Around the World in 50 Years (13 page)

Aside from having swum in a lot of shark piss, Steve could have been in deep shit, because the bull shark is responsible for more attacks on humans than any other. They're temperamental, unpredictable, and aggressive—like Russian drivers—but nine to ten feet long, with powerful jaws, and will eat whatever mammals they can wrap their teeth around, from rats, dogs, and tree sloths, to antelope, cattle, and people. (In India, I'd watched their genetic cousins swim up the Ganges to eat the human corpses that bereaved families devoutly dumped into that sacred river.) Ichthyologists believe that bull sharks are the most dangerous to humans because, of the three main man-eating species—great whites, tigers, and bulls—only the bulls habitually live in shallow water close to populated shorelines; the others live farther down and farther out.

The bulls were the apex predators of the lake. They're attacked only by tiger sharks and great whites but, since none of those lived in the lake, the bulls were able to thrive there. Until the Japanese came along in the 1980s and pretty much fished them out for their fins.

THE PEAK OF DEATH

If sweat and tears count as water, this harrowing incident belongs here, for it caused me to shed more of both than any other on our auto expedition.

The Inter-American Highway north from Panama City was bordered by thick tropical jungles and littered with the run-over carcasses of dozens of snakes, but it was paved and fast. Halfway up through Panama the cement ended and Steve and I entered its worst stretch, more than 200 miles of jolting corrugations, loose gravel, razor-sharp rocks, and spring-busting potholes, continuing through southern Costa Rica. Ahead loomed the highest mountain pass of our trip around the world, the 13,000-foot summit of
Cerro de la Muerte,
the notorious Peak of Death, a nerve-wracking rut of a crooked road with narrow curves bordered by steep cliffs, subject to dense fog, flash floods, and landslides.

We didn't make it.

A thousand yards below the pass, on a blind curve, we felt a sharp jolt and heard the shriek of tortured metal scraping on stone. Steve jerked the Cruiser to a halt and we leaped out to see our camper—20 yards behind us, its nose dug into the road, its A-frame still hitched to the Cruiser, snapped completely through at both joints.

It was our worst possible breakdown: Only a heavy-duty welding shop could fix it and none existed on the Peak of Death. It made no sense bringing the A-frame to a welder unless we also brought the camper to which it had to be reattached, but it was not possible to bring the camper anywhere with its A-frame detached. We were stranded on a treacherous mountain road, on a blind curve, with trucks charging down, no shoulder on which to pull off, far from the nearest city, on the fog-shrouded summit of the highest peak on the Costa Rican section of Inter-American Highway at the height of the rainy season.

We concluded that the only way to get our trailer back on the road was to build an entirely new A-frame. We established a protective barricade of warning boulders and reflectors along the road, pitched our Pop-tent in a clearing we macheted out of the adjacent jungle, chopped down two mature bamboo trees, and toiled for three days with crude tools, trimming and shaping and fitting and binding the tree trunks into place.

We hoped this bamboo frame had sufficient strength and flexibility to enable us to haul the camper to a welding shop in San José. If it broke anywhere on
Cerro de la Muerte,
the camper could roll out of control and be dashed on the rocks below. But we had no alternative. We headed toward San José at a speed reduced from the 15 mph we had been doing to an excruciating crawl of 5 mph, to avoid straining the timber.

We reached San José nine days after we had left Panama City, a mere 317 miles away. But at least we'd pioneered an indispensable technique for other world travelers who find themselves stuck in the wilds with a broken trailer frame—if, that is, any other travelers were stupid enough to try to drag an easily breakable camper-trailer around the world.

IN PERIL ON THE PACUARE

The east-to-west-flowing rivers of Latin America offer some of the best and fastest white water anywhere. The Andes run up the far western side of the continent like a spine, hundreds of high peaks covered with snow or drenched by rain that inevitably flows down to the sea, which is not far away, making the descent steep and filling the streams with flash and foam.

