The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  By 9 p.m., about three hours into the delay, the independent passengers had become a collective, united by grievance and doubt. Mauro, all smiles, kept ducking back into the cabin to tell us not to worry. But our patience had narrowed to a very sharp point. Passengers began discussing the merits of other South American bus companies—the reliability of their vehicles, the plushiness of their fully reclining seats, their straight-shooting drivers. The Ecuadorian professor, who proved our most enthusiastic mutineer, suggested we present Mauro with a strict ultimatum: either the bus was fixed within an hour, or we got our ticket money back plus return fare to São Paulo.

  We marched off the bus and peered through the café windows, watching Mauro settle his dinner bill. Moments later, he walked through the door and straight into our little nest of vipers.

  Mauro—a compact 52-year-old who spends an average of 26 days a month driving this highway—calmly illustrated what he would later describe to me as the most important lesson the Interoceanic has taught him: plans rarely match up with reality, and it’s almost never immediately obvious whether that’s a good or a bad thing.

  “Look,” Mauro explained to our group, “if we run on schedule, we reach the Peruvian border at about 1 a.m. on the third day.” But he said the border-patrol office would be closed at that time. So we would have to sit there and wait until 8 a.m., when the office opened again. He motioned to the café, with its 24-hour food service, its ice-cold drinks, the soccer match on TV. “Waiting here is better, believe me.”

  Expertly defanged, we offered no rebuttal. About 20 minutes after midnight, more than five hours after the belt snapped, we settled back into our seats—legs stretched, bellies filled, and perspectives altered by a highway that’s constantly turning expectations inside out. Many pilgrims have been drawn to the road by dreams of transformation, but those who thrive learn to rewrite their plans on the go.

  On my maps, the highway was a thin black line that arched frownwise across the continent. It jagged fitfully, as if drawn by someone with a tremulous hand—an empire-builder in the throes of a fever dream.

  In 1970, a cyclical drought scorched the fields of northeastern Brazil and drove president general Emílio Garrastazu Médici to make a promise: no longer would the country’s farmers be dependent on a relatively slender tract of arable territory near the eastern seaboard. Médici vowed to open Brazil’s vast, forested interior to agricultural and industrial development. Step 1: a road.

  The proposed Trans-Amazonian Highway would cross Brazil’s western border and connect to Peru’s highway system, which itself was mostly hypothetical. A Brazilian government report printed that same year described the continent’s core as “an enormous demographic and economic emptiness” where “man continues to be the great absent.” The report’s authors cast themselves as realists grounded in practicality; the so-called experts who worried about the environmental impacts to the region, on the other hand, were fantasists. “In fact, many of the various scientific missions that have studied [the Amazon region] seem to lose themselves in its immensity, offering reports much more descriptive and full of admiration and astonishment than sound conclusions and objective results,” the report declared.

  Years passed, and funding evaporated. But the idea of a coast-to-coast road didn’t die. In 1984, Brazil finished paving the BR-364, connecting São Paulo to the thickly forested state of Rondônia. Médici’s plan for the Trans-Amazonian had envisioned a Peruvian border-crossing hundreds of miles north of the BR-364’s trajectory. But by paving an existing dirt road that stretched from the Peruvian border to the terminus of the BR-364 about 500 miles away, Brazil could piece together a more efficient route.

  In 2000, the presidents of 12 South American countries identified the completion of an interoceanic route as one of the continent’s top infrastructural priorities. A committee of South American leaders approved a financing plan that combined state and private resources with funding from international-development banks. Brazil’s government—seduced by the promise of easier access to lucrative Asian markets—agreed to finance much of the work on the Peruvian side. The cost of the new construction has been estimated to be about $2.8 billion.

