African Mountains- 2 Spiritual Experiences

African Mountains

At the end of 1966 I had my first real significant encounter with someone who helped show me my path. It shook me up considerably  and set me irrevocably on the road to an adventuring life. He was Martin Rasini, an Englishman who had travelled overland from Egypt to South Africa. In those days it was possible to travel fairly safely by land in Africa as long as you didn’t hold a South African passport. Meeting Martin and his fellow travellers blew my mind. They lived a communal life in a rented house in Avondale road in Sydenham Johannesburg.

Martin turned me on to Marijuana, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, the Kabbalah, the Bagavad Gita, the 1812 Overture when stoned etc, and most significantly, to esoteric concepts based on idea that we have at least two selves: an inner self which he called the essence which is eternal, and a personality which I form to maintain my physical self. These selves he called the Essence and the Ideal, and identified 24 types of people by symbolically combining the esoteric meanings of the four elements: water, air, earth and fire. This was my first encounter with an esoteric system  in a systematic form, which attempts to define the inner self separately from the personality and the body.

My meeting with these free spirited adventurers shattered forever the false and safe Johannesburg suburban middle class world I was living in. I was confused, enthused, and dazzled. I grappled to understand this avalanche from my narrow materialistic ‘white’ viewpoint. I couldn’t. But I knew that I had  received a great gift and that I had to  start a journey and that living at home, getting a degree and settling down to a career was not part of it. My first step was to leave home, which I did. I moved to a university hostel called Knockando on the top of Parktown Ridge in the older part of the city, where I made two good friends: Terry Volbrecht and Willem van der Walt.

I still continued at University, but the restlessness that had by now irrevocably gripped by soul made me drop out before finishing my BA. So a the end of 1969 I decided to join Terry, Willem and Alison (Terry’s wife) in a rented house which they had taken after graduating in Landsdowne Road in Cape Town. This was the first time I had left home permanently, so I suppose I can count it as the beginning of a continuous ‘adventuring’ life which took me to unfamiliar places and which was to continue for another 20 years. I remember telling my mother of my decision to leave my home town of Johannesburg when I visited her in a nursing home where she was recovering from a hysterectomy. She had had a bad time as she was anaemic and had bled. She gave me her blessing.

But before leaving for Cape Town I had had the following two mind blowing (the reader can judge) experiences.

View from the Top of Northcliff Hill

                                                             Northcliff Hill

I had been reading Aldous Huxley’s essay ‘The Doors of Perception’. One part in particular resonated. After taking mescaline Huxley recalls how he walked to the bottom of the garden, and saw the flowers as if for the first time. I wondered if it would be possible to induce such a state of wonder without drugs. Then I had the following experience (From a blue note book I kept at the time):

‘There is a peculiar thing about Johannesburg weather in August. By day the wind blows warm and strong and dry and people talk of spring. But at night there is only a great stillness, unmoved by frost or wind or humidity, a flat nothingness. A state of no weather.

It was on a night such as this in 1967 that Terry, Willem and I decided to go walking on Northcliff Hill, a quartzite promontory looming 200-300 metres above the North Western suburbs of Johannesburg and which forms part of the Witwatersrand Ridge. It is Johannesburg’s highest point at 1800 metres.

I don’t know why I wanted to go there that night. Perhaps consciously to see a different view of Johannesburg than what I was used to from my room in the College of Education hostel on Parktown Ridge. We parked the car and walked along the top of the hill, talking, jabbering and kidding each other in our youthful exuberance. There are no bushes on top of the hill, just short tufts of grass interspersing large white quartz boulders. We wandered aimlessly around for a while and then decided to follow a dirt track across the top, drawn like all men are to ‘the other side of the mountain'.

On the north side, the view was slightly different. The boulders were bigger, the plain below more distant and emptier with fewer lights. At this point something came over us. We stopped chattering and sat down in silence on the big white rocks. As time passed I realised that to break the silence would have been a sort of desecration. But of what? I didn’t know then if the others were having the same kind of experience. I tried to reach out into the darkness, but only sensed vague frustration.

Then Huxley’s observation came back to me. I started gazing at a boulder in front of me, shining whitely in the full moon. An idea came. ‘Try to forget all the concepts you have created to contain this object, to make it ‘safe’, I told myself. ‘Try to see it as if for the first time’. So I start repeating over and over again the words, ‘rock’ ‘hard’, ‘shiny’, ‘white’, ‘quartz’ until after a while, as what happens after constant repetition ,they lost their meaning. But if the labels, the comfortable labels we attach to keep the external world under control had disappeared, the boulder, the object was still there. I realised I was seeing ‘it,’ ‘something’, for the first time.

