Llama for Lunch (21 page)
The road was in even worse condition than the one this far had been, but at least it was flat. It stretched in front of the bus like a ragged ribbon of dust to the horizon. It was hot, so all the windows were open and the dust poured in mightily. When I got off I had filthy, uncombable hair, a dirty face and clothes that were stiff with dirt. By that time, however, I was long past caring about keeping up appearances.
The uneven, winding and deeply rutted road required first gear to negotiate the bad parts and the countless creeks. And this was the great new road! Then came even worse, many kilometres of boneshaking corrugations that were interspersed now and then by a pothole so bad it almost shook the teeth from my head, and sent me flying up off the seat.
The first stop we made at a bus station I rushed to the loo and joined a queue from another bus. While standing there I gazed upwards and a hole in the ceiling enabled me to see the manufacture of this establishment’s interior. It was chicken wire with papier-mâché spread over it. While I was contemplating this marvel I heard our bus engine start and by the time I came flying out, waving and shouting, it had backed out and was moving off. But I wasn’t as delinquent as the passenger who actually missed it. How can you miss a bus that is three hours late? A few kilometres from Rurre a motorbike roared alongside the bus and a passenger who’d been left behind got on covered with dust.
We encountered pampas country north of Rurre and after a while I saw cows, horses, large white storks and egrets, and, looking down as we passed over a bridge, several large crocodiles basking sinisterly on the riverbank. Later I saw many more on the marshy wet lands, paddy fields or creeks by the side of the road.
I was glad I did not see the appalling logging and deforestation that is taking place out from Rurre where once there was thick rainforest. Mahogany trees are cut down for only the bottom five metres – the rest is burned for charcoal and firewood. Less valuable trees are simply burned on site. The land is being stripped and sawmills and lumber yards have sprung up since the new road north was opened.
Lunch was provided in a ramshackle dump where I ate soup, meat and rice at a rough wooden table while fowls pecked in the dust around my feet. The Bolivian men who had shared my seat joined me, and I helped myself to a glass of their Cola by mistake. I thought the drink was communal as so much else was. When there were only two of us left on the wooden bench the other fellow got up, the bench catapulted me off and I went flying onto the dirt floor. The men hauled me to my feet, dusted me off and set me straight again. Then I went out the back to look for the ladies’. Stepping among the pigs and the plentiful mud, I came to a wooden outhouse that was used for washing, but there was no toilet. I used the ground as indicated by one of the ladies of the establishment while she stood in front of me to protect my modesty. Then I did the same for her. We are all sisters under the skin. I washed in a bucket of water drawn up from a round, bricklined well. It was a pigpen of a place but the people were friendly. I asked what the name of this spot was and they told me it was Sheraton. The hotel chain would be pleased.
The dinner establishment was a lot better. In a neat riverside village flying a Bolivian flag, we crossed a wobbly pontoon bridge and stopped at a cafe surrounded by a white picket fence. Sitting at tables on its wooden-floored, semi-enclosed verandah, we were served decent fish and rice. Two big green parrots sat near me on top of the picket fence and carried on a noisy argument in Spanish while I ate. The waiter, a Quasimodo replica, one eye blinded by a cataract and with one shoulder up near his ear, lurched at me with a mad leer and a cackle. I didn’t know whether to laugh or run, but as no one else seemed to notice anything odd, I stood my ground. This time I sat with some Bolivian ladies, one of whom had been sitting in front of me in the bus. She had the usual hairdo – two long pigtails – and lots of skirts and petticoats and she hung her precious bowler hat in a plastic bag from a hook by the window. A businessman with glasses, briefcase and watch sat beside her and soon they were in deep conversation. The young men nearby occasionally swigged chicha, an unappealing milky-coloured local hooch made from industrial strength maize, out of big, plastic bottles.
The bus had broken seats, missing armrests and smashed windows mended with tape, and became ever more littered and filthy. The conductor took off his shirt later in the day when it got hot and some passengers did the same. Night came with a glorious red-ball sunset followed by a fabulous, apricot-and-crimson sky.
During the night a bolt sheared off from somewhere underneath the bus. I was surprised the whole caboose hadn’t shaken to bits long ago. The passengers climbed down to wander around on the road in the moonlight waiting for it to be fixed. Back on the road, this journey seemed as though it would go on forever – jolt, shake, bump, lurch, crash. Everything I had rattled, but, just when I had completely given up on ever arriving, we did. I fell off totally relieved to be on firm ground again. We should have arrived in Riberteralta at eight in the evening. It was now after six the next morning. It had taken more than twenty hours to travel five hundred kilometres.
Motorbike taxi-ing to the Amazonia Hotel I found it all in darkness. I knocked on the massive, ancient wooden door until finally a light showed and a large, rumpled but friendly man gave me access to a bed, bless him. Badly needing a shower first I asked if there was hot water. ‘No, aqua naturalle!’ I didn’t care. I fell on the bed and slept for hours. Today was Sunday the sixth of August and this was National Day in Bolivia. I heard church bells as I went to sleep.
The Amazonia Hotel, a stone, two-storey building of obvious great age, cost forty bolivianos per night. Lots of wood had been used in its construction. The lofty ceilings were all polished wooden planks and the walls were panelled to chest height. The entrance doors were like those of a fortress, great solid old barricades secured by padlocks. I saw no other type of lock in this town. The floors were lovely parquetry or ceramic tiles. Set into the tessellated yellow brown and green floor tiles of the entrance-lobby-cum-sitting room was one continuous plank, without joins, that must have been twelve metres long. It started at the front door and passed through into the kitchen to disappear under a 1920s’ dresser. It was possibly mahogany and there were signs of wear in its middle. Although I puzzled over it I could not work out its use. The hotel owner, a laid-back man who had a Spanish look, had a great job, as two young Indian girls did all the work. He unselfconsciously wore a torn, creased shirt and had three-day old stubble on his face, but he was very kind to me.
