The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (31 page)

“I'm getting off,” I tell her through clenched teeth, as if this is all her fault. I step into the aisle.

Annoyance flickers across her face. “Yeah,” she says, closing her eyes again. “And then what? We're in the middle of nowhere.”

She's right, of course. The only thing I can do is sit back down, defeated, pop my last sleeping pill (the one I was saving to numb the plane ride home), and drift into a drugged sleep for the next twelve hours.

When I wake up, I am surprisingly clearheaded. A simple epiphany rings in my brain: I do not have to be Carly. I realize my
hesitance over meeting up with her in South America was partly that it would inevitably lead to activities that would scare the pants off me but not her. Yet I've never given myself credit for doing those things in the first place or acknowledged that they are more difficult for me than for Carly—that she has inched outside her comfort zone while I've skydived out of mine. All I've felt up until this moment is guilt for not living up to the challenges as well as Carly always does. Hers has become another expectant voice in my head, like my parents'. Her values differ greatly, of course, but the imperatives are still there. My instinct is, as with my parents, to please her, but although I love to travel, I am not a die-hard adventurer, and that's okay. Alternatively, I'm not ready to settle down in the predictable existence my parents have plotted. I'm somewhere in between. And only I can figure out how to make this balance work.

For now, I realize, it's unfair to blame Carly when things go wrong or are scary. I chose to be here, in part to test myself, and this involves inherent risks I cannot hold Carly accountable for. Who you are when you are tested might not be pretty, but it's always real.

Rurrenabaque sits at the edge of the Amazon basin, with a population of fifteen thousand. It's a more difficult, remote entry point into the Amazon than from Brazil, so it's less developed and less overrun with travelers, too.

We pay twenty bolivianos for a cell-like room without a private bath, though the water is currently off due to the massive floods that prevented any buses after ours from making it here today. We're so wiped from the tense trip—Carly didn't sleep at all, and I'm still groggy from the sleeping pill—that when no one knocks with sheets for our twin beds, as promised, we simply spread our sarongs across them and pass out for the next four hours.

After our lengthy nap, we set off into town to book a jungle tour. Scores of tour operators line the main street, and we spend the afternoon comparing and haggling. Everything in Bolivia is negotiable, but if a salesperson has the opportunity to rip you off,
he will. It's the way it goes here, nothing personal, but it can be annoying finding out that someone else paid significantly less for the same good or service. It just doesn't seem fair, and Carly and I bristle at the discrepancies. At the same time, we're never quite comfortable with the process of bargaining. On one hand, we want to be like the locals—and the locals haggle. But we know even on our measly budgets, we're privileged, comparatively, and is it conscionable to spend ten minutes convincing a vendor to give us something for one U.S. dollar less than the asking price? In the end, we opt for a four-day jungle tour that costs the equivalent of twenty-five U.S. dollars per day with gear, meals, and transport included. It's not exactly the disappearing act of many weeks Carly hoped for, but it's a start.

That night we chow down on the cheapest, most delicious meal. Although Rurrenabaque boasts a handful of tourist restaurants serving familiar fare like burritos and pizzas, we have decided to follow a line of locals around the corner to a tucked-away side street. We find it difficult to communicate here because almost everyone speaks Quechan or Aymara, so our limited Spanish is of little use, but when we reach the front of the line, nothing can be lost in translation. One meal is on offer: succulent pieces of moist chicken torn from a rotating spit and accompanied by greasy banana fries, all for a grand total of under one U.S. dollar. We pull up a piece of sidewalk next to the others with their unwrapped meals on their knees and dig our fingers into the oily dinner.

Although we desperately need a good night's sleep, we are out of luck because it's El Día del Padre, Father's Day. This is not the brunch-and-golf-themed-gifts variety of the holiday. Here the ritual seems to be drink, karaoke, fight—in that order. Our room shares a flimsy wall with a raucous karaoke bar whose entrance is plastered with glossy posters of pouty blond women with bare breasts and heads thrown back in ecstasy as they croon into a microphone because, really, what woman doesn't come to Bolivia to
sing topless? It's so noisy next door that we might as well be in there with them. I check my ticking travel clock first at twelve-thirty
A.M.,
then three. The last time I look, it's five-thirty in the morning. Two of the singers are arguing loudly in the street outside our window. Carly claims it's because one of them butchered the other's favorite song, but their words are so slurred, I can't translate anything.

