How to Walk a Puma (10 page)

I pushed on as soon as I felt able to do so, the light now a beacon, drawing me towards it. I stumbled into some more mud, my shoes now leaden lumps. I seriously considered dropping to my hands and knees and crawling. Instead I shook my feet, one after the other; though the energy that took almost winded me, I broke into a
stumbling trot, making it at least twelve paces before tripping and falling onto all fours, shuffling a while this way before getting up again and, with some newfound will, taking a few more steps.

After a while the light seemed closer, brighter, and I considered shouting but doubted my voice would be any louder than a strangled fart. I stumbled along, my throat raw from dragging at the thin air. It was a ragged figure that stumbled into the communal room and collapsed onto the bed assigned for me.

‘You okay?’ the Minke asked me, looking up from her book.

‘No,’ I said, but before I could elaborate it became apparent from some squeaks and creaks that the Polish couple, not at all mindful of being in a well-lit room with four other people, were engaged in some under-the-blanky hanky-panky. It was hard to believe anyone could have the energy for that under the circumstances; I didn’t think I could even muster the strength to laugh at it, but then a choked guffaw emerged that I tried to stifle with my hand. Soon the Minke and I must have looked as if we were engaged in the same activity as we clutched at each other to try to muffle our giggles.

Waking the next morning I looked out at the lake and berated myself for being a drama queen. It really wasn’t that far to the other side. But after taking my first few steps of the morning my legs went dead and my head pulsed with flares of pain behind each eye.

Mountains are not my thing, I decided: I can’t ski (apparently I was born without a pelvis, as my legs drift apart as soon as I set off on skis and simply will not rejoin), I don’t like the cold, and while flamingos are all very nice, I prefer the jungle, where being a bird watcher might get me killed by something like a jaguar, but at least
that had some dignity to it. We had three more days of travel ahead of us, and then some time scheduled in La Paz, perched at an altitude greater than any other capital city in the world. After that it was all downhill to the jungle, and there’d be no more getting high for me.

Driving Blind with Jesus

There’s an old saying in Africa that goes something like this: ‘You’re a bloody idiot, Peter Allison.’ Like many old sayings there is much truth to it, which may explain why I became so excited at the idea of spending five days floating down a tributary of the Amazon on tyre tubes. Lisa and I were in the office of a small tour company, and I hopped from foot to foot like a child with a full bladder, while the Minke, sensible and therefore unsure as to whether the trip was a good idea, prevaricated. Another option was to take a motorised canoe, in which case the same journey could be done in three days. However, that seemed incurably dull to me, and when I added wheedling and puppy eyes to my full-bladder dance, the Minke agreed to go the tyre-tube route. Before she could change her mind, we booked in.

We were in La Paz, the world’s highest capital city, but since my evening of birdwatching at Lago Colorado, I’d become somewhat more acclimatised and the hilly streets only punished me mildly for daring to walk them.

We decided to fill in the few days until the trip began by heading to the small town of Coroico, a few hours downhill from La Paz. The Minke decided to make her way there on a mountain bike, riding along the infamous Death Road, a path with sheer drops that has claimed many lives. My fear of heights precluded me from enjoying
such an activity, so instead I took a minivan along a newer, only moderately more sane piece of engineering that was deadly looking for a mere fifty per cent of the time.

After arriving in Coroico via our different routes and modes of transport, the Minke and I relaxed for a few days. Then the power went out, resulting in the whole town’s electricity being switched off. This was clearly such a common occurrence that everyone continued with business as usual, all with a stock of candles at hand. Unfortunately, we were waiting to hear from the tyre-tube people via email about a blockade that might make our departure impossible. Truck drivers, unhappy with some government figure, had blocked several routes out of La Paz, and were beating up any drivers who tried to get through. They were apparently tolerant of foreigners and might let them pass, but the situation could flare up at any moment.

For hours we waited; finally, as the sun dipped beneath the omnipresent Andes and plunged us into gloom, the sound of refrigerators kicking into gear and lights dimly glowing told us that the town’s power was back on. Scurrying back to the internet café we logged on to find a message saying that yes, we were going ahead with the trip, and that the company had a blockade-busting plan in place. All we had to do was be back in La Paz the next day for a five am departure, instead of the previously arranged and far more civilised start time of ten.

‘Buggershitpisswee,’ I said. ‘We’d have to leave here at two!’ We found a working phone and to our surprise someone was still in the tour office back in La Paz. Whereas in the West many such places might have been inflexible with regard to our predicament, the man on the other end merely said, ‘Ah, no problem, we will leave later, how about eight?’