The ‘rock’ started vibrating before my eyes, as if it was alive. I was overwhelmed by a sense of primeval menace, and also of supreme indifference as I was to experience in the Lesotho Mountains five months later( see the next story ‘No Knife no Matches’). Then not only the rock, but the whole mountain and the plain below me started shimmering. I realised that I was seeing it all ‘for the first time’. And it was very different. But this was too much to sustain. I felt really scared, so I started to hastily reconstruct everything with my conscious mind. ‘This is just a quartz boulder, I am on Northcliff Hill. Those are house lights below’ etc. Then when I felt more ‘normal’ I got up and the other two mutely followed me to the car.

If we communicated with each other on the journey home, it was not by word, yet I had a feeling of unity with all life that I dimly recalled having with the world as a child. So we drove the ten or so kilometres back to the residence in silence. It was only when we were getting out the car in the familiar parking lot and Willem said ‘I wonder if one should have such an experience often’, that we jerked back into our usual confused excitable voluble 19 year old selves.

Strangely, although we usually shared everything that happened to us, we never spoke to each other of our experiences on Northcliff Hill. It was as if we each realised that in order to preserve something important to each of us, we had to keep our silence.’

Postscript

42 years later I read Jill Bolte Taylor’s book ‘My Stroke of Insight'. Dr Taylor, had had a stroke which temporarily totally incapacitated her left brain function. Her description of how she perceived the world around her is identical to how I perceived the rock: ‘I perceived people (doctors and nurses) as concentrated packages of energy’ (My Stroke of Insight- Jill Bolte Taylor -Hodder and Stoughton 2008). I am convinced that by repeating over and over the ‘labels’ I knew to define the rock, I temporarily suspended my left brain function by making its categories meaningless, and therefore ‘saw' with the right brain.

Five months later I had the following adventure in the mountains of Lesotho which taught me several life lessons, some of which I understood immediately.

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Lesotho Highlands . Typical Landscape I Hiked Through on the First part of my Journey 

                                   No Knife, No Matches

‘There are times in your life when you know you must cast yourself into the unknown with nothing in your hands and let destiny take care of you. You will always learn something valuable and unexpected.’ (Kenedal)

‘When fear is present one cannot communicate. It blinds, smothers expression of all other emotions and thoughts. To cut behind that veil, and softly touch the stranger’s mind, to share its joys and sorrows…’ (Softly Touch the Stranger’s Mind -Amalia Andujar, published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Oct 1978.)

This account is only from memory. I was twenty when it happened and not yet of an age where I felt the need to record at the time what was happening to me, or to reflect on its meaning. I only recently realized the significance of this trip when I recounted the story 40 years later in 2008 to Shaheed Ndongeni, who persuaded me to write it down.

It was mid January 1968, the height of the summer. I was on vacation during my first abortive attempt to get a University degree. I was relishing those warm almost hot days on the Highveld (high plains of Eastern South Africa) with their clear blue skies above the green trees and lawns of Northern Johannesburg. It is a time when the city was at its most beautiful, and the streets quietest, when its wealthier white inhabitants had left for their summer holidays for the less fine humid tropical summer weather of coastal Natal, or hot dry windy Cape Town, and the black proletariat who served them, for their ‘homes’ in bush areas unknown and unimagined to most whites. It is an electric time when one waits for the almost inevitable build up of vast white fluffy clouds and the increasing humidity presaging the afternoon thunderstorm.

Justin, a university friend, had secured a holiday job at a diamond mine in the Lesotho highlands, 300 kms to the south, and invited me to accompany him there for a week’s break. The mine is called L’tseng Terai. It is in the middle of the Lesotho highlands. I remember little of it, but much of what happened after. We drove there in a Land Rover in pouring rain through the rolling green grasslands and maize fields of the North Eastern Free State, and then ascended a bad dirt road through the Maluti Mountains onto the mis-nomered Lesotho Plateau. Mis-nomered because it isn’t flat at all, but consists of steep slopes and deeply incised valleys. I remember mud and mist everywhere, and being cold at almost 3000 metres, sleeping on a foam mattress in a bunk in a small building on the mine, