Comments, Travel and Risk

Sitting in Internet café in Porto Velho, Brazil – teenage boys playing video games, a feral dog with red sores lying in the doorway – contemplating the nature of travel and risk – and life and risk, for that matter.

I figured out how to add comments to this blog and the very first came from an anonymous someone castigating me for taking my daughter on the bus from Lima to Ayacucho to Cusco. “What the hell were you thinking?” she or he wrote.

I’ve asked Lily to comment and we’ll see if she does. It’s her choice.

The world is big, rich, complex, sometimes dangerous, always interesting. You can hide from it or explore it, embrace it in all its complexities. I’m hoping The Lunatic Express does just that.

My children have grown up in the city, not the suburbs. They take buses all over the city by themselves; they attend DC public schools where they walk through metal detectors every morning. An Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post called their high school a war zone. Lily read it from Cusco, in fact. She laughed, shook her head. She’s almost 18. She has traveled to Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua and driven across the country at least ten times. She is finishing AP Spanish IV this year. She drank a Mojito overlooking the Plaza de Armas in Cusco.

Are we, her parents, corrupting her, scaring - or scarring - her? Or are we teaching her how to feel safe and confident, strong and self-reliant in a wondrous yet turbulent world?

What do you think?

We imagine travel will transform us in some way. We go somewhere else and leave the old us behind. But travel is like therapy, or maybe even a good Ayahuasca trip. It just shows you the real you, there’s no escape from yourself, ever. Your fears, anxieties – how you embrace the world; it’s all exposed on the road. The Lunatic Express will ultimately, I suspect, be a pretty personal journey, a tale as much about my own psyche as the buses and boats and planes and trains on which I ride.

I’d like to think Lily learned and saw much on her short but intense journey across the Andes. She was, yes, scared and uncomfortable for certain periods. So have I been on this journey and others. But she never flipped out. 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.

Speaking of which, I’m sick of buses. At 2 pm I’m climbing on a riverboat in Porto Velho for Manaus – two and a half days away along the Madeira River. It is big and wooden, with a beautiful curving sheer-line, with cargo stacked high on the first deck and hammocks strung on the second. Very slow and hot and crowded. A similar boat hit an oil barge and sunk five weeks ago, killing 13.

Carretera Transoceanica

From Cusco, Peru, my plan had always been to travel by bus to La Paz, Bolivia, there to ride the world’s most dangerous road and then a train to the Brazilian border known as the Train of Death.

Both sounded pretty tempting. But a new route bypasses the World’s Most Dangerous Road, which is now a staple of tourist mountain bikers. And in Cusco I ran into a stringy-haired British computer programmer who’d just taken the Train of Death. “It was nice, dude,” he said. “No problems at all and there were a couple of other backpackers on it.”

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.”

Expresso los Chankas didn’t seem worried. Seventeen hours if it didn’t rain; $20; we leave daily at 3 pm.

The road is the last key piece of the Carretera Transoceanica – a 2,500 kilometer highway linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from Brazil to Peru. More importantly, though, it will 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 ago a researcher was shot after reporting on an illegal load of old growth mahogany.

All started well. The bus was old, but clean, and I had an aisle seat with no one next to me. And the road was newly paved in December, two lanes of smooth blacktop snaking up the Andes into a cold, largely treeless world of Llamas and smoke pouring from adobe houses with thatch roofs.

The clouds were ominous, though. And a couple hours out, as we started descending the Andes’ eastern flanks, everything changed: the pavement ended. Harsh white lightening ripped through the skies and torrential rains came pouring down. The bus filled; the air turned humid and thick. My seatmate had a three-year old on his lap who coughed 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, 32-year old Juan Luis, fought to keep us on the road. All through the night in pitch blackness we jerked and bumped and slid. We forded rivers so deep I thought we’d get swept away. We stopped, backed up, waited, inched past trucks and cliffs so close you could touch them out of the window. “It is heavy,” Luis confessed to me during a bathroom break, during which 40 people pissed on the side of the road in the rain. “And very tiring. The road is clay and very slippery.”

