Llama for Lunch (20 page)

We motored over the river to San Buenaventura, which had no road into it. Its only access to the outside world is via the ferry from Rurre, as it was with all these towns before the road was built. In San Buenaventura we paid a tax and registered our names and passport numbers with the police. Then we set off on the wide, calm River Beni.

As soon as we left Rurre behind we were among dense jungle with few signs of inhabitants. Now and then there would be a small clearing and a native house with a canoe tied at its landing – a blissful idyllic scene. After a time the river occasionally broke into boiling rapids and whirlpools. I could see the terrific pull of the current and, thinking that this would be a dangerous river to fall into, realised that we had no life jackets. High-water marks and huge trees with massive trunks that had been uprooted like toothpicks lay where the river had dumped them on sandbanks.

The Beni was joined by a smaller river, into the channel of which we now turned. The water in this river was lower and sometimes the guide needed to take up a long pole and punt the canoe along. Occasionally he stopped the motor and jumped into the water with the cook to push us over a sand bar. At the shallowest places we all had to leap into the river and heave against the rushing current. Under my feet I felt the smooth stones that completely cover the river bed and much of its banks. The stones were lovely – round, smooth and flattish. I lusted after them for my garden.

The only traffic we had passed on the Beni had been a few canoes and a man fishing from a raft, but there was nothing on the second river. We made slow progress and now it was very hot, so I popped up my pink sunshade.

The camp we were going to was a steep climb up the river bank from the landing place, which was itself well hidden in the jungle. This tour company brought the only people who ever visited here. The camp consisted of two blue plastic tarpaulins that covered the cookhouse/dining area and the sleeping platforms. The latter had been constructed of slender trees that had been split in half and laid three inches off the ground and had poles at strategic places to which mosquito nets could be tied using strips of bamboo. The beds were thin slabs of foam rubber with one blanket on top. The dining table and benches were also constructed of split trees cut locally. The cook house, in which the cook performed miracles, was a primitive arrangement that incorporated a two-burner gas jet.

We all helped carry our supplies up from the canoe, and as a reward for this chore, were given tea, bikkies and fruit and told that it would be lunch time in forty minutes. The meal duly served was a local specialty called picante macho. It was delicious. Served with rice, salad and many side dishes, it was made of chopped vegetables and meat in a wonderful spicy sauce. The cook then made a speech which Bella translated. He said, ‘If you get sick, come to me and I will make you better with local herbs and tea.’ I wondered at his timing, telling us this during a meal he had prepared.

Then it was siesta. I slept soundly for two hours, after which we punted the canoe to the other side of the river and fished for piranha – without luck. It seems even piranha are frightened off by me. But we did see the marks of turtles and capybara – like an enormous guinea pig, it is the world’s biggest rodent – on the sand banks. Dinner was another seven-plate feast, then we tripped out in single file for a night walk that lasted for hours and achieved the sum total sighting of one mouse. I hadn’t expected much else with all the racket we made trooping through the undergrowth like a herd of rhinoceros.

I bathed at the river’s edge, dippering water over me with one of the plastic soup-bowls from which we later ate breakfast. It was lovely lying under my mosquito net in bed watching the shadows behind the glow of light put out by the candle stuck on a post at the end of the bunks, listening to the frogs croaking and the monkeys hooting. In the distance thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. Toward morning the frogs stopped their racket and then it was beautifully quiet.

The cook, Santos, was a man of much nervous energy who took great pride in his work and was very eager to please. The guide, Enrico, was quiet, with a nice smile and kind eyes in his deeply lined face. After breakfast they took us for a four-hour walk in the jungle where they showed us plants that would fix anything that ailed you or were otherwise useful, like the sap of the ajo ajo tree that smells like garlic and is a good insect repellent. And just for fun, there was the Big Mac, a liana whose seed when germinating opens to look like a hamburger with mustard, ketchup and pickle in the right-sized bun.