I should have known better, but I decided during a visit to Costa Rica to run the Pacuare, a challenging stream on whose steep sides lived kingfishers, herons, toucans, tanagers, and lizards, and whose thickly vegetated side gorges were home to jaguars, ocelots, monkeys, and sloths. The Pacuare has some of the grandest white water in Central America, with rapids ranging up to Class V on the international scale of VI, based on gradient, constriction, and obstruction. Its Class III rapids feature high to irregular waves and narrow passages that often require complex maneuvering. The Class IV are long, difficult rapids in constricted passages that demand precise paddling in extremely turbulent waters. As for the Class V … we never made it that far.

All the signs said
DON'T DO IT DUMMY
: It had been raining for a week and the river was boiling; it was the day after Christmas and the regular rafting shops were closed, so I ended up with a guy who had a patched, outdated raft and a hangover; I had no strong team, only my friend Anna and her two preteen kids, which meant we were woefully underpowered for the Pacuare. I was experienced enough to know better, but too determined to go for it—a frequent failing throughout my misadventures.

I was paddling for all I was worth on the left side of the raft, with Anna's son behind me, Anna and her daughter on the other side, our befogged guide perfunctorily steering in the stern. We miraculously managed to make it through Crazy Rock, Double Drop, Chicken Drop, and Pin Ball, and were halfway down to the Caribbean, when the raft was sideswiped in the Devil's Armpit and got pushed far down on my side. Anna's son was flipped overboard and clear, safe in his life rest, but I was stuck fast and sucking up water. I was on my back, arched over the side, with my head completely in the water and my feet tightly wedged under my butt and beneath the raft's gunwale, on which my full weight was pressing down. I could not get free. I flapped. I floundered. I tried to twist, to turn. But I could not get free. The flow of water over my chest and face was too powerful for me to rise up and pull myself back into the boat, and my agility was impaired by a cumbersome life vest. The water kept pouring into my nose and mouth.

In my many decades in the water—kayaking, canoeing, diving, rafting, even surfing at big breaks in Hawaii—I'd never been in a more perilous situation. Although my face was only a few inches underwater, I was drowning and was powerless to do anything about it. It was truly one of those Is-this-the-way-I-go? moments.

As I was about to pass out, Anna carefully crawled to my side of the raft, reached out, grabbed a strap on my life vest, and hauled me back in, coughing, sputtering, and expelling a liter of water.

I was too shaken up to even think of asking her for some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—although I corrected that oversight the next day.

TORN BETWEEN THREE FALLS

Within a small area in northeastern South America are three waterfalls: one is the world's most awesome, the second is the world's highest, and the third is its most magical.

The most awesome is Iguazu, my favorite spot on the planet.

I fell in love with Iguazu the moment I saw her, thundering between Brazil and Argentina, and have remained faithful ever since. She is incomparably stunning, thrilling, and enchanting.

I'd reached her from Rio de Janeiro after a long and enervating bus trip, expecting to stay half a day. I stayed three days, mesmerized. I saw her first from the rim, almost two miles wide, over which she seemed to suck into herself the entirety of the region's rainfall and hurl it 270 feet over the basalt cap of the Paraná Plateau in 275 different drops, between which only tiny tufts of clinging grass survived.

After soaking up that remarkable sight for several hours, I clambered down a long metal walkway that merged into stairs that descended to a small island in the river at the base of the falls, where water came crashing down on three sides, its vapor rising 500 feet. I just sat there on a solitary bench in the jungle, not another person in sight, and stared, eyes wide in wonder, mouth open in astonishment, ears filled with the relentless roar, basking in the gentle mist, hour upon hour. It's like no other place on earth. Small wonder that when Eleanor Roosevelt first saw Iguazu, she exclaimed, “Poor Niagara!”

You may not be aware of it, but you have also probably seen Iguazu—in many movies:
Moonraker, The Mission, Miami Vice, Mr. Magoo
. And those are just the Ms.

Don't settle for the film version. If you only come face-to-face with one great place before you kick the bucket, make it Iguazu.

And don't be surprised if you find me there, relaxing at the base of the falls, in the shade of a tropical hardwood, surrounded by misted orchids and butterflies, looking up in blissful exaltation. I'm heading back as soon as I can.