The journey was 20 hours of torture. But hardship brings rewards: 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’s all jangly prosperity and dynamism; dirt and mud streets filled with motorcycles and Indian bemos, and wooden clapboard open-air restaurants dishing out thick soups, against the banks of two big khaki-colored rivers. Immigrants are pouring in from the Andes to work its timber and gold, the road is slowly improving; two concrete pilings are in place for a bridge across the Madre de Dios, which now can be crossed only by ferry.

Two hours down the Madre by longboat I found Rudolpho Munoz on one of five gold-mining dredges rafted together, hard against the banks of the fast moving river. Munoz was Bolivian, small and wiry and leprechaun-like, with green eyes and a helmet of black hair, and he’d been going after gold for 24 years, since he was 16. His boat was sun bleached wood on two hulls – two simple beds, a kitchen, outhouse and grinding, hot diesel pumping sediment from as deep as 45 feet into the riverbed up onto a king-bed-sized sluice.

Six days a week, 20 hours a day, Munoz worked the river, stopping at 4 am on Sundays until nine on Monday morning. “On a good day,” he said, scooping up a day’s sediment from a blue bucket into a rounded gold pan, “we get one gram an hour.” He swirled the mud and flicked water into the pan and pointed: a speck of gold so small I would never have noticed it. “A bad day is eight grams in 20 hours. Now, gold is 84 soles ($31) a gram; in a good week I get 120 to 140 grams.”

As big-headed and long beaked Banded Kingfishers dived and swooped overhead, I noticed the sluices sparkling with round balls of mercury. Munoz brought out a plastic jug of the toxic metal and showed how he poured it into the bucket, mixed it with the mud and squeezed it all through a cotton sieve – the water and mercury washing out into the river, leaving gold behind. From his bunk he fished out a small piece of paper wrapped around a silvery ball: five grams of gold.

Two men worked each boat and shared a cook; someone owned the mining concessions for every section of the river. “Every day is for us,” he said, “except Saturday, and that day’s gold goes to the men who own the concessions.” The engine was loud and the day humid; this was his life. “What else can I do? It is peaceful here and with my boat I can go to town, and here I make 800 soles a week instead of 800 soles a month like I would if I had a job in town. We take a risk,” he said, “and hope for buena suerta.”

When the road was finished, whenever that would be, Puerto Maldonado would grow even faster. More timber. More gold. More tourists to see the rapidly disappearing jungle and its monkeys. I liked it now; soon it would need all the luck it could get. And me, too. Heading into Brazil tomorrow, to Rio Branco and beyond.

Ayacucho to Cusco

It always seems hard to imagine how guerilla movements linger for years in remote places, like the FARC in Columbia, or the now defunct Shining Path in Peru. That is, until you go to those places themselves and understand how rugged and hard it is to move around in them.

My daughter Lily came to visit for a few days, and I threw her into the deep end. Eight hours after stepping off the plane in Lima we were on a bus to Ayacucho, birthplace of the Shining Path guerilla movement. As we loaded our luggage a little man videotaped us, then marched up and down the aisle shooting each passenger. What’s up, I asked him.

“In case someone steals something or there’s an accident, then we’ll know who did it,” he said.

“So there are a lot of accidents?” I said.

“Oh no!” he said.

“A lot of thefts?”

Oh no!”

“Anyone killed?”

“Oh no!” he said, scanning us all carefully.

Ayacucho is only a few hundred miles as the crow flies from Lima, but it took 10 hours to get there on a freshly paved road. The mountains are steep, high, relentless. And I’d miscalculated: I needed to get Lily to Cusco, 100 miles down the road, for her flight to Lima. But Cusco was another 24 hours away and there were only two choices: a bus at 6:30 am or a bus at 6:30 pm. “But don’t take the night bus,” the hotel clerk warned. “It’s dangerous.”

