Bills football jersey that came down to his knees. “Too much rain. Maybe we can do it in five hours.” I bought some crackers and bottled water and waited for the car—a white Toyota station wagon with plastic-covered seats and a red-and-yellow lightning bolt painted on its side—to fill up. Its tires were as bald as racing slicks. After forty-five minutes there were six of us piled in hip-to-hip, plus two men huddled in the back deck with no seats—and bumped through the streets and the puddles and down a concrete ramp to the river. We stepped out as the driver backed down a slippery dirt trail and then up two wooden planks barely wide enough for each tire, and onto the ferry. We crabbed across and piled in again on the other side, accelerating along a rutted, soaked red mud road with low green scrub on either side. The air was sweet and smoky and wet, the sky filled with low gray clouds, and the car slid and swerved, mud spattering so hard and high I had to roll my window up.
My fellow passengers were mute. We killed a dog, a quick thump, and the driver laughed. We skidded past horsemen and small farms and giant ficus trees, and I spotted a hawk perched high above the road. At every river, big concrete pilings were rising from the banks, while we inched across narrow, one-lane wooden bridges. Soon, when the bridges were finished and the road paved, this would be a highway, but now it was still the outer reaches of the known world. I was happy; nothing but mud and rain and big wet sky, with no idea of where I was heading, save my vague notion of catching a boat that I wasn’t sure even existed. I felt a building exhilaration, with little loneliness. It should have been the opposite, but this deep frontier fed my romantic soul. I liked the idea of a place so vast and unexplored that, as the legendary British travel writer Peter Fleming wrote in his 1934 Brazilian Adventure, “You can believe what you like …; no one has the authority to contradict you. You can postulate the existence of prehistoric monsters, of white Indians, of ruined cities, of enormous lakes.” There were people not far away who had never seen a telephone or computer. Macaws and parrots, jaguars and sloths. Who cared if I couldn’t see them from the road? Just knowing they were out there felt good. This was the kind of place I’d learned to love, and feel at home in, during all my years of traveling. To be discovering a world, to be thriving in a place without connections, made me feel free. And out here I had to be alert all the time, focused, watching my back even as I roared across a dirt road with no idea where it would lead.
We pulled into Inapari at 4:30 p.m. under a light rain, after six hours of hard driving through the relentless, sticky, flying mud. The town was a single square surrounded by wooden clapboard houses and more mud; a sign announced that the Atlantic Ocean was 3,908 kilometers away, the Pacific 1,874. Alone in the middle of nowhere, I got out of the car and stood in the rain. A pregnant feral dog slinked by. Chickens pecked at the edges of puddles. I wasn’t sure what to do; Inapari didn’t look like much of a place to hang around. A man approached me; he looked different. Tall, broad-shouldered, but pale-skinned, with black jeans and pointy-toed loafers. “Asis?” he said. That was the name of the town across the river, in Brazil.
“Any hotels here?” I said in Spanish. He didn’t understand, and I realized he was Brazilian and spoke Portuguese, not Spanish.
“Taxi?” he said, pointing to a small white station wagon. His taxi was spotless, with newspapers spread across the carpet, and before crossing the border he tanked up on gasoline siphoned from a bucket. When he offered to take me all the way to Rio Branco in the fading light, I agreed, and I fell asleep on the fast, straight, paved roads of what just two decades ago was remote Amazon jungle, foreshadowing Peru’s future. In Rio Branco I caught another bus and arrived in Puerto Velho at four in the morning, falling onto the thin mattress exhausted, in a concrete room across from the bus station.
I was so tired I couldn’t sleep, though, and thought of Lawrence Osborne’s words: “A journey is never a simple thing. The hitches and the boredom, the missed connections and empty hours are the price for leaving one’s real life and entering an unreal one.” Right now I was nowhere and everywhere, alone and foreign and unsettled in never-ending movement. It was raw travel that was stripping everything to the bone and tearing away my leftover anxieties. When you travel you imagine leaving your old self behind. But hunger, fatigue, the aches and pains of life in a bus seat, only show you the real you—there’s never any escape from yourself. And that’s no small thing. It was just me, and over the past few years I felt like I’d gotten so twisted up in multiple lives of trying to be different for different people, it was sometimes hard to remember who I was. Out here I could just be myself, happy, self-reliant, content, exactly where I belonged. Osborne was saying this was an unreal life, and maybe it was—I certainly couldn’t do it forever. But it was also the opposite, real, a reminder that happiness wasn’t all the external comforts but just there, within myself.
. . .
IN THE MORNING I tumbled out of my concrete hotel and flagged a taxi. “Take me to the river,” I said, “to the docks.” It was hot, humid, cloudless, the sun glaring and burning on top of my head. We wound through haphazard streets and blocks and squeezed down an unpaved road as full of people as a fair, stopping at the river’s edge. Literally: it was so high it overflowed its banks, muddy water lapping onto the street. As everywhere in places that were poor, I didn’t have to search or wonder and I was never lost; I stepped out of the taxi and was assaulted by touts for every service I might ever need. “Manaus?” shouted a man in bare feet and a muscle shirt.
He grabbed my arm and we trotted onto a series of wooden planks over the water and mud, out to a lovely sight: Tied to rotting wooden rafts floated the Altamonte Moreira VII, 100 feet of wooden Amazon river boat. She was three decks tall, all elegant curves and upturned bow, with a graceful sheer-line and a low waist ending in a rounded stern. “We sail at two p.m.,” said the captain, a bulky man in flip-flops and loose shorts, sitting at a folding table collecting money, as an army of men bearing crates of tomatoes and giant sacks of potatoes ran up and down the narrow gangplanks. “Seventy dollars to hang your hammock and three meals a day.” The journey would take three days.