Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (27 page)

‘I’m seriously PMS-ing over here,’ Russ said in frustration as he smeared the window of our bouncing truck with another coating of sunscreen from his forehead.

Russ started taking anti-malarial pills somewhere between Alto Paraíso and Brasilia and has since been struck with sudden emotional bursts that he says are opening his eyes to what it must be like to be a woman. I have to say, dark-mood inducing anti-malarials are dangerous at the best of times, not least on a long-distance truck journey with fifteen people you may or may not exactly get along with.

Travelling in a group after all this time going relatively solo isn’t always easy. There are strict schedules to adhere to, whingers to deal with, muddy tents to erect and a strange rule about ‘flapping’ your dishes after each camp meal, meaning we must all stand in a field like raving scarecrows waving plates and spoons about until they’re dry. Towels are full of germs, you see.

We are also not allowed to call the Dragoman truck a bus. If we do, we must perform five press-ups. This was funny the first time, but after the ninth mistake or so my arms are starting to burn. In fact,
all
of it is fun, until you’re knackered and sweaty and haven’t showered in four days and the Indian girl is still asking if she can upgrade to a hotel while the rest of you sleep in tents surrounded by crawling, hairy, black tarantulas (this really happened!) — then it’s just a bit of a stupid idea you wish you’d cancelled.

Ah, I don’t mean that. See how knackered I am? It’s just that travelling overland like this is not for everyone and there will be moments when you hate it. There will also be moments you’ll remember forever that make it all worthwhile. I guess because Brazil is so frickin’ huge we’re spending a lot of time trundling along dirt roads and highways in the truck just to reach each point of interest. We’re getting a great insight into what it’s like to be a lorry driver, though, eating only indistinguishable foods that have been deep fried to within an inch of their existence along the way. Brazil offers free coffee, too, in every service station. This excited me greatly until I tried to drink some and discovered it was ninety per cent sugar.

Gearing up for the jungle with the Dragoman crew.

I will say that one seventy-something-year-old guy on the truck, Ken, is fantastic. He was on the hunt for Che Guevara in the sixties, used to own a baby food factory and has all sorts of cool stories, confirming my previous statement that old people are awesome. I call him Khaki Ken because, since we left Rio, he has worn only beige hunting outfits, as though we might deposit him at any moment in the jungle and leave him to fend for himself.

A two-night stop in a colonial gold mining town called Ouro Preto was a welcome break — it’s like a Brazilian Cotswolds, if you can imagine that. Very quaint. Dave, our chirpy British driver, loves it particularly because it has a shop that sells the best hot chocolate in the world.

‘It’s like real melted chocolate!’ he enthused and hurried off quickly along the cobbled streets to buy some while the rest of us went to see two mines. He’s been to Ouro Preto before, of course, so I guess the highlights are different for him now.

A guy called Billy, who sounded American and looked like a weathered George Clooney, took great pleasure in showing us round Brasília the other day. As the capital of Brazil, this city is all but sixty years old and, to me, it feels a bit like England’s Milton Keynes crossed with Canberra — a concrete jungle where nothing seems to make sense, in spite of having been purportedly designed for convenience.

Brasília consists of a montage of concrete blocks and weird, white sculptures deposited at random. The significance of each one was explained and instantly forgotten as Billy gesticulated enthusiastically in all directions, a human beacon in his fluorescent yellow vest, complete with his own name on the front in giant letters. Between spouted facts and figures regarding social demographics, he told us proudly of the time he showed Obama’s people round the city, and how he came to be in the
Lonely Planet
.

Underneath his vest, Billy wore a Dragoman T-shirt with a Rio to Cuzco map on it, which he’d drawn himself in marker pen. He’d had these T-shirts printed for all of us and charged us $15 each for them. We paid up rather begrudgingly because no one had the heart to tell him they were a bit shit, and Stef (who, incidentally, is twenty-four and a circus performer who climbs silk ropes — how cool is that?) hacked hers up creatively with my nail scissors, so it’s now a bit more wearable. The rest are bunged in the overhead nets in the truck till we can get rid of them. Bless Billy.

We did see a rather nice church with a million blue windows, and a cathedral shaped like a crown, before he took us to an all-you-can-eat pizza restaurant on a strip of fast food outlets that looked like Las Vegas. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d taken Obama there, too.

Three days of driving and several bush camps later, we arrived in Poconé, the small gateway town to the Pantanal. There, a group of us found ourselves in a pool hall surrounded by local guys who stared at us girls slack-jawed and blinking, like they’d never seen a woman before. It wasn’t long before one particularly amorous man in his sixties started dancing around our pool table. He was swigging Cachaça from a plastic bottle, grinning with teeth so lopsided he looked like he’d been struck in the face with a baseball bat. At one point he spilled some of his Cachaça on the floor in a cross-shape and said a small drunken prayer over it, before lifting his shirt in an effort to make one of us fall in love with his beer gut.

