How to Walk a Puma (11 page)

He reversed again, aiming for maximum turning room, taking the rear wheels right to the lip of the ledge. Everyone remained silent, except the Dutch guy, who gave a strangled groan. I didn’t want to look out the window, but my neck swivelled of its own accord. Through the narrow aperture that was the rearmost window I could see down. Straight down, to the base of the cliff which was strewn with mangled cars, trucks and buses. For a brief moment I wished I was blind. We were over nothing but air, and I damn near pooped.

‘You okay back there?’ the Minke asked, not turning around to do so.

‘No,’ I squeaked.

Gravel crunched and I was sure the lip we were on was about to give way, and that we would tumble and freefall to an excruciating death. This road made the Death Road seem wimpy.

But Jesus revved the engine, and after several more
scrotum-withering
turns we were facing in the desired direction and we zoomed off, the sound of the engine almost drowned by a collective exhalation.

Our relief was short-lived and a general grumpiness set in as the road rocked and rattled us, those trying to snooze cracking their skulls against windows or the heads of others as the vehicle bumped and thumped along the corrugated track. We were still in the high Andes, and every time I took heart from a descent any hope was soon dispelled by a steep climb.

The seven-hour mark we had been promised passed, then the revised ten hours. My right leg no longer felt like it had ever belonged to me. The Dutch couple and I played a game of musical chairs in the cramped back seat. It might possibly have been erotic under
other circumstances, but we did it purely to stop gangrene setting in from lack of bloodflow.

‘How much longer now?’ English Nick asked about eleven hours into our journey.

‘Another two, maybe three hours,’ Cesar rumbled, not even attempting to soften the blow.

‘Jesus,’ somebody muttered, but the driver didn’t respond.

‘La, lahlahlah!’ Thema sang, which was odd but not particularly disturbing as by this time I thought I might be going mad too. One of my knees had been wedged into a nostril (not my own) for some time and a seatbelt socket that had been broken off dug into the small of my back, gouging into it with every jolt.

Finally we were granted another break, not due to the kindness of Cesar or Jesus but because the car was overheating, understandable in the circumstances. We stopped in a village, where we ate at a small restaurant, grumbling to one another through the meal, feeling we had been lied to.

‘My legs are so sore,’ the Minke said, rubbing at her lengthy limbs. ‘But I can’t uncurl them or I’ll end up in Cesar’s lap.’

‘Yeah, I’d prefer you didn’t do that,’ I said, not out of any real jealousy, but because Cesar on occasion fed coca directly to Jesus so he didn’t have to take his hands off the wheel. I had a theory that the coca might be all that was keeping him awake and the four-wheel drive on the road.

Back in the vehicle, Cesar turned to us. ‘Only four hours to go now,’ he said.

‘What?!’ exclaimed the Minke in dismay.

‘Yes, we are close now!’ Cesar replied, clearly delighted.

Meanwhile, Jesus just kept on chewing and steering and pushing the throttle, driving us into darkness barely pierced by his headlights, until a truck came by, sheeting us in dust which didn’t seem to lift no matter how much further on we drove. After a while I realised it wasn’t dust hanging infinitely in the air but a fog that had descended, dense and cooling. This was good for the engine, but I rescinded my earlier wish for blindness and hoped that Jesus had been endowed with X-ray vision. As it was we were driving blind without a guide dog, and it was madness.

The fear that overcame us all during Jesus’s earlier lunatic turnaround came back, and silence again dominated the vehicle. Even Thema stopped treating us to fragments of songs none of us knew.

From the back seat I could see only a portion of the windscreen, blocked as it was by the row in front of me, and Jesus, Cesar and the Minke (whose head was oddly angled to avoid hitting the roof), but what I could see was the most frightening vista of opacity, just a blank nothing, as if the world had ended.

‘Keep feeding that man coca!’ I shouted, breaking the silence, hoping that the leaves would somehow impart laser-like vision to Jesus. ‘He must know this road really well,’ I tried to tell myself. ‘So well that he doesn’t even need to see it!’

Soon after this wishful thinking of mine we lurched to a halt once more, ten heads rocking forward then snapping back with the sudden deceleration. Jesus reversed a little, then made a sharp left turn. It took a moment to register what had happened, before it dawned on me that we’d almost driven straight off a cliff. Jesus wasn’t driving by memory, radar or supernatural powers, he was just peering into the gloom and had only seen the turn a split second before it was too late.

Less than an hour later lights appeared ahead of us, not moving; as we drew closer I saw it was a small
pueblo
(a vague term meaning more than one hut, but smaller than a town) with electricity from a generator. Several buses were parked in the
pueblo
’s small scrubby parking lot, their passengers sleeping through the break. But we powered on by, making me more and more terrified. Bolivian buses are famously dangerous, with a safety record comparable to asbestos mining, so if other bus drivers had pulled over because of the poor visibility then continuing on was surely as safe as juggling chainsaws while blow-drying your hair in a shark tank.

