As it turned out we were all optimists, and getting through the night would be one of the most frightening experiences I’ve ever had.
•
We left the altiplano in the mid-afternoon and were soon on pure mountain roads again, a mix of dry dirt and gravel that pinged against the bottom of the vehicle, the dust kicked up by the tyres permeating the leaky seals and forming a paste in our mouths. There were few other cars to be seen, but plenty of trucks, which flew past us on the narrow roads at suicidal speeds, rocking our four-wheel drive on its springs with a blast of wind and a toot of the horn, then enveloping us in blinding dust. Although unable to see through the dust, Jesus wouldn’t even slow down; he just drove on at the same pace until we emerged at the other side, miraculously still on the road and not flying off one of the sheer cliffs above which the road wound.
‘Murciélago … what is murciélago in English?’ Cesar muttered from the front at one point, his voice so deep it carried all the way to the back. While my Spanish was still far from expert, one of the first things I learn in any language are animal names, so I was able to reply, ‘Bat.’
‘Yes! Bat! Who wants to see a bat?’ Cesar rumbled pleasantly.
The other passengers and I all looked at each other blankly. Though the idea of a break from the cramped interior was appealing, I was also keen to reach our destination within a reasonable time. When I said this everyone murmured their assent, which left us nowhere. We needed a leader.
‘I need to stretch my legs,’ the Minke said, and so it was decided.
We turned off the road we were on, the only pass through this section of the mountain yet so narrow it was impossible to believe it was a ‘main’ road. After travelling down what felt like a goat track, Jesus stopped the vehicle near the entrance to a cave, where for a paltry entry fee we were shown some stalagmites, stalactites, and bats that looked down at us with an indifference that possibly mirrored our own.
‘Nobody knows where this water goes,’ Cesar intoned, gesturing towards a decent-sized body of water covering much of the base of the cave. ‘According to legend, the Incas used to throw golden idols in here, along with human sacrifices, to please the gods. Lots of people have looked for the gold, and some have tried to explore further to find out where the water goes. The last group to do so were Japanese. None of them came back.’
I felt the creepy tingle a good story can produce and was also glad to be out of the cramped vehicle, but that was all Cesar had for us and in a short time we were herded back to where Jesus was waiting, and squeezed back into his chariot. After heading back up the goat track we rejoined the main road, but the two roads met at an angle that meant we were facing the wrong way. Any sensible driver would have continued along a little distance until they found a section wide enough to do a three-point turn.
Jesus didn’t.
With no discernible change in the rate of his cud chewing, he yanked strongly on the wheel and we slewed sideways, just as we had when the tyre had blown, and nudged into the gently sloping bank that defined one side of the road. The other side was more abrupt, dropping several hundred screaming metres to life-eating rocks below.
Jesus backed up towards the edge of the cliff.
I have two default behaviours when scared, each aimed at distracting myself from whatever it is that frightens me. One is to make the crazed grunting of an aroused baboon and the other is to be sarcastic. This time I found myself reverting to sarcasm. ‘Oh goody, Jesus thinks he can drive on air,’ I said.
The Dutch girl looked at me through eyes glazed with terror, clearly wondering how I could be flippant at a time like this.
We stopped suddenly, lurched forward again towards the bank, then shot back once more. This would be no three-point turn. Oh no, this was going to take several bites to get through, and each one was making my internal organs squirm. Finally we got to a point where we were exactly ninety degrees to the road. Heart thudding, I prayed a truck wouldn’t come barrelling along and, unable to stop in time, smash us straight off the ledge; on the other hand, Jesus’s driving might get us there first.
He reversed again, aiming for maximum turning room, taking the rear wheels right to the lip of the ledge. Everyone remained silent, except the Dutch guy, who gave a strangled groan. I didn’t want to look out the window, but my neck swivelled of its own accord. Through the narrow aperture that was the rearmost window I could see down. Straight down, to the base of the cliff which was strewn with mangled cars, trucks and buses. For a brief moment I wished I was blind. We were over nothing but air, and I damn near pooped.
