The next morning I awoke earlier than the rest of the family, as had become the pattern. Our hostel offered a simple breakfast on an outdoor patio: coffee, bread, juice, and cornflakes. On a whim, I opened up a file on my computer that I had not looked at in six years. It was a novel called The Rationing. There were forty pages or so, which I read over my coffee. This is not terrible, I concluded. I had been feeling the urge to write. Perhaps dusting off the novel would satisfy my writing urge while giving me a fun way to enjoy the morning solitude.
That was to be the last such solitude for some time. We had signed up for a hike to the bottom of Colca Canyon, a giant fissure running through the Andes nearly twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. The adventure began with a bus pickup from our hostel at three-thirty the next morning. We stopped at a small restaurant for breakfast—still before dawn—where our group sat shivering at a long table. The waiters brought coffee and tea and a small basket of rolls. We nibbled on the bread while awaiting more substantive food. As I wondered hungrily what might be coming out of the kitchen next to sustain us for our day of hiking, our guide declared, “Okay, back on the bus.” Apparently we had just eaten breakfast: bread, butter, and jam. Meanwhile, CJ had developed a bad head cold; he was snorting and coughing and could not breathe through his nose.
If our hike were televised to a live audience, the color commentators would have pointed out that Team Wheelan was not starting the day in peak form.
Commentator One: “They look tired and cranky to me, Bob.”
Commentator Two: “That’s right, Nadine. Also, sick and hungry.”
Commentator One: “Are they really prepared to hike down one of the deepest canyons in the world?”
Commentator Two: “I think that’s what we’re about to find out.”
Before the descent, we paused on the rim of the canyon to look for Andean condors, the largest flying bird in the world. The sun came up, casting a soft glow on the rocky precipices where the condors build their nests. The sunrise over the canyon was a reasonable payoff for getting out of bed in the dark and cold. And then the condors began soaring in front of us: first one, then two, and then many. Imagine bald eagles floating over the Grand Canyon. I perched on a rock and did my best to take photos that did justice to the condors, the sunrise, and Colca Canyon.
We began hiking down a narrow path cut into the side of the canyon. The altitude would have made the hiking rigorous under any conditions. CJ was doing it without being able to breathe through his nose, pausing every so often to rest on a rock. After a long morning, our group stopped for lunch: a half bowl of soup and a small serving of alpaca stirfry, both of which were good. I eagerly awaited the next course. “Back to the trail,” the guide announced.
“Can I get some more alpaca?” I asked.
“It’s time to walk,” the guide said.
“Maybe more soup?” I pleaded, as if I were in the hiking equivalent of a Charles Dickens novel.
“We go to the trail,” he commanded.
Back to the trail it was. CJ had squirreled away his chocolate bars from our class in his pack. When we stopped for a break, he sat on a rock and ate one greedily, pausing between mouthfuls of chocolate to breathe through his mouth. The rest of us stared at him like jackals. Around sunset, the expedition reached the bottom of the canyon, where we would spend the night in rustic cabins arrayed around a spring-fed swimming pool. Most important, there would be dinner.
“Is there a vegetarian in the group?” the waiter asked as we crowded around an outdoor table. Katrina raised her hand. This seemed like a courteous thing to ask. In fact, it meant that none of us would get any meat. Those scraps of alpaca at lunch now felt like luxury. I devoured a plate of vegetables and rice. Still ravenous, I asked the waiter, “Can I get some more vegetables?”
“I’m sorry, no,” he replied.
“How about an extra tea bag?” I implored.
“Of course,” he agreed. Finally, a small victory. But then he never brought it.
The alarm on my phone awoke us the next morning at four a.m. I have no recollection of getting any breakfast. We began hiking in the dark using our headlamps. The route out of the canyon was steeper than the descent. CJ paused around sunrise to eat the last of his chocolate bars. Again, the family looked on hungrily as he ate. “This is good,” Katrina said. “We can fatten him up—like the Donner Party.”
“What are they talking about?” CJ asked suspiciously. “A dinner party?”