They also told us tales of jungle animals. I was intrigued to learn that a small capybara-like animal and a poisonous snake are friends who sleep curled together in the base of tree trunks. In the case of snake bite, fluid from this animal’s body will act as an antidote. Some stories were gruesome, especially the one about a certain kind of monkey, thousands of which fall out of huge trees at night and tear people to pieces. They also do this when it rains. At that moment it started to rain and I was seized with a perfectly understandable urgency to leave immediately the vicinity of the large tree under which we sat.

We partook of another ten-platter meal for lunch. This time there was fried rice and a potato salad like no other I’ve ever tasted, as well as fried chicken, fried banana chips, fruit and vegetables all attractively arranged. The rain, which had started so gently that it only hit the canopy and didn’t reach further, fell stronger and steadier while we were eating, until it was wetting the ground. We were told that it was dangerous to walk in the jungle when it is raining as tree branches can fall on you. The others went fishing but, knowing this was a lost cause, I slept.

Dinner was once more very good – this time it was noodles added to all of the above. Afterward we paddled the canoe over to the opposite river bank again, lit a huge bonfire of driftwood on a sand-and-stone-covered spit of land and, sitting on logs, watched the yellow eyes of animals that came down to drink at the water’s edge of the opposite bank. Now that the rain had stopped it was a lovely night and the Southern Cross and the Milky Way stood out in the dark velvety sky. Enrico and Santos told us tales of anacondas as thick as tree trunks and said that there was an example residing in a zoo in Riberteralta, the next town I was heading for. I resolved to see it.

I woke at dawn to the sounds of birds and monkeys and made my way down to the mist-shrouded river to wash. After breakfast of fritters, bananas and coffee we packed up the camp and trundled down to the canoe, then we proceeded to the opposite river bank to collect some big trunks of balsa wood to make a raft. Further down-river we stopped to chop off a couple of tree branches and strips of bamboo for ties. When completed, the raft consisted of seven large logs tied together with smaller ones that were a movable feast placed on top as seats. We tourists and Bella scrambled on board and Franz, the Belgian boy, took first turn at standing up front with a pole to punt and paddle us along.

Going along noiselessly with the flow was very peaceful and all went well until we hit the rapids. Then we were bumped and dragged over the stones on the bottom. It was great fun and we all took turns to drive in the two hours that elapsed before we reached the spot on the Beni where we met the canoe bearing Enrico and Santos. We stepped ashore here, and Enrico led us inland to visit a primitive village of Chimane Indians.

For half an hour we were marched briskly in single file through jungle so lush it totally covered us overhead, while underneath my feet the path was soft with damp fallen leaves. The warm air, heavy with the sweet, dank scent of flowers, hung about us absolutely still and all was quiet except for the cries of birds. Enrico pointed out the tree that animals rub against when they are wounded to heal them, as well as the diarrhoea tree, the worm tree, and the chocolate tree with its livid red fruit that turns brown and smells like its name. We sloshed through a couple of muddy creeks and, crossing a stinking rivulet, climbed up its bank to where three families of Chimane lived.

At first I thought that they must sleep on the ground in their open-sided shelters of sticks under palm-frond roofs, but then I saw that there was a sleeping platform under the fronds. ‘Away from the tigers,’ Bella translated. A fat, exceedingly grubby, naked baby toddled about the flattened earth under the shelter. Almost everybody had a baby in Peru and Bolivia. One family consisted of a small woman with pleasant features, her husband, also very short, and two grimy children. They all wore vestiges of tattered clothing. We had brought our left-over food for them and it was fallen on instantly – even the two pet monkeys got a piece of biscuit. Their household goods included a geriatric rifle that had been mended with solder, a waist-high piece of tree trunk that was now a stand for pounding grain, a chopping-block also cut from a tree trunk, a table made from pieces of bamboo tied together, some woven reed mats, a fire on which a couple of turtle carcases smouldered, a bottle of yellow fluid that I discovered was urine used as medicine and for healing, and a bottle of filthy river water that looked even less appetising than the urine and was for drinking. No wonder they need the healing tree and the diarrhoea tree. Their only livestock were a couple of chooks and the two gorgeous pet monkeys. They said that the day before a jaguar had nearly made off with one of the monkeys. Looking around outside the shelter, my stomach heaved when I encountered the stench from chunks of meat that were drying on a bamboo rack and a bag of stinking rib cages standing under it.

