The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (30 page)

Besides being generally embarrassed over my performance, I am aware of being the only American in the group. If I give up, not only am I the
girl
who gave up, but I'm the
American
who couldn't hack it. In my mind, they will immediately associate nationality and competence.

Often during our journey, we have to pull off to the side of the road to let huge trucks squeeze by, two or three passengers riding high atop them. We stand right at the edge of the cliff, our heels against the abyss, and my head spins from altitude and fear.

Last night before I fell asleep, I imagined myself gliding downhill in the bright sun of a Bolivian morning, the wind carrying me across the mountains. I didn't anticipate the rain and mud and the fact that I'm not E.T. Two hours into the bike ride, I have had it, no matter how determined I was the night before.

“I feel sick,” I tell Carly. “I think it's the altitude.”

“That's no good, mate.”

She knows I'm faking it and so do I and we both pretend we don't.

Ten minutes later, I am in the minivan following behind the riders. This is the one thing I told Carly I absolutely refused to do: traverse the Death Road in an actual vehicle. Now here I am beside the toothy driver, carrying on a sulky conversation in my half-baked Spanish, irked at Carly for making us do this in the first place.

Later, she will generously strike this wimpiness from the record of our travels. When other backpackers ask if we've done the Death Road, she'll say, “Yup, we went, and it was fantastic. You should definitely do it.” Meanwhile, I will look distractedly in the other direction, pretending to examine some interesting piece of wall in the distance.

When we miraculously reach Coroico, I swear there are angels
singing. At a mere fifteen hundred meters above sea level, I feel the expanding sensation of oxygen flowing back into my starved lungs. Nestled in the Andes, Coroico is a popular vacation spot for middle-class Bolivians, though only in this country would folks willingly cross something called the Death Road for a little R & R. As usual, we are greeted by men advertising accommodations. They carry laminated photos of their respective hotels in large binders, each bargaining with the others so effectively that we have only to look on and wait for the lowest available price. It winds up being twenty bolivianos a night, about the equivalent of three U.S. dollars.

“Do not tell this to the other guests,” our salesman warns us. “This is a special price. Only for you. Okay?” We nod conspiratorially.

Hotel Esmeralda resembles a Swiss ski lodge. It's at the top of a steep hill that we rattle up in his red jeep. When our escort drops us in the lobby and reveals our bargain rate to a woman folding laundry, she looks first at him and then at us with open dismay. He shrugs, and she motions for us to follow her down the hall, refusing to make eye contact. In our room, I open the white shutters onto a perfect postcard view of the Andes. An unobstructed panorama of snowcapped mountains stretches in all directions. We stick our faces out the window and inhale deeply. I feel the stress of La Paz and the trauma of our recent bike ride recede as if it happened weeks and not hours ago.

“Carly,” I sigh happily.

“I know,” she says.

It's not just that Carly and I often have different concepts of fun (see: Death Road). Traveling with someone isn't always easy in general. We were “in each other's pockets,” as Carly put it. So any number of individual preferences and personality clashes were magnified, and we'd been together in close quarters so long that we also knew precisely how to get under each other's skin. Luckily, we shared a fundamental desire to see the world. So
whenever we took in a new, spectacular piece of it, like at this moment, we let everything else go and embraced the awesomeness together. We were always ready to start fresh in a new place and with each other.

Our shared reverence is interrupted by a floating British accent. We follow it down to a very pale girl in a very pink bikini and a hairy guy floating on his back in the pool.

“I don't know what the big deal is,” she says loudly. “It's just a bunch of ruins, yeah?”

“I think so,” he agrees. “I mean, we're on holiday, and I'd rather sit by the pool and get pissed.”

She nods thoughtfully, then slowly shakes her head again in disbelief. “In the pictures, it just looks like a bunch of bloody ruins. I can't even pronounce it. Maccho Pichi?”

Carly rolls her eyes at what is for her an abominable way to discuss the place she has already decided will be the highlight of our trip a few weeks from now.

