by Lydia Laube
I took a taxi to the minibus company, looked at the beat-up object that stood there with the top of its roof loaded up to the sky – and hired the taxi! At least I could, hopefully, control its driver. I asked him if he would take me to Coroico. He agreed. I inspected his vehicle’s tyres and looked under the bonnet. We agreed on a price and that he would drive carefully and slowly. That night my taxi driver reneged on the deal. He brought his wife to tell me that she wouldn’t let him go. Wise woman. Scouring the street, I found another taxi driver with a four-cylinder stationwagon who said he was willing to go. I bet he won’t do it again. When he started asking directions of passers-by, I realised that it was his first time too. I wouldn’t do it again either. The guide book described it as the most terrifying ride in the world and, for once, it was right.
At first the road consisted of two lanes of asphalt with steep declines surrounded by brown and barren mountains with little sign of habitation, just an occasional person with a few animals. Then we were way up at the top-most level of the range and the mountains right beside me were close enough to touch their bare black rock. They were topped with snow and looked like badly iced cakes or as though they had been dusted with talcum powder that had slid off untidily. Ice that had fallen down from their hillsides lay heaped beside the road.
All too soon we reached La Cumbre Pass. At 4600 metres it is the road’s highest point and from here the ride descends to Coroico. Beside the big boom gate there was a sign that said that this was the start of the one-way road and that drivers were to go one way between certain hours and the opposite way at other times. This turned out to be a myth. No one observed the rule. At the point where drivers were about to start the horror of the road, mongrel dogs lined up to be fed for good luck and there was much ritual sprinkling of tyres with alcohol. Never mind the tyres, it was the passengers who should be sprinkled, inside and out. Then, horns blaring, brakes squealing, the vehicles set off suicidally, their loads lurching out over great abysses edged by the omnipresent white crosses. The worst tragedy had occurred a few years before when two trucks loaded with passengers collided, fell over the edge and killed more than one hundred people.
My driver, Miguel, who had long before taken down his taxi sign, paid the toll at a wonky wooden office, the gate was lifted and the narrow dirt road began. It was horrible, even worse than I had visualised. Rough and potholed and barely a few metres wide, it had ghastly elbow-bends with crumbling edges that hung over sheer space and a drop of a thousand metres. There was little room to get around these bends, and trucks and other vehicles that were coming the other way when they weren’t supposed to be there had to back up to manoeuvre past. We almost crashed into several of them. Waterfalls fell on us from above and washed over the road making it slippery with mud. Despite the appalling conditions, everyone drove as fast as they could.
We had been stopped by customs men looking for drugs at a road block just before the bad road began. My bags had been searched, all my belongings played with and my passport examined. They asked me if I had marijuana or cocaine. Sure thing buddy, I’d be likely to tell you if I had. But now the road was so scary I longed for any sort of sedative. The only way to do this trip is unconscious. I sweated blood as I clutched the side of the car and the seat in front of me, and shrieked ‘Despacio!’ (‘Slowly!’) at Miguel. He drove far too fast with little care for the health of his car, not to mention his passenger.
Now the mountains and valleys below were greenish and so was I. Looking across to where the road snaked around the mountain opposite I saw wrecks and the scattered remains of vehicles sprinkled down the hillsides. It was sick-making. Later there were many rainforest trees, vines and shrubs, while towards Coroico bananas and palms grew. When we finally made it and passed the church in the plaza, Miguel crossed himself. I wanted to join him. Instead I fell into the dining room of the hotel calling for the strongest drink in the house.
I stayed at the Esmerelda, a quiet, secluded hotel built into the side of an almost perpendicular mountain eight hundred metres above the village. This mountain is said to be the home of Pachamama, the earth goddess. From here the view was sensational and Coroico, nestled on the mountainside, was utterly beautiful. Steps cut into the mountain led down almost vertically from the hotel to a lane cobbled in stones so rough they hurt my feet through my shoes. The lane finished in the plaza but was so steep that I was glad when I managed to hitch a ride back up it with the Esmerelda’s four-wheel drive vehicle. In the plaza I booked a seat on the bus to Rurrenabaque the next day. I also needed to reserve space on the truck that takes you seven kilometres down the mountain to connect with the bus at Yolosi in the valley below Coroico.
