The Lunatic Express (4 page)

“I don’t know what all these people will do when the bridge is built,” said Vizcarra, dickering for a boat and captain. A pretty, brown-haired woman wearing Teva sandals (a mark of her travels outside of Puerto Maldonado), she waved her hand over the ferries and longboats as we slid into the current of the swollen river, the air heavy with humidity and the smell of smoke. The daughter of a high-school principal, she’d grown up in a village twenty-five miles east of Puerto Maldonado, but had been shipped off to live with an aunt in Lima for high school and college. “When I was little,” she said, “there was nothing here. It was a wild town and the road was terrible; it took us five hours to travel the twenty-five miles from our village to town.” We were going downstream and stayed where the current was strongest, right in the middle. The river was high, flooding banks tangled and overhanging with scrub, full of tree limbs and whirlpools. “Now, every day, more people come. We call them
colones
. All this, when I was little, was still primary forest cut with little trails where native people came to fish.” It was a disappearing world; loggers had taken the trees, and cattle ranchers had moved in afterwards. “There’s no mahogany left,” she said, as heavy, widely spaced drops of rain fell. “When I was little my father and I would walk through the forest looking for Brazil nuts, but now you’ve got to go seven hours upriver to find primary forest.”

We ground down the river, the engine roaring, for two hours. After so much time on buses, the river felt free, open, a wide, silvery brown pathway under a huge gray sky. But I was seeing it at its fullest in the rainy season; during the long, hot, dry summer, Vizcarra said, “it will be covered with miner’s dredges. Like a city at night.” The river divided around a flat, forested island. “It is full of black spider monkeys,” she said. “A man used to live on it and feed them and you could go and see them,” Vizcarra said, “but then he died and now it’s dangerous. The monkeys are aggressive and wild; they’ll bite you. It’s horrible!”

We swept around a bend, and ahead lay five gold-mining dredges rafted together, hard against the banks of the fast-moving river. Rodolfo Muñoz waved us aboard, glad, I think, for a distraction. Small and wiry and leprechaun-like, with green eyes and a helmet of black hair, Muñoz was a Bolivian who’d been going after gold for twenty-four years, since he was sixteen. The five boats shared a single cook, a woman in cutoff blue jeans, and his colleagues were from Brazil and Bolivia, all illegally in the country. His boat was sun-bleached, bare wood on two hulls—two simple beds, a one-burner gas stove and enamel basin, an outhouse, and a grinding, burning-hot, eight-cylinder diesel engine inhaling sediment from as deep as forty-five feet into the riverbed up onto a king-bed-sized sluice covered with gray carpet.

Six days a week, twenty hours a day, Muñoz worked the river, sucking up sediment and water that poured over the carpet, leaving a fine mud behind. He stopped at 4:00 p.m. on Sundays until nine on Monday morning. “On a good day,” he said in Spanish, 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 twenty hours. Now, gold is eighty-four
soles
($31) a gram; in a good week I get 120 to 140 grams.”

As big-headed and long-beaked banded kingfishers dived overhead, the sluices sparkled with round balls of mercury the size of skateboard wheel ball bearings. Muñoz 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. His was one barge; it was hard to imagine how much mercury was washing into the river every day during the busy dry season. From his bunk, curtained by a sheet of blue plastic, he fished out a small piece of paper wrapped around a silvery ball: five grams of gold.

Two men worked each boat; someone else 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.” Sometimes Muñoz had to dive into the underwater hole, sucking on an oxygen hose. “It’s dangerous,” he said, “because the hole is not wide and sometimes it collapses and you die. Only the pipe comes out, not the man. I’ve lost men in Bolivia, but not here.” He shrugged, grew quiet, looked down at his feet.

“Ever been robbed?” I said, imagining a wild-west scene of highway—or river—robbery.

“Only once,” Muñoz said. “A man stole my boat, but my friend saw it and we jumped in his boat and followed him, and I took it back.”

“What did you do to him?”

Muñoz smiled. “Nothing. I knew he did it because he was poor, and I felt his shame.”

The engine was deafening, and the humidity and heat were as heavy as a wool blanket. This was his life. “What else can I do?” he said. “It is peaceful here and I make eight hundred
soles
a week instead of eight hundred
soles
a month like I would if I had a job in town. We take a risk,” he said, “and hope for
buena suerte.”