“Ugh,” I groan in agreement. These are the loud, ignorant kinds of tourists we try hardest to avoid. It's an irony of our present situation. Although traveling ideally makes the traveler more tolerant of other cultures, one sometimes isn't so tolerant of fellow vagabonds, especially when she believes, like Carly and I do, that they are somehow disrupting her own “authentic” experience.

“Let's get some wine,” I say, closing the shutters and blocking out the voices.

Since I now fully appreciate the feat of transporting it, I am not too disappointed that the wine is twice as expensive here as it was in La Paz. We buy two bottles and some fresh bread and make our way back to the hotel. When we get there, pink-bikini girl has joined her friends on the patio, where they are all guzzling beer—except for the back-floater, who is grasping a massive
bottle of vodka with both hands. I'm tired and really don't feel like making small talk. I can tell from Carly's quickened pace that neither does she, so we politely decline their offers to join the party, not knowing that we will all be together again soon.

Two white hammocks sway unoccupied at the bottom of a small hill behind the pool. We pour our wine into tiny white plastic cups and settle into the netting.

“Let's stay another day,” I say.

“Okay,” she immediately agrees.

Partly, I think Carly says yes because she worries I will have a stroke if forced back onto the Death Road so soon (we'll have to traverse more of it to reach the Amazon), but I know she, too, likes the quiet pace of Coroico. Through the trees, car lights still flicker along the route to La Paz. We learned today that a new, safer road is being built parallel to the Death Road; I hope it will have a more optimistic name. Bolivia is so surprising: dusty desert, endless salt flats, jagged mountains, and the sweaty Amazon all occupy the same vast landscape. Tonight I'm glad we're here.

Two days later, peaceful Coroico seems a world away as we race along a supposedly less dangerous stretch of road in a bus. My forehead is plastered against the greasy glass as I strain to see beneath the bus, to confirm that the wheels are connected to the road and we are not, as it appears, suspended in midair. I squash my face harder into the window, painfully flattening out my nose while I crane my neck at various angles. But I glimpse only the outer slice of one black wheel hugging the edge of a drop hundreds of feet from the ground; the muddy path is tucked neatly out of sight below the belly of the bus. Next to me, Carly ignores my manic investigation. She leans back against the seat and puts one flip-flopped foot across her knee. Behind cheap aviator sunglasses, her eyes close. She has gotten thinner since we arrived in South America two months ago—we both have. But Carly's body
is a muscular, compact thin, whereas I look more waify and anemic. She wears knee-length tan shorts and a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt. Her blond hair is pulled back into a short ponytail, her Discman earphones dangle like a futuristic necklace.

I lean over her lap to get a better look at some of the other passengers and accidentally step on her exposed toes. “Sorry, Carlz!” I whisper.

She reluctantly opens her eyes. “What's the drama?” Loosely translated, this is Australian for “Why are you acting like such a complete idiot and stomping on my foot?”

“We have a problem,” I say, and gesture wildly toward the window.

It has become abundantly clear over the past few months that Carly and I have vastly different definitions of a problem. For her, the word is employed only after something bad happens, as in “Charlie had a bit of a problem last week when that shark bit off his leg.” I personally feel that experiencing actual misfortune is a mere technicality. The real problem began with the idea of the shark lurking in the water, something it would have occurred to me to worry about long before I actually paddled out into the ocean. In my opinion, a problem is the promise of disasters to come, two seconds or two years from now. And considering its treacherous landscape, foreign languages, unpredictable transportation, and total disregard for fixed prices of goods and services, Bolivia itself is, for me at least, pretty much one big problem.

“Don't stress,” Carly says, and offers me a relaxed smile. “It's no worries.”

Now, unlike the word “problem,” the expression “no worries” tumbles off her tongue with alarming ease. After living in Australia, I've come to understand that this phrase doesn't always mean there isn't anything to worry about—it's more like a suggestion that you will be much happier if you go about your business believing everything is okay. Call it positive thinking or unflagging confidence or maybe a Zenlike notion all Australians
share that the mysterious workings of the universe are completely out of our control, so why bother getting all worked up? Or, I don't know, maybe surviving twenty-two years in a country home to an unfathomable number and variety of creatures that can kill you has instilled in Carly a profound nihilism. Whether it's personal or cultural or what, I don't have it, so the fact that we are barreling along at fifty miles an hour on a one-lane, two-directional glorified horse trail suspended high in the air in a bus that should have been scrapped for parts in the 1970s, driven by a guy who I am reasonably sure is intoxicated doesn't trouble Carly. Or if it does, she doesn't let on. It's infuriating.

