Sunday, November 11, 2012
I Can Miss Everything Now
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Sleeping in Your Clothes
Halloween passes completely without event. We’d gotten into La Paz at about 5 AM, hung around the bus station for an hour or so waiting for the sun to come up and then went off to find a cheap room. The ride back into the city from the northern jungles had been so ridiculously overwrought with peril that I harbored that strange feeling you have when it seems you are still alive despite having passed through a fatal or at least near-fatal situation. In a word, I felt ghostly, and it was easy to feel that way in an almost empty bus station at 5:20 AM. We had found one stall open where they sold coffee and sandwiches. The proprietress sold us coffee but was quite upset when we told her that we didn’t want anything else to go with it. She only allowed us to sit with our ghastly reconstituted coffees for about 10 minutes before asking us to finish and be on our way. (In Bolivia, when you order a coffee you do not get instant coffee powder with hot water, rather, at some indeterminate point in the past, they’ve already mixed the water with the instant coffee powder in a nearly 2-1 ratio. When you order a coffee, they produce this instant coffee concentrate and add hot water to it. It is worse than any instant coffee I’ve ever had. It may just be the power of suggestion because this stuff looks like garbage water, but somehow, I always taste soap or bleach in it.)
We checked into a typical bus-station hotel, dirty carpets, sullied light coming in through the windows that somehow makes it always look like very early morning outside and a room crowded with beds. Our room was about 8x10, but somehow they managed to pack three very lumpy beds into it, all of them sort of parked around a small TV up on a stand, like kids in the 50s sitting around a radio listening to Little Orphan Annie.
I was too tired to feel tired and took a shower before settling in to watch the bleary, eye-drying TV for a little while. There was some terrible show on about a dysfunctional family that lived in Chicago (it looked like Chicago, anyway). The teledrama’s trope seemed to be general scumbaggery. It gave me a terrible feeling watching it. I’m sure they probably had performances like that in Nero’s Rome as well, like a trait of cultural septicemia.
I turned the show off before it was over and fell asleep in my clothes on the lumpy narrow bed.
I woke up thinking it was much later than it was. Ten o’clock and we went out to get something to eat and pick up our Death Road pictures that the bike tour company had compiled for us.
La Paz was outfitted incredibly well for Halloween. The next day was to be Todos Santos so in one of the central plazas they had all loaves of bread shaped like people for sale and that night The Nightmare Before Christmas was shown on TV, with the exception that it was called The Strange World of Jack, which, in keeping with the tradition of renaming American movies in Spanish, was a terrible change and told one nothing about the movie.
The next day we left for Copacabana on the shore of Lake Titicaca. The entire day before we had done almost nothing, celebrating the fact that we were still alive after our round-trip down the death road. We had drifted around La Paz until evening when we went out for a couple of beers at a nearby hostel that was much hipper than our bus station hotel. There were Halloween decorations up and drink specials on those tall beer glasses that always look like they are about to tip over. As I mentioned before, it was a night entirely without incident, which is why it seemed so unreasonable that I woke up in a terrible mood the next morning.
After working a job in which I stayed in hotels all over Latin America, I’ve become very opinionated about the subtle things that make a good hotel. Over the course of my job, we probably only stayed in one place that would actually be called nice, and even then the difference was largely cosmetic, and mostly on the outside of the building. So, I refer only to hotels of slightly poorer quality. The ones with bare rooms, threadbare towels and the feeling of a long-faded grandeur that hangs around the lobby. Among these hotels there are certain qualities that make some better than others, about 99% of them having to do with the shower. But, the most important factor in the end has to do with coffee availability in the morning. I should stress here that I really don’t care about the quality of the coffee. In nearly every place we went it was instant, and often of bulk quality. I became accustomed to this; I didn’t like it, but it was to be expected. At five o’clock in the morning, coffee is coffee. No, it is not the quality, what truly sets the good apart from the bad is if it is available at all. In my mind, the finer hotels begin breakfast services (which consist of coffee and a basket of mummified rolls, maybe some jam or butter)very early. After all, in places like Rio Quarto, Argentina, or Rancagua, Chile, most people are not there on vacation. Like us, they have some kind of work to do in the town. They will probably be getting up early. In such places, when we rose at 5 or, if we were lucky, 6, inevitably, the other patrons of the hotel would be joining us at breakfast. If there was a breakfast. Sometimes, and this is the point now, these places wouldn’t deign to start their breakfasts until 7 or sometimes even 8 o’clock. I imagine that they did this so they could avoid serving breakfast (and coffee) until after all the guests had good, thereby either conserving all of their meager resources, or taking them all for themselves. But this was rarely the case, since we asked for little more than hot water we were almost always accommodated.
In La Paz, I had thought the bus station hotel’s kitchen was to open at 6. I went downstairs with my thermos at 6:20 or so thinking I’d be able to get some water for the coffee. No one at all was downstairs. The restaurant wasn’t to be opened until 7. I’d have to wait 45 minutes for coffee. No big deal really, but we had to be at the bus station at 7:45, so it meant that we wouldn’t be able to relax and have a nice morning coffee together, which is an essential part of travel, especially for me.
At ten to 7 I sent Gina down to see if maybe anyone was downstairs yet, hoping that maybe the porter would take pity on a pretty girl, only asking for hot water and unlock the kitchen door himself. She came back up empty-handed about five minutes later. I packed up my bag, got everything ready to leave and then went downstairs myself. It was now after 7, probably by about ten minutes. Some old crone was just unlocking the door to the kitchen. So dropped the keys as she attempted to do so and grumbled loudly. I could tell I would get no favors from her.
The hard part about asking for hot water is that you feel like you are asking for a favor. You aren’t ordering anything. You’re not getting what you’re supposed to and you obviously don’t plan on spending very much money. As a result, you have to defer to the people you are ordering from. You have to wait for them to acknowledge you. So there is always an awkward wait while you stand there holding the thermos, like the proverbial empty cup of sugar. When you are acknowledged, which in the morning is always in a crisp manner, especially because the server notices your deference and therefore assumes that you’ve got some mealy-mouthed favor to ask. The servers always seem far too happy to turn you down. Even offering to pay rarely changes their mind. What is really annoying is that you know that they’ve got to have hot water; even the most bare-bones kitchen has the means of making hot water. It’s got to be the most basic thing that a kitchen can produce. This makes you defiant; you follow the old crone into the kitchen, point to the stove and the tea kettle, asking “no hay gas? No hay agua?” Pointing and frowning. Eventually she gives up and tells you to come back in ten minutes.