It was nearly two am and we’d been travelling for fourteen hours when we finally started to descend. Down, down, we went, down and down, so that I felt we must’ve finally punctured the Andes and would start heading into the lowlands, where the jungle and river began.

I was right. Less than an hour later we burst from the fog into fetid and humid air, air that had oxygen in it, and a tang. It smelled of bananas, papaya and other, more exotic fruits, and pricked sweat beads from the skin. The change was no less dramatic than waking up to find you’d turned into a kangaroo. Spontaneous conversation began, jaws unclenched, fists unballed, shoulders relaxed, and Thema sang a snatch of song before breaking into his standard encore of unintelligible muttering.

Three hours later the euphoria of survival had worn off, and it was a grubby, grumbling bunch of travellers who disembarked from Jesus’s jalopy in a bland little town somewhere between two places not marked on any maps. The muss-haired woman we’d woken up at the town’s hostel was surprisingly chirpy for the hour, and with good
humour chased a mangy cat from the spartan room that the Minke, myself and the Dutch would share for what was left of the night.

‘I just need the bathroom,’ the Minke said to me after we had had a much-needed hug, curtailed because we both felt gross covered in sweat, dust and road grime. ‘Then bed. So I can straighten out.’

I smiled at her optimism as I checked out the beds, which were visibly banana-shaped. Turning down the unnecessary blanket on my bed I found a chicken’s egg on my sheets.

‘Ah!
Huevo! Que bueno!
’ (‘An egg! How good!’) the hostel owner said in delight when I gave it to her, as if she’d won a prize, before walking out with it. I had to assume that the bed’s previous occupant was a chicken, and the sheets hadn’t been changed since then, but by then I was too tired to care.

Soon after, Lisa returned from the bathroom, looking
shell-shocked
. ‘My God. I don’t think that room has ever been cleaned. And the wall is so thin between it and this room I could almost see you.’ I decided to use a tree outside instead, chasing a sleeping chicken from underneath in doing so. ‘One of your kids was in my room,’ I said to it as it scuttled off.

I fell deeply asleep, but was woken after what seemed like a very brief time by Cesar’s bass voice shouting ‘
Vamos!
’ before the rooster outside could crow.

After an extraordinary breakfast of steak, eggs, rice, lettuce, tomato and an instant coffee so dastardly that even my caffeine-craving system rejected it, we were on the road again.

‘Only three hours,’ said Cesar, smiling.

‘Sure,’ I thought.

It took another eight hours from breakfast to reach our destination, meaning that all up we’d spent over twenty-two hours stewing in our
own juices in the four-wheel drive, not to mention experiencing the terror of impending death. So it was a huge relief to be at the water for our relaxing float downriver. Little were we to know that this was where the real adventure would begin.

Without a Paddle

Despite our delayed arrival, our raft wasn’t yet ready for launch from a river bank strewn with litter from a nearby village and landmined with dog turds. While the setting was less than idyllic, the river looked inviting. First though we had to meet our crew.

A hard-working man with a gold-toothed smile was lashing tyre tubes to a rectangular frame made of bamboo.

‘Hmm, rubber, twine and bamboo, all noted shipbuilding materials,’ I mused, watching him, though I quite liked the rough look of our vessel as it came together. How could this not be fun?

The gold-toothed man introduced himself as Abel, and introduced us to his wife, Reina, who would be our cook.

‘
Mucho gusto
, Reina,’ we all replied, Thema rolling the ‘r’ at the front of her name as if he found it delicious.

One further crew member sat watching us all toad-like through heavy-lidded eyes. Though it was evident he put in a lot of effort at the gym, he clearly didn’t replicate it in the boat-building endeavour.

‘Our son,’ Abel explained, a hint of resignation in his tone. He offered no name, and a few of us quietly agreed to think of the lad as Captain Useless.

Thanks to Abel’s heroic solo labour, in no time we were boarding, our luggage wrapped in two-ply plastic bags in case of splashes or, worse, a flip. The luggage then doubled as our seats and I quickly
discovered that a bird book has nasty edges to sit on, and resolved to repack it more sensibly the next day.

We set off into a side channel as the sun sank, our goal a much more impressive-looking river only a few hundred metres away. The tyre-tube raft bucked a little where the waters met but Abel’s efforts with a paddle soon had us in calmer waters, and before long a feeling of absolute serenity overtook us. Jesus was no longer with us, and that was surely a blessing. Everyone was silent, enjoying the peace, except Thema, who started singing a few notes of some song, then muttered and, tranquillity trashed, went silent again.

