How to Walk a Puma
Peter Allison
MORE THRILLING ADVENTURES WITH THE WORLD’S FAVOURITE SAFARI GUIDE
Plans are usually only good for one thing—laughing at in hindsight. So, armed with rudimentary Spanish, dangerous levels of curiosity and a record of poor judgement, I set off to tackle whatever South America could throw at me. Not content with regular encounters with dangerous animals on one continent, Peter Allison decided to get up close and personal with some seriously scary animals on another. Unlike in Africa, where all Peter’s experiences had been safari based, he planned to vary things up in South America, getting involved with conservation projects as well as seeking out “the wildest and rarest wildlife experiences on offer”. From learning to walk—or rather be bitten and dragged along at speed by—a puma in Bolivia, to searching for elusive jaguars in Brazil, finding love in Patagonia, and hunting naked with the remote Huaorani people in Ecuador, How to Walk a Puma is Peter’s fascinating and often hilarious account of his adventures and misadventures in South America.
Peter Allison
HOW TO WALK A PUMA
And Other Things I Learned While Stumbling Through South America
Dedication
While escaping a desk, hitting the road and collecting new experiences is fun to do, there are always treasured people you leave behind. In my case these are my wonderful sister Laurie—the only person I’ve known my whole life—and her two children, Riley and Molly, plus my oldest friends, Nick Goodwin (has it really been a quarter of a century?), Hayden Jones and Marc Butler. I love you all, despite the names I call you.
Map
Introduction: Slapped on the Streets of Cebu
It’s all the labradors’ fault. I grew up with two of them, as well as a brave cat who brutalised the dogs, an outdoor goldfish pond regularly raided by a red-bellied black snake, and the odd sheep—our neighbour had one because it made the perfect lazy man’s lawnmower. My single mother frequently borrowed Bunty for the same lawn-trimming purpose, though the poor creature was often distracted from its hungry work by the attention lavished on it by my sister and me. In our otherwise normal Sydney suburb this animal seemed to us quite exotic.
But it was always the dogs I loved best, with their unswerving devotion and affection, and their endearing habit of accompanying me everywhere I went on my bicycle. My closeness to them taught me to pay attention to all the animals around me, not just those with a collar. Showing early signs of the wildlife nut I would become, I wanted a relationship with the possums and frogmouths in the yard at night as well as my dogs.
Then, when I was sixteen, I went to Japan for a year. During that time a series of near-biblical plagues overtook our city of Okayama, a couple of hours north-east of Hiroshima. First came praying mantises, which begat a plague of frogs that emerged en masse from the city’s open drains in pursuit of the bounty of insects. Close behind them came the snakes. For the town this was a nightmare, but I was delighted. My host family’s cat was the only one to share my enthusiasm; she caught the snakes alive and dumped them proudly at the bare feet of whichever startled family member was at home. ‘Piitaa!’ would come the cry, and I would sally from my room, scoop up the snake and take it back outside. ‘Sayonara,’ I would farewell each snake. ‘Hiss,’ the snake would reply, if at all.
I always wanted to be around wild animals, but saw no practical way to do it. The path to law school that was expected of me by my parents was as personally appealing as the snakes had been to the residents of Okayama, so when I returned to Australia I dropped out of high school. I worked for a harbour cruise company for two years, then decided to travel for at least a year, to somewhere that had an abundance of wildlife. Maybe then I would go to law school.
I had two places in mind, both inspired by the nature documentaries I loved on television. Either Africa or South America would allow me to spend the time that I craved with animals. So in late 1993, a few days before my nineteenth birthday, I used the most rigorous and scientific method I could think of to decide between these destinations, and tossed a coin.