So on the bus we were again, at 6:30 the next morning. And immediately it was clear why it took 24 hours, why the night bus was dangerous, and why it can be so hard to dislodge festering guerilla 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. 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 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 – 16 of us pissing on the side of the road. The women didn’t budge.

At dusk we pulled into Andahuaylas to change buses. Twelve hours to go. The station was wild, dirty, almost medieval, and Carleton, a mid-50s Canadian, 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.”

Poor Lily. We ate a quick meal of chicken soup on narrow wooden benches under a tarp and then took off. Roaches swarmed out of the curtains; they fell into her lap, crawled into her coat, scurried under feet. The bus filled to standing room only with people who were so brown and withered they looked like canned mushrooms. Bowler hats and long pig-tails; a dog; an old man dressed in black and so small and frail he was like a marionette puppet.

All this time on buses is odd time – time in sort of a suspended state. You’re in the heart of things, but removed, too; sometimes I want to climb out of the bus and be in places and not just passing through. And it’s physically painful. Lily and I were in agony by the time we rolled into Cusco; but at some points I get Zen-like, just succumb to the pain in my knees and my aching neck and my hunger and thirst. It’s out of my control and I rise out of that suffering into an odd state of grace, totally surrendering, my mind dancing to distant places.

Lily was dizzy from it all. But last night, over beers at the bar, we fell into conversation with a German traveler who bragged about getting away from the hordes and finding the real Peru, and then listed his itinerary of all the regular gringo trail destinations. Lily laughed, gave me a sly look, and started telling the tale of the bus from Ayacucho….

Lima

I’m reading The Naked Tourist, by Lawrence Osborne, in which he muses about the traveler’s dream of finding the end of the earth and his obsession with “the idea of leaving the world.” I’ve chased that dream for years, from my journey to a Dayak longhouse up the Mahakam River to hanging with pygmies in Irian Jaya and Oroki reindeer herders in Siberia. But those places are fading; they’re mirages of a quaint and distant past – they’re not really real anymore.

As we lurched into Lima after 28 hours of travel on a single bus from Guayaquil, it hit me that this trip is all about the opposite. It’s not about losing contact with the modern world, it’s about embracing it, reveling in it, losing myself in its massive vascular system as its multitudes lurch and pedal along its thousands of miles of veins and arteries and capillaries.

I mean, we watched eight movies, classics all, including Resident Evil III and Armageddon (there are no chic flicks on South American buses), while inching through the crowded market and border town of Huaquillas (six foot tall plastic flowers; quail eggs, four for a dollar; stilettos and skinny jeans and an upside down pig on a hook) and rain in Chiclayo so driving it flooded the streets up to the curbs and then paused in the hot morning sun to wash our hair in a concrete trough by the side of the road. “Only seven more hours to Lima!” said one of the drivers, shaking the water out of his hair like a dog after a bath, before lathering up his armpits. We ate quivering red Jell-O and watched the Bee Gees in between flicks, as Mariana, a 24-year-old “food engineer” whose favorite food was spaghetti, chatted on her cell phone and her 21-year-old sister read the Latin American edition of Cosmo, all while passing broken, dusty towns of tiny, garage-sized brick houses and sun and wind and burros and internet cafes.

All driven along the miles by two “conductores” – such a better word than driver – with gold teeth and faded, mystical home-made tattoos on their shoulders, who switched the wheel every five hours and slipped the bus through its seven forward gears like it was all they ever did. Which was true: they drove from Lima to Guayaquil (28 hours) back to Lima and then another 20 hours on to Puno, before turning around and doing it all over again.

“Lots of accidents,” they said, laughing. “You want to drive?”

And then, a few hours later, I was drinking a pisco sour with the world’s most famous volleyball player.

I’m smack in the very middle of the world and it’s a very weird place.