‘We will camp in an hour,’ Cesar said after two minutes/hours and we all burst out laughing at the idea that he had any idea when that was. Though he probably didn’t know what we were laughing about, he joined in, and for the next two hours we happily let the current take us into the night, finally pulling in at an unnamed beach in a remote part of the world.

‘This feels like South America, doesn’t it?’ I said to Lisa as we set up our camp for the night.

‘Yes, it does,’ she said, briefly letting go of a tent pole to squeeze my hand. ‘But I’ll admit I can’t see anything here so we might be in London.’

Dawn revealed that we had set up camp on a flat mix of sand and river rocks (actually some of the rocks had made themselves known to my spine during the night). The river here was the colour and opacity of milky coffee.

On the opposite bank, some fifty metres or so away, men were already dredging and panning. Cesar explained that they were miners
looking for gold. The miners set up a pump which emitted a dull thrumming, its outlet pipe spewing muddy waste straight back into the river, which explained the murky colour.

As we set off on the raft again I felt content. Every hope I had had for this trip was finally being fulfilled. The river was serene, even if the jungle on either side was disturbed by mining and the water often cloudy. The brochure hadn’t mentioned that the herons, kingfishers, caimans and otters I’d hoped to see would be absent—there was no way they could hunt in this murk—yet the peacefulness made it impossible to be too disappointed.

Once more our little group from La Paz, never verbose, stayed quiet and simply enjoyed the view of the horizon-stretching river and its banks, the gentle lap of water against the raft (this led to the occasional buttock soaking, but no one complained) and the soft splish of Abel’s paddle as he steered us down the centre of the river.

‘Cesar,’ I asked, ‘what is the name of this river?’

‘It is the Rio Kaka,’ he replied.

It took a few moments for it to hit me. ‘Shit Creek? That’s fantastic!’ I said, laughing, though nobody else seemed to share my delight in the waterway’s name.

The day passed with little incident and few breaks, Cesar keen to make up the time lost by our late arrival by encouraging Abel and his loafing son to paddle while the rest of us sat, chatted, and tanned on the raft.

We set up camp again in the dark, the fire lit first so Reina could make us what turned out to be a surprisingly tasty meal given the deceptively plain ingredients of bread, tinned tuna and a mystery sauce, as well as plaintain, the savoury banana that is a staple in many South American countries.

The next morning we were woken by what had become the familiar Cesar alarm clock. ‘Abel!’ he would shout in his bass voice. ‘
Vamos!
’

By day three we saw fewer and fewer signs of people. The banks were no longer gouged by mining and the river ran cleaner, with increasing numbers of streams joining it from the surrounding low hills. Macaws flew overhead and branches shook with the weight of fleeing monkeys, their fear of humans a sign that they were most likely hunted in this area. Among the dense greenery was the odd orchid, a splash of yellow or red tended by bees the size of birds, and birds the size of bees.

On the fourth morning we were woken by something far louder than Cesar’s bass rumble. A harsh, sustained bellow—changing in pitch but never waning—began before sunrise, rousing all but the dead from sleep.

‘What the hell is that?’ the Minke asked me.

‘Howler monkeys. The world’s loudest land animal,’ I replied, grinning in the dark. I’d glimpsed them before in the Pantanal, but hadn’t heard them calling properly until now, and only knew what the sound was because there was simply nothing else it could be.

The aptly named howler monkeys kept their chorus going all through our breakfast, then went silent as they headed off to find their own food.

By now, despite some sunburn and Thema’s uncanny ability to wait until people had just begun to doze off before hitting us with a phrase of an unknown song, I was more relaxed than I had been in years. South America was teaching me that it wasn’t just adventure I had given up to sit behind a desk. Feelings of peace and contentment had become so foreign to me during the last seven years in Sydney
that at first I resisted them, in case I became accustomed to them and was heartbroken once they were taken away again. But the river won, and by the fourth day I was little more animated than a carrot, but surely much happier. Having Lisa to share it with made it even more special, and she whispered in my ear one night that she was glad we came on the trip, and even more that we’d been on the same bus all those months ago in Patagonia.

On the fifth day, though, everything changed. Somehow we had made up the lost time from our late arrival and Cesar promised that we would make it to our destination, the small jungle town of Rurrenabaque, by nightfall.

‘Lah, lah, lah,’ Thema responded flatly to the news.

‘Oh, come on!’ I protested. ‘That’s not even a song.’

Despite the pleasure we had all taken in the trip we now began fantasising about a shower, a bed that didn’t deflate during the night, beer, and fatty food like pizza (Reina’s impressive earlier fare had dried up and our more recent meals had been variations on fried plantain—which, without condiments, we discovered to be as tasty as an old sponge).

The scenery, which had been subtly changing since our trip began, gave way dramatically, with sheer cliffs soaring on either side of us, their sides worn smooth from years of the river’s work. By now the water was clear, and at last I saw some herons, standing on rounded ledges, staring intently at the river, waiting to spear any fish that ventured too close to them.

