Llama for Lunch (19 page)
That night I ate in the hotel dining room, which was lit by candles. It was a strange sensation to be dining on the edge of a dark precipice. Looking out I could see nothing except a few lights in the village. I talked to a Bolivian gent who said he came up here regularly to stay in his weekender, nineteen kilometres away, where, he said, there were many beautiful birds, including toucans. It would require more than a few feathered friends to get me to ride regularly over that hideous road. But Coroico was a delightfully peaceful spot and after extracting an extra blanket from the management and having a great hot shower in my huge bathroom, I slept warm. In the morning, when the sun reached over the mountains, the twittering birds got me up. I watched a tiny hummingbird sipping his breakfast from a banana flower.
The Esmeralda jeep took me down to the plaza, where I ate a huge breakfast of eggs, bacon, ham, tomato, bread and sheep’s cheese. The plaza was a pleasant place that was lined with many small shops and had garden seats under huge palm trees. I talked to an itinerant trader from whom I bought a petrified shark’s tooth. Don’t ask me why, it must have been the altitude. When I asked him directions to a loo he took me by the hand and led me there. I also met a park ranger who told me that recently in the north an anaconda had been found that had a suspicious bulge in its middle. On investigation this turned out to be a twelve-year-old boy.
When it was time to truck it down to connect with the bus to Rurrenabaque, I saw, shock horror, that the truck was not only open and a stand-up-in-the-rear job, but that it was already packed solid and grossly overloaded. I refused to stand on the open tailgate, which was the only space left, and was squeezed into the front seat. Even though it was only a few kilometres, it was still a hideously steep road and I begged the driver to go slowly and, dear man, he did.
The village of Yolosi had a checkpoint where vehicles had to stop and pay a toll in order to pass. This was where you waited for the bus. Enterprising souls had set up stalls to sell warm cold drinks, mandarins and bananas to those forced to stop. Many vehicles went through, mostly buses and trucks. There were few private vehicles and all of these were four-wheel-drives. I had been given the number of the bus I was allegedly booked on and told that it would arrive at half-past-two. It came at half-past-five. There had been a landslide on the road. During the long wait I talked to other travellers or sat on my bag and read. Someone said that two trucks had gone over the edge close to Yolosi the week before and more than twenty people had died. Eight children had survived by being thrown off.
I walked down the road in search of a loo. All I had to do was follow my nose – I smelt it for ages before I got to it. When I reached the gate I found it securely locked. I questioned a nearby shopkeeper about the possibility of a key and was sent to the house of the man who was the Keeper of the Toilet. He opened the padlock on the gate, gave me a ration of rough, pink loo paper and charged me a third of a boliviano.
At last the bus arrived. It was a lumbering old brute whose top was heaped high with baggage – to which mine and eleven other people’s was added. Two men who failed to win a seat had to stand in the aisle.
Then we were off. Steep, jungle-covered cliffs loomed above humid, cloud-filled gorges and the first hour and a half was a continuation of the same narrow, nefarious track that had brought me to Coroico, but now I was in an overcrowded, top-heavy vehicle that tipped and swayed as it lurched along the edges of precipices and around blind elbow-bends. At one stage I looked back at the road we had just traversed – a strip of dirt halfway up an incredibly high mountain, a mere wisp of white on the dark-green vegetation. It was so scary my stomach churned and my heart leapt into my mouth trying to escape.
The bus bumbled on, tilting and rocking, waiting on the blind corners for trucks to pass. I was sitting at the rear, which had five seats in a row across it. My companions were three Irish girls and one Bolivian gent. The girl nearest the window groaned in horror every now and then. I thanked heaven that, unlike her, I couldn’t see what was, or was not, under the back wheel.
At six o’clock we stopped for a meal at an outdoor cafe. It was merely a few tables under a wooden verandah, but they fed me reasonable tucker for a tiny price.
It started to rain as we took off again. Terrific – now it was not only dark, but slippery to boot. Jolting along the edge of a precipice while slithering in mud in the pitch-dark convinced me that this would be my last mountain ride ever. Flat, flat terrain from now on, thank you.
At around nine we stopped for more food and at about four in the morning, when we were out of the mountains and in the yungas – a source of gold as well as the major area of coca production – we drove under a scaffold that enabled the police to search the top of the bus for drugs. Then they entered the bus to search us. It was a very perfunctory search – I could have had heaps of loot hidden under my feet. Sometime later we ground to a sudden halt and something seemed to have broken. Fortunately we were out of the mountains by then. The driver jacked up the bus and asked the passengers for a knife. Someone obliged and I saw the driver cutting up an old tyre tube. The repairs took an hour or so. I think it had something to do with the springs. We went on very carefully after that.
Dawn found us on a road that was almost flat. My relief was unbounded, but the road was still appalling. It took seventeen-and-a-half hours to travel three-hundred-and-fifty kilometres. When daylight came I could see that the country was very green, the vegetation consisting of rainforest thick with trees and vines. Now and then we passed a type of house that I had not seen before, made of wooden planks and with overhanging thatched roofs. Chooks, pigs, small plots and banana trees surrounded the houses. Occasionally we would pass a man walking on the road, carrying a rifle and a machete.
Rurrenabaque is a real frontier town but it looked fine to me after the bus, the road and the Andes. Rurre, as it is known, lies on the Rio Beni – the ‘river of wind’ in the language of the Tacana, the original people of this place. They were one of the few lowland tribes to resist Christianity and western civilisation. Now only a few forest tribes continue a hunting and gathering existence in the country around Rurre, but along the jungle waterways there are tribes that have had minimal contact with modern civilisation and still roam the deep jungles as they did thousands of years ago. It is said sometimes that they are the remnants of the tribes who inhabited the lost Atlantis.