‘You okay back there?’ the Minke asked, not turning around to do so.
‘No,’ I squeaked.
Gravel crunched and I was sure the lip we were on was about to give way, and that we would tumble and freefall to an excruciating death. This road made the Death Road seem wimpy.
But Jesus revved the engine, and after several more scrotum-withering turns we were facing in the desired direction and we zoomed off, the sound of the engine almost drowned by a collective exhalation.
Our relief was short-lived and a general grumpiness set in as the road rocked and rattled us, those trying to snooze cracking their skulls against windows or the heads of others as the vehicle bumped and thumped along the corrugated track. We were still in the high Andes, and every time I took heart from a descent any hope was soon dispelled by a steep climb.
The seven-hour mark we had been promised passed, then the revised ten hours. My right leg no longer felt like it had ever belonged to me. The Dutch couple and I played a game of musical chairs in the cramped back seat. It might possibly have been erotic under other circumstances, but we did it purely to stop gangrene setting in from lack of bloodflow.
‘How much longer now?’ English Nick asked about eleven hours into our journey.
‘Another two, maybe three hours,’ Cesar rumbled, not even attempting to soften the blow.
‘Jesus,’ somebody muttered, but the driver didn’t respond.
‘La, lahlahlah!’ Thema sang, which was odd but not particularly disturbing as by this time I thought I might be going mad too. One of my knees had been wedged into a nostril (not my own) for some time and a seatbelt socket that had been broken off dug into the small of my back, gouging into it with every jolt.
Finally we were granted another break, not due to the kindness of Cesar or Jesus but because the car was overheating, understandable in the circumstances. We stopped in a village, where we ate at a small restaurant, grumbling to one another through the meal, feeling we had been lied to.
‘My legs are so sore,’ the Minke said, rubbing at her lengthy limbs. ‘But I can’t uncurl them or I’ll end up in Cesar’s lap.’
‘Yeah, I’d prefer you didn’t do that,’ I said, not out of any real jealousy, but because Cesar on occasion fed coca directly to Jesus so he didn’t have to take his hands off the wheel. I had a theory that the coca might be all that was keeping him awake and the four-wheel drive on the road.
Back in the vehicle, Cesar turned to us. ‘Only four hours to go now,’ he said.
‘What?!’ exclaimed the Minke in dismay.
‘Yes, we are close now!’ Cesar replied, clearly delighted.
Meanwhile, Jesus just kept on chewing and steering and pushing the throttle, driving us into darkness barely pierced by his headlights, until a truck came by, sheeting us in dust which didn’t seem to lift no matter how much further on we drove. After a while I realised it wasn’t dust hanging infinitely in the air but a fog that had descended, dense and cooling. This was good for the engine, but I rescinded my earlier wish for blindness and hoped that Jesus had been endowed with X-ray vision. As it was we were driving blind without a guide dog, and it was madness.
The fear that overcame us all during Jesus’s earlier lunatic turnaround came back, and silence again dominated the vehicle. Even Thema stopped treating us to fragments of songs none of us knew.
From the back seat I could see only a
portion of the windscreen, blocked as it was by the row in front of me, and Jesus, Cesar and the Minke (whose head was oddly angled to avoid hitting the roof), but what I could see was the most frightening vista of opacity, just a blank nothing, as if the world had ended.
‘Keep feeding that man coca!’ I shouted, breaking the silence, hoping that the leaves would somehow impart laser-like vision to Jesus. ‘He must know this road really well,’ I tried to tell myself. ‘So well that he doesn’t even need to see it!’
Soon after this wishful thinking of mine we lurched to a halt once more, ten heads rocking forward then snapping back with the sudden deceleration. Jesus reversed a little, then made a sharp left turn. It took a moment to register what had happened, before it dawned on me that we’d almost driven straight off a cliff. Jesus wasn’t driving by memory, radar or supernatural powers, he was just peering into the gloom and had only seen the turn a split second before it was too late.