Ten minutes later and we’re waiting in the lobby with all our bags, still waiting on the crone. Gina’s standing at the door of the kitchen, holding the thermos in the deferential way. How did we get to this point? Are we not guests of the hotel? Are we asking for eggs benedict? Hot water should not be so complicated and drawn-out. When we finally get our water she charges us, a paltry sum, yes, but almost as if to justify her grievance, to demonstrate to the world that we were the ones who put her out, rather than the other way around. After an occasion like this, I am inclined to say that the hotel has failed to meet my incredibly low standards. If such a basic item as hot water (not even coffee, I know enough to have brought my own) is such a struggle to procure in the morning, than maybe you shold consider converting into a flophouse or a brothel, something where you customers will all be deferential and will not ask you for anything more than a bed and something to keep out the rain.
We drink the coffee at the bus station. It’s good, but it’s hard to enjoy sitting on a crowded bench with our enormous packs leaving us little room to pass the cup back and forth. The bus that we board afterward is the nicest in Bolivia, and the road is paved and smooth, but stopping for about 45 minutes to wait for extra passengers and then, seemingly as a consequence, to get stuck in traffic outside the city, does nothing to improve my mood. Everything is annoying me, all the other tourists on the bus, the repetitive scenery, the story that I’m reading for the fifth time because I’ve brought nothing else.
Copacabana is incredibly touristy, but it is small and quiet. All the tourist activity is confined to one street. No one is attacking us with tour packages as in Uyuni, the hostels are not all on the other side of town as in Rurrenabaque, still, I am annoyed. We check into a room and go out to find some lunch. After some over-priced food and a long nap, my spirits are finally restored, and Gina and I watch an incredible thunderstorm over the lake from our balcony. Or I should say Gina watched the thunderstorm, I was too busy looking at the hostel’s restaurant below, trying to figure out how likely it was that I’d be able to get hot water from them before 7 AM. The relaxed look of the place did not bode well
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Only Shallow
In Bolivia there is tradition of hawking things to bus passengers that is reminiscent of con artists selling snake oil in the old American west. After the bus pulls out of the station, someone stands up and begins to declaim something, either an institution or the general state of Bolivian living. The person talking is standing in the aisle, and because people are constantly getting on and off and moving around on these buses he must keep looking over his shoulder. This gives the appearance of doing something illegal, like the speaker is gearing up to jump out of the bus window if necessary to flee from the local law enforcement that has already run him out of town twice.
No one seems to listen to these people, except me. Usually, they are selling some kind of vitamin supplement disguised as a panacea. I appreciate their oratory style. All the classic rhetorical devices can be observed in their speeches, and anyone thinking of running for some kind of public office would do well to come down here and listen to how these speakers attempt to woo the crowd. They constantly speak of ‘our Bolivia’ and when speaking of nutrition they mention absurdities about how people in Europe are paying 20 US dollars per kilo for quinoa, which, by the way, is practically free in Bolivia. If it looked like anyone was paying attention I would have to dispute such ridiculous claims, but there seems to be little reason to interrupt a speaker that no one is listening to and is, otherwise, delivering a very good speech.
There is a bit of pathos inherent in the speeches of these traveling salesmen, and I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not. It seems that they are using a rhetorical device when they ask the audience a question, but the reserved nature of Bolivians doesn’t seem to permit them to answer out loud even if they were listening. The result is that the speaker always has to answer his own question. The more questions he asks the pauses get shorter and shorter until even the loud-mouthed American who pays 80 dollars per pound of quinoa can’t even answer anymore.
I noticed that on the last bus I was on no one stood up and started talking about ‘our Bolivia’ or the nutritional aspects of some tuber no one outside this area has ever heard of. The traveling salesmen must know to stay off the La Paz-Rurrenabaque bus because 1. They don’t want to risk their lives to try to sell packets of parasite expellant at 8 Bolivianos a piece and 2. Because no one would listen to them, everyone is far too busy praying. On the other hand, I think a seller of any religious items would do very well on this bus. If, say, there was a priest who was corrupt enough to sell last rites or renew the practice of selling indulgences, I think nearly everyone on board would be hanging on every word of his pitch, already kneading their money in their pockets as the bus careens over yet another hairpin turn 100s of feet straight above the river below.
Before we took the bus to Rurrenabaque we had taken a bicycle tour of the death road to Cororico. On a bike, much narrower than a passenger bus, I was scarcely nervous at all. I remarked to Gina how I could believe that driving over such a road was ‘deadly’, especially as it was entirely one lane and permitted two-way traffic. But, riding a bike on such a road provided lots of room and left one firmly in control of one’s own destiny. For a joke, I had sent home postcards of the death road in its heyday depicting two trucks meeting head on, both of them about a mile up in the air with nowhere to back up to. I had no idea that I was soon to be in a number of such situations. I had no idea.