Some 500 miles farther north, in Venezuela, towers Angel Falls, the planet's longest uninterrupted plunge of water. I'd always assumed this moniker derived from the conceit that its lofty heights were home to the heavenly hosts; it wasn't until I got there that I learned it was named after an aviator, Jimmie Angel, who, in the 1930s, crashed his small plane two miles away, survived the wreck, discovered the falls, spread the word to the world, and got himself immortalized.

The setting is spectacular: The Churun River pours over the flat-topped plateau of the Guiana Highlands of southwest Venezuela straight down the smooth escarpment of Devil's Mountain into some of the world's thickest jungle, 2,648 unbroken feet down, down, down.

Not many miles away murmur the magical, miniature waterfalls of Canaima. They form a sparkling tiara in an idyllic, isolated region near Venezuela's southeastern border with Brazil and Guyana, in Canaima National Park, the globe's sixth largest such preserve, the size of Maryland, a rugged, unspoiled, barely populated wilderness of towering rock plateaus called
tepuis
that rise hundreds of feet straight up from the jungle valley, yet look like midgets beside the mountains of the Roraima range, which terminate 3,000 to 9,000 feet higher. These are among the oldest rocks on our planet, formed in the Precambrian era, and now riddled and scarred by eons of erosion, with gullies, sinkholes, and gorges hundreds of feet deep.

What I found most enchanting about the diminutive group of falls, none more than 50 feet high, which the locals called Hacha, Wadaima, Ucaima, and Golondrina—is that I could safely go
behind
them. To another world.

I'd slink out of my hammock shamefully late every morning and, after a breakfast of the juiciest mangoes and sweetest bananas, splash through the knee-high waters of the Canaima Lagoon toward this irregular arc of shimmering showers, pick my way along a strip of rock to the edge of a falls, then rush through the thinner curtain of plunging spume at its side to enter an intimate, cave-like compartment scooped out behind the falling water. I'd stand there and hear nothing but the water's roar all about me. I could see no sky, no ground, no trees, nothing but a blue-white curtain of pure frothy water crashing down an arm's length away. Everything else was blocked out. I was alone in an enchanted realm where I could dream and drift and watch and wonder in devout adoration of nature's power and majesty.

BAD TIMING IN BELIZE

It was, as have been so many disasters in my life, the fault of a beautiful woman—or, to put it more accurately and less chauvinistically—of my adolescent, but lifelong, obsession with beautiful women.

She was an Israeli, divorced, stunning, and sublimely sensual. I'd met her via one of the personal ads I'd answered in my wilder days. After dating for a month, we flew to Cancun and drove down the Coastal Highway to dive the reef off Belize. Or so we thought until we reached its border, where the guards refused to let her across because she had an Israeli passport with no Belizean visa, a visa that I, as a U.S. citizen, did not need.

I was confronted with a dilemma of deprivation: either leave my love at the border for several days, or skip the scuba. After much consternation and cogitation, chivalry triumphed—the more cynical would think sex—and I retreated with my lady to Cancun and the noisy scene at Señor Frog's.

I next had the opportunity to visit Belize four years later, again in the friendly company of an exquisite woman, this time a Russian, this time
with
a visa. And again I almost didn't make it. We left from Cancun, driving a rented VW Beetle. I'd promised to show her the ancient Maya sites along the way; therefore, after making the customary tourist stop at the walled city of Tulum, I cut west and south through the Yucatán jungles along the Campeche Triangle to wow her with Uxmal and other ancient temples at Quintana Roo, Kabah, and Xlapak—none yet discovered by Spell Checker.

The girl was a total free spirit, a ravishing 20-year-old red-haired wild child who loved to take off all her clothes in the jungles and among the ancient ruins. If other tourists were about, she didn't give a fig, or a fig leaf.

Strolling through a lush jungle with an enchantingly carefree hard-bodied young beauty gamboling about, totally naked and glistening with the moisture of rainy-season sprinkles, did
not
make me eager to head back to the car and resume driving. I might put the pedal to the metal, but not in any way that'd get me closer to Belize.

I'd not yet taken my vow to visit every nation, but I
did
want to dive Belize. Therefore, at great personal sacrifice, we staggered into Belize City ten days after we left Cancun, surely an anti-record for that distance. But I was guided by the old Cunard Line slogan: “Getting there is half the fun.”