When the road was finished, whenever that would be, Puerto Maldonado would roar louder. More timber. More gold. More tourists to see the rapidly disappearing jungle and its monkeys. I liked it now, I thought, as we pushed back upriver in the hot sun back to town. Soon it would need all the luck it could get.

A ferryboat carrying more than 100 passengers collided with a barge loaded with fuel tanks and sank to the bottom of the Amazon River on Thursday, officials said …

Rescue teams recovered the bodies of four children, five women and one man … and a check of the boat’s passenger manifest indicated nine people were still missing
.

—Los Angeles Times,
February 22, 2008

THREE
Your Time Comes or It Doesn’t

T
HE DEEPER INTO THE
A
MAZON
Basin you go, the fewer roads there are, until they give out entirely; rivers take over, and buses are replaced by boats. According to my map, if I headed due east from Puerto Maldonado I’d hit Rio Branco, Brazil, and then Puerto Velho, on the banks of the Madeira River, from which I hoped to catch a ferry 660 miles northeast to the jungle metropolis of Manaus. Amazon ferries sank with regularity; in the first three months of the year more than two dozen people had died in two separate incidents. But to get to the Madeira I had to cut a hundred miles east through the Peruvian Amazon, and there was only one option for getting there: shared taxis on roads that looked none too impressive on my map.

Tiptoeing around the mud of Puerto Maldonado, I caught a three-wheeled auto rickshaw to the Imperial Car Service. Inapari, the Peruvian border crossing, was supposed to be three hours away, but “the roads are horrible,” said the driver, a short fellow in a Buffalo Bills football jersey that came down to his knees. “Too much rain. Maybe we can do it in five hours.” I bought some crackers and bottled water and waited for the car—a white Toyota station wagon with plastic-covered seats and a red-and-yellow lightning bolt painted on its side—to fill up. Its tires were as bald as racing slicks. After forty-five minutes there were six of us piled in hip-to-hip, plus two men huddled in the back deck with no seats—and bumped through the streets and the puddles and down a concrete ramp to the river. We stepped out as the driver backed down a slippery dirt trail and then up two wooden planks barely wide enough for each tire, and onto the ferry. We crabbed across and piled in again on the other side, accelerating along a rutted, soaked red mud road with low green scrub on either side. The air was sweet and smoky and wet, the sky filled with low gray clouds, and the car slid and swerved, mud spattering so hard and high I had to roll my window up.

My fellow passengers were mute. We killed a dog, a quick thump, and the driver laughed. We skidded past horsemen and small farms and giant ficus trees, and I spotted a hawk perched high above the road. At every river, big concrete pilings were rising from the banks, while we inched across narrow, one-lane wooden bridges. Soon, when the bridges were finished and the road paved, this would be a highway, but now it was still the outer reaches of the known world. I was happy; nothing but mud and rain and big wet sky, with no idea of where I was heading, save my vague notion of catching a boat that I wasn’t sure even existed. I felt a building exhilaration, with little loneliness. It should have been the opposite, but this deep frontier fed my romantic soul. I liked the idea of a place so vast and unexplored that, as the legendary British travel writer Peter Fleming wrote in his 1934
Brazilian Adventure
, “You can believe what you like …; no one has the authority to contradict you. You can postulate the existence of prehistoric monsters, of white Indians, of ruined cities, of enormous lakes.” There were people not far away who had never seen a telephone or computer. Macaws and parrots, jaguars and sloths. Who cared if I couldn’t see them from the road? Just knowing they were out there felt good. This was the kind of place I’d learned to love, and feel at home in, during all my years of traveling. To be discovering a world, to be thriving in a place without connections, made me feel free. And out here I had to be alert all the time, focused, watching my back even as I roared across a dirt road with no idea where it would lead.

We pulled into Inapari at 4:30 p.m. under a light rain, after six hours of hard driving through the relentless, sticky, flying mud. The town was a single square surrounded by wooden clapboard houses and more mud; a sign announced that the Atlantic Ocean was 3,908 kilometers away, the Pacific 1,874. Alone in the middle of nowhere, I got out of the car and stood in the rain. A pregnant feral dog slinked by. Chickens pecked at the edges of puddles. I wasn’t sure what to do; Inapari didn’t look like much of a place to hang around. A man approached me; he looked different. Tall, broad-shouldered, but pale-skinned, with black jeans and pointy-toed loafers. “Asis?” he said. That was the name of the town across the river, in Brazil.

