The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (40 page)

I got up, began to inch my way down the stairs. Mr. Nhem kept wanting to show me things, kept wanting to thank me; he wanted my phone number. His wife gave me another warm bottle of water. I was sick to my stomach. I just wanted to get into the van; I just wanted the air-conditioning to come on; I just wanted to go home. As I climbed into the van, Mr. Nhem called out to me. “He says that maybe you can find a millionaire from your country to become an investor,” Samithy told me. “Since there are many there.”

Samithy and I were silent for the first part of the ride back. He stared forward at the highway. “That man,” he said at last, “he is one of the ones who killed my family.

“Maybe not him,” Samithy continued after a pause. “Maybe he didn't do the killing, but someone like him.” He paused again. “Maybe he photographed my parents before they died.”

“Were your parents at S-21?” I asked at last.

Samithy shrugged. “I don't know,” he answered. “We were separated very early on. My parents, they were high-class people. They were the kind of people they killed at S-21. So maybe he met them there.”

The silence hummed. I felt the heat blazing in. “He went to China in 1976,” Samithy said, scanning my face the way he had back at Mr. Nhem's house.

“I know,” I said, looking at my hands.

I asked Samithy if he thought Mr. Nhem was a bad man. He nodded. “Yes, I think he is a bad man. He helped kill many people.”

“Then why,” I cleared my throat, croaked the words out, “why did you give him money?”
Why did you want me to become an investor?
I wanted to ask.

“I give him because I must forgive.” He paused then added, “I am a Buddhist.”

“Yes, but aren't you angry? To see that man, like that? Because I'd—” I stopped myself. I was going to say
I'd be angry
, but I realized that wasn't quite true. I shook my head, corrected myself, “Because
I'm
angry.”

“But how can I live if I am angry?” Samithy answered. “How can I work? How can I take care of my family? It's very painful; he is a bad man who did many bad things and he is free. He is not just free; he live a good life. He has a good position and a nice house. Me, I am taxi driver. For me, this is painful.”

The sky ahead of us was heavy, the heat pushing against the sealed windows.

“I think the museum is a good idea. I think he should build it, because it is important. I think maybe he use the money I give for drink, for girls.” He shrugged. “But I give anyway.”

“I don't get it,” I finally said, slumping against the seat, my nose twitching with the sting of tears.

“It's because I'm Buddhist.”

I shook my head. “I understand that. I understand you're Buddhist. But I'm not. I'm American and I . . . I'm just angry.”

“For me,” Samithy said, “it's just painful.”

We fell into another silence. I considered the fact that after a day of contradictions, this was the first time it felt like Samithy was being truly upfront with me. How was someone, anyone, supposed to move on in a country where the trauma was still so palpable? Where all the same men were still there; where the remnants of the war were that easy to touch and sit next to and give money to? If the wound was still that open, how could tourism do anything but scrape against it?

We fell into another silence. The ruggedly logged landscape passed outside the window. The heat was a hand pushing in on us. Finally it burst and the rain started. It was a real rain, one of those Southeast Asian ones you can't hide from. Umbrellas, ponchos—they don't do anything. There's no fighting it; you just have to surrender.

And that's what people did. Outside the window, I watched the young boys on motorbikes not bothering to cover themselves; I saw women walking slowly alongside the road, their clothes stuck to their bodies. Skeletal cattle blinked placidly in the puddles that had suddenly formed in the fields.

No one looked for shelter.

MONTE REEL

FROM
The New York Times Magazine

B
EFORE THE PASSENGERS
turned on the driver and began plotting a mutiny, the ride was smooth. The bus rolled out of the station in São Paulo at about four o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon last July, and within an hour it had shaken free of the city's clotted tunnels, jammed overpasses, and coded graffiti. By six, we were barreling straight into a lurid sunset that endowed everything with the candied luster of fresh paint. Green hills, silver ponds, golden palms. Two parrots soared in tandem over a sugarcane field, inviting us to drift into a pastoral trance.

Then the engine's fan belt snapped. The bus limped into a roadside service station about 220 miles from São Paulo.

“In a half hour we'll be ready to go,” Mauro Yodes, our cheerful driver, assured us. “Go ahead and get something to eat at the café, if you want.”

This was the only bus that advertised start-to-finish service on the recently completed Interoceanic Highway, the first paved route to fully cross the big green heart of South America. The breakdown should have been a useful reminder that South American cross-continental travel was still new and many kinks had yet to be worked out. But we were antsy. We had so much ground to cover.

The bus was supposed to cross 3,500 miles of pavement (roughly the same distance as a flight from New York to Paris) in about 96 hours. My plan was to disembark early, about 50 hours into the trip, then I'd cobble together a series of shorter bus routes, which would allow me to spend time in towns and villages, all the way to the Pacific coast. Mauro told us he planned to stop for just 40 minutes a day—enough time, theoretically, for each passenger to wash up and buy food and drinks at a gas station. For the other 23 hours and 20 minutes, as he shared driving duties with his partner, José, we'd be confined to rigid seats—benumbed contortionists sweeping crumbs from our laps.

Among those onboard were more than a dozen unrelated Peruvians who worked in São Paulo and were returning home to visit family; a few Brazilians on vacation; a college professor from Ecuador who said he was studying the continent's “touristic infrastructure”; and a young couple from Cuzco, laboring heroically to entertain their 18-month-old daughter.

The various nationalities rarely mingled. The informal segregation reflected the continent itself, where two of the Western Hemisphere's most isolating geographical features—the Amazon basin and the Andes mountain range—have always gotten in the way of a unified South American culture. Lowland Brazilians and highland Peruvians couldn't be more different—in language, in genetic ancestry, in culinary traditions. But now an unbroken strip of common ground unites them, and every time someone makes the journey from one end of the Interoceanic to the other, the clean divisions between regions blur a little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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