Africa came up heads that day, and the coin-flip changed my life. Within two weeks I was on a plane to Zimbabwe. I thought I would stay in Africa for a year, but my passion for wildlife shone through while I was visiting a safari camp, and I was offered a job behind the bar. Over the next seven years I worked my way up and became a safari guide, a camp manager, and ultimately a teacher of guides for one of the largest safari companies on the continent. In that time I had some of the best experiences with animals that anyone could wish for. I witnessed an elephant giving birth, was charged by lions, had a leopard walk into my tent, and made friends with a family of cheetahs who would allow me to lie down beside them. In fact I had enough experiences that I was able to write two books about them.
Somehow through all of this I retained the nagging doubt that I was cheating at life and that at some point I would need to get a real job. The sort that grown-ups had.
‘You’re a fool,’ one of my colleagues told me when I said I was leaving to head back to the real world of nine to five.
‘You’re good at this,’ some of the kinder ones said.
But it was time to be a normal adult.
I have no idea why I thought I’d be good at that.
•
On my return to Sydney from Africa in late 2001 I felt too old for law school and applied for an array of different jobs instead, fielding interview questions such as: ‘And what skills do you think you can bring us?’ In truth I felt I had little to offer the mainstream office world. ‘Um, I can stare down a charging elephant,’ I’d joke on occasion. After a somewhat startled pause the inevitable response to this would be along the lines of, ‘Interesting, yes, but not something we value here at McDonald’s.’
After enduring countless rejections and dropping several rungs on the ladder of self-respect, I eventually got a job—which turned into a series of jobs—that at least paid the rent.
I also fell in love and felt certain enough about the relationship to get engaged. In the next few years we accumulated the things adults do, mainly furniture and debt. For the first time I owned more than I could carry on my back, and even if I didn’t like the sensation, I believed I was doing what I was supposed to.
I was on a work trip to the Philippines six years after meeting my fiancée when I realised that the life we had together didn’t feel right to me. One day I was walking down the street in Cebu and was hit with a sudden shot of wary adrenalin, as though if I wasn’t alert there could be trouble. It was invigorating. It felt like being back in Africa. It felt like being slapped awake from a long sleepwalk. It felt like coming home. Only then did I realise that I’d been turning grey from the inside out, and had become the cliché of the dissatisfied worker bee. I’d spent most of the last seven years waiting for five o’clock, hanging out for Friday, going on holiday only to stress out because I couldn’t relax fast enough. Perhaps some adults aren’t meant to be in one place. It is like being left-handed: no matter how good you become at using your right hand, your nature still insists you are something else. Nomads are the same.
While some people allow the hollowness of their lives to consume them until they are at zero, so blank they merely exist, others rebel. Some men find solace in sports. Some have affairs. Others dress as a woman and insist on being addressed as Gertrude. My way of breaking the shackles is to go looking for animals. As a teenager I had travelled to escape my life; now I wanted to do it to have one. ‘I think you’re being a fool,’ my fiancée said with more sadness than harshness when I told her I wanted to travel open-endedly again, with her this time, working part-time as a safari guide. ‘We’ve built a life here!’ She indicated the apa
rtment we lived in, and our possessions within it.
‘I want experiences,’ I answered softly, ‘not stuff.’
‘Stuff? This isn’t stuff! It’s security!’
But what felt like security to her felt like a prison to me. She wouldn’t come with me and I couldn’t stay. It was the hardest decision of my life, but we broke up and, taking little more than some clothes, I left.
Over the years I had often wondered what would have happened if the coin that sent me to Africa had landed tails-up that day. So in late 2009, sixteen years later and hopefully an equivalent number of years wiser, I made my way to Santiago, Chile, ready to seek out the continent’s best, weirdest and maddest wilderness experiences. This time around, though, I was no longer a teenager and was wary of further injuring my weakened knees and sorely abused back (almost ten years’ driving off road has compressed my spine; I’m sure I’m an inch shorter than I was before). But the continent holds challenges—dense rainforests, high mountains, waterless deserts, vast and lonely steppes, as well as dangerous animals like jaguars, pumas and bushmaster snakes—that I wanted to seek out.