That night I ate in the hotel dining room, which was lit by candles. It was a strange sensation to be dining on the edge of a dark precipice. Looking out I could see nothing except a few lights in the village. I talked to a Bolivian gent who said he came up here regularly to stay in his weekender, nineteen kilometres away, where, he said, there were many beautiful birds, including toucans. It would require more than a few feathered friends to get me to ride regularly over that hideous road. But Coroico was a delightfully peaceful spot and after extracting an extra blanket from the management and having a great hot shower in my huge bathroom, I slept warm. In the morning, when the sun reached over the mountains, the twittering birds got me up. I watched a tiny hummingbird sipping his breakfast from a banana flower.
The Esmeralda jeep took me down to the plaza, where I ate a huge breakfast of eggs, bacon, ham, tomato, bread and sheep’s cheese. The plaza was a pleasant place that was lined with many small shops and had garden seats under huge palm trees. I talked to an itinerant trader from whom I bought a petrified shark’s tooth. Don’t ask me why, it must have been the altitude. When I asked him directions to a loo he took me by the hand and led me there. I also met a park ranger who told me that recently in the north an anaconda had been found that had a suspicious bulge in its middle. On investigation this turned out to be a twelve-year-old boy.
When it was time to truck it down to connect with the bus to Rurrenabaque, I saw, shock horror, that the truck was not only open and a stand-up-in-the-rear job, but that it was already packed solid and grossly overloaded. I refused to stand on the open tailgate, which was the only space left, and was squeezed into the front seat. Even though it was only a few kilometres, it was still a hideously steep road and I begged the driver to go slowly and, dear man, he did.
The village of Yolosi had a checkpoint where vehicles had to stop and pay a toll in order to pass. This was where you waited for the bus. Enterprising souls had set up stalls to sell warm cold drinks, mandarins and bananas to those forced to stop. Many vehicles went through, mostly buses and trucks. There were few private vehicles and all of these were four-wheel-drives. I had been given the number of the bus I was allegedly booked on and told that it would arrive at half-past-two. It came at half-past-five. There had been a landslide on the road. During the long wait I talked to other travellers or sat on my bag and read. Someone said that two trucks had gone over the edge close to Yolosi the week before and more than twenty people had died. Eight children had survived by being thrown off.
I walked down the road in search of a loo. All I had to do was follow my nose – I smelt it for ages before I got to it. When I reached the gate I found it securely locked. I questioned a nearby shopkeeper about the possibility of a key and was sent to the house of the man who was the Keeper of the Toilet. He opened the padlock on the gate, gave me a ration of rough, pink loo paper and charged me a third of a boliviano.
At last the bus arrived. It was a lumbering old brute whose top was heaped high with baggage – to which mine and eleven other people’s was added. Two men who failed to win a seat had to stand in the aisle.
Then we were off. Steep, jungle-covered cliffs loomed above humid, cloud-filled gorges and the first hour and a half was a continuation of the same narrow, nefarious track that had brought me to Coroico, but now I wa
s in an overcrowded, top-heavy vehicle that tipped and swayed as it lurched along the edges of precipices and around blind elbow-bends. At one stage I looked back at the road we had just traversed – a strip of dirt halfway up an incredibly high mountain, a mere wisp of white on the darkgreen vegetation. It was so scary my stomach churned and my heart leapt into my mouth trying to escape.
The bus bumbled on, tilting and rocking, waiting on the blind corners for trucks to pass. I was sitting at the rear, which had five seats in a row across it. My companions were three Irish girls and one Bolivian gent. The girl nearest the window groaned in horror every now and then. I thanked heaven that, unlike her, I couldn’t see what was, or was not, under the back wheel.
At six o’clock we stopped for a meal at an outdoor cafe. It was merely a few tables under a wooden verandah, but they fed me reasonable tucker for a tiny price.