The bus is one of those one that looks like a British Double Decker, but has no seats underneath, the only one who sits down near the ground is the driver and maybe some kind of bus co-pilot, but I have no idea. Everyone else is about ten feet up in the air. This seems to make the ride a little smoother, especially when you’re on a bus that has nothing left of its original shocks. It also makes the ride just that much more precipitous and harrowing when you’re constantly clinging to the edge of a mountain range. Not only because you’re higher up, but because the distance between you and the ground tends to be skewed a little by this height. Often when you look down you can’t see the tire on the road. You can’t see the road. There is nothing under your window but air, clouds and, much further down, some very jagged looking rocks. Even this would become acceptable if the bus weren’t constantly pitching in and out against the cliff face on the other side of the road. To one side it’s a sheer drop, to the other a sheer wall and the road is nothing but obtuse and acute angles going in and out. The road is also not even dirt; it’s been ground down by so many vehicles over the years that its desiccated into a bed of dust. You’re riding in a bed of dust that goes on for miles and miles and the driver is honking and passing other large buses and trucks like he’s late for his own wedding. About every mile or so you meet another bus tearing around a corner moving at the same breakneck speed as your own. Both slam on their brakes just in time to avoid a disastrous collision and then begin the arduous process of trying to force the other to back up to the last space where there was enough room for both buses to precariously slide by each other. Your bus frequently loses these staring matches between drivers and when you start backing up you can already feel all that nothingness looming up underneath you. This is almost always how the traffic falls from the road. Backing up. A long passenger bus, with broken mirrors and the driver even wants to back up as if he is in a hurry. After a few seconds you hear ‘whoa’s and ‘para’s. It’s a good thing that some of the other passengers decided to look and not just leave it to chance like you did because the driver almost backed right out over the cliff. Just like that you would’ve been falling. You would’ve felt the back tires drop and then it only would’ve been a matter of seconds before gravity pulled the entire bus down into the abyss. You can imagine the pandemonium it would caused inside the bus as everyone desperately forced themselves toward the windows on the right side. You never would’ve made it since you’re on the left side, the one that would already be hanging off the edge. No use jumping out that window unless you want to expedite the process of falling to your death.
This goes on for hours. You try not to pay attention, but the situation is probably the first ever in your life in which you are constantly subjected to the extremely likely possibility of your death. Looking at the gorge below you can’t reason it away. If you fall you will die. It’s so certain. And every few seconds you confront the possibility of falling: a large bump that makes the bus hop that much closer to the edge, the dust obscuring the driver’s vision, the sickening wheeze of the pneumatic brakes when he tries to pass and very suddenly runs out of road. You cannot read; You cannot close your eyes. You cannot even summon any regrets. There is only you and this road and each bump, each stop that brings your heart hammering past your throat into your face, behind your eyes.
After twenty grueling hours you manage to make it to your destination. You try not to think about how you’ll be getting back, but in the quiet moments, between the searches for something to eat, and the jungle expeditions, in the distance between the pointer finger of the guide and the toucan crouching in a tree there it is: your return. From Rurrenabaque, Bolivia there is no road that crosses into Peru where you have a flight in ten days back to the gracious comforts of your home country. You have to return to La Paz to get back. The only way to do this is to fly (flights are booked for the next week, at least) or to take the incredibly circuitous route to Trinidad (10 hours), Santa Cruz (18), Cochabamba (10 more and back to La Paz (at least 8) which would cost you four times as much time and money, assuming that you never even stopped in any of these places and were able to catch a connecting bus immediately in each of them (no way).
The bus station in Rurrenabaque is small, most of the locals have the good sense not to go anywhere. There are hardly even any cars in the town, only motorcycles. You get the sense that they all think of cars and buses and being the things that fall off mountains no matter where they may happen to be. There’s a kid at the ticket counter, which is a table inside a flyblown room. In front of him there is a seating chart for a bus. ‘La Paz?” He asks. “Yeah, sure, La Paz.” Outside, Gina is not happy. A few minutes ago everything was fine. There was no other way. Let’s just get the tickets and then we’ll go get a drink. No problem, people do it every day. But the bus station is ominously empty and seems to be run by a ten year-old. I put the tickets into my wallet and we start back down the street, but the sudden crash of resurgent fear keeps us from going very far. It’s hard to walk my mind is suddenly so hung up. It screams ‘go back! Exchange the tickets!’ Death!’ But there is nothing to exchange the tickets for. I’ve noticed an unprecedented number of expats living in Rurrenabaque, a small town at the edge of the jungle of about 15,000. Is it possible that they’re all waiting to build up the courage to go back? Courage that never comes completely, like trying to swallow a pill that’s just a little too large? It seems about to pass and then begins to break down into acidulous paste causing you to retch it out slow close to the goal?
We stop for a tamarind juice on the corner and take our glasses to the dusty curb. Gina says she has an anxious feeling, says that it rose sharply the second I bought the tickets. Her dreams have come true before. She dreamt the end of The Mill on the Floss
and has déjà vu all the time. The tickets feel like DOA toe cards in my wallet, my back pocket already sliding into a lonely grave. I can’t comfort her. I’m too shaken myself. I wish she wouldn’t have told me. I’d prefer to just suddenly start falling, pretend nothing is going to happen until the last minute and then in a few seconds it would be over anyway. At least we tried.
The tamarind is gone. We go back to the hostel. I ask the proprietress about the road. ‘No problem,’ she says. ‘I do it all the time.’ I am almost relived until she mentions a bus company. ‘Just make sure you get you tickets with them. The other ones are all a little fly-by-night.’ The tickets I’ve bought are not from the company she mentioned. I tell Gina about the old woman’s words of advice. I don’t tell her about the company. I figure it really can’t matter that much anyway. We go out to get drinks. A gin and tonic that I drink too fast and a daiquiri I can’t finish. The walk back, I feel faint. It’s about 8:30 and I just want to go to bed. Gina seems better and makes me get up and brush my teeth.
I thought it was seven, but it’s actualy only six. The sun comes up early in tropical places. It’s already hot outside. The coffee is an empty ritual. Maybe the last cup I’ll ever have, but I can hardly taste it. We pack and look at the clock. Go shopping and look and the clock. Come back to the hostel and look at the clock. Nine. Good enough. Let’s go.
We’re at the bus station an hour early. While we’re waiting, I remember another horrible bus ride and decide to go out and buy a half pint of something strong. It’s the only succor, the only protection I can offer myself and it distracts me for about ten minutes. I come back and there’s still an hour. We wait half an hour more and there’s still an hour. A couple that was trying to fly out appear at the bus station. There are no flights. They’ve decided to take the bus as well. The more the merrier. We wait. The sun is bright and the station is still. There is only motorcycle traffic swarming around the town. I smoke. I ask the kid when the bus is coming now. I smoke again. The shadows disappear.