So it was that at four the next morning, we waited bleary-eyed for a taxi we’d arranged the day before to take us back to La Paz. Shortly after we were climbing the switchback road, leaving the pleasant vegetation of Coroico behind for the stripped-bare mountainsides surrounding the ramshackle capital.

When Lisa and I booked the tyre-tube trip we’d been the only people interested, but we arrived back in La Paz to find the tour had filled up with six more people who would be joining us. They slowly assembled: a young English guy named Nick, an Israeli (‘Call me David,’ he said. ‘Not Ishmael?’ I asked facetiously, paraphrasing
Moby-Dick
. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘My name is Adair. But call me David’), an Italian woman named Gabriela, a Dutch couple, and a Spanish man named Thema with a bald and mottled scalp, who was the only person visibly older than me.

‘Okay, folks, here is the deal,’ said the man from the office, who spoke remarkably good English. ‘We cannot get through the blockade.’

My heart sank. Had we left Coroico at the crack of dawn for nothing?

‘But we can go around it,’ he continued. ‘It will add a day to the trip, which we won’t charge you for, okay?’

We all agreed, happy that our adventure hadn’t been cancelled.

‘Instead of taking just a few hours to get to the river, it will be a seven-hour drive, and I’ll admit that the vehicle is not the most comfortable, but it is the best we can do. Is everyone happy with that?’

‘Seven hours, not a problem,’ I thought. ‘Sure,’ I said.

Sure, the others all agreed.

The vehicle, another four-wheel drive, was built to take only seven passengers, but there were eight of us, plus the guide we met
at the office just prior to departure. His name was Cesar, pronounced ‘Chazar’, and he was a deep-voiced man with the weathered features of someone who’d lived most of his life outdoors.

‘And this,’ Cesar intoned in his bass rumble, ‘is our driver, Jesus.’

‘Holy Roman Empire,’ I thought.

Jesus (pronounced ‘Heyzuz’) turned out to be a taciturn man who kept a bag of coca leaves stashed beside him. Coca (the raw material from which cocaine is manufactured) is perfectly legal in Bolivia, and at any given time more people than not seem to have wads of it in their cheeks, chewing it for the mild buzz it provides, and for its supposed benefits of increased concentration and alertness. Personally, I found it made my mouth taste of leaves and did little else except make my gums a little numb, which meant I spilled even more than usual of whatever I was drinking.

We piled in, and everyone agreed that the Minke should get the front seat with its greater leg room, as she was clearly the tallest of our group. I was scrunched in the narrowest seat at the back with the Dutch couple, a friendly pair who had the blemish-free skin of people who lived healthily and rarely saw the sun. In front of me in a tight knot sat the four singletons, and we all chatted merrily as Jesus set off through the choked roads of La Paz. A wheel well that pressed into my buttock rendered my right leg numb almost immediately, but seven hours would be fine, I was sure. To ensure blood reached my foot I would just need to occasionally shift around as if breaking wind.

We soon left the winding mountain roads and hit the broad, open altiplano. These high-altitude plains have been agricultural lands since the Incas, and are still tended by poncho-wearing Quichua people, accompanied by bored-looking llamas.

As soon as we hit the flat plains Jesus put his foot down, continuing to chew monotonously on his coca. While we were travelling on one of these long stretches there was a sudden bang and our momentum abruptly decreased before the vehicle started to lurch about. I felt a clawed hand clutch my thigh and thought it belonged to one of the Dutch, then realised it was my own. We veered off the road, coming to a skidding halt some metres from the tarmac, where we all got out of the vehicle.

As a guide I’d changed countless tyres so I offered to help, just to give my still-shaking hands something to do. My offer was rejected and instead I threw one arm around Lisa, who I feared might already be regretting coming on this trip with me. Jesus and Cesar got to work changing the tyre, and recommended we walk to the town a kilometre down the road, where they would join us for lunch.

The air was chilly, but we were all keen for a walk to stretch our legs, and the views were so spectacular nobody much noticed the cold. We were in an elevated valley, and from the dead-flat altiplano the Andes loomed on each side of us, rising to impossibly high snow-capped peaks.

Only a few minutes down the road we were sprayed with dust as Jesus skidded to a stop in front of our strolling group, and urged us back into the vehicle. After a bland café lunch of maize soup and a meat probably best left unidentified, we were on the road again.