At six-thirty I drag myself out of bed and into an icy shower. On our way to the tour operator's office, we pass a street parade. Boys in camouflage uniforms cradling rifles stride by. They are the new army recruits, and this is their first day of service. One blows Carly a kiss, his face serious and sincere.

In typical Bolivian fashion, we are on our way three hours after our scheduled time. We board a motorized canoe and wind down the muddy waters of the Río Beni into the Amazon. Our tour companions turn out to be the annoying Brits from Coroico who had an even hairier bus ride because they not only had to convince their driver to slow down but also politely request that he quit taking swigs from his flask.

“Eso no importa,”
he assured them.
“Estoy con dios,”
which means “I'm with God,” apparently leaving only those who were not with something to worry about.

We're put out that they're here, after we've braved the Death Road to get to this faraway spot. We don't think they belong, though we don't question whether we ourselves should be in this remote area untouched by tourism until recently. As hard as we've tried to be respectful, eager travelers—and to distance ourselves from those who are not—no doubt the tour guide motoring our canoe has no need for such distinctions among his customers.

Despite our initial snobbery, we grow to like most of the Brits, which is its own tidy lesson about jumping to conclusions. The only obnoxious one is the belly floater, a truck driver named Dan. He's traveled everywhere but seems to have gained nothing
other than anecdotal evidence for his theory on why everyone else is inferior to the English. He drinks from sunrise past sundown, a red plastic cup filled with vodka his permanent appendage.

A middle-aged British couple is also part of our group. Are Kevin and Anne married? you want to know.

“She's no wife of mine!” Kevin bellows good-naturedly when I ask. He seems pleased with himself, as though he has managed something rather miraculous, and Anne doesn't appear fazed in the slightest by the outburst. But they've been together going on a decade and they look alike, as some couples tend to after time. Both are tall and lanky. Their hair is the same dusty-brown shade. And they wear matching hiking boots, pants, and shirts.

Carly and I nickname them the Wild Thornberrys because they remind us so much of that comically inquisitive cartoon family. Each time our guide, Melvin, points out some new plant, Kevin and Anne bend over and press their noses against it. They interrogate the stranger with deep, pensive inhalations.

“Smell that, Anne?” Kevin will say each time.

“Ohhhhh, yeeeees!” Anne will respond enthusiastically.

“What does this plant do?” Kevin always wants to know. Then he will mention how this particular foliage reminds him of some herb they came across in South Africa or maybe a tree they once encountered in Guatemala.

Kevin and Anne are extremely well traveled. Right before this tour, they were working with traumatized monkeys in another part of Bolivia. Before that, at a wildlife refuge in Peru, a puma tore a deep gash in Kevin's left leg, a rather gaping wound that he rubs ointment on a few times a day. It was Kevin's job to walk the injured puma as part of a rehab program, when he got startled and attacked one day.

“I hold no grudge against the old boy,” he tells us. “No, no, I don't think he meant any harm.”

In between their excursions, Anne is an aromatherapist and
Kevin works in construction. Given their jobs, as with the younger Brits (a truck driver and a few teachers and bartenders), I am surprised they can travel for so long, but it's all about priorities for these two. Plus, it doesn't hurt to be making pounds and spending bolivianos.

Our guide Diego's uniform is a pair of camouflage pants with a machete tucked in his waistband and a sleeveless red Adidas shirt. A wood cross dangles from his neck. His exposed arms seem immune to the bug bites that plague me and Carly. As he shows us around the campsite, he has only to extend a finger into the surrounding bush in order to point out each of the inhabitants that lie in wait. He teaches us about a species of ant whose bite inflicts twenty-four hours of misery, a nasty little creature that would give even his Australian brother the bull ant a run for his money. Diego details a variety of toxic plants. He sniffs out tracks of a tapir—a piglike animal with a short, prehensile snout. Diego is a master of jungle ingenuity who spins twigs into an elaborate water-bottle carrier when he notices I need one. Best of all, he finds me and Carly massive vines from which to swing through the trees like Tarzan.