The man from the couple comes over. The bus is an hour late. He’s got a van taxi if we want it. Says it’ll go straight to La Paz. No stops. Should only take about ten hours. Half the time. Twice the price of course, but there’s still no bus. I don’t want to tempt fate by switching transport. I balk. ‘How much again?’ I ask. ‘And the price?’ But I’m sick of waiting. The van seems slightly safer. On the way up we didn’t see any buses down on the gorge, but we saw cars. Smashed. Nothing left. No reason for emergency recoveries. Still, the chances seem better in a van. Two other travelers want to know if there’s room. The more the merrier.
The van looks alright. The driver is taciturn, but it seems like that might be the hallmark of a good driver. No need for words, for assurance. Just drive. The bags are in, there’s a little bit of room in the back and we’re driving out of town, bouncing and clunking over a road that is not a road. The window got stuck and dust is choking out the light. It’s heavy in my beard, in my eyebrows. My fingers feel trapped in their fingertips, but I am feeling relieved. The taxi seems like a good idea. We’ve still got a ways to go before the dangerous part, but we’re not as wide, or as top-heavy as the bus. We’ll be OK. We’ll make it. I manage to read through the bumps for a while. There is one open seat and a young girl gets in with her baby. A baby. I always feel safer when I see them in dangerous situations. God would want to spare the sinless baby. I blather to the woman about village life for a while. It takes my attention of the dangerous parts of the road that are cropping in from the darkness and the dust: vast spaces of night that rear up and the retreat. There’s a rock slide in front of us. We stop and wait for it to slow to a dusty trickle. There is silence and then we’re back in gear flying over the spot where just a few seconds ago rocks the size of volleyballs were raining down over the road and off the edge, into the darkness.
A town. A stop, just before the worst stretch of the road. We take twenty minutes. The driver seems tired. He told us eight hours when we left at 11 am. It’s now 7 pm and before the village girl got off with her baby she told me we had at least 5 hours left before La Paz. She didn’t need to tell me because I remembered them from before. Five hours of road blowing out into the sky, of tire tracks millimeters away from nothing. This was still before us. The driver goes off to rest. Someone checks the tires. They’re totally bald. We laugh nervously and for some reason the thought crosses my mind that if I die on the road I’m going to have to repeat this miserable day over and over again. All the anxiety, the tamarind, the lack of food, the cardboard Bolivian cigarettes and Gina’s hands rigid at her sides, balled into fists for the last hour. I didn’t mean to bring us up here, but there was no way back. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
We picked up a new passenger, a gregarious young man, very friendly and he distracts me from the road. ‘Used to be nothing but a two track the whole way! When cars met, they would wait sometimes half an hour before one of them would break and try to back up kilometers to the last turn around. They usually never made it, boom! Right off the edge. It’s much wider now.’ I felt better. I hoped hearing the sounds of Juan Carlos and I chat easily was soothing Gina a little. We were having an adventure. Nothing more. I don’t look at the road. From the back of the van I can’t see anything anyway. There’s nothing but dust in front of the headlights. It was the dust about an hour ago, that had so obscured our path that we almost ran right into a pile of sand. We would’ve run into it if the front passenger hadn’t noticed it. So much for our quite driver. I talked to Juan and tried not to think about how the dust could just as easily obscure our progress right out into the night sky. No sudden breaking this time because there wouldn’t be a big obvious pile in front of us, just the sudden swoon and the headlights screaming down into all that darkness, and we would fall like a swollen and uncertain firefly. It would be beautiful to the other drivers in a way against all that darkness.
We’re stopped now. Stopped behind a line of cars. There’s shouting down the road. ‘Did someone go off?’ There’s not enough room for two trucks to pass each other and a puzzle is solved one car at a time. A bus backs up, a car goes forward. A truck stops, the driver shakes his head, suddenly his cab is surrounded by men screaming at him to move; he’s got room. Just move! You feel for him. His tire, also treadless, is crumbling the little bit of road beneath it. It takes an hour and a half before we get through and even after we do we leave a line of traffic that snakes way back along the road behind.
It’s been about 3 and a half hours now. There can’t be that much more of the dangerous stretch of road left. After Cororico, it get better, paved, wide, like an American highway going through the mountains. I begin to nod off. I try to keep talking to Juan, but my Spanish has been reduced to ‘hmmm’ and ‘ah mira!’ We seem to be nearly out of the worst part. I’m not over confident. The driver has been on the road now for about twelve hours. I know he’s tired, but there’s nothing I can do.
Another rock slide wakes me. Actually, the skid of the breaks on the dust wake me but it’s the rock slide that’s caused them. There are two huge boulders in the middle of a part of the road that’s barely wide enough for a single car to go through. I hear someone say ‘tomorrow’ and I fall asleep. I no longer care that we’re never going to get off this road. It’s toyed with me for too long and no I’m going to turn my back on it.
I’m awake again and the driver is trying to back up. It’s looks like they’ve cleared enough of the rock to go through, but for some reason he doesn’t want to. The big boulder is still in the way , but the littler one is gone. Pushed off the edge, now hundreds of feet beneath us. Juan tells me that in the villages up stream, before the road was widened, corpses used to float by on a regular basis. The rock is down where the corpses used to be, or, where we saw the smashed car on the way here, still are. The driver keeps backing up. The men are all around the car now telling him to go forward. Telling him there’s room. They all look very angry. They want to get off the road and he’s blocking all the traffic. It’s about 3 AM by the clock in the van. He pauses, shifts and begins driving forward, fast, too fast. Suddenly, everyone in the car is screaming ‘no, por dios!, slow, SLOW!’ The boulder is right next to us it’s too dark to see anything else and then we are driving ahead. Still on the road. I don’t fall back asleep, but kind of grey out for a while.
We are pst the bad part, on the paved part, although the pavement breaks up every 1,000 feet or so. I wake up and Gina is saying that the driver is obviously very tired. We are in the wrong lane. The van is weaving. It’s almost five in the morning and we left at 11. To come all this way and die now in a head-on collision. The music is on and the driver’s got his window open. There’s nothing that can be done. There’s no place to stop and sleep and in a moment I am asleep again.