Seeing that he was being annoying, the pool hall manager came over and asked him to leave us alone. This worked for five minutes, until the drunk recommenced his dancing and slurring. The manager asked him to leave again … and again … and again … but each time he’d come back in and wobble around us, singing.

After maybe five or six evictions and re-entries by this drunk, the manager appeared again with a whip. But not just any old whip, mind you. It was one of those whips with numerous tassels on it, creating one long leather weapon of fear. He grabbed the annoying man by his sweaty shirt, hauled him outside and proceeded to whip the living shit out of him. We watched in horror as he struck his face with the same force you’d apply to a growling werewolf about to eat your baby, over and over again, until eventually the poor man burst into tears and ran away to the park over the road, where he sat on a bench and continued to drink his Cachaça. We assumed he’d wake up in the morning wondering why his face was whiplashed, and concurred it was probably better he didn’t remember. We also realised why his teeth were probably so wonky. You wouldn’t want to piss anyone off in Poconé.

So anyway, here we are now in the Pantanal, finally, at an eco-lodge called Pousada Rio Claro. On our first boat trip into the murky river waters this afternoon, we were surrounded by inquisitive otters and circling caiman. The engine died in the middle of this wildlife display and our drivers were forced to tie our two boats together with what looked like a skipping rope, but we survived and made it back to the lodge triumphant, having learned that caimans are afraid of otters. Did you know that? Apparently otters will always win a fight.

With 100,000 square kilometres in Paraguay and Bolivia and the rest in Brazil, the Pantanal wetlands is by far this country’s number one destination for bird watching and wildlife spotting. It covers an area nearly half the size of France, and in the far north merges into the Amazon, which, surprisingly, is where most tourists will still head first.

Russ and I just watched the most sensational sunset I think I’ve ever seen. The brooding sky was reflected in the wetlands as billowing clouds turned from white, to amber yellow, to pink, red and blue, creating a 360-degree wonderland that stretched to infinity. Giant Jabiru storks, toucans and hummingbirds, kingfishers, parakeets and macaws all fluttered happily around in trees resembling gnarly hands poking up from the water, as we stood there in the changing colours, wondering if we’d died and gone to heaven.

The Pantanal is one huge nature documentary in action, twenty times the size of Florida’s Everglades and home to even more birds than the Galápagos. You won’t find many flowers here, but it boasts the biggest concentration of fauna in the New World and, whereas many animals hide in the dense Amazon forest, here in the open wetlands they’re all on full display. There are also more insects here than I’ve encountered anywhere else, ever. When we first pulled up at the eco-lodge, having driven the 145-kilometre Transpantaneira Highway — a dusty, orange, lizard-infested dirt road from Poconé, so beautiful for its emerald surroundings that, at one point, we all sat on the roof of the truck and counted the birds in awe — I noticed that it, too, appeared to be bordered with flooded grass and stagnant pools.

‘Oh wow, it’s soooo pretty, look at all the water!’ Stef enthused. But I caught the glint of recognition in Khaki Ken’s eyes, and my instincts, too, were primed. Top mosquito real estate by the acre stretched before us: a nursery for malaria carriers birthing killers by the millisecond. We were right. Sure, the Pantanal is all so pretty in the day, what with its preening birds and glistening caiman and white horses wading through the swamps like mythical unicorns missing their horns, but come nightfall we’re forced to make a mad dash between our rooms and the dining hall through what can only be described as an insect blizzard. You can tell when Stef’s on her way back to our room because you can hear the screams.

Still, it’s definitely all worth it … the whingeing companions and the bad truck-stop food, even the enforced ‘flapping’ and press-ups. Because I can’t even begin to explain how incredible that sunset was tonight. If Pachamama blesses everywhere in South America, as I’ve witnessed over the past eight months, the Pantanal, at the heart of it all, is surely the place she must call home — the place she keeps her rocking chair and comfy slippers and comes to have a chuckle at tourists screaming in an insect blizzard.

08/03

So, I was going to leave you there, my friends, at the very centre of this fascinating continent, humbled and enchanted once again not by another South American city, but by the vast expanse of nothing and everything in between.

I was going to leave you there, high on natural wonders with yet more travel ahead to God-knows-where-exactly … but I should probably tell you what happened on the truck ride back to Cuzco at the end of our intrepid Dragoman expedition.