Whereas Africa always appears brown in documentaries, every nature show I’d ever watched about South America has been in glorious technicolour. Evolution seems to have taken some strange, strong medicine before setting to work there, producing improbable, extraordinary creatures. In Africa I could be trampled by elephants or consumed by lions; the most dangerous animal in South America is a kaleidoscopic frog so toxic that just touching it can be lethal. There is a bird called the hoatzin which has evolved my favourite strategy for evading the attention of predators, a solution so simple that anything else seems a waste of energy—it is too smelly to eat. Then there are sloths, whose legendary slowness actually works for them, making them hard to pick out among the foliage in which they live—this, along with a groove in each of their hairs in which camouflaging algae grows, makes them almost invisible. I wanted to see all these animals and more; but above all, more than any bird, fish or reptile, I wanted to fulfil an ambition born of all those nature documentaries I’d watched as a child: to see a wild jaguar.
But my plans are usually only good for one thing—laughing at in hindsight—so, armed with bad Spanish, coupled with dangerous levels of curiosity and a record of poor judgement, I set off to tackle whatever South America could throw at me.
Running with Roy
‘See a jaguar? Mwah ha ha! You’re more likely to fall pregnant to a llama,’ said my friend Marguerite Gomez as we drove from Santiago airport to her home.
Marguerite’s husband, Harris, gave me an apologetic look at his wife’s bluntness, but as she and I were old friends from Africa days I was far from offended. And I also knew she was right. Jaguars live in the jungle, a hard place to see anything that isn’t right in front of you, given the usually impenetrable foliage. Adding to the challenge, the jaguar is the master of stealth. If they don’t want to be seen, chances are they won’t be.
But if it was going to be easy, why would I bother?
‘I’m going to see one, along with everything else natural that I can,’ I countered.
‘Sure,’ said Marguerite, as you would to someone who’s just told you they have access to Nigeria’s hidden billions.
The birds of South America were another draw for me, as during my safari career I had picked up the hobby of birdwatching, a habit which to some people is as sexy as flatulence (at best when I admit to it I get a restrained smile that clearly indicates the listener wants to hear no more).
I stayed for a week with Marguerite, Harris and their two young daughters. Harris shared with me the delight of staggeringly good Chilean wines while Marguerite mixed the best pisco sour on the continent. (The pisco sour is a wonderful cocktail that both Chile and Peru claim to have invented; at times this argument becomes so heated you wouldn’t be surprised if it led to military action—not as improbable as it sounds considering the countries once waged war over bird poo.)
When I arrived in Santiago I hadn’t expected to see many animals around the city of high rises and office blocks, but on only my second day Marguerite summoned me upstairs, insisting I bring binoculars with me. Through them I saw an enormous bird soaring over the not-so-distant, snow-frosted peaks of the Andes.
‘Condor?’ Marguerite asked, grinning, knowing how much I would enjoy it if it was.
‘Wow,’ was my eloquent reply. That was all it could be; there was nothing else so huge in the skies that wasn’t man-made.
The condor was the bird I’d most wanted to see. The sighting was a great welcome to South America and more than I could have asked for—until I hit somewhere more wild I would have been content with the mockingbirds and hummingbirds that visited the Gomezes’ garden.
Santiago is a city occasionally reviled by travellers seeking the famed chaos and liveliness of South America, but I think this is unfair. While it may lack the exuberance of Buenos Aires and the sexiness of Rio, it has its charms, such as the fancy, brightly coloured buildings jammed beside cheap student bars with plastic chairs and umbrellas advertising beer, sharing a bonhomie until late into every night. Food is excellent in the city, and levels of service high. In short it was the perfect introduction to South America. While I was impressed with Santiago’s orderliness and cleanliness, I was now to set off for Bolivia, a place that Harris said was so undeveloped not even Chileans visited.