I wake up to the dark outskirts of La Paz, too tired to be overjoyed, but peaceful, serene. We’re not quite back to the city yet when we pull off to a side road and stop. ‘What’s happening? One of the passengers without any Spanish asks. I explain the exchange I’ve just heard between the Argentine passenger in the front and the driver. ‘We’re stopping here, he says. We told him we wanted to go to the terminal but he says we’re stopping here. The guy up front says he’s not going to pay if he doesn’t take us to the terminal.’ The driver sits in his seat obviously exhausted. The Argentine tells him he’s getting out, he and his wife. They aren’t paying anything if they’re to be dropped off here. And they don’t. Within a matter of seconds, they’ve taken their bags out of the trunk and jumped in a cab. We’re alone. There’s no one around. Gina’s bag has fallen in the street in the argument. I tell the girls what just happened, even though I assume it’s obvious. I don’t want to leave the poor guy without paying. He’s just worked 19 hours straight, but I’d also like to get to the terminal. I go out the truck and begin to shoulder my bag. The driver seems almost indifferent. Juan keeps saying ‘por favor.’ And he agrees. We’re back in driving to the terminal. It takes about five minutes to get there. Nothing at all considering how far we’ve come.
At the terminal, I pay him and thank him. Juan writes down a list of Bolivian fruits I need to try and Gina and I, completely punch drunk, drift through the darkened terminal looking for some bad coffee.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
The Road to the Road of Death
We’re in the office of one of the thousands of agencies offering bike tours of El Camino del Muerte. The guide has warned us to accept no shabby agencies, but to go for the one that offers English-speaking guides trained in rope rescue with top-of-the-line, well-maintained American bikes. We went to an agency like that, the price they were asking was twice was all the other agencies wanted. The other agencies may have not had English-speaking guides, but what’s so hard to understand about, lento, izquierda, para and derecha? I didn’t expect that the guides would need to tell us more than that. We were only biking down a road; yeah, It was a road that was, in some places, little more than a cliff hanging on to the side of a mountain, trellised hundreds of meters above the jungle floor, with no rail of any kind and lots of irregular-sized rocks as pavement-rocks that would cause your tires to jump in different directions or even to cause your bike to topple over, but still, it was just a road. Considering what paying half-price would meant later on in the trip, we decided to do it. The lady at the agency seemed nice enough and the bike she showed us looked top-of-the-line. It seemed to me that anyone with as much experience riding bikes as Gina or I would be ok, as long as the brakes worked OK. The next morning, when we set out, I wasn’t so sure.
The entire trip has been really mellow. Since we left Argentina, we haven’t had a night pass in which we’ve been out later than 11 o’clock. Starting a routine of getting up early every day, has helped. Since the beginning I’ve been getting up at six am every morning. Usually, by 11, or sometimes even ten, I’m ready for bed. The night before we were to ride bike down the death road was, predictably, the one exception to this. After we had bought our tickets, it was still early in the evening, and not having much else to do in the capital city of La Paz, we thought that we’d check out a nearby recommended bar. We had a drink there, but it was a little pricey, so we left. On the way back to the hostel, we passed another bar that looked a little more local and decided to pop in and have a quick beer before going back. We did and then remembered that we should buy some food to take with us. On the way back from the grocery store we drank the cans of beers that we had bought and suddenly remembered that our hostel provided one free beer each evening. We drank that one too, for a little night cap and then began talking to some Australians and decided to have a beer with them. This all ends with me lying awake in bed at about 4 in the morning riddled with anxiety, what the hell were we thinking? We had to leave at 7:30 for the world’s most dangerous road, way up in the mountains, and there was no way I was going to be in top form or even capable enough to go racing down cliff-hugging mountain roads.
At six, still over whelmed by these uncertainties, I got up and went downstairs to make coffee. Outside, I noticed there was a van with bikes on the top of it. ‘Wow,’ I thought to myself, ‘one of these groups starts off really early.’ Just as I had gone in to start the hot water, a man came in and said ‘estoy buscando por Jonny y Gina.’ WHAT! I dashed out of the kitchen and tried to fumble my way through an explanation. We were told 7:30. Gina isn’t even awake yet. Our stuff is still all over the road and, my god, man, can’t you see how haggard I look? I need coffee. I need an hour to get ready. I need to get my head back on before heading out with you and your suicidal crew. He gave me 5 minutes.
About twenty minutes later, we’re on top of a mountain putting on gear, all of which looks like something out of Mad Max. The knee pads are shredded. The elbow pads are cracked and there are bits of rocks embedded in them. The helmets actually seem to have some kind of carbon scoring on them, as if they have been exposed to metal and extreme heat at the same time. In short, ever piece of equipment that we are now putting on looks like it came off some crushed and broken body at the bottom of a landslide. The bikes are not much better. The one that we had been shown in the office, was obviously, a display model. The ones we were now apprehensively looking over, looked like zombie versions of the same bike. Different parts were joined into the original design at obtuse angles. Parts that didn’t fit were broken to be made to fit. Gear cables wrapped in ways I have never seen before, brake handles that were totally different makes and therefore, sat on the handle bars in complete opposition to each other, one on the top the other sort of out in the front. The bodies of the bikes themselves had been subjected to the same vicious scoring, as if they had been drug behind us the entire trip up the mountain, instead of sitting on the rack above the van. Somehow, I suddenly felt surprising optimistic. I may have just been trying to put on a brave face for Gina, who was still upset about having been woken at six in the morning to me running in the room and yelling. ‘Oh, shit, we’re screwed! There’re here! Get up! They’re here already!’ Since then, El Camino del Muerte, was nothing but a stupid novelty for her, sleep or at least rest, was the only thing she cared about, and all this gearing up with battered and broken pads and looking over shotty, worn-out bikes was not helping.