Our basic campsite consists of a few picnic tables, a fire pit, and an enclosed structure with several rows of bunk beds, each pair draped in mosquito nets. The bathroom is a hole in the ground enclosed in four splintered wooden walls, open to the elements at the top. When it rains—and it rains a lot in the jungle—you rather efficiently have a shower and use the toilet simultaneously.

Our second day, Diego takes us fishing. The makeshift gear consists of a branch with a piece of twine and hook attached. Miraculously, I catch a catfish right away, a success that annoys Carly for several satisfying hours. She's not the only one with a competitive side.

“Do you want to eat it for lunch?” Diego asks.

“Don't mind if I do,” I say proudly.

With that, he whacks it on the head with startling force, then stuffs it in a plastic bag.

Our fondness for Diego is tested by his constant attempts to make contact with our bodies, relentlessly offering a hand to escort us over any stray twig in our path, say, or randomly putting an arm around our shoulders. He often displays a frustrating macho bravado. For example, on the walk back from fishing, we pass directly below a wasps' nest. Diego marches past unscathed, but I'm second in line when the inhabitants notice our intrusion and set about declaring their displeasure by excitedly stinging my face and neck. I cry out in shock and pain, whereupon my knight in camo armor rushes to my aid, then proceeds to stand calmly beside me and look as though an important thought has just escaped him, while I continue swatting furiously at my face. After a few contemplative moments, he brandishes his machete and offers to avenge me.

“No!” I yelp. I've gotten blindly away from the wasps and am not eager to incite them further. “I'm okay.”

Carly checks out the damage. It's minimal enough. In a final show of victory, Diego spits at the nest and gestures grandly for us to follow him back to camp.

The mosquitoes here are fat and nasty, bulging with blood. While at home, they magnanimously stick to feeding on exposed skin, here they have no problem chomping at you through clothing. Even when I wear layers, I feel the occasional sting just out of reach in the small of my back or behind my knee. My whole body is riddled with bites. After we get back to Rurrenabaque, the locals gasp,
“¡Dios mio!”
when they catch a glimpse of my ravaged skin, in this case Spanish for “Yo, your shit is seriously fucked up, lady, and we
live
here.” Even though they are relatively immune to the bites, they have seen plenty of backpackers who aren't, and apparently, I take the mosquito-ridden cake.

Our third day in the jungle Carly and I head to the river. It's our only hope of washing away at least a little of the pungent
odor that has begun to emanate from us. We make our way in shorts and bras down the small embankment where our canoe is docked, mosquitoes feasting in droves on our naked flesh. You can't call what we do swimming so much as clinging to the shore while the lower halves of our bodies are jerked downstream by a surprisingly strong current. When we emerge, a row of new bites marks the skin exposed above the waterline. Some of the bites are from sand flies, horrible little creatures whose marks leave a telltale spot of blood in the center like a target. They itch like chicken pox on crack.

In the jungle, we're all hopped up on malaria tablets. Even Carly (who to this day refuses to admit she took them) gratefully accepts a few extras I have in my pack after the agent who booked our spots on the tour made it sound as though the whole jungle is festering with the disease. Each of us is coping with the powerful drugs in different ways. Anne is a little dizzy. I have terrible insomnia, kicking around in bed until three or four
A.M.
while trying not to disrupt the tightly tucked-in mosquito net. Kevin loses his appetite. For Carly, colors are brighter. The greens of the jungle glow almost psychedelic; the river glimmers like the Pacific. And we all have unnervingly vivid dreams. I dream—a common enough one for stress cases like me—that I am in a play and don't know my lines. But the stakes are somehow higher, the audience bigger, the sense that I am really there more palpable. I wake in a cold sweat after dawn, the sounds of the jungle greeting a new day intermingled with Diego's thunderous, echoing farts.