It started to rain as we took off again. Terrific – now it was not only dark, but slippery to boot. Jolting along the edge of a precipice while slithering in mud in the pitch-dark convinced me that this would be my last mountain ride ever. Flat, flat terrain from now on, thank you.
At around nine we stopped for more food and at about four in the morning, when we were out of the mountains and in the yungas – a source of gold as well as the major area of coca production – we drove under a scaffold that enabled the police to search the top of the bus for drugs. Then they entered the bus to search us. It was a very perfunctory search – I could have had heaps of loot hidden under my feet. Sometime later we ground to a sudden halt and something seemed to have broken. Fortunately we were out of the mountains by then. The driver jacked up the bus and asked the passengers for a knife. Someone obliged and I saw the driver cutting up an old tyre tube. The repairs took an hour or so. I think it had something to do with the springs. We went on very carefully after that.
Dawn found us on a road that was almost flat. My relief was unbounded, but the road was still appalling. It took seventeen-and-a-half hours to travel three-hundred-and-fifty kilometres. When daylight came I could see that the country was very green, the vegetation consisting of rainforest thick with trees and vines. Now and then we passed a type of house that I had not seen before, made of wooden planks and with overhanging thatched roofs. Chooks, pigs, small plots and banana trees surrounded the houses. Occasionally we would pass a man walking on the road, carrying a rifle and a machete.
Rurrenabaque is a real frontier town but it looked fine to me after the bus, the road and the Andes. Rurre, as it is known, lies on the Rio Beni – the ‘river of wind’ in the language of the Tacana, the original people of this place. They were one of the few lowland tribes to resist Christianity and western civilisation. Now only a few forest tribes continue a hunting and gathering existence in the country around Rurre, but along the jungle waterways there are tribes that have had minimal contact with modern civilisation and still roam the deep jungles as they did thousands of years ago. It is said sometimes that they are the remnants of the tribes who inhabited the lost Atlantis.
The Spanish came here looking for El Dorado, the Gilded City, in the mid 1600s. They gave up and moved on. Jesuit priests founded the first mission in 1675 and imposed Christianity where they could, but they also brought cattle and horses. Despite what some people think, northern Bolivia is not all cocaine and rainforest – there are large cattle ranches in the savannahs. Some of the cattle are descended from the Jesuit herds, but most are Asiatic Zebu imported from Brazil. The Jesuits also taught European trades like leatherwork, and established tropical agriculture, including the farming of bananas, coffee, tobacco, cotton, cacao and peanuts. The Jesuits were expelled in 1767. Other missionaries and settlers came later, but they only brought disease and slavery.
My luggage and I were transported from the bus station on a motorbike, for which dubious pleasure I was charged one-and-a-half bolivianos, forty-five cents, the price for any ride around town. From the several small hotels available I chose one situated on the River Beni that was named, not very originally, The Beni. Its outlook was not as picturesque as it sounds, as it only backed onto the river – the rest of it was in the main street. The Beni’s design was pseudo-Spanish with balconies and a courtyard where hammocks were slung invitingly between pillars.
Rurre had rough dirt streets that were lined with shanty shops and rows of stalls, but the town was clean and the shops had limited supplies of cans and bottles on their small wooden shelves. A big cement curb separated the street from the area in front of the shops. Not good enough to call a footpath, it meandered haphazardly up and down and over planks that had been laid across the open drains to help pedestrians negotiate them.
I found breakfast down the road at the Rurre Club, a pleasant outdoor spot overlooking the river under huge mango trees. While I ate I watched the coming and going of the motorised canoes that provide transport up, down and across the river. I had read that passengers were taken on the cargo vessels that ply the mighty rivers of Bolivia’s north, and intended to try for one.
Then I slept for several hours. When I surfaced I indulged in a washing fest. This was the first place that had been warm enough to dry clothes. I had now thrown off my winter woollies. Bliss! The noisy airconditioner in my room worked for a little while, then gave up the ghost. The hot water service did ditto but the TV was fine. However when I complained that I was not able to change channels I found the solution was simple. There was only one.