‘Buen dia, amigos!’ the guide begins and proceeds to say a bunch of things in a rapid Spanish that I can barely understand. He says, ‘por las dudas’ and ‘si no quieres morir’ a bunch but the rest goes over my head. The first part doesn’t look too bad. We’re up in the mountains, but it’s paved and there are shoulders and guard rails. We begin and the ride is exhilarating. Even with the gear in the lowest setting, it is impossible to pedal because we are coasting so fast, coasting, down the mountain highway, through cloud banks and around corners that jut out over the misty abyss below. It’s like riding a bike in the sky. There’s a slight chill, but we are dressed warm enough and no effort at all is required. Just hold on and brake. It’s hard to keep your attention on the road because the scenery is so ethereal and a couple of times, I look back down to see myself heading toward the edge and quickly correct my course. The scenery gradually grows greener. The bare rocks begin to be swarmed by moss and then a panoply of undergrowth begins to swell out and drift up the mountains in fuzzy green currents. The smell changes, the dust is soaked with fog and oxygen that all the plants are producing. The air is heady, suddenly there is almost too much of it after a week in the oxygen-deprived heights of southern Bolivia.
We come around a corner and find that everyone has stopped. It’s time for a short break, before we continue on to the actual death road. The guide offers everyone a coke. ‘Coke!?’ at seven in the morning, what’s wrong with these people. He asks me if I want a coke and I tell him I’d much prefer even the worst instant coffee if it’s available somewhere. In a minute he comes back with exactly that. It’s too light to be coffee. It’s too terrible to be anything else; it’s hot and it’s earth-colored so I’m happy. I eat a few generous spoonfulls of peanut butter to try to give myself something to burn for the day and I drink the coffee to help it down my paradoxically dry and filmy throat.
The drive to the death road is uphill. Most of the road that we are continuing up looks like that which we earlier came down. It is nothing like a death road, it could be a highway in Colorado. There’s a turn a head that looks like some old hermit’s private driveway. The green wraps around us. The paved road gives way to a slurry of rock and mud that narrows to a desperate-looking two track. Above it, the mountain roars up into the clouds, below, it breaks off into nothingness. From where we stop I can see the road snaking all the way across the mountain. It goes on for mile after unguarded mile, all of it nearly toppling into the green emptiness below. To contemplate even having to go down this road for a few minutes is scary. It’s something that you’d hold your breath to do. Considering that we are going to spend the whole morning going down it, through the mud and the rock, around sharp turns on these Frankenstein bikes is almost too much to contemplate. It’s something that’s going to have to be done one pedal at a time. There’s brief safety lecture, very little of which I understand. I keep looking at Gina, hoping my look conveys, 1. Are you OK to do this? and 2. Am I OK to do this? She looks back at me in the same way and I get no reassurance before we are on our bikes and desperately squeezing our loose and poorly positioned brake handles bouncing treacherously over gobs of mud and human head-sized rocks. We slip and gasp and clutch our way past, wet, mossy outcroppings, giant ferns, waterfalls in which the water has fallen so far that it has broken down into a mist, into little clouds that drift downward lie autumn leaves. Every couple of hundred feet there is a memorial of some kind: a copper cross covered with verdigris, mildewed plastic flowers or a lichen-eaten stone cross, all of them with names and dates, placed on the part of the road that they last touched before going over.
It was all dizzying, but eventually, the green swam up around us in such a cooling and leathian way, like a fatal overdose, that we broke loose from our fear, or just accepted the fact that everyone dies sometime and that if it were to happen to us now, at least it would happen in a beautiful and serene place. Riding on, the sun broke out through the sweltering clouds and the evergreen around us became a wild jungle light. Birds that had songs that sounded like rocks skittering across a frozen pond shot above us, heedless of the height. Bananas hung down in emerald green bunches between explosions of wet, surf-board-sized leaves. Gina and I are now riding past each other to talk. The stupor of the early morning is gone. The beauty competes steadily with any remaining fear. You never forget how high you are and how close to the edge, but after a while you begin to feel like you know the road and respect it enough to not be another of its casualties. We bank and brake and bounce and the green and blue flies by in torrents, in silhouette waves and we are down; we are at the bottom. Not able to believe that it is over and already considering if we have enough money to do it again. ************
There is something that sounds like a large drop of water hitting an empty wooden bucket. You hear this sound in quick succession, about three times, before it turns into a cranking whistle and then levels out to the sound that mourning doves make on hot summer afternoons. The birds making this sound live in the tree in front of our cabin. They are black with bright yellow tail feathers and beak and their nests are woven and hang from the branches. If I were to try to look them up I would probably start with something like ‘hanging nest bird-Bolivia.’ Then I would continue my search to include, ‘screeching vulture-fowl, colorful neck, Bolivia,’ and ‘green moth,’ firefly beetle,’ ‘giant pool spider,’ ‘largest snail in the world: shell like a baseball, mollusk part like a cow tongue,’ and finally glassy-eyed monkey with incredibly long fingers.’ After all of these animals I would have to write Bolivia, or northern Bolivia, because that’s where I’ve seen them all and I can only assume that such jungle animals are indigenous to this place, well, except the birds, I guess, but that snail couldn’t have been going anywhere.
After we had finished with the death ride, we got dropped off at the bus stop for Cororico, the place that I think I had been the most excited about visiting since leaving Buenos Aires. Coroico, is a small town on top of a misty green mountain where they grew everything from coffee to coca leaves. I looked forward to visiting it after ungainly making my way through the saltiest, driest and dustiest places of South America. I eagerly anticipated bathing my tired and dry eyes in jungle humidity and diversion. The place, largely due to our lodgings, has not been at all disappointing. First of all, without even going for a trek through the surrounding area we have seen all the animals mentioned above and a few more. The monkey was waiting for us on the road in. The mini bus driver, who had been fairly laconic most of the ride, suddenly turned to us and made a little whistling noise. I looked up to see this ‘mono’ sitting on the side of the road, regarding us suspiciously, but not without some curiosity. He would look about himself as if he’d misplaced something nearby and then suddenly dart his glance back up to the van. It was the first time I’d seen a monkey in the wild and I was pretty much bouncing up and down in my seat.
We arrived in the town after taking about forty looping switchbacks up the plantain-leafy mountain. From the road you could only see a profusion of greens, the type of endless varying green that I imagine would begin to drive someone lost in the jungle insane with its all-encompassing beauty after a while. When the green was interrupted it was by vistas, pauses that opened out to the cloud valley straight down the face of the mountain. The town, once we arrived, was slightly colonial-looking. I mean the building façades were high and flat and they crowded a narrow cobblestone street. There were few cars and women drifted up and down the lanes carrying loads wrapped in bright tapestries. From the back, the only human detail that could be made out was their long braids, so encumbered by their loads and garments as they were.
