The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (42 page)

About a half hour later, I ducked into one of the gold-buying shops. There he was again, manning the scales behind the counter. “Not in here,” he said sternly. “This is a place of business.” He punctuated the warning with the same wag of his index finger.

Outside, I stumbled upon a taxi driver who said he was going back to Puerto Maldonado and would be stopping to search for additional passengers at a
pueblo de plástico
, villages so named for the plastic structures that pass for homes. These boomtowns were built by gold miners and are occupied for as long as it takes the miners to strip the forest and sift the soil for gold, before they abandon the whole mess in favor of fresher territory. The encampments invariably attract “prostibars”, jerry-built bordellos staffed by prostitutes who aren't necessarily adults. I had been warned about stopping at a pueblo. It was too dangerous, said Loja, the biologist from the Amazon Conservation Association. He went twice, once to meet local government officials, and both times he was run off under the threat of bodily harm. He predicted that as a gringo, I'd fare worse.

I got out of the taxi and stepped across a wooden plank that spanned the highway ditch. Brown water ran under the boards and radiated in channels behind the tents. A young woman, probably in her late teens, carried a case of pisco into a tent labeled
DISCO FONTANA
, where another girl in impractical heels swept trash from the floor. Men in tank tops, athletic shorts, and muddy wading boots walked between tents. Under a water stall built to wash motorcycles, a woman scrubbed an infant.

When I walked a short distance into the camp toward what seemed to be a convenience store, a woman rose from behind a table, alarmed. Two men, one whose face was hidden behind the dark shield of a motorcycle helmet, walked toward me. The woman indicated I wasn't welcome by flashing a sign that I understood perfectly: the wagging finger. I turned and left.

Hairpin turns, screaming tires, near head-on collisions, roadside crosses, knotting intestines—all come standard on the Andean stretch of the Interoceanic. I boarded a bus in Puerto Maldonado, and on my GPS, I monitored its ascent, which topped out at 15,579 feet (imagine three Denvers stacked atop one another). At times it seemed as if we had been transported back to the sixteenth century—the terrace farms notched into the mountainsides, the grazing llamas and alpacas, the mud huts with straw roofs, the stone-walled gardens, the campesinos bundled in colorful woolen shawls.

I spent one night in Ocongate, the collective name for 33 villages of clustered huts embedded in the mountainside at about 11,500 feet. There I found the first motorist lodge built along the Andean stretch of the Interoceanic, a 35-bed complex on the banks of the Mapacho River. A retired Peruvian narcotics-dog trainer named Rubén Santander built the place in 2010. His clients often include hikers who trek around the snowcapped Ausangate peak. In a couple of weeks, he was expecting 25 German hikers, followed by a group of anthropologists from the University of Minnesota, but I was alone in the complex.

Santander, like many of Ocongate's residents, had been schooled in the business of hospitality by Odebrecht. About twice a month for most of 2011 the construction company held workshops for all locals who might benefit from the expected influx of highway travelers—grocers, street vendors, even alpaca herders with some wool to sell. Once, the workshop participants took a field trip to Cuzco to visit a five-star hotel. “They wanted us to see how clean it is,” Santander said, “and what services they offer.”

Santander, who previously helped run a hotel in Arequipa, had nothing but good things to say about the classes. But at the Hostal Flores, about a half-mile up the road, Angelino Flores, the owner, doubted whether the lessons sank in with the citizenry. “These are campesinos who have never gone to a school of any kind, have never sat in a classroom,” he said. “It was as if they were speaking another language.”

In late December 2012, three American tourists pulled their camper off the highway one night, parking it on a small dirt road in Ocongate. According to an account titled “Nightmare in Peru” on the tourists' blog, they had just popped open beers when villagers approached them and demanded to see their identification. But the Americans, who spoke limited Spanish, refused to surrender their passports and tried to drive away. Rocks were thrown by the villagers, and a can of Mace was deployed by the Americans. “After nearly 11 hours of being attacked, chased, beaten, whipped and held at gunpoint without food, sleep or water, we were led back to the truck,” one tourist wrote after getting medical treatment in Cuzco, three hours away. “All of the windows and the windshield of the truck had been broken, and the camper had been broken into.”