The Spanish came here looking for El Dorado, the Gilded City, in the mid 1600s. They gave up and moved on. Jesuit priests founded the first mission in 1675 and imposed Christianity where they could, but they also brought cattle and horses. Despite what some people think, northern Bolivia is not all cocaine and rainforest – there are large cattle ranches in the savannahs. Some of the cattle are descended from the Jesuit herds, but most are Asiatic Zebu imported from Brazil. The Jesuits also taught European trades like leatherwork, and established tropical agriculture, including the farming of bananas, coffee, tobacco, cotton, cacao and peanuts. The Jesuits were expelled in 1767. Other missionaries and settlers came later, but they only brought disease and slavery.
My luggage and I were transported from the bus station on a motorbike, for which dubious pleasure I was charged one-and-a-half bolivianos, forty-five cents, the price for any ride around town. From the several small hotels available I chose one situated on the River Beni that was named, not very originally, The Beni. Its outlook was not as picturesque as it sounds, as it only backed onto the river – the rest of it was in the main street. The Beni’s design was pseudo-Spanish with balconies and a courtyard where hammocks were slung invitingly between pillars.
Rurre had rough dirt streets that were lined with shanty shops and rows of stalls, but the town was clean and the shops had limited supplies of cans and bottles on their small wooden shelves. A big cement curb separated the street from the area in front of the shops. Not good enough to call a footpath, it meandered haphazardly up and down and over planks that had been laid across the open drains to help pedestrians negotiate them.
I found breakfast down the road at the Rurre Club, a pleasant outdoor spot overlooking the river under huge mango trees. While I ate I watched the coming and going of the motorised canoes that provide transport up, down and across the river. I had read that passengers were taken on the cargo vessels that ply the mighty rivers of Bolivia’s north, and intended to try for one.
Then I slept for several hours. When I surfaced I indulged in a washing fest. This was the first place that had been warm enough to dry clothes. I had now thrown off my winter woollies. Bliss! The noisy air-conditioner in my room worked for a little while, then gave up the ghost. The hot water service did ditto but the TV was fine. However when I complained that I was not able to change channels I found the solution was simple. There
was
only one.
In a tour office in the main street I arranged to take a three-day trip into the jungle. The tour lady was a charming Slovenian with a lit-up face. A born-again Christian, she was reading the Bible when I rocked up. Bella told me that she had spent a year in a jungle village living off the land with a local tribe because ‘God sent me’. She made a detailed note of my name and particulars – in case God lost me? Bella exclaimed in horror when I said that I had come by road and told me that she lost a friend that way when the jeep he was travelling in went over the side and eleven people were killed.
I ate dinner on the riverfront in a basic cafe that was half outdoors. There appeared to be no way to lock it up and the bottles on the bar were left out in the open when the place closed for the night. A handy spot to go for a free drink after hours, I thought. Long, sleek motor canoes put-putting by and boys on motorbikes doing wheelies on the foreshore provided the evening’s entertainment as the sun set behind them and sent a blaze of fiery colour over the calm water of the river. Large birds that looked like jungle fowl but were a type of vulture zoomed in. They hovered gracefully like hawks, but landed like malfunctioning bulldozers, then waddled off like ruptured ducks. In a tree close by, a tiny monkey, who should still have been with his mother, was attached to a limb by a rope that was tied very tightly around his middle. A big green parrot, also securely fastened, kept him company. I watched a woman set up a rival cooking establishment outside the cafe, unpacking from her basket a small burner, cooking pots and other bits and pieces. As each customer finished eating, she rinsed his plate in a bucket and dried it on the edge of her apron.
I saw no cars in Rurre’s streets, just a couple of four-wheel-drive vehicles and several motorbikes. There were, however, a multitude of placid dogs. I heard that sloths lived in the trees of the plaza but did not find one. I did see two toucans sitting on top of the wooden sign above a shop. They were so brightly coloured and larger than life that it took me a while to convince myself they were real.
Walking in the streets I passed many men who carried rifles and machetes. Everyone said ‘Buenos dias’.
Next morning I had the local breakfast of meat, egg, rice, tomato, coffee and bread. It was good and the coffee for which the yungas are noted was excellent. Seeking information about onward boat travel from Rurre, I was sent to the naval office, where a charming uniformed officer shook my hand and informed me that there were no boats at this time of the year as the water was too low. I would have to endure another bus ride. A road to the north had recently been completed but before this the river had been the only form of transport.
Great river systems drain this vast area – the Madre de Dios (Mother of God), the Beni, the Mamore and a score of others flow northwards towards Brazil, into the Amazon tributaries and eventually to the Atlantic. I motorbiked it to the bus station and bought a ticket to Riberteralta, five hundred kilometres further north, for a few days hence, when I was due to be back from my jungle trip.
The Beni Hotel was terribly rowdy. I moved to an upstairs room hoping it might be quieter. Getting rid of the airconditioner was a good start but now I had an overhead fan that went around in the accepted manner but didn’t send any air down where I needed it. Goodness knows how this was possible and what it did with all that air.
There was no electric power in Rurre from midnight to seven in the morning. I had a cold shower by torchlight at six, packed my bag in the dark, then presented myself at the tour office ready for the jungle. Three hand-carts piled with gear were pushed to the riverbank and loaded – along with a young Belgian couple, the guide, the cook, Bella as the interpreter because she couldn’t find an English-speaking guide and me – into a huge canoe with a forty-five-horsepower motor. The canoe had been carved entirely from one big tree – its base was very narrow for its length and only just fitted two people across.