Quaint as the town was, I was glad to leave it. After traveling for about two weeks, I wanted to get away from everything for a day or two. Since we don’t have a tent we took up residence in a hostel that was about a twenty minute walk up the mountain from the town. I say hostel because that’s what the place calls itself, but it is absolutely nothing like any hostel I’ve ever seen. Our room is a cabin that sits up on top of the hill. The shower and bathroom are outside, near the fire pit. The area is demarcated by ornamental gardens, coffee shrubs and plantain trees. There is also a little wooden balcony that overlooks the valley and the other green mountains of the area. Since we have arrived here, we have done nothing at all except remark to each other on the beauty of the place, often in the limited vocabulary of ‘wow; look at that; shhh, look’ and in the case of the giant snail: ‘holy shit!’
If I had more money, I would stay here at least three more days. As I write that, I cannot tell if I mean it as a tribute to the place or an indication that I am getting older and learning how to relax. In all my travels, I have always been ready to move on after a few days in even the most beautiful places. Perhaps this is because most of them were cities, or towns and the attraction was man-made, startling at first as the Venetian canals or the madrassas of Samarkand, but becoming less remarkable almost as soon as you realize what they are. There is the moment of realization where you look upon the bricks and shattered columns of global antiquity and reel with the heady image of these near-eternal things that the Mongol hoards, the Visigoths or the Incas once looked upon, but continue to look upon these things for days and they shed their mystery and assume the appearance of old bricks.
The life in the jungle is more of a continuum: the sun, the mists, the rain, the hunt, the migration, the back and forth trail of leaf cutter ants, the bloom and the return to the nest in the evening. I am as awed in each moment that I am here as I was when I first arrived because what I am watching is renewal rather than petrifaction.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Salted Sleep
We waited around for about two hours before there was to be a bus for Colchani, which is the closest village to the salt flats. I kept thinking to myself that they had all the tour companies for a reason, that to get out to the famous Salar Uyuni alone was not possible. Still, we waited on the bus, as from Google maps, it looked as though the salt flats really did abut the village.
From the bus windows, we can see the luminescence of the white salt. Along the horizon there was a diffuse glow, like when you see a photo taken from space of Earth while the sun is behind it. The brown earth turned to khaki and to a thin line of white that mixed with the blue of the sky; the reflecting qualities of the white made it difficult to tell where the horizon ended and the sky began. We hadn’t yet reached Colchani and the bus rambled further along the dirt road.
We got off in a small village that had railroad tracks and not much else. Somewhat leery, because we couldn’t tell how far away the Salar was, we began to walk toward the horizon’s luminescence. We were heartened when we past some touristy stands selling woven blankets souvenir hats and, God, ‘llama sutra’ t-shirts. I threatened to buy Gina one of the abominations. At the stands we were among a large group of tourists, looking at them all we realized that we had forgotten one (probably) very important requirement for the Salar: sunglasses. “Oh, shit,” I thought. “Those things are going to cost a fortune here, if they even have any.” We looked around a few places and found a display of sunglasses that didn’t look totally disposable. They weren’t too expensive, and since Gina didn’t have any anyway, and the ones I own are incredible crooked, we bought them and set out past the waiting tourist 4x4s on foot.
It was a great feeling to visit the Salar unaccompanied because it’s something that should be played on. I could see how it brought out this spirit in everyone who came to it. The glowing emptiness coaxes out a childish run and jump and prod response. As the ground under our feet gave way to salt trails, cracks and crispy filigreed pockets of dust and salt we began to jump and shout and say absurd things that made us laugh even more. Perhaps it was the feeling of being in such a remote and desolate place, but with the consolation that you had a way back home. It may have also been that the otherworldly landscape evokes a certain response because it is altogether unfamiliar. If you think about it, there is a certain decorum for places like cathedral forests, and vast impressive mountains. A white desert starts at you like an impressive thing, but somehow quickly becomes an absurd thing, perhaps because it is such a harsh environment that one becomes irreverent.
With due irreverence, we bounded along the salt flats, jumping on piles of salt, kicking up buckled plates of dried salt, eating salt, poking salt sludge and flinging it at each other and continually saying ‘wow’ to every tiny variation we came across. At the ‘Ojos del Salar’ (which were a collection of a few large thermal pools in the Salar) we dug our arms elbow deep down into bubbling red pools. The water was warm, but not warm enough to bathe in, especially with the wind that was whipping around out there. As soon as you took your arm out of the jasper-red water, it got very cold. The solution was to wipe it repeatedly on my pants and end up totally encrusted in dried salt. This led to complete disregard to preserve any of my clothing and soon I was completely covered in salt.
We had been out on the Salar for a while and were wondering whether we should go back to the village and try to figure out where to get on the bus, or if we should walk just a little further. Our question was answered for us when we saw what looked like a bus gradually growing on the horizon. It was hard to be sure, the Salar does weird things to perspective. We had earlier been following a 4x4 that had been moving away from us, thinking that it was some kind of attraction. We ran over to where we though the bus would intersect our path. There were no clearly demarcated roads on the Salar, cars just drove across it in all directions like a vast, white parking lot.
“This is like something out of an acid trip,” Gina said as the bus slows down to let us on. “Or like the end of a movie,” I added. Where previously, there had been nothing, this bus had suddenly materialized in front of us and now stood waiting with open doors, nothing around but white. In this environment, the bus seemed more like a conduit or a plot device than an actual tangible thing. We stood on a blank white page waiting for the author to make a decision, lacking inspiration a writes ‘ a bus appears’ and that’s all we’ve got: white emptiness and this bus.
We bought tickets of Oruro when we got back into town. The buses didn’t leave until 8 pm and now that we had seen the Salar, there didn’t seem to be any reason to stay in Uyuni for another 24 hours. We had a nice room, we could’ve just stayed and relaxed, but we had become accustomed to the perpetual motion of travel and longed for another rocky bus ride that would leave the inside of our nostrils raw, our lips chapped and our bodies coated with a fine, undefinable film.