“Donner Party,” Katrina said.
“You’re vegetarian,” I said.
She shrugged. “Sometimes I make exceptions.”
“What’s the Donner Party?” CJ asked.
“I’ll explain while we walk,” Leah said.
Team Wheelan summited Colca Canyon around nine in the morning. A woman was selling snacks off a blanket laid on the ground. Leah authorized us to spend most of that day’s food budget on Snickers bars, after which we basked in the warmth of the sun, enjoying the endorphins from the hike and the sugar high from the candy bars. CJ had been heroic as he struggled to breathe. The hike was beautiful. “It would have been fine if there had been enough food,” Leah remarked as we got on the bus.
“The same could be said for the siege of Leningrad,” I replied. CJ chuckled. Leah ignored me. Katrina told me I was an idiot. And Colca Canyon entered the Wheelan family vernacular as a synonym for something at risk of going terribly awry. To this day, CJ will assess a situation and warn, “Oh no, it’s Colca Canyon!”
And then another early morning, this time to catch a bus to the city of Puno on the banks of Lake Titicaca. An enterprising company, Peru Hop, sold us bus passes for a fixed price that allowed unlimited travel for two weeks along their routes. We used our passes to head west in Peru toward Lake Titicaca, one of South America’s biggest lakes and the world’s highest navigable body of water. If this were a film, one might cue the ominous music here: lingering fatigue from Colca Canyon . . . multiple early mornings in a row . . . no rest day for a week. Also, the rest of us had caught CJ’s cold.
Puno is home of the legendary “floating islands.” As the name would suggest, these are man-made islands constructed of tightly thatched reeds that float in Lake Titicaca. During the Inca Empire, the floating islands were a clever way to survive. The inhabitants could feed themselves by fishing; if necessary, they could float the whole village to a new location. As an economist, I would argue that living on a manmade floating island in the twenty-first century is less practical. A boat dropped us off on an island the size of a football field. Several women urged us to buy souvenirs. Saying no to their handicrafts was more difficult than usual, as we were stuck on the island until the boat came back to pick us up.
I will admit that the engineering of the islands was impressive. Still, the overall experience felt like Colonial Williamsburg: an exhibition of how people used to live. In the present day, the only way people can survive on a floating island is if tourists pay to watch them live that way. We were not observing a unique culture; we were making it possible, like performance art.
That evening Katrina and I, the introverts, went to a café for a glass of wine and to write in our journals. On the walk home, we came across a concert in the central plaza. An orchestra was playing in front of a beautiful church with the moon rising behind. The central plaza was alive: families, couples, food vendors. We bought food, listened to the music, and admired the physical splendor of the moon hovering over the church and the aliveness of the plaza. The serendipitous public concert was the opposite of the floating islands: one showed us something about life in Peru five hundred years ago; the other was a charming snapshot of Puno in that moment.
That evening also gave us our first glimpse of what happens to Katrina when she gets tipsy. Katrina is wispy thin, and Puno is thirteen thousand feet above sea level. One glass of wine went straight to her head. When we arrived back at the hotel room, Katrina was abnormally chatty. She began making loud, emphatic assertions about th
e Ottoman Empire and other historical periods. The rest of us looked at each other in amusement as she pronounced, “Alexander the Great, really? What was so great about him?”
Some people get happy when they are buzzed. Others get mean, or funny, or weepy. Katrina becomes a truculent nerd.
The next morning, the bus dropped us at the Peru-Bolivia border. As we were walking to a small hut where we would get our Bolivian visas, Katrina declared, “CJ is not allowed to sit within five rows of me on any bus ride for the rest of the trip.”
“You can’t do that!” CJ howled.
“You do talk a lot on the bus,” I told CJ, trying to sound reasonable, but really taking the side of my fellow introvert.
“Let’s just get across the border,” Leah admonished, like a diplomat trying to hold a delicate peace process together. As we waited in line outside the small immigration building, Leah informed me that we were now over budget because of the Bolivian visas and the Peru Hop bus tickets; we would have to be more frugal in the coming weeks.