Guayaquil

Paused for a day in a little village called Canoa, little but mud streets, a few tiki bars, a fat stretch of sand and big frothy Pacific waves. Transportation out here is slow but incredibly efficient. Leaving Canoa this morning I walked to a wet corner, set my bag down and in swooped a rattling old bus – 35 cents to the town of San Vicente, there to catch an open boat across a swollen bay for another 40 cents. Barely off the boat and a guy snatched up my bag, loaded it on a pedicab and 50 cents later, deposited me in front of the bus to Guayaquil, which was $5. So that’s two buses, a boat and a pedicab, with never a wait in between, a nine-hour journey for $6. And forget bringing food; at every stop on the bus vendors supply all the fresh mineral water and little warm crunchy hollow bread things called pan tortillas you could want. Not to mention crayons, pills that make you young again – his sales pitch was a good 35 minutes and we each got to hold a bottle – and even a cell phone for $20.

This journey is not just about having an adventure. It’s also about seeing the world moving and traveling in huge numbers. Not one of my buses from Bogotá to Quito to Canoa to Guayaquil had a single Gringo traveler; they were filled with people of poor or modest incomes – the rich fly, and they do so on the best airlines – traveling for work or to see relatives.

Two recent items of note in the New York Times: on Sunday, March 9, a piece on oil mentioned that “In recent years the world’s developing countries have been growing about seven percent a year, an unusually rapid rate by historical standards.”

And on March 17 a story appeared about a World Bank economist named Dilip Ratha, who is the first person to seriously study remittances – the money migrants send home. “Until the 1990s,” the piece says, “most economists saw remittances as small private sums irrelevant to development.” But Ratha’s research showed otherwise, and the numbers are staggering: over 200 million migrants worldwide sending $300 billion a year home to their families and villages – three times more than the world’s combined foreign aide. Think about it – that’s all those guys waiting for work at your neighborhood 7-Eleven, the busboys, the roofers and concrete pourers and landscapers, all earning minimum wage and sending a dollar here and there back home.

Directly, indirectly – it’s all those people who are crowding the collectivos and long distance buses and bad airlines that thread the remotest villages and biggest cities together into this growing worldwide economic tapestry. The roads of Columbia and Ecuador, bad as they are, are crowded with packed buses and minivans; the bus terminals from which they depart in places like Bogotá and Quito are massive labyrinths of restaurants and internet phone services and tamale joints that offer more options and services than Dulles airport.

The journeys are efficient, but never easy. The next time you’re steaming over sitting an extra hour or two in Dulles waiting for your delayed flight, think 25 hours on a bus with two guys slugging Tequila and FARC guerillas somewhere out there in the dark. Or today’s journey along the coast of Ecuador: hot, steamy, crawling along unpaved stretches of dirt washed out by rain and flooding, your knees jammed against the seatback in front of you. If all goes well, though, I’ll be catching the 6 am bus tomorrow for Lima, just another 25 hours down the road….

Bogota to Quito

Arrived in Quito, Ecuador yesterday afternoon after 30 hours on two buses. My whole body hurt. Head pounding from the altitude and little nourishment and no coffee, and the latest video: two hours of Rambo killing and blowing things up and blood spurting in slow motion, broadcast at full volume on a distorted sound system. Knees, shoulders, neck – I stumbled out into Quito’s chaotic central terminal in a cold, driving rain, somewhat in a fog. But I was better than the guy across the aisle: he and his buddy had polished off a whole bottle of Suiza gold Tequila in four hours and he couldn’t get up at all. His buddy was shaking him and slapping him and he wouldn’t open his eyes.

Regarding bus safety, the government of Colombia was progressive: since 2004 it required bus companies to post safety statistics in every ticket window. At first the stats for my bus didn’t seem too bad – only 18 accidents, eight injuries and six deaths. But that was only for the first two months of 2008. And no one seemed to have died on other lines. Oh well, I bought a ticket and settled in. My seatmate was a young woman so shy she could barely speak – she literally hid from me behind a lamppost when we made an afternoon pit stop – and she had a complicated name I couldn’t pronounce. I didn’t envy her. She’d traveled 28 hours by bus to Bogotá for two days work (what that work was, I couldn’t understand), and now was heading back – another 28 hours.