‘Good,’ I replied cockily, to hide my own doubts about the decision I’d made in leaving Sydney. Was a nomadic life really feasible? Was I too old for this? Was I, perhaps, now too wise to have the sort of adventures that Africa had given me?
In a life peppered with moments of grand idiocy, the last thought was the most foolish so far.
•
In central Bolivia, in a patch of forest near the small town of Villa Tunari, lives a puma. His russet fur shows that he is a jungle puma (mountain pumas have grey coats), but he wasn’t born there. At the age of around six weeks he was confiscated by wildlife authorities from a marketplace. The wildlife authorities then delivered him to a group called Inti Wara Yassi who take in such animals, care for them as best they can and then release them if possible. This particular puma has noble features, is strongly muscled, and deserves a mighty name. But he is called Roy. And I was tied to him for a month.
I got to know Roy while I was volunteering at Parque Machia, a small reserve where hundreds of animals live and the first stop on my quest to learn about South America’s wilderness. After a flight from Santiago to crumbly old Santa Cruz de la Sierra, one of Bolivia’s larger towns, I’d hopped onto a surprisingly modern bus. Its passengers were mainly locals, with a smattering of backpackers. Among the locals were bowler hat– and poncho-wearing women, a sight that went from captivating to commonplace as we passed through a bewildering series of villages. After a day of travelling I stumbled from the bus halfway between Santa Cruz and Cochabamba into the town of Villa Tunari.
The local mayor runs a small tourist attraction next to the Parque Machia reserve, where visitors—mainly Bolivians—come to see monkeys who are unusually relaxed around humans. The reserve also has bears, ocelots, coatis, macaws, eagles and pumas, but the tourists don’t get to see these unless they meet one as it crosses the trails with its handlers. For the animals’ wellbeing most of them see no one but their handlers.
While Bolivians founded and manage Parque Machia, most of the staff is made up of short-term volunteers from every corner of the globe. The group of volunteers while I was at Inti consisted of a close-knit cluster of Israelis, a handful of French, a few Americans, a disproportionately large number of Australians, one or two Italians and a lone Norwegian. (He was quite thrilled when two Danes arrived, since he could understand them.) We pieced together communication through intersecting languages, and the shared love of animals that had drawn us to this punishment.
Within hours of arriving at Parque Machia, I joined eight other new volunteers to listen to an Australian calle
d Bondy give us a rundown on the park. This was to be our induction, we would learn what animals we would be working with during our time there. We had very different backgrounds and reasons for being there, but we were all excited about the work ahead. ‘My sort of people,’ I thought, and was pleased with my decision to come here, even though ensconced volunteers had already warned me that most days were filled with grimy work. ‘A monkey just spunked on me!’ one woman exclaimed moments after I introduced myself at a communal table. ‘That’s after already being shat and pissed on this week!’ (It probably says a lot about me that I still found her quite attractive.)
What had drawn me to this place, and presumably the others too, was the philosophy of Inti Wara Yassi (which means ‘Sun, Earth, Moon’ in three local languages). Its founders and managers believe that no animal deserves to live its life in a cage, and so every single creature in its care has time in the jungle each day. Monkeys being vile was surely as bad as it could get, right? At the induction, Bondy talked to us about the different animals in the reserve: the monkeys and macaws, as well as less familiar creatures like tayra and coatis, and finally the cats.
‘You have to be fit to be a Roy Boy—that’s what we call the volunteers who work with Roy,’ said Bondy. ‘He covers a lot of ground each session, most of it at a run, over rough terrain that can snap an ankle or smash your knees. He nails the guys with him all the time so they have to stay on their toes. And when I say “nail” I mean that he grabs the back of your legs with his paws then bites you on the knee. So you have to be fit—fit and a little bit crazy.’
‘That,’ I thought, ‘sounds wildly irresponsible, dangerous, and maybe a bit stupid.’ ‘That,’ I said, raising my hand, ‘sounds like me.’
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