My room boasted an overhead fan with only one speed – noisy – and a feebly inadequate fluoro light. The wooden plank door into the swampy bathroom was fastened by a plastic bag twisted to make a loop over a long nail and the shower rose was suffering from third-degree rust. The windows and the door panels had no glass, just fly screens. There were two huge double beds, an open rack for my clothes and a hideously incongruous, triple-seated brown vinyl couch. A wide verandah outside kept the big room cool. Palm trees and bushes grew in the courtyard and around the outdoor sitting area and somewhere in them lurked a pet parrot who was up early and very verbose. This was not a tourist town and I could not find a laundry, so I washed my filthy clothes outside in the yard sink.
Near the main square I had a great lunch of the famous Beni beef – in the form of barbecued shaslicks – with rice and lovely fresh apple juice. This was the first decent pile of meat I’d had since the
Atlanta
. The town was sleeping in the hot afternoon, so I went back to bed until evening when a smashing rainstorm came to cool things down.
Taking a walk at five o’clock all the people I passed greeted me with ‘buenos tarde’. One small boy had a monkey on his shoulder and there were the now expected legion of dogs. The two main streets were brick-paved or cobbled and the other streets were dirt. The footpaths went crazily up and down over breaks, holes, deep ditches and open drains, lethal at night when the streets were unlit. Shops were very basic, but the streets were reasonably clean, helped no doubt by the pouring rain that soon had them awash. Boards placed conveniently over the deepest drains and gutters enabled them to be negotiated without drowning, but I still got very wet. (I don’t mind this as long as it is not cold.) The market displayed the usual array of goods in a big covered shed. Near the hotel I passed a large second-hand-clothes shop and wondered where all the stock came from. Most people looked as though they were wearing their old clothes – as did I. The rain washed away the band and the celebrations for National Day were a total fizz. Shame. All that was left in the plaza was a lot of rubbish and a damp, forlorn seller of fairy floss.
Riberteralta is on banks of the River Beni near the confluence of the Madre de Dios. After the rubber boom collapsed around 1914 it resorted to its current mainstay of growing, producing and exporting oil from Brazil nuts. My guide book said that Riberteralta is ‘paralysingly hot with a contaminated water supply and deadly open sewers’. The town’s plaza was enormous and in its centre was a rotunda surrounded by gardens and seats under large trees that were neatly clipped into dense umbrella shapes. The edges of the square were colonnaded, or shaded by the verandahs of stone buildings, none of which were grand – indeed, some were rather tatty. The few cafes had their seating outside on the footpath. Nothing was fancy. The cathedral that fronted the plaza was a massive, new-looking pile of reddish brick, not at all conventional in style. When I looked inside at seven in the evening it was packed with worshippers. The pews all faced the altar in a fan shape and on one side was an almost open confessional – a pretty public place to be airing your sins and negligences.
Away from the square the buildings were mostly basic wood or clapboard and had divided swing doors that opened directly onto the street. The top half of each door was often open and I could see what family life was like inside. There seemed to be only the bare necessities – a bed, a table, a cot.
At the Social Club I waited an hour for some picante macho but when it arrived it was very good. I also had some delicious juice of unknown aetiology. The club was an attractive building outside but inside it was a monstrous, empty stone place with high ceilings, arches and columns and pale green walls. There were fancy metal chandeliers with glass shades, ceiling fans, and lots of white-cloth-topped tables with red artificial rose buds in glass vases. The kitchen was so far away I couldn’t smell any cooking, which had me worried when my dinner took so long. And I had all this echoing emptiness completely to myself. Lunch seemed to be still the focus of the social scene.
Riberteralta traffic was motorbike or scooter, on which it was pleasant to ride pillion in a cool breeze. Discovering that there are no buses that travel further north, the next morning I went to a share taxi stand on the edge of town to negotiate a ride to the Brazilian border. After I had arranged to be collected at my hotel at twelve, I had a sumptuous breakfast of pawpaw juice in a milkshake, coffee, real French bread, two eggs and chicken salad – all for the usual five bolivianos. Then I tried to change some money and found that both banks were closed, possibly because of the holiday or just out of pure cussedness. I was saved by the hotel proprietor who sent one of his girls off to a moneychanger for me.
The taxi came for me three quarters of an hour late. The driver, who had a round jolly face, helped me with my bags and made the hundred kilometre trip in half the time that the book had alleged the mythical bus took. The beat-up old car made horrible noises and I never thought it would make the distance, but it zipped along over the dirt road at eighty kilometres per hour most of the time. This got exciting at corners but Jolly Face was a good driver. Soon after leaving Riberteralta we crossed a bridge over the wide river where an entire village was in the water washing clothes, pots, pans, kids and themselves. Long lines of poles supported by posts were festooned with dripping clothing. It was a washing-fest extraordinaire. But it
was
Monday!
The country we passed through was jungle so dense I couldn’t see a metre past the side of the road. There was only a very occasional clearing occupied by a lone house or a tiny village. The houses were made of white-painted adobe or wooden sticks, with thatched roofs. We crossed another river, this time on a punt that was pushed by a canoe with a twenty-five horsepower Yamaha outboard. No fee was charged for this. At times there were roadworks and bridges in progress along the road. And once a man on horseback wielding a big, business-like whip chased a three-coloured – white, brown and black – bull down the road. Later I saw cleared and burned ground and herds of cows, mostly skinny white brahmins.