  From Mauro’s bus, the highway that emerged after all those years of back-and-forth often looked like a simple country road. For a majority of its length, it was just wide enough for one lane of traffic in each direction. As we motored across the plains of Mato Grosso, I saw drivers choose to travel on the comparatively smooth dirt shoulder instead of slaloming the potholes in the pavement. Tractors and other slow-moving farm vehicles regularly forced Mauro and José to play chicken in the other lane. I never saw a patrol car lying in wait for speeders; the road conditions allowed the highway to police itself.

  Back in the 1990s, Brazilian analysts predicted that an interoceanic highway, by shortcutting the Panama Canal, would reduce Brazilian agricultural shipping costs to Asia by as much as $100 per ton. These days, even the highway’s most enthusiastic proponents concede that the Asian angle was oversold. “The truth is this hasn’t happened yet,” said Jorge Barata, who heads the Peruvian offices of Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction firm that built many of the newest stretches of the road and has a 25-year concession to maintain them. The road in its current form, he said, simply isn’t suitable for heavy-duty, long-distance shipping. “The cost of river transport ends up being a lot more competitive.”

  For the first two days, through Mato Grosso and much of Rondônia, the view from the bus was dependably uniform: oceanic fields of sugarcane, soybeans, and corn and flat pastureland studded by rust-colored termite mounds and patrolled by herds of wattle-necked Brahman cattle. No one exposed to more than 50 consecutive hours of it could doubt that Brazil was the world’s top beef exporter or that Brazil will most likely produce more soybeans than the United States this year. Similarly, no one treated to so many hours upon this spine-rattling highway could fail to recognize how much more might be possible if Brazil’s infrastructure were better. Last year, China’s largest soybean-importing firm canceled an order for 2 million metric tons of Brazilian soybeans because of crippling transportation delays in getting those crops to the Santos port.

  For several weeks before I boarded the bus, Brazilians were demanding that more of their tax dollars be spent on basic services, particularly transportation infrastructure. Cost overruns related to hosting the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics enraged a population that was asked to accept a hike in bus fares. Late on the second day, our bus ran into a demonstration in Rondônia. A vendor walking along the side of the road hawking pamonhas, a sort of tamale, explained that demonstrators had blocked the highway with metal bars and pieces of wood. “It goes on for kilometers and kilometers,” he said. “Traffic has been stopped for six and a half hours.”

  It came as something of a surprise when the road abruptly came to an end at the Madeira River in western Rondônia. Dozens of bridges had been constructed in Brazil and Peru before South American politicians inaugurated the “completed” Interoceanic almost two years before, but this one was left unbuilt. A barge waited to ferry the bus to the other side.

  We began drifting across the inky current at 11:15 p.m. Several of my fellow passengers staggered moon-eyed, mouths agape, conversing in tones that deserved italics and multiple exclamation marks. At first I assumed they’d been drinking, but I had failed to recognize something rare: genuine, unselfconscious wonder. They were staring at the night sky, which shone with enough stars to impart an instant understanding of the infinite. A twenty-something Brazilian tourist named Guilhermo spoke for everyone: “I have never seen anything like that!”

  We were leaving the pragmatic monotony of large-scale agribusiness and heading into more improvisational territories. Ahead lay the steamy hollows of the Amazon basin and the stonewashed skies of the Andes, regions where the highway more forcefully influences the enterprises popping up in its path. Guilhermo, doling out high-fives to anyone with a free hand, seemed to sense
and embrace the change. Before we got back on the bus, he told me that he’d never in his life been this far from home.

  About 62 hours after first boarding the bus, I bid Mauro adeus in Rio Branco, capital of the far western state of Acre. It was 4 a.m., and I believe I was the only passenger awake.

  I hope the others didn’t sleep all the way to the border. Acre não existe (Acre doesn’t exist) is a Brazilian chestnut that pokes fun at the state’s isolation, the gist being that the place is about as real to most Brazilians as is, say, Atlantis. People in Acre tend to shrug off the joke as obvious nonsense, which isn’t to say it doesn’t bother them a little.