Then just as suddenly we emerged from the canyon, and the river fanned out to the greatest width we had seen so far, perhaps two
hundred metres across. The currents and countercurrents this change set up made the surface a sequin-dazzle of ripples, and our little raft jolted as if being dragged over cobbles.

A sideways thrust suddenly caught us and despite hard paddling from Abel and some desultory stirs at the back from his son, the raft was dragged close to the bank. A visible current ran against the river’s flow, and a line as definite as lane markings on a highway showed where the two currents met each other. The circular span of spinning water covered almost the whole width of the river, and there was no way of avoiding it. Soon we were heading back upriver, until the current we were trapped in pushed against the rocks and shot us back in the direction of Rurrenabaque. Yet this was no cause for celebration, because we were heading towards far more turbulent water. My heart thumped as I realised we were going to be sucked into the dangerous-looking whirlpool ahead of us.

The front left corner of the raft dipped down as we hit the swirl, water rushing up and over Abel, then onto the Minke, myself and English Nick. Bucking and bobbing, the raft spun round in a sickening circle. Despite being drenched, Abel kept his rowing regular and strong. As we spun faster and deeper into the whirlpool I clutched at my smaller backpack like it was my baby. My larger backpack could be sacrificed but this one contained all my most treasured possessions—a camera, my binoculars and bird books.

The whirlpool abruptly spat us out, soaking everyone at the back, then the raft was caught once more in the cross-current and we shot back in the direction we’d come. Again, Abel leant hard into his strokes. Glancing back I saw Captain Useless dipping his paddle as though he were stirring tea and didn’t want it to slosh out of his cup.

The whirlpool had an inexorable pull, and after one lap past the bank we were sucked straight back into the centre, sinking deeper, the water coming up to my waist and grabbing me like desperate hands, pulling and tugging.

‘Hold on,’ I shouted, as much to myself as anyone else, as we spun deeper into a chaos of foam and turgid water. The stoic Abel kept paddling, somehow not flung from the raft despite having no handhold.

A sudden savage lurch saw the paddle ripped from Abel’s grasp and accelerate past us into the spiral of water. I looked back at Abel’s son, who was similarly empty-handed, his paddle also ripped away, or perhaps thrown away for fear of having to use it.

‘Without a paddle!’ I shouted, laughing hysterically despite the danger we were in. The whole raft angled sideways now, leaning into the vortex, and while it wasn’t quite a science-fiction waterspout with a huge cavity that could swallow us whole, I did imagine that when we hit its middle we’d all be sent flying; in that sort of water even the Minke with her fins for feet might struggle.

The rear of the raft dipped, touched the middle; we spun, and somehow crested out of the turbulence, back into the mad looping current again. We could maybe paddle for the bank, using our arms and whatever tools we had, then portage the raft until we were past the vortex, but Abel and Cesar gave no orders.

‘A paddle!’ the Dutchman shouted, and we turned to see it bob to the surface, tantalisingly close. ‘I’ll get it,’ he added, making as if to dive in.

‘No! You’ll die,’ shouted the Minke, causing his girlfriend to clasp a vice-like hand on his arm.

Attached to the raft by twine was a loose tube which we’d used as a dinghy of sorts when someone wanted off the main vessel. The Minke offered to get into it and scull her way to the errant oar, but Abel had a better idea, and reeled the tube towards himself, then threw it like a life ring, snaring the paddle and drawing it in.

At the same time we were heading back into the whirlpool. Abel leant deeper into his strokes, and those on the same side as him used their hands and even a book to paddle along with him. The sucking noise of the whirlpool grew louder, and we drew closer, angling in despite the grunts of effort aboard; then the front of the raft nudged the edge of the maelstrom, but this time it did not dip, and instead we sailed past, the circle broken, on the way to Rurrenabaque.

‘My God, did we almost die then?’ came the voice of someone from the back.

‘Yep,’ I answered, still looking resolutely ahead, still holding the raft so tightly it’s amazing I didn’t pop a tyre tube. A pulse thrummed in my ear and I knew that I was grinning, feeling a thrill usually reserved for some wildlife encounter. ‘Makes you feel alive though, doesn’t it?’

‘Loony,’ said the Minke, leaning over to peck my cheek.

‘Oh yes,’ I thought, ‘loony for sure, but alive. Alive!’

Drunk with relief we laughed through the last leg, cheering the sun on as it sank and threatened to break Cesar’s promise of arrival by sundown, then erupting into cheers when the town came into sight as the barest solar sliver hovered over the river’s surface.

‘Nicely done, Cesar, nicely done,’ I said, still buoyant in the adrenal afterglow, and not even minding when, to celebrate our arrival, Thema burst into song.