In a tour office in the main street I arranged to take a three-day trip into the jungle. The tour lady was a charming Slovenian with a lit-up face. A born-again Christian, she was reading the Bible when I rocked up. Bella told me that she had spent a year in a jungle village living off the land with a local tribe because ‘God sent me’. She made a detailed note of my name and particulars – in case God lost me? Bella exclaimed in horror when I said that I had come by road and told me that she lost a friend that way when the jeep he was travelling in went over the side and eleven people were killed.
I ate dinner on the riverfront in a basic cafe that was half outdoors. There appeared to be no way to lock it up and the bottles on the bar were left out in the open when the place closed for the night. A handy spot to go for a free drink after hours, I thought. Long, sleek motor canoes put-putting by and boys on motorbikes doing wheelies on the foreshore provided the evening’s entertainment as the sun set behind them and sent a blaze of fiery colour over the calm water of the river. Large birds that looked like jungle fowl but were a type of vulture zoomed in. They hovered gracefully like hawks, but landed like malfunctioning bulldozers, then waddled off like ruptured ducks. In a tree close by, a tiny monkey, who should still have been with his mother, was attached to a limb by a rope that was tied very tightly around his middle. A big green parrot, also securely fastened, kept him company. I watched a woman set up a rival cooking establishment outside the cafe, unpacking from her basket a small burner, cooking pots and other bits and pieces. As each customer finished eating, she rinsed his plate in a bucket and dried it on the edge of her apron.
I saw no cars in Rurre’s streets, just a couple of four-wheel-drive vehicles and several motorbikes. There were, however, a multitude of placid dogs. I heard that sloths lived in the trees of the plaza but did not find one. I did see two toucans sitting on top of the wooden sign above a shop. They were so brightly coloured and larger than life that it took me a while to convince myself they were real.
Walking in the streets I passed many men who carried rifles and machetes. Everyone said ‘Buenos dias’.
8 Road to ruin
Next morning I had the local breakfast of meat, egg, rice, tomato, coffee and bread. It was good and the coffee for which the yungas are noted was excellent. Seeking information about onward boat travel from Rurre, I was sent to the naval office, where a charming uniformed officer shook my hand and informed me that there were no boats at this time of the year as the water was too low. I would have to endure another bus ride. A road to the north had
recently been completed but before this the river had been the only form of transport.
Great river systems drain this vast area – the Madre de Dios (Mother of God), the Beni, the Mamore and a score of others flow northwards towards Brazil, into the Amazon tributaries and eventually to the Atlantic. I motorbiked it to the bus station and bought a ticket to Riberteralta, five hundred kilometres further north, for a few days hence, when I was due to be back from my jungle trip.
The Beni Hotel was terribly rowdy. I moved to an upstairs room hoping it might be quieter. Getting rid of the airconditioner was a good start but now I had an overhead fan that went around in the accepted manner but didn’t send any air down where I needed it. Goodness knows how this was possible and what it did with all that air.
There was no electric power in Rurre from midnight to seven in the morning. I had a cold shower by torchlight at six, packed my bag in the dark, then presented myself at the tour office ready for the jungle. Three hand-carts piled with gear were pushed to the riverbank and loaded – along with a young Belgian couple, the guide, the cook, Bella as the interpreter because she couldn’t find an English-speaking guide and me – into a huge canoe with a forty-five-horsepower motor. The canoe had been carved entirely from one big tree – its base was very narrow for its length and only just fitted two people across.
We motored over the river to San Buenaventura, which had no road into it. Its only access to the outside world is via the ferry from Rurre, as it was with all these towns before the road was built. In San Buenaventura we paid a tax and registered our names and passport numbers with the police. Then we set off on the wide, calm River Beni.
As soon as we left Rurre behind we were among dense jungle with few signs of inhabitants. Now and then there would be a small clearing and a native house with a canoe tied at its landing – a blissful idyllic scene. After a time the river occasionally broke into boiling rapids and whirlpools. I could see the terrific pull of the current and, thinking that this would be a dangerous river to fall into, realised that we had no life jackets. High-water marks and huge trees with massive trunks that had been uprooted like toothpicks lay where the river had dumped them on sandbanks.