According to Santander, the villagers who initially approached the tourists were part of a
ronda campesina
—the Andean version of a voluntary police squad. When the Americans refused to show them their IDs, he said, the villagers decided they were thieves. After the melee, local officials convened the members of the
ronda campesina
to try to persuade them that tourists should be welcomed, not chased away. “There were even messages broadcast on television about the importance of treating people well,” Santander said.

Most people I spoke with said they were still waiting for the influx of tourists they were promised. Near evening I took a walk for a couple of miles along the highway. I spotted a woman carrying an enormous cloth bundle, which she laid out on the gravel shoulder of the road. Inside the bundle was a load of recently harvested quinoa, which she spread out on her cloth. Then she waited. Within minutes, a large fuel truck whooshed by. The wind from the tires blew over her pile, separating the light chaff from the heavier grain. For centuries, Andean farmers have fanned or hand-tossed their grain to do the same job. The Interoceanic, it seemed, was not wholly without local benefits.

When Cuzco was founded, the wheel was little more than an idea in South America. The Incans called the city “the navel of the world” because an estimated 25,000 miles of footpaths radiated from the city into the known world. Now it's again a hub, the spot where the Interoceanic splits into alternate routes down to the Pacific. At Cuzco's auto expo, an informal event held every Saturday morning for anyone with a new or used car to sell, Haber Enriques, a used-car salesman, praised the increase in business the highway had brought. “Everyone wants a car. You can drive to lots of different places now in a day. That's new for us . . .”

Enriques stood beside two roomy pickup trucks he hoped to move and watched one customer after another pass him by. “Lots of first-time buyers,” he complained. “They start off with the little ones, and then they move up to something bigger.”

One first-timer was Eudes Ayrampo, 40, trailed by his teenage daughter and son. He quickly eyed a Suzuki Alto, the smallest car in sight. The family huddled together. “It's necessary,” his daughter said. “What if there's an emergency and we need to get somewhere fast?” Her brother agreed, and rubbed his fathers shoulders, trying to loosen him up. Eudes conceded that a car would make family trips easier, and with that, another car joined Cuzco's fray.

You can argue that this emerging demographic of car buyers unites one end of the continent to the other. As Roberto Espejo, a 66-year-old cabdriver, told me: “The people believe if you own a car, you are in a different class. It automatically puts you above the lowest.” The wave of protests in Brazil didn't reflect an increasing gap between rich and poor, as some articles suggested; it reflected rising expectations of those in the middle. In the past decade, tens of millions of Brazilians climbed over the poverty line to join the middle class, according to government figures. This helps explain why Brazilians bought more than 3.8 million automobiles in 2012, setting a new national sales record for the eighth consecutive year. Peruvians also bought more cars than ever that year—165,427—eclipsing the previous year's sales total, which had also been a record, by 28.4 percent. Sales in Peru more than quadrupled between 2007 and 2012.

The bus I boarded in Cuzco to get to the Pacific had fully reclining bed seats, silken pillows, and individual touch screens with dozens of movies to choose from. I settled in for a 20-hour ride, planning to enjoy the best leg of the trip, but constant twists and plunges meant sleep was out of the question. Moans issued from the back of the bus, and by dawn, the bathroom had suffered unspeakable indignities. When we finally rolled into Lima on a cloudy afternoon, past Catholic churches, high-rises, and five-star hotels, all I saw was a finish line.

I eventually found my way to the ocean. The words “from sea to shining sea” clanked around in my head. Nothing about that phrase sounded right. That was partly because the idea of interoceanic unity is still too new here to be reduced to cliché, but mostly because the sea in Lima wasn't shining. It was matte gray, leaden. The sky was overcast and drab.

I stood in front of a dark, shaley beach. Six surfers in wetsuits paddled out into the water and disappeared in the blur of sea mist and sky haze. I was staring into the Pacific, but all was fog. It felt very much like the end of a line. There was no horizon to look into or beyond. The only thing to do was to turn around.