When we left, one of the children, a small boy of about six who had trouble holding up his tattered pants, picked up a small bundle of this meat. His father took a bigger one and they slung them in the traditional manner on their backs, suspended by a band around their foreheads, then they followed us. The small boy, who was in front of me, kept looking around anxiously at his father behind me. He thinks I’m going to kidnap Dad, I thought. Or maybe he feared that he might be left with this weird woman. I tried to get Dad to pass me but no go. Maybe he was the rearguard defence against the tigers. I wouldn’t have been a lot of use. A jaguar, when mature, can be nearly a metre tall at the shoulder, two metres long and one hundred and twenty kilograms of sheer power with its massive jaws and big, square head.

Back at the river Santos had set up his gas cooker in the narrow canoe and made us a delicious lunch, four platters of mixed goodies plus rice and fruit. He offered a share of this feast to a couple of other travellers who happened along, a pair of Israeli fellows who were about to set off into the jungle alone and on foot. Our guide said this was very dangerous. Aside from the snakes and tigers, there were evil bandits to avoid. He said that an American girl had left Rurre alone in a canoe and attempted to reach Riberteralta. She had been killed and her body found in the river. I had also read that women should not go into the jungle alone or in pairs with a guide. Bella said that kidnapping occurred often in La Paz and other cities but not much in the country. No, here they just murder and maybe eat you. She also said that the Indians kill much wildlife and the reason that we hadn’t seen many animals was that there were numerous Indians living in this area. Now she tells us! Although we didn’t see them, there were anacondas ten metres long, alligators of five metres and insects of twenty centimetres as well as jaguars, tapirs, peccarys, anteaters, monkeys, snakes, capybaras, giant river otters, armadillos, agoutis – a long-legged rodent – sloths, lizards, parrots and spectacled bear living nearby. And turtles, fish and pink dolphins were in the river. Not to mention zillions of bugs – I could vouch for them.

The small boy shared a seat with me in the canoe. He was dubious about this at first and kept looking nervously at his father in the rear, but finally I got him to smile. When I was not looking he studied me carefully and edged beneath my pink umbrella to see what life was like under there.

At Rurre two hours later I tipped the guide and the cook handsomely – well, by local standards anyway. It was the best food I’d had this trip. Bella found me a hotel that was quieter than the Beni. It had an interesting shaded courtyard that was paved with thousands of pieces of broken tile and had hammocks slung around its edges. After a quick clean-up I met Bella at five o’clock and we took motorbike taxis to see a friend of hers, a Swiss fellow who maintained an animal sanctuary for orphans and strays, as well as a very cheap backpackers’ hostel. Judging from the specimens loitering in the garden this was also for orphans and strays. At the sanctuary I met a beautiful jaguar called Gaddafi, who had been orphaned as a baby, and a large, lithe enchantress of a black monkey named Monica Lewinsky. She was prettier than her namesake.

I ate chilli con carne in the cafe down the road, slept well and, cursing, rose by candlelight to be at the bus station at seven. The bus from La Paz was late so I had a ‘brekfest compleat’ – the usual gargantuan repast – in a nearby cafe. The station waiting area was a bench under the verandah. From here I watched a black pig foraging freely around the square in front of the station, while countless dogs sniffed by and a grazing horse wandered up and down. The seven o’clock bus finally arrived at half past nine and a man got off it carrying his fighting cock in a leather sling over his shoulder. It was the same bus that I had come up from Coroico on, very high in front like a truck (which made it difficult to get in and out of), as well as old, worn and already full. I talked to an English couple who got off here. They were definitely going to fly back. Apart from the terrors of the road, they’d had to stand for four hours despite having numbered tickets.

We rattled off with a huge load on top as well as inside. This bus was a veritable vegetable market. One man carried a large coconut palm, another a box of six sprouting trees, while another had a plastic bag with a growing fig tree in it which he hung from the window hook. I had a little trouble getting my reserved seat but the problem was resolved amicably in the end. I sat in the middle of the row of five back seats between four Bolivian men and put my feet up on my bag. We all snoozed.