The Lunatic Express (3 page)

“Lots of accidents,” they said, laughing. “Do you have a driver’s license? You want to drive?”

We passed through broken-down towns of tiny, garage-sized brick houses and sun and wind and Internet cafés, a weird world that had so many layers of culture it sometimes felt, in a way, nowhere at all. When she picked up a cell tower, Marina chatted on her cell phone; the Bee Gees crooned on videos between flicks; sheep and donkeys wandered in the dusty road.

In Lima, I made my break. I needed to go deeper; I’d been on too many highways, too many long rides between big cities. These buses were beginning to feel too civilized. East of Lima rose the Andes again, and deep within them lay Ayacucho. It was there, in one of the poorest areas of Peru, that a sociology professor named Abamael Guzman had started the Maoist Shining Path movement in 1980, which had risen to become one of the most violent and ruthless guerrilla armies in South America. I’d always been fascinated by the brutality and longevity of the Shining Path, and I’d long wondered how guerrilla movements were so hard to stamp out even when, in Peru’s case, soldiers and militias and right-wing death squads had been everywhere. I wanted to get to Cusco; via Ayacucho it would take thirty-six hours to cover the 450 miles.

Back in Washington it was spring break, and I invited my seventeen-year-old daughter, Lily, to come along with me. She’d be going to college next year, and I wanted her to get some sense of what my life was like. And after days and days on beat-up buses, I no longer had any concern about anything happening during our five days together. I picked her up after midnight and dragged her to the bus first thing the next morning. As we boarded, a little man videotaped us, marching up and down the aisle shooting each passenger. “What’s up?” I said.

“In case someone steals something or there’s an accident,” he said.

“So there are a lot of accidents?”

“Oh no!”

“A lot of thefts?”

“No!”

“Anyone killed lately?”

“Oh no!” he said.

Ayacucho was only a few hundred miles as the crow flies from Lima, but it took ten hours to get there on a freshly paved road. The mountains were steep, high, relentless, and I realized I had miscalculated. I was used to the endless hours squished on buses, used to the twists and turns on the road and uncertainty of the whole enterprise—I had done it for years. But Lily had been chatting with her high-school friends one day and was being crammed on a bus through the mountains of Peru the next, with no transition. She was dizzy, exhausted after the long day, and her Spanish was good so the political graffiti shouting “Assassins” unnerved her. Cusco was another twenty-four hours away, and there were only two choices: a bus at 6:30 a.m. or a bus at 6:30 p.m. “But don’t take the night bus,” the hotel clerk warned. “It’s dangerous.”

So on the bus we were again, at six thirty the next morning. And immediately it was clear why it took twenty-four hours, why the night bus was dangerous, and why it can be so hard to dislodge festering guerrilla movements in the mountains and jungles of South America.

There was no road. Or what was called the road was a one-lane dirt track that rose and fell thousands of feet in altitude, full of switchbacks and cliffs and eroded sections that dropped straight down steep mountainsides. Looking out of the windows, it felt like flying, albeit in slow motion through turbulent skies. Mountain ridge after ridge, valley after valley—traveling ten miles took hours, through villages of adobe mud and thatch, atop high, treeless mountain plains where there was nothing but sheep and alpaca and round, waist-high thatch shepherd’s huts. We passed a truck with no windshield, its front crumpled from a recent crash; we jerked to a halt on a hairpin turn inches from crashing into a truck filled with watermelons. We plunged into river valleys that were hot and humid before climbing back up above the trees, all at the speed of a walk. This was the highway; anyplace off the road, and there was only one way to get there—walking in brutally steep country. Every six hours or so we’d stop and we men would pile out—sixteen of us pissing on the side of the road. The women didn’t budge.

At a small village we paused for a quick break and I snapped a photo of the rugged landscape. “Are there no rocks in the U.S., gringo?” said a woman. Lily was quiet. I ate whenever I was hungry, as vendors piled in with hot, waxy corn with kernels the size of quarters, and chunks of fried bread filled with warm cheese, but Lily wanted nothing. I worried about her, but it was nice to have her along, not to be alone.

At dusk we pulled into Andahuaylas to change buses. The station was wild, dirty, almost medieval, full of feral, begging dogs and piles of dirt and women in bowler hats and twin braids. Carleton, a mid-fifties Indian-Canadian and the only tourist I’d seen in days, was freaked out. “I promised myself I wouldn’t take any night buses,” he said, “but the rest of the journey is at night. I’m really scared! I had to turn my eyes away a few times on those cliffs.”