We’d rolled out of Bogotá in the morning, and just rolled and bumped and rolled on and on and on, through never ending mountains of green and clouds and rain and fog and switchbacks – straight through Colombian army patrols and checkpoints. Every once in a while soldiers boarded the bus and checked a few IDs; once I had to get off and let them go through my luggage. The dude in cammos seemed most flummoxed by my guidebook to Africa, which he studied, but then shrugged and moved on to someone else.

Avoid traveling at night, the guidebook warned. Somewhere out there were FARC guerillas, but no one seemed too worried – and it was hard to imagine anyone any one out in the dark and rain and cold doing anything but hunkering down.

I was happiest when the guy who had been masturbating across the aisle while staring at me got off the bus – that was just as dawn was breaking.

Right now rain is the big threat; it’s been raining incessantly for months. Once, early in the morning we had to detour around a landslide that covered the road. All of Ecuador has been declared a disaster area, but particularly the southern coast. Roads and bridges are out, thousands homeless. But this journey is all about plunging in so I’ve decided to take the southern coastal route to Peru.

Havana

Never been much of a strident anti-communist, but I found Havana creepy and sad, and compelling and dynamic, too. The flight attendants on Cubana flight said it all without words: an hour out they began stuffing everything that wasn’t nailed down or screwed into the bulkheads into their luggage. Piles of paper napkins. Plastic cutlery. Doggie bags of food. It was dark and wet when I stepped out of the airport, into a gypsy taxi running on three cylinders, belching oil and fumes, and without door handles. I don’t like to lose sight of my luggage but the driver insisted it had to be hidden in the trunk: “Policia!” he said. “Eleven million Cubans, five million police.”

And then suddenly, speeding down dark streets, an endless line of ghost-like people plodding along the pavement, the driver wanted his money up front. Now. “No,” I said. “I need gas,” he said. “No,” I said. “No money, no gas,” he said. “We won’t make it to the city.” Finally we agreed on half now, half when I got to my hotel. And sure enough, half went right into the tank a few miles later.

In this land of free health care and free education and Che and Fidel on every wall, the Cubans were hustling and bobbing and weaving around the system – and the police on every corner. Havana is a city seething with restlessness and want. “I teach Salsa,” said a sweet young thing named Martha. She was 21, could have been my daughter, was modestly dressed in running shoes and shorts and a t-shirt. Twenty minutes later her friend appeared out of the woodwork and worked hard to pimp Martha out. “We’re hungry,” they said. “Come on, fucky-fucky.” I bought them a plate of grilled fish. The friend rolled cigars – 100 a day – and earned 240 pesos a month - $10 at the official exchange rate. “America great,” they said. Yeah, I said, but you get free health care.
“Ha!” they said. “Nada free! You gotta give the doctor perfume, shampoo, souvenirs,” they said, “or else you’ll sit on a list for years. And the police earn 800 pesos a month, plus 40 convertible pesos.” They wanted more. “Mojitos! Shrimp cocktail! Fucky-fucky?”

I spent a night drinking with a Cuban in dreads named Orange and his girlfriend. Well, I bought them drinks – the bill was four months salary for Martha’s friend. Orange said there was a better bar around the corner. “Let’s go,” I said. “You go first and then we’ll meet you,” they said. “Huh?” I said. “Policia!” they said, eyeing the goons outside the bar. And just to be safe, they said, you better buy the cops a beer. Which I did.

Still, the Cubans are always in motion, always rocking. Huge crowds of men argue over baseball in the park. Couples dance salsa on the beach. Reggaeton and salsa blare from speakers and kids play stickball in the streets.

In Cuba I also realized the Lunatic Express isn’t just about movement; it’s also about ending up in places I never would have traveled to otherwise.