By now we’d been driving for about three hours, and my back was already jarred from the uneven road and my right leg was so numb it felt detachable, so I was comforted by the thought that we must be close to halfway through the journey. So when Cesar said, without explanation, that the journey might take ten hours, we were all moved to a frozen silence, broken only when, for no discernible
reason, Thema started singing a few lines of a Spanish song in a deep off-key voice, before muttering something unintelligible.

We had ended up leaving La Paz at ten in the morning, so the original estimate of seven hours would have had us at our tyre-tube launching point at around five in the evening, maybe as late as seven allowing for the usual elasticity in Bolivian estimates of time. But Cesar bumping up the total trip time by another three hours made me wonder if we’d be on the road far longer again. Periodically I postured up, had a shake-shake of what my mama gave me, and settled back down, bloodflow assured for the next little while. To pass the time I started a sweepstake: the estimates of our arrival time ranged from the Dutch couple’s optimistic seven pm, through to my cynical one am.

As it turned out we were all optimists, and getting through the night would be one of the most frightening experiences I’ve ever had.

We left the altiplano in the mid-afternoon and were soon on pure mountain roads again, a mix of dry dirt and gravel that pinged against the bottom of the vehicle, the dust kicked up by the tyres permeating the leaky seals and forming a paste in our mouths. There were few other cars to be seen, but plenty of trucks, which flew past us on the narrow roads at suicidal speeds, rocking our four-wheel drive on its springs with a blast of wind and a toot of the horn, then enveloping us in blinding dust. Although unable to see through the dust, Jesus wouldn’t even slow down; he just drove on at the same pace until we emerged at the other side, miraculously still on the road and not flying off one of the sheer cliffs above which the road wound.

‘
Murciélago
… what is
murciélago
in English?’ Cesar muttered from the front at one point, his voice so deep it carried all the way to the back. While my Spanish was still far from expert, one of the first things I learn in any language are animal names, so I was able to reply, ‘Bat.’

‘Yes! Bat! Who wants to see a bat?’ Cesar rumbled pleasantly.

The other passengers and I all looked at each other blankly. Though the idea of a break from the cramped interior was appealing, I was also keen to reach our destination within a reasonable time. When I said this everyone murmured their assent, which left us nowhere. We needed a leader.

‘I need to stretch my legs,’ the Minke said, and so it was decided.

We turned off the road we were on, the only pass through this section of the mountain yet so narrow it was impossible to believe it was a ‘main’ road. After travelling down what felt like a goat track, Jesus stopped the vehicle near the entrance to a cave, where for a paltry entry fee we were shown some stalagmites, stalactites, and bats that looked down at us with an indifference that possibly mirrored our own.

‘Nobody knows where this water goes,’ Cesar intoned, gesturing towards a decent-sized body of water covering much of the base of the cave. ‘According to legend, the Incas used to throw golden idols in here, along with human sacrifices, to please the gods. Lots of people have looked for the gold, and some have tried to explore further to find out where the water goes. The last group to do so were Japanese. None of them came back.’

I felt the creepy tingle a good story can produce and was also glad to be out of the cramped vehicle, but that was all Cesar had for
us and in a short time we were herded back to where Jesus was waiting, and squeezed back into his chariot. After heading back up the goat track we rejoined the main road, but the two roads met at an angle that meant we were facing the wrong way. Any sensible driver would have continued along a little distance until they found a section wide enough to do a three-point turn.

Jesus didn’t.

With no discernible change in the rate of his cud chewing, he yanked strongly on the wheel and we slewed sideways, just as we had when the tyre had blown, and nudged into the gently sloping bank that defined one side of the road. The other side was more abrupt, dropping several hundred screaming metres to life-eating rocks below.

Jesus backed up towards the edge of the cliff.

I have two default behaviours when scared, each aimed at distracting myself from whatever it is that frightens me. One is to make the crazed grunting of an aroused baboon and the other is to be sarcastic. This time I found myself reverting to sarcasm. ‘Oh goody, Jesus thinks he can drive on air,’ I said.

The Dutch girl looked at me through eyes glazed with terror, clearly wondering how I could be flippant at a time like this.

We stopped suddenly, lurched forward again towards the bank, then shot back once more. This would be no three-point turn. Oh no, this was going to take several bites to get through, and each one was making my internal organs squirm. Finally we got to a point where we were exactly ninety degrees to the road. Heart thudding, I prayed a truck wouldn’t come barrelling along and, unable to stop in time, smash us straight off the ledge; on the other hand, Jesus’s driving might get us there first.