“Any hotels here?” I said in Spanish. He didn’t understand, and I realized he was Brazilian and spoke Portuguese, not Spanish.

“Taxi?” he said, pointing to a small white station wagon. His taxi was spotless, with newspapers spread across the carpet, and before crossing the border he tanked up on gasoline siphoned from a bucket. When he offered to take me all the way to Rio Branco in the fading light, I agreed, and I fell asleep on the fast, straight, paved roads of what just two decades ago was remote Amazon jungle, foreshadowing Peru’s future. In Rio Branco I caught another bus and arrived in Puerto Velho at four in the morning, falling onto the thin mattress exhausted, in a concrete room across from the bus station.

I was so tired I couldn’t sleep, though, and thought of Lawrence Osborne’s words: “A journey is never a simple thing. The hitches and the boredom, the missed connections and empty hours are the price for leaving one’s real life and entering an unreal one.” Right now I was nowhere and everywhere, alone and foreign and unsettled in never-ending movement. It was raw travel that was stripping everything to the bone and tearing away my leftover anxieties. When you travel you imagine leaving your old self behind. But hunger, fatigue, the aches and pains of life in a bus seat, only show you the real you—there’s never any escape from yourself. And that’s no small thing. It was just me, and over the past few years I felt like I’d gotten so twisted up in multiple lives of trying to be different for different people, it was sometimes hard to remember who I was. Out here I could just be myself, happy, self-reliant, content, exactly where I belonged. Osborne was saying this was an unreal life, and maybe it was—I certainly couldn’t do it forever. But it was also the opposite, real, a reminder that happiness wasn’t all the external comforts but just there, within myself.

.    .    .

I
N THE MORNING
I tumbled out of my concrete hotel and flagged a taxi. “Take me to the river,” I said, “to the docks.” It was hot, humid, cloudless, the sun glaring and burning on top of my head. We wound through haphazard streets and blocks and squeezed down an unpaved road as full of people as a fair, stopping at the river’s edge. Literally: it was so high it overflowed its banks, muddy water lapping onto the street. As everywhere in places that were poor, I didn’t have to search or wonder and I was never lost; I stepped out of the taxi and was assaulted by touts for every service I might ever need. “Manaus?” shouted a man in bare feet and a muscle shirt.

He grabbed my arm and we trotted onto a series of wooden planks over the water and mud, out to a lovely sight: Tied to rotting wooden rafts floated the
Altamonte Moreira VII
, 100 feet of wooden Amazon river boat. She was three decks tall, all elegant curves and upturned bow, with a graceful sheer-line and a low waist ending in a rounded stern. “We sail at two p.m.,” said the captain, a bulky man in flip-flops and loose shorts, sitting at a folding table collecting money, as an army of men bearing crates of tomatoes and giant sacks of potatoes ran up and down the narrow gangplanks. “Seventy dollars to hang your hammock and three meals a day.” The journey would take three days.

I raced back to my hotel, checked out, bought a hammock and some rope, and was there by noon. A bit late, as it turned out—the
Moreira
was filling up fast. The first deck, just two feet above the water, was one open space stacked with crates and sacks; I had to weave my way through narrow passageways between them, and they unnerved me. They must have weighed tons. The second deck, open too, was a tangle of hammocks tied to the rafters; they were next to each other and above each other; I tied mine among the tangles, only inches to spare above and next to me.

The top deck was open, except for a roofed bar area with a few tables and plastic chairs, and the party was already cranking. The sky was high and wide and epic, the breeze like a big-bladed fan on low, the double-time beat of accordion-fused samba coursing through from a pair of three-foot-high speakers. Two women were dancing, swaying their hips like their spines were worms, around a table heavy with empty beer cans. Ten little kids ran around the deck, and two played naked under an outdoor shower spigot. “What’s your name? Where are you from?” asked Irma. She had long black hair, skintight blue jeans, and a belly that hung five inches over her waist.

Off to one side swayed a black cowboy with green eyes, wearing cowboy boots and high-waisted jeans with a huge metal buckle and a ten-gallon hat. He looked like he needed a horse. “This is the best boat,” said Roberto, an agricultural economist in a polo shirt and loafers. “The food is good and there’s a lot of it and there are a lot of women!”

It was like I’d stumbled into a dormitory on the first day of college. Irma, Val, Kleyton, Lucia, and Antonio were dancing and drinking and none of them had ever met each other before. Irma slipped off her wedding ring and slid it onto her right hand. Antonio, already shirtless, did the same. Kleyton smiled, clapped me on the back, and said, “All Brazilians think about is sex!”