  According to government figures, more than 85 percent of the state is jungle; the rest mostly consists of Rio Branco and the string of small villages along the highway. That denuded strip has been filled with people, Toyotas, pizza parlors, and shopping malls, yet the forest’s shadow looms over everything. One of Rio Branco’s soccer stadiums is called Arena da Floresta (Forest Arena); another is known as Florestão (the Big Forest). The regional government’s public Wi-Fi network is called the Digital Forest. A central square is the Plaza of the People of the Forest.

  Some people, like Eziquiel Alves da Silva, the manager of the state’s first ethanol-producing factory, are pushing for Acre to become more like the regions we’d already passed through. Da Silva told me that he had been visiting local landowners, trying to convince them that sugarcane-based ethanol soon would become a cornerstone of the local economy. He suggested that if exports to Asia took off, market forces could expand the sugarcane industry, now centered in São Paulo, westward.

  “We’re in a privileged position here,” he said of the month-old factory, which perfumed the highway with sweet, pungent notes. “From here, we can go”—he waved his arm with a flourish—“to the world.”

  But along the highway he seemed outnumbered by people resisting corporate development and experimenting with enterprises that might protect local forest traditions. About 120 miles past Rio Branco, I passed a government-subsidized company called Natex, which uses latex collected from trees by local rubber tappers to make condoms. A few miles down the highway, I followed a dirt road into a 100-square-mile reserve that’s collectively managed by about 80 families, most of whom make their living roaming the forest and harvesting either Brazil nuts or latex. They told me they’re trying to carry on the legacy of Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper and activist who was shot in 1988 for defending the rainforest. “This is what he fought for,” said Everton Paiva de Oliveira, who manages an ecolodge in the reserve with one of Mendes’s nieces.

  Trails led into the forest between the flying-buttress roots of enormous tauari and samaúma trees. Dozens of white butterflies erupted upon approach—a handful of tossed confetti. In the tree canopy, Oliveira pointed to an obstacle course of rope bridges and ziplines. Guests can sleep in individual chalets or less-expensive dormitory-style rooms. But when I visited, at a time of year that should have been considered high season, every room was empty.

  Over a glass of pale yellow araçá-boi juice, Oliveira admitted that the lodge wasn’t turning a profit and depended on state funds to stay afloat. When he mentioned that they didn’t have Internet access, I wasn’t sure if it was another example of the rustic ambience he was trying to sell or if he was explaining why they were having trouble selling it. The lodge’s quandary was Acre’s writ small: how much change can tradition absorb before it becomes something else entirely?

  On a Saturday night back in Rio Branco, I met Junior Fera, an 18-year-old who doesn’t make a habit of worrying about such questions. I first noticed him standing with a small group of friends in the middle of a suspension bridge and embracing a girl. A couple of seconds later, both of them plunged off the side of the bridge toward the current far below, still locked in each other’s arms. A harness line, which I hadn’t noticed at first, cut their swan dive short. They swung together in a wild arc, a few feet above the water, before their scissoring feet eventually found purchase on the sloping bank. A few minutes later Junior returned to the bridge, alone. “Was that your girlfriend?” I asked, wondering where the other jumper went. He erupted in laughter. “It was just some girl who was walking by!” he said. “I asked her if she wanted to jump, and she actually said yes!”

  Once or twice a week he and a group of about 30 friends bring their ropes and harnesses to the bridge. They range in age from 15 to 45 or so, and about the only obvious thing they share is the instinct to embrace the natural world—rivers, forests, mountains, whatever—in the most physical way they can. The group wouldn’t exist, they admitted, if the highway didn’t; all of their rappelling equipment comes from their periodic road trips into the Andes. “By car, by bus—we go any way we can,” said Junior, who told me that he finances his trips by working as a physical therapist. He and his friends were the only people I found in Acre who seemed comfortable honoring both nature and the highway at the same time.