Less than an hour later lights appeared ahead of us, not moving; as we drew closer I saw it was a small pueblo (a vague term meaning more than one hut, but smaller than a town) with electricity from a generator. Several buses were parked in the pueblo’s small scrubby parking lot, their passengers sleeping through the break. But we powered on by, making me more and more terrified. Bolivian buses are famously dangerous, with a safety record comparable to asbestos mining, so if other bus drivers had pulled over because of the poor visibility then continuing on was surely as safe as juggling chainsaws while blow-drying your hair in a shark tank.
•
It was nearly two am and we’d been travelling for fourteen hours when we finally started to descend. Down, down, we went, down and down, so that I felt we must’ve finally punctured the Andes and would start heading into the lowlands, where the jungle and river began.
I was right. Less than an hour later we burst from the fog into fetid and humid air, air that had oxygen in it, and a tang. It smelled of bananas, papaya and other, more exotic fruits, and pricked sweat beads from the skin. The change was no less dramatic than waking up to find you’d turned into a kangaroo. Spontaneous conversation began, jaws unclenched, fists unballed, shoulders relaxed, and Thema sang a snatch of song before breaking into his standard encore of unintelligible muttering.
Three hours later the euphoria of survival had worn off, and it was a grubby, grumbling bunch of travellers who disembarked from Jesus’s jalopy in a bland little town somewhere between two places not marked on any maps. The muss-haired woman we’d woken up at the town’s hostel was surprisingly chirpy for the hour, and with good humour chased a mangy cat from the spartan room that the Minke, myself and the Dutch would share for what was left of the night.
‘I just need the bathroom,’ the Minke said to me after we had had a much-needed hug, curtailed because we both felt gross covered in sweat, dust and road grime. ‘Then bed. So I can straighten out.’
I smiled at her optimism as I checked out the beds, which were visibly banana-shaped. Turning down the unnecessary blanket on my bed I found a chicken’s egg on my sheets.
‘Ah! Huevo! Que bueno!’ (‘An egg! How good!’) the hostel owner said in delight when I gave it to her, as if she’d won a prize, before walking out with it. I had to assume that the bed’s previous occupant was a chicken, and the sheets hadn’t been changed since then, but by then I was too tired to care.
Soon after, Lisa returned from the bathroom, looking shell-shocked. ‘My God. I don’t think that room has ever been cleaned. And the wall is so thin between it and this room I could almost see you.’ I decided to use a tree outside instead, chasing a sleeping chicken from underneath in doing so. ‘One of your kids was in my room,’ I said to it as it scuttled off.
I fell deeply asleep, but was woken after what seemed like a very brief time by Cesar’s bass voice shouting ‘Vamos!’ before the rooster outside could crow.
After an extraordinary breakfast of steak, eggs, rice, lettuce, tomato and an instant coffee so dastardly that even my caffeine-craving system rejected it, we were on the road again.
‘Only three hours,’ said Cesar, smiling.
‘Sure,’ I thought.
It took another eight hours from breakfast to reach our destination, meaning that all up we’d spent over twenty-two hours stewing in our own juices in the four-wheel drive, not to mention experiencing the terror of impending death. So it was a huge relief to be at the water for our relaxing float downriver. Little were we to know that this was where the real adventure would begin.
Without a Paddle
Despite our delayed arrival, our raft wasn’t yet ready for launch from a river bank strewn with litter from a nearby village and landmined with dog turds. While the setting was less than idyllic, the river looked inviting. First though we had to meet our crew.
A hard-working man with a gold-toothed smile was lashing tyre tubes to a rectangular frame made of bamboo.
‘Hmm, rubber, twine and bamboo, all noted shipbuilding materials,’ I mused, watching him, though I quite liked the rough look of our vessel as it came together. How could this not be fun?
The gold-toothed man introduced himself as Abel, and introduced us to his wife, Reina, who would be our cook.
‘Mucho gusto, Reina,’ we all replied, Thema rolling the ‘r’ at the front of her name as if he found it delicious.
One further crew member sat watching us all toad-like through heavy-lidded eyes. Though it was evident he put in a lot of effort at the gym, he clearly didn’t replicate it in the boat-building endeavour.