“I think we should get everyone over to the other side of the bus,” I say, but the look on Carly's face stops me from further explaining my theories of weight distribution. Luckily, a movie is starting on a small screen above the driver's head. I turn away from her and pretend to be engrossed in the opening credits. The film is in Spanish and begins with a lengthy car chase. Vehicles crash and roll all over the road, spilling their contents and then catching fire for a few seconds before exploding.

“I cannot believe they are showing this,” I mutter.

Many of the Bolivians are engrossed in the film, and the rest ignore it in favor of dozing against the headrests, outstretched legs in the aisles. No one else looks worried about the seventeen hours of treacherous driving before we (hopefully) reach Rurrenabaque, our jumping-off point for the Amazon. In fact, I realize that I have never seen a nervous Bolivian passenger on any of the various jeeps/buses/trains/boats I have ridden through rain/ hail/snow. But all that is about to change.

“Look out the window,” I urge Carly. My voice is shaking. “What are we doing on this bus?” I ask a little too loudly. The Bolivian couple next to us shift uneasily in their seats and glance in my direction. “What is anyone doing on this bus?” I press my head against the window, taking long, dramatic gulps of air. I can
feel Carly's eyes boring through the back of my head. I feel, and must look, a bit deranged.

“Do you want to change seats?” she offers.

“No way,” I say.

As ridiculous as it is, the only thing I have control over at this point is being able to see out the window of this suicide machine, and I am not giving that up, no matter how insane it makes me.

“If it upsets you to look, don't look.” She puts her earphones in and nods to the beat of the music.

“As soon as this lunatic stops, I am getting off.” She rolls her eyes. I try to reason with her. “The driver is going too fast, Carly.”

“He's driven this road hundreds of times.”

This is how Carly manages unpleasantness—as calmly as possible. She closes her eyes, puts on music, tells herself the wild-eyed bus driver is capable, then zones out. My panicked need to assess the situation is not helping her, just like her attempts at oblivion are further agitating me.

I look for escape routes and then, in one final attempt to get her to understand the gravity, I whisper, “We. Are. Going. To. Die.”

“Okay, so we're going to die,” she snaps. “Just don't think about it.”

Is that seriously an answer?

Carly closes her eyes again, blocking me out.

Suddenly, I hate her, her insistence on being the bravest and baddest, on doing everything the most dangerous way on principle. I hate that she's such a know-it-all and that she thinks her Spanish is better than mine. I hate that she's always clarifying to people we meet, “Well,
she's
American.
I'm
Australian,” as if I'm supposed to apologize for where I was born. I even hate her face, her superior, upturned button nose.

What murderous thoughts must she be having of me in that moment? No doubt that I am painfully melodramatic, that I'm
annoyingly riddled with insecurities and anxieties. She probably thinks she made a mistake, that there is only so much you can do for a girl who claims she wants to see the world, then isn't willing to acknowledge what it takes to do that. She hates my face, too, I bet, my beady brown eyes and my chapped lips that I gnaw on when I'm nervous.

I stare out the window and down into the ravine. I cannot see the bottom because it is a tangle of green, the jungle growing in and among itself. It looks soft and welcoming. Maybe we will tumble, tumble, tumble slowly but never bang against the hidden floor. The green leaves will catch us.

But no. There is a bus behind us now, hurrying us through the mud. We swerve faster and faster around blind corners. I clutch the edge of my seat and dig my nails in to keep from crying. All of a sudden there are white lights and an oncoming truck racing toward us. All three drivers slam on their brakes, and we are thrown forward in our seats. Everyone is screaming. Our front wheel dangles over the edge of the cliff, and all we need is one tap from the madman behind us to send us the rest of the way. He stops just short of our back bumper. No one moves. When I turn to Carly, she has already wiped the fear from her eyes. She grins at me.