I didn’t feel any danger. I’d taken so many overloaded helicopters and airplanes in the past few years, I’d learned to resign myself to fate, or fate mixed with preparation; you controlled what you could (hence my excellent first-aid kit), kept your eyes open and your wits about you, but then you just rolled with things. Carleton couldn’t eat; I wolfed down a quick meal of rich, gamey chicken soup ladled from a pot big enough to throw a couple of toddlers inside, sitting on a on wooden bench the width of a single two-by-four under a ragged blue tarp. Lily didn’t want any, but the chef could spot a hungry, nervous girl and brought her a bowl, insisting that she eat, which she did under the pressure of a mother, even if it wasn’t her own. Then, as church bells pealed, we piled on an even older bus. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get sick?” said Carleton, shaking his head. “I’m starving, but there’s no way I’m going to risk eating that!”

I looked at Lily and we laughed. “See how brave you are!” I said, secretly praying she wouldn’t get sick. As soon as the sun went down, roaches swarmed out of the curtains; they fell into Lily’s lap, crawled into my coat, scurried under our feet. It was black outside, the bouncing headlights illuminating dirt road and sheer drop-offs. Lily was scared; I felt bad for her and proud of her. I hoped she’d love the journey, but even if she didn’t, at least I knew she’d remember it and feel, perhaps only later, strengthened by it. That she’d learn that the world was big, rich, complex, sometimes dangerous, always interesting. That you could hide from it or explore it and embrace it in all its complexities.

The bus stopped every few miles, quickly filling to standing room with people who were so brown and withered they looked like canned mushrooms. Soon a dog joined us, and then an old man dressed in a black suit and so small and frail he looked like a marionette puppet.

All this time on buses was odd time—time in sort of a suspended state. With no light, we couldn’t read. We were in the heart of things, but removed, too; I wanted to climb out of the bus and be in places and not just passing through. And it was physically painful—the seats were close together, there was no legroom, and the bus was so crowded we couldn’t stand to stretch our legs. At some points I got Zen-like, just succumbing to the pain in my knees and my aching neck. It was out of my control, and I rose out of that suffering into a state of grace, totally surrendering, my mind dancing to distant places. It was easy for me to do, but harder for Lily; she sank into lethargy, though she never once broke down. She smiled, kept her cool, learned to trust her instincts and to open herself to experiences beyond her usual boundaries. She was being transformed only by learning the strengths she already had, who she already was: someone capable and confident, and sometimes scared and happy, even at the edges of the world. I’d fall asleep and wake up confused, shocked to find myself on a bus in South America with my daughter.

When we got to Cusco we spent two days wandering, eating on balconies in the sun, forgetting, in a way, the journey I was on. So quickly she had to go, and I took her to the airport and she disappeared through security and I sat waiting for her plane to take off and cried. Five days hadn’t been enough time. I couldn’t tell if she’d enjoyed the trip or not, couldn’t tell if she’d gotten to know me more or had liked what she’d seen. And it was easier for me to feel content the more distant my home and family became; having Lily with me and then not left me feeling empty, deeply conscious of what I’d left behind. I missed her and felt guilty for not being more normal, for pursuing a life that took me so far away, for needing to experience the intensity of loneliness and danger and discomfort.

I
T WAS TIME
to move on. From Cusco, my plan had always been to travel by bus to La Paz, Bolivia, there to ride the World’s Most Dangerous Road and then take a train to the Brazilian border, known as the Train of Death. Both sounded tempting. But a new road had been built, bypassing the World’s Most Dangerous Road, which had become a staple of tourist mountain bikers who wanted to experience a taste of danger in an organized package. And in Cusco, Lily and I had run into a stringy-haired British computer programmer who’d just taken the Train of Death. “It was sweet, dude,” he said. “No problems at all and there was a great bunch of other backpackers on it.” It wasn’t that I was a snob about backpackers; I had been one, too. Authenticity was a buzzword in travel, but what exactly did that mean? At its purest form you could make the argument that the only really authentic places were ones that had never seen contact with the outside world at all. There were still a few of those left—in the Amazon, perhaps in Indonesian New Guinea. But they were hardly representative; they were freakish vestiges of a changed world, and authenticity was simply everywhere; it was all authentic in one way or another. But if you were on a train with a lot of backpackers, it got too easy not to meet locals, not to get lonely, not to feel scared, and I wanted all of those things.