‘Our son,’ Abel explained, a hint of resignation in his tone. He offered no name, and a few of us quietly agreed to think of the lad as Captain Useless.
Thanks to Abel’s heroic solo labour, in no time we were boarding, our luggage wrapped in two-ply plastic bags in case of splashes or, worse, a flip. The luggage then doubled as our seats and I quickly discovered that a bird book has nasty edges to sit on, and resolved to repack it more sensibly the next day.
We set off into a side channel as the sun sank, our goal a much more impressive-looking river only a few hundred metres away. The tyre-tube raft bucked a little where the waters met but Abel’s efforts with a paddle soon had us in calmer waters, and before long a feeling of absolute serenity overtook us. Jesus was no longer with us, and that was surely a blessing. Everyone was silent, enjoying the peace, except Thema, who started singing a few notes of some song, then muttered and, tranquillity trashed, went silent again.
‘We will camp in an hour,’ Cesar said after two minutes/hours and we all burst out laughing at the idea that he had any idea when that was. Though he probably didn’t know what we were laughing about, he joined in, and for the next two hours we happily let the current take us into the night, finally pulling in at an unnamed beach in a remote part of the world.
‘This feels like South America, doesn’t it?’ I said to Lisa as we set up our camp for the night.
‘Yes, it does,’ she said, briefly letting go of a tent pole to squeeze my hand. ‘But I’ll admit I can’t see anything here so we might be in London.’
•
Dawn revealed that we had set up camp on a flat mix of sand and river rocks (actually some of the rocks had made themselves known to my spine during the night). The river here was the colour and opacity of milky coffee.
On the opposite bank, some fifty metres or so away, men were already dredging and panning. Cesar explained that they were miners looking for gold. The miners set up a pump which emitted a dull thrumming, its outlet pipe spewing muddy waste straight back into the river, which explained the murky colour.
As we set off on the raft again I felt content. Every hope I had had for this trip was finally being fulfilled. The river was serene, even if the jungle on either side was disturbed by mining and the water often cloudy. The brochure hadn’t mentioned that the herons, kingfishers, caimans and otters I’d hoped to see would be absent—there was no way they could hunt in this murk—yet the peacefulness made it impossibl
e to be too disappointed.
Once more our little group from La Paz, never verbose, stayed quiet and simply enjoyed the view of the horizon-stretching river and its banks, the gentle lap of water against the raft (this led to the occasional buttock soaking, but no one complained) and the soft splish of Abel’s paddle as he steered us down the centre of the river.
‘Cesar,’ I asked, ‘what is the name of this river?’
‘It is the Rio Kaka,’ he replied.
It took a few moments for it to hit me. ‘Shit Creek? That’s fantastic!’ I said, laughing, though nobody else seemed to share my delight in the waterway’s name.
The day passed with little incident and few breaks, Cesar keen to make up the time lost by our late arrival by encouraging Abel and his loafing son to paddle while the rest of us sat, chatted, and tanned on the raft.
We set up camp again in the dark, the fire lit first so Reina could make us what turned out to be a surprisingly tasty meal given the deceptively plain ingredients of bread, tinned tuna and a mystery sauce, as well as plaintain, the savoury banana that is a staple in many South American countries.
The next morning we were woken by what had become the familiar Cesar alarm clock. ‘Abel!’ he would shout in his bass voice. ‘Vamos!’
By day three we saw fewer and fewer signs of people. The banks were no longer gouged by mining and the river ran cleaner, with increasing numbers of streams joining it from the surrounding low hills. Macaws flew overhead and branches shook with the weight of fleeing monkeys, their fear of humans a sign that they were most likely hunted in this area. Among the dense greenery was the odd orchid, a splash of yellow or red tended by bees the size of birds, and birds the size of bees.
On the fourth morning we were woken by something far louder than Cesar’s bass rumble. A harsh, sustained bellow—changing in pitch but never waning—began before sunrise, rousing all but the dead from sleep.
How to Walk a Puma Page 11