The Bolivian visa required a prodigious amount of paperwork: forms; photos; multiple copies of all our passports; and proof of onward travel. We had a small problem with that last one. If a scrupulous bureaucrat scrutinized our paperwork, he would find a problem with our proof of onward travel. We had no tickets out of Bolivia—only the airline tickets from Ecuador to New Zealand.
“We’re missing something for our visas!” CJ said, loud enough to be heard in both Peru and Bolivia.
“Shut your mouth,” I snarled. “Do not say anything to anybody until we are in Bolivia.”
“What if they ask me a question?” CJ asked earnestly.
“You’re not going to understand it anyway,” Katrina offered. It was a perfect opportunity to appear helpful while really just criticizing CJ’s poor Spanish.
“What if it’s in English?” CJ asked.
“Pretend you don’t speak English,” I said impatiently.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” CJ protested. “Why wouldn’t I speak English if my family is American—”
“CJ,” Leah implored, “let us handle this.”
A bored-looking immigration official counted our cash multiple times and then threw the paperwork into a cardboard box without looking at it. There were no questions about onward travel.
On the Bolivian side of the border, CJ stopped in front of a food stall and inspected the items for sale. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Can I buy some Pringles?” This was a Western brand in a proper container that cost three dollars, not the homemade chips that cost twenty cents.
“He didn’t eat his breakfast,” Katrina muttered under her breath. I was thinking the same thing. CJ had eaten only half his eggs at breakfast that morning. He and Tess (now at home) had a habit of leaving food uneaten at breakfast and then complaining of being hungry around ten-thirty. Now that we had been put on budget watch, a three-dollar canister of Pringles felt like an extravagance.
Leah bought CJ the Pringles.
We walked into the Bolivian town of Copacabana, hoping that a few hours of fast Internet would improve the collective mood. Every establishment up and down the main street advertised free Wi-Fi, but as we walked from one café to the next, none of them had a strong enough signal to get our devices online. CJ was eating his Pringles; the rest of us were getting hungrier. Eventually a waiter at one of the restaurants admitted, “The Internet doesn’t really work anywhere in this town.”
We decided to have lunch. Leah reminded us to be cognizant of the budget. Katrina and I stared at CJ, who was licking the salt off his fingers. “Why did you let him buy the Pringles?” I asked Leah.
Like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the Pringles purchase quickly exposed other fault lines. We were still tired from Colca Canyon. The Internet wasn’t working. The introverts found CJ’s talking to be insufferable; CJ felt that Katrina and I were being mean to him. Leah, a middle child and the peacemaker in our family, defended CJ and then felt ganged up on for doing so. Katrina and I argued that when Leah defended CJ, she abetted his annoying behavior.
When the waiter came to our table to offer us menus, we were all yelling at each other. “I will come back in a moment,” he said in Spanish.
“How do you think CJ feels when you tell him that you won’t sit near him on a bus?” Leah asked Katrina.
“Bad,” Katrina said, her eyes welling up with tears.
“It does make me feel bad,” CJ blubbered.
Leah turned to CJ. “Do you understand why Katrina finds it hard to sit next to you on the bus?” she asked.
“Sometimes I can’t help talking,” he said, tears streaming down his face.
Leah, still channeling her inner Oprah, looked at Katrina and me: “How do you think it makes me feel when the two of you don’t want to be with the rest of us?” Katrina and I apologized. When the waiter reappeared, we were all crying.
The lunch discussion cleared the air. Sleep, a slower pace, and good Internet would help, too. Mostly, however, we had to adapt to who we all were. CJ was not going to stop talking, but he would have to become more aware of others around him. Katrina and I needed quiet time. I resolved to work on the novel every day, mostly as a solitary morning ritual. Leah would continue to hold all this together, like the conductor of a needy symphony orchestra.
I had been keeping a tally of travel-related events in the back of my journal: bus rides, countries visited, and so on. That night I added a new category, Complete Family Meltdown, which would henceforth be defined as three family members crying at the same time, or one adult and one child.