Which made the road to Puerto Maldonado, in the Peruvian Amazon, sound like heaven: “According to Peruvian road engineers, this is Peru’s worst road between two major cities,” warned my guidebook. “It takes two and a half days in the dry season and longer in the wet. Don’t take the trip lightly; the journey requires hardiness, self-sufficiency and loads of good luck. Fatal accidents are not uncommon.” The book was outdated. Immigrants were pouring into Puerto Maldonado to seek their fortunes, so of course a bus company had stepped into the void and Expreso los Chankas didn’t seem worried. Seventeen hours if it didn’t rain; twenty dollars; buses left daily at 3:00 p.m.

The road was the last key piece of the Carretera Transoceanica—a 6,000-kilometer highway linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from Brazil to Peru. More important, though, it would tie one of the last great remaining pristine rain forests of the Amazon basin to ports on the Pacific coast. Gold. Mahogany. Uncontacted tribes. Puerto Maldonado was said to be a seething boomtown on the banks of the Madre de Dios River; only two weeks before, a researcher had been shot there after reporting on an illegal load of old-growth mahogany.

A
LL STARTED WELL
. The bus was old, with cracked armrests, and it smelled of urine, but was freshly swept, and I had an aisle seat with no one next to me. And the road, it turned out, had been paved in December, two lanes of smooth blacktop snaking up the Andes into a cold, largely treeless world of llamas and adobe houses, with smoke pouring from chimneys in thatch roofs.

The clouds were ominous, though. And a couple of hours out, as we started descending the Andes’ eastern flanks, everything changed: the pavement ended. Harsh white lightning ripped through the skies and torrential rains poured down. The bus filled; the air turned humid and thick. The seat next to me was taken by a peasant in rubber boots and thick sweaters. His three-year-old son coughed like a wounded guinea pig and puked into a plastic bag and pissed out of the window throughout the long night. The rain fell in heavy, big drops and the driver, thirty-two-year-old Juan Luis, fought to keep us on the road. All through the night we jerked and bumped and slid, big blobs of water leaking onto my head. We forded dark frothing rivers so deep I thought we’d get swept away. We stopped, backed up, waited, inched past trucks and cliffs so close I could touch them out of the window. “It is heavy,” Luis confessed to me on a bathroom break, during which forty people pissed on the side of the road in the rain, and a trillion frogs croaked. “And very tiring. The road is clay and very slippery.”

The journey was twenty hours of torture. But hardship brings rewards: as dawn broke in pouring rain, we bounced and jerked into a wet and glistening terrarium. Sopping jungle and red mud roads and one-room wooden shacks from which candles flickered—I had, at last, passed into a new set of arteries, smaller, more remote; the world I was entering felt fertile and fresh.

Puerto Maldonado might be the beginning of the end of Peru’s rain forest, but I liked it the minute I stepped off the bus. It was all frontier prosperity and dynamism: dirt and mud streets filled with motorcycles and Indian auto rickshaws right off the lot, and wooden clapboard gold-buying houses and open-air restaurants dishing out thick soups, against the banks of two big, khaki-colored rivers half a mile across. I spent hours walking through its muddy streets, just soaking up the energy. Houses were springing up, new mud streets reaching ever farther into the bush. Immigrants were pouring in from the Andes to work its timber and gold; when the road was paved and the Madre de Dios River bridged, the place would explode. Which could happen tomorrow or never—two concrete pilings stood on either side of the river for a steel bridge that had been stored in a nearby warehouse for the past decade.

Along the muddy shores of the river, fifty-foot longboats jostled for passengers and wooden one-car ferries with outboard motors pulled in and out. Lumberyards with rusty cranes unloaded stacks of jungle hardwood; it was along this river that the artist Tobias Schneebaum had walked naked into the forest, where he found tribes that still practiced ritual cannibalism. Even now, some of the Amazon’s last uncontacted people lived up the river’s tributaries in Peru, and just five hours downstream lay Bolivia. I wanted to know more, and found Joseline Vizcarra tending her newly opened Internet café. She agreed to take me down the river.