The original plans for a transcontinental highway imagined a road that would allow goods to flow outward, from the heart of South America to the world. One day that very well could happen. But for now, the travelers on this road seemed to have reversed the prevailing course. The destinations were right here, inside the very continent that had opened itself up.

When I got back to my hotel room, an e-mail from Joseph Silas, one of the Haitians I met in the migrant camp, was waiting for me. He had received his residency papers, he said, and was ready to hit the road. Based on the date that he sent his message, I calculated that he would be arriving in São Paulo very soon, if he hadn't already. He was traveling every inch of the highway I'd covered, feeling every bump and curve, taking it all in a totally different direction.

PAUL SALOPEK

FROM
National Geographic

I. To Walk the World

W
ALKING IS FALLING FORWARD
.

Each step we take is an arrested plunge, a collapse averted, a disaster braked. In this way, to walk becomes an act of faith. We perform it daily: a two-beat miracle—an iambic teetering, a holding on and letting go. For the next seven years I will plummet across the world.

I am on a journey. I am in pursuit of an idea, a story, a chimera, perhaps a folly. I am chasing ghosts. Starting in humanity's birthplace in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, I am retracing, on foot, the pathways of the ancestors who first discovered the earth at least 60,000 years ago. This remains by far our greatest voyage. Not because it delivered us the planet. No. But because the early
Homo sapiens
who first roamed beyond the mother continent—these pioneer nomads numbered, in total, as few as a couple of hundred people—also bequeathed us the subtlest qualities we now associate with being fully human: complex language, abstract thinking, a compulsion to make art, a genius for technological innovation, and the continuum of today's many races. We know so little about them. They straddled the strait called Bab el Mandeb—the “gate of grief” that cleaves Africa from Arabia—and then exploded, in just 2,500 generations, a geological heartbeat, to the remotest habitable fringe of the globe.

Millennia behind, I follow.

Using fossil evidence and the burgeoning science of “genography”—a field that sifts the DNA of living populations for mutations useful in tracking ancient diasporas—I will walk north from Africa into the Middle East. From there my antique route leads eastward across the vast gravel plains of Asia to China, then north again into the mint-blue shadows of Siberia. From Russia I will hop a ship to Alaska and inch down the western coast of the New World to wind-smeared Tierra del Fuego, our species' last new continental horizon. I will walk 21,000 miles.

If you ask, I will tell you that I have embarked on this project, which I'm calling the Out of Eden Walk, for many reasons: To relearn the contours of our planet at the human pace of 3 miles an hour. To slow down. To think. To write. To render current events as a form of pilgrimage. I hope to repair certain important connections burned through by artificial speed, by inattentiveness. I walk, as everyone does, to see what lies ahead. I walk to remember.

The trails scuffed through the Ethiopian desert are possibly the oldest human marks in the world. People walk them still: the hungry, the poor, the climate-stricken, men and women sleepwalking away from war. Nearly a billion people are on the move today across the earth. We are living through the greatest mass migration our species has ever known. As always, the final destination remains unclear. In Djibouti city, the African migrants stood waving cell phones on trash-strewed beaches at night. They were capturing a cheap signal from neighboring Somalia. I heard them murmur: Oslo, Melbourne, Minnesota. It was eerie and sad and strangely beautiful. After 600 centuries we were still seeking guidance, even rescue, from those who had walked before.

Herto Bouri, Ethiopia

“Where are you walking?” the Afar pastoralists ask.

“North. To Djibouti.” (We do not say Tierra del Fuego. It is much too far—it is meaningless.)

“Are you crazy? Are you sick?”

In reply, Mohamed Elema Hessan—wiry and energetic, the ultimate go-to man, a charming rogue, my guide and protector through the blistering Afar Triangle—doubles over and laughs. He leads our microcaravan: two skinny camels. I have listened to his guffaw many times already. This project is, to him, a punch line—a cosmic joke. To walk for seven years! Across three continents! Enduring hardship, loneliness, uncertainty, fear, exhaustion, confusion—all for a rucksack's worth of ideas, palaver, scientific and literary conceits. He enjoys the absurdity of it. This is fitting. Especially given our ridiculous launch.