* Cacao refers to the unroasted beans. Cocoa is the product of beans that have been roasted.
Chapter 7
Inspired by Real Events
If I were in a place with a top-notch criminal justice system, I would have called the police myself, or even grabbed the guy by the lapels and told him to walk away. Uyuni, Bolivia, is not such a place.
“WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN?” Leah asked. She had just Googled: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CHILDREN INGEST POT? CJ, abnormally quiet, was sitting beside her. The two of them had just returned from a long walk in La Paz, Bolivia. Along the way, they had stopped at an organic farmers’ market where there were free brownies on offer at one of the stands. CJ had helped himself. As he was wiping crumbs off his face, however, Leah noticed a large marijuana leaf displayed behind the table with the brownies. They hustled back to our apartment, where CJ’s behavior seemed normal, or at least no more aberrant than the Dramamine incident in Peru.
“You didn’t ask the guy at the stand if there was pot in the brownies?” I asked.
“CJ had already eaten the brownie. It either had pot in it or it didn’t,” Leah explained. “I wasn’t going to pump his stomach at the farmers’ market.” She turned back to her computer. “Wow,” she exclaimed as she read the online posts. “Lots of kids eat their parents’ pot brownies.”
“He’ll talk less if he’s stoned,” Katrina offered.
“We’re not buying him Pringles if he gets the munchies,” I said.
“I’m fine,” CJ insisted. “Everything is fine.”
“That’s exactly what a stoned person would say,” I pointed out.
“I like him better this way,” Katrina said.
We never found out for certain what was in the brownies. Whatever CJ had ingested, he was back to his voluble self soon enough, and La Paz would prove calming and restful, even without special brownies for the rest of us.
We had made our way to La Paz after the family meltdown in Copacabana. Once all the crying had stopped, we took the Peru Hop bus for the four-hour ride along the southern shore of Lake Titicaca. It was late afternoon and clouds had settled over the lake; the jagged peaks of the Andes jutted above the clouds. There was virtually no development, just mile after mile of stark, barren beauty, especially at dusk when the setting sun cast a golden light on the lake, clouds, and mountains. After dark, the bus stopped in a small
market town to make the crossing to the north side of the lake.
There was no bridge. Instead, the passengers disembarked while the bus was driven onto a barge and floated across the lake at a point where it narrowed to about a half mile. The passengers were packed into a dilapidated motorboat that sank lower and lower in the water as we climbed in. “Sit there,” the driver said in Spanish as he pointed to bench seats on either side of the boat. That turned out to be the complete safety briefing as well. My head was only slightly above the waterline as we puttered to the other side.
We reboarded the bus and continued on. Bolivia was noticeably poorer than Peru. On the outskirts of La Paz, a fierce wind was blowing dust through wide, empty streets. We could see buildings with lights on, but no human inhabitants. The blowing sand shrouded everything in what looked like fog or smoke, making the little towns we drove through feel like the setting for a postapocalyptic film. Eventually La Paz came into view: points of light spilling down the side of a mountain, as if someone had draped Christmas tree lights across the Andes.
Our Airbnb apartment was in an upscale residential neighborhood across from a small park. La Paz is ten thousand feet above sea level, with steep streets; the uphill walks left us short of breath. The huffing and puffing notwithstanding, we quickly found places to do laundry and buy groceries. CJ and I ate cheap noodles at a food court on the second floor of a grocery store, which struck me as a fun snapshot of globalization: two Americans eating Chinese food in a Bolivian food court. The measure of the charm of our Bolivian neighborhood was how quickly we adopted possessive pronouns: “our apartment”; “our park”; “our grocery store”; “my café.” The weather was sunny and warm, and the city was easy to explore on foot. We used the strong Internet in our apartment and FaceTime to have a video chat with my parents (once they pointed the camera on my father’s phone in the right direction). I marveled that we could communicate visually across continents at no cost using a technology I had first seen on Star Trek. Most important, just a few days after the first Complete Family Meltdown, I was able to write in my journal, “The healing has begun.”
We Came, We Saw, We Left Page 10