  “This is not a big place,” Junior said, “so we have to make our own opportunities.” He clipped the ropes back into his harness and took another leap into the dark. Acre exists.

  About 30 miles from the Brazil-Peru border, in Brasiléia, a man trudged through the 90-plus-degree heat wearing jeans and a heavy denim jacket. One block from the local bus station, he disappeared into a crowd of hundreds of aspiring immigrants. All had journeyed from their homes in Haiti to end up in this makeshift migrant camp. Many arrived overdressed—an attempt to save space in their roller bags.

  After the 2010 earthquake, rumors began circulating around Port-au-Prince that Brazil might be a haven for migrants. Human smugglers began offering desperate Haitians travel packages priced anywhere between $2,000 and $4,000 for passage to Brazil, typically via a bus to the Dominican Republic, a flight to Ecuador through Panama, another bus to Lima, and, finally, a ride to the Brazilian border along the Interoceanic Highway.

  More than 7,000 Haitians have been granted a visa or permanent residence in the past three years. But the immigration bureaucracy struggles to keep pace. Newcomers were showing up at the pavilion every day, where they generally waited 20 to 30 days for their Brazilian residency papers to come through.

  The population of the encampment was around 500 when I was there, but recently it was as high as 1,200, about four times its capacity. Most are men. When I arrived, a mob of about 50 pressed against me on the off chance I was an immigration official. It must have been 100 degrees in the middle of that crowd.

  Scores of saggy, stained mattresses lay on the concrete slab under the open pavilion. Many people tried to sleep; others listened to headphones. Few spoke.

  “We wait patiently to be able to leave,” said Joseph Silas, 34, who left his wife and three children in Haiti. “That’s all we do.”

  The men described conditions that were tolerable, but just barely. A few shower stalls stood nearby, but most said they washed with buckets of water. Their meals never varied—rice, beans, a little chicken. Many complained of stomach problems.

  Everyone was focused on getting to São Paulo. They all wanted jobs, the kind of legitimate work they believed they could get only with solid immigration papers. A civil engineer hoped to work in a restaurant, any restaurant; Silas, who was a professional driver, figured he might get a job in construction. Or as an electrician. Or whatever else he could find. They spoke of handing over their life savings, but no one expressed buyer’s remorse. “There is no hope in Haiti,” Silas explained to me. “That is the difference.”

  Later that day, I took a minibus to the Peruvian border, sharing the vehicle with two Brazilians and two Peruvians, one of whom avoided Peruvian immigration officials by hiring a motorcycle to take him on dirt paths around the passport station. A couple of miles beyond the office, our driver pulled over to welcome our lawbreaking companion back onboard. I thought of the Haitians waiting in the heat of the pavilion, playing by the rules. Nothing was keeping them in that slice of hell, other than an unwillingness to
stop pursuing a rumor of hope.

  The jungle town of Puerto Maldonado, about three hours beyond the Peruvian border, seemed clear in its purpose: to squeeze whatever money it could from tourists before they could make it to one of the many riverside ecolodges in the surrounding rainforest. Within the past five years, the population doubled, to some 200,000, and that growth gives the city an every-man-for-himself vibe. The newcomers have included environmental organizations critical of the Interoceanic, and their news releases warn of wildcat gold miners who exploit the opened access to once-pristine rainforests, stripping the landscape of vegetation so they can sift through the soil in search of alluvial gold. Illegal logging is also on the rise, the conservationists say, thanks to many new secondary roads, most unpaved, that branch out from the main highway.

  But when I stopped by the offices of the Amazon Conservation Association, the regional director, Juan Loja Alemán, said he tries to be careful not to go overboard with the dire warnings. “There are no comprehensive statistics yet measuring the positive and negative impacts of the highway,” Loja, a biologist, said. “But an interesting balance is starting to emerge. Illegal activity has definitely increased, but clearly so has interest in sustainable activities. The Interoceanic is creating a tourist circuit that’s getting very interesting.”