8 O’clock in the evening seemed like a good time to leave. We had seen a lot of the area from a walk in the morning and we were tired out from our trip to the Salar. We had time to relax a little and then go over to the bus station. It seemed possible that we might even sleep. To better our chances, I bought a couple cans of beer for us to drink at the bus station. Bus stations are naturally overwhelming places. It helps if you can have something that shows your disregard for them. Sitting on your pack, holding a can of beer, the running people, the ticket sellers shouting over each other and all the buses jockeying for position mean nothing. Your bus leaves at eight. There’s no reason to get up until then.
We had a about a can and a half of beer a piece, not much, but enough to make a bathroomless bus ride hell. At about 5 minutes to 8 we ran to the public bathroom to empty our bladders. When we got on the bus, I thought we had beaten the whole thing. Yeah, we were going to have an uncomfortable night bus ride, that was probably going to dump us off at our destination at some ungodly hour in the morning, but we were relaxed and intrepid; we weren’t concerned with such things. Once on the bus, we put our headphones on in the dark, smiled to each other and watched the blur of stars outside the window.
The ride was supposed to be very cold so we had layered up before leaving. It wasn’t, however, and soon we were getting warm. I left my sweaters on in hopes that somehow the discomfort of being hot would distract me from having to pee so bad. We hadn’t been on the road more than twenty minutes when I had begun to feel the disconcerting tug of my bladder. The last bus we had been on had stopped once in the middle of a six-hour journey and it seemed less than fain to even do that.
We rocked and bounced along in the suffocating heat and darkness, so much different from the bright and cool salt flats of that afternoon. I clenched my teeth, I crossed my legs, I tried to lose myself in the music, but it wasn’t long before the pull became a tug and then clenched into an actual fist of pain right below the left side of my ribcage. The fist bounced and broke with every bump in the road. I felt short of breath, sweat seemed to cascade down my forehead. I pulled my hat off and kneaded it between my hands. I gasped. And then the bus stopped. Not a rolling stop, but an actual hard stop. The lights came on. In my desperation, I stood up, hopeful. The aisle was full of sleeping children and a few sitting adults. I had no way to get off or get to the driver there was no room even if all the kids had stood up they would have to get off the bus to allow me to pass though. Dejected, I sat back down, waited for the lights to go back down and took out my thermos. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as difficult as I had imagined, nor as awkward even while sitting next to a complete stranger. I hadn’t wanted to do it, because I knew that Gina probably had to pee as well, even when she reassured me that she didn’t, but it got to a point where it felt like something was going to break. We stopped about an hour later and I went again, just to be sure.
The bus pulled into Oruro at exactly three am, which is probably the worst time to arrive anywhere, but especially a place you know nothing about. I had set up a meeting with a couchsurfer there and hadn’t planned on getting a room at all, but when we found ourselves in dirty bus station where dogs slunk through the open door and fought with each other, I decided that we would go out and find a room regardless. I’ve slept in bus stations before, but I didn’t want to sleep here alongside the cavorting dogs. We shouldered our packs and went out in search of a hotel. In the parking lot, I stopped to ask an attendant where a certain street. He began to tell me and then asked if I planned on going there now. ‘Well, yeah, I’m going to get a room,’ I told him. He shook his head, ‘you don’t want to go out there now, there’s nothing but thieves out there. You’d better go back into the bus station and wait until dawn, then go and get yourself a room.’ It seemed reasonable advice, but by dawn I would have no reason to get a room since we had someone in town to stay with and the bus station was full of dogs and no benches, not even a chair to sit on. I thought about leaving the pack with Gina and going out alone to see what I could find, but I was too tired for such heroism and soon found myself spreading out my sleeping bag on the bus station floor, amidst the yelping and growling dogs.
I wasn’t asleep, but I wasn’t awake either. When you try to sleep outside without ample equipment, you enter into a strange sort of twilight sleep: aware, but foggy. You can feel your hip grinding against the cold tile floor and the drool running down your cheek, but you cease to care after a while and abandon yourself to the idea that you’re going to have to lay here for hours, turning back and forth. I was in the middle of accepting this when a woman was suddenly above us telling us to get up, she needed to get into her store, the door of which we were laying in front of. Oh, it must already be morning. We got up and began to pack up the bag, but something seemed wrong, outside, it was still dark and there were still people sleeping all over. I looked at the phone to see what time it was. 4:40. We walked over to another part of the bus station, lay down on the cold tile and pulled the sleeping bag over our heads, trying to shut out even the idea of what we were doing.
Around six we could no longer ignore the roar that was gradually breaking over us. The bus ticket sellers had become much more strident. “Potosi, Potoseeeeee,” they yelled. “Cochabama, Cochabama, Cooooochabaaaaama,” they shouted. I peeked out from under the sleeping bag, there were feet all around us, not sleeping feet, standing feet, waiting feet. It was time to get up. My only consolation, was that the morning sun would be much warmer than the tile floor had been. We pack up the sleeping bag, shouldered our packs and walked about a block away before stopping. We had nothing to do and nowhere to go. Even if we wanted to go somewhere, we had our massive packs. I needed to contact the couchsurfing host, but I knew that it would be some time before the internet cafes opened. I badly needed a cup of coffee. We sat there for a while, trying to decide what to do. My eyes had sand in them, my clothes, salty from the day before, were practically stuck to me and my mouth was nearly gummed shut. It was great.
The night, we made dinner together with our couchsurfing host, Juan Carlos and some other couchsurfers from France. The French couple were travelling around South America promoting different kinds of games, as well as learning about them, but they weren’t as hippy as that sounds and we had a great time trying out their games and eating quinoa and trying to speak Spanish to each other. It was my first Couchsurfing experience in which everyone wasn’t speaking English and by the end of the night I was full and incredibly thankful to have a bed again. As I lie down, I could still hear the dogs and the bus ticket sellers in my head. “Potosi, Potoseeee!”
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Flor De Cohete
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