We were trundling up the road with steep cliffs and deep valleys on either side when we saw a white car parked, a blue pick-up truck on its side in a ditch and a motorbike in the middle of the road. I caught a glimpse of a man standing between the motorbike and the car, leaning in towards the car window. I thought there had been an accident. Daniele, our Spanish-speaking driver, was at the wheel and he pulled to a stop, at which point we heard a gunshot.
Holy shit
! My heart literally slammed into my ribs and I almost puked. The guy was so close-range to the car, there’s no doubt whoever was in that car had just been murdered in the middle of the road.

‘Guys, get down,’ Dave told us then from his place in the passenger seat up front. He didn’t have to tell us twice. All fifteen of us threw ourselves to the floor just as I caught sight of both our drivers throwing their arms in the air. I was huddled under a table with two other girls, looking at Russ under the table opposite, fully expecting the man with the gun to get on the truck. I’ve never been so terrified in my life — I thought that was it, quite frankly. Everyone’s face was drained of colour, in spite of our tans and insect bites.

‘
Tranquilo, tranquilo
,’ I heard Daniele say then, as whoever it was with the gun approached him. I later found out it’d been one of three guys all wearing balaclavas. Another shot went off and I hugged my knees on the filthy truck floor, not caring about the mud, the smelly shoes, or the possibility of stray tarantulas on board. Every part of me was trembling. Stef, who’d been asleep with her iPod on, woke up suddenly and was yanked to the floor by Russ before she knew what was going on. Daniele was speaking hurriedly in Spanish at the front. I later learned that the people who’d been in the upturned pick-up truck were lying on the road and one had been shot in the knees. The white car had stopped to help and, unfortunately, the driver had been shot at point blank, no doubt as a result of having seen too much.

I have no idea what it was all about, or how someone on our truck wasn’t shot at, too, but apparently, while the shooter was pointing his gun at us and urging Dave and Daniele to look away, somehow Daniele found the presence of mind to calmly ask if they could just let us pass like nothing had happened. The guys with the guns were obviously panicked at having already shot so many people, and probably didn’t want to risk doing anything else, although I guess they could have got on board and taken our valuables, if they’d wanted.

I think Daniele staying calm saved our lives, or at least stopped us getting robbed. Eventually we were allowed to drive off untouched and unhurt, thank God, although further up the road at a tiny village we saw another white car parked by the road with at least fifty people crowded around it. A bullet hole was clearly visible in the windscreen but we never saw any police about as we high-tailed it as fast as we could to Cuzco, without stopping.

I’ve heard worse stories than this over the past eight months — people who’ve been held at gunpoint on the street, kidnapped, mugged, stripped, raped. You never think anything like that is going to happen to you. But the truth is, this is the real world. Calling a ‘path’ The Gringo Trail doesn’t necessarily make it safe. Shit happens when you grow complacent, and I guess there’s a lesson in that for all of us.

There is so much more to see of this daunting continent, so many places I didn’t go, but I guess in going with the flow I’ve still seen so much more than I ever dreamed I’d see, good and bad. I, along with numerous other people who’ve crossed my path, have been floored by the wonders of the world and changed irrevocably by standing small in the face of so many miracles. The mountains, the sweeping grassy plains, the sequined southern skies at night. The jungles, the beaches, the wetlands, deserts, scrub and snow, each setting as different and inspiring as the passionate, proud people who inhabit them all.

It’s kind of hard to decide which specific part of this trip has been my favourite, or my least favourite. In retrospect everything looks different and my eyes have been opened to so many new things. You can’t help but grow and expand spiritually (as well as width ways) when you’re travelling out here and, if I’m honest, I feel that this experience has shaped me as a person more than living in Bali last year ever did.

Opening my mind always seemed like something I was trying to
learn
how to do. But somehow, in exploring South America, I’ve found it has come naturally. A connection with nature, and to something else. To the divine perhaps, at times? Even without ayahuasca running through my bloodstream, I can still appreciate now how we’re nothing but energy, flowing like rivers from mountains into the fields of other people. This continent is as beautiful as it is frightening, as vast as it is part of a ridiculously small world (as exhibited when you meet a friend from home in the middle of Machu Picchu).

Excitingly, it looks as though The Crab and I are meeting up again when this truck reaches Peru, and there’s talk of us travelling northern Chile together once The Lion goes home to work on new projects … a thought that makes me smile even when my head is bouncing off the window on a dirt road and Russ is acting like a woman on his period. I’m ready to go out and face the future, whatever that might be. All I know is that, when it comes to travelling, there’s no such thing as going the wrong way. Every time I’ve thought I’ve made a bad decision, I’ve made a new connection that has ultimately led to something else.

Of course, I’ve also learned to be extremely careful with earplug insertions, to never put a date on the expected arrival of extraterrestrials, and to never,
ever
fall for a Latin American man. Especially not one who lives in the Ecuadorean jungle, plucks bats from thin air and doesn’t even have a Facebook account.