“We’re not leaving until seven,” said Val, who had two huge dimples and was almost bursting out of her halter top.

I bought them all a round of beers and settled in, and at five the engines started rumbling and we pushed away from the dock. But out in the current we stopped, going nowhere. Aluminum johnboats sped out, full of men. “Look,” said Carlos, an older man from Venezuela. “There is supposed to be a line down there, the waterline.”

I peered over the rail and saw nothing. “Yes,” he said, “You can’t see it. We are overloaded!”

He was a former accountant from Caracas who’d taken up long river trips in his retirement. He’d been on enough ships to be worried. In late February, just a month before, the
Altamonte Montiero
(a carbon copy of the
Moreira)
also en route to Manaus, had struck a fuel barge during the darkness of a lunar eclipse. No one knew exactly how many people were on board, but the
Monteiro
rolled and sank, killing at least eighteen. Three months later another ferry, carrying eighty, overturned in a rainstorm, killing fifteen.

It took an hour to sort out; instead of offloading cargo to reduce the boat’s overloading, money exchanged hands. Disaster films are filled with ominous foreshadowing: dramatic music plays; the camera lingers on, say, the payoff. But this was the stuff of everyday life. It was utterly banal and commonplace, hardly even worth mentioning. Until, that is, a storm rolls in or two boats collide and tragedy ensues. On these riverboats it was usually those sleeping in the tiny, hot windowless cabins toward the bow who drowned, as had happened on the
Monteiro
. The Venezuelan shrugged and made the sign of the cross. There was nothing to be done about it; we would be in God’s hands. As the sun dipped low we finally eased down the wide, silver-brown river.

There’s nothing better than the vibration of a ship’s engines gently surging underfoot. It’s the sound of travel, a long journey. The Madeira was a mile wide and seemed to go on forever. I had grown up sailing on Chesapeake Bay, had a sailboat on the Potomac River now, and I was struck, not for the first time, by the idea of the earth defined and dominated by water, the continents but islands in a great pool of liquid that is more the original road than any highway. From here we could float to the Amazon, from the Amazon to the Atlantic; from the Atlantic we could go anywhere. Deep in the jungle, I still felt strangely connected to everywhere. And though roads are, by definition, new constructs, rivers flow as they always have; here in the Amazon Basin, as we slid past wild green banks and forest, it couldn’t have looked too different from what Francisco de Orellana had seen along the Amazon itself in 1542.

Night falls quickly on the Equator; one minute it was sunny, the next it was dark, the Southern Cross low in the sky and the Milky Way thick overhead, the blackness of the river and its unpopulated banks impenetrable. Heat lightning flashed along the horizon, and I played a simple card-slapping game with Kleyton and five kids. But after the afternoon’s beer, sun, and heat, we were all suddenly exhausted. Irma and Val stopped dancing and plunked down on plastic chairs. Kleyton disappeared. And I ducked and shimmied under hammocks and swaying bodies and slid into my scrap of hanging cloth. It was a long night. Bodies above me and beside me pressed and bumped into me every time one of us shifted. The boat rumbled. My rear end touched the floor. The night grew damp and cool; I threw on extra shirts but couldn’t stop shivering. In the middle of the night I awoke to find us docked, a line of men throwing whole frozen fish, one by one like cut wood, from a truck into the hold.

A Klaxon sounded at six a.m., signaling breakfast, and again at eleven and five, for lunch and dinner. We ate around a long table, twenty at a time, big bowls of rice and beans and noodles and chicken, with copious amounts of farina and homemade hot sauce, finished with black coffee as sweet and thick as ice cream. No one spoke; we shoveled it in and hurried out for the next group standing in two lines on either side of the door. We dozed in our hammocks. We paused at villages where crowds of people nearly sank the floating docks, and took on sacks of charcoal, bags of ice, motorcycles, pots and pans, and people. At one village the sound of our Klaxon was answered by a string of firecrackers. We passed miles and miles and hours and hours of nothing but a tangle of green trees. Sometimes we were but a few yards from the riverbank; at others we were midstream, amid a swirl of languid currents and floating islands of water hyacinth. The river held no buoys, no markers; navigation was by intuition and experience. We played cards and read; we drank too much beer; we baked in the sun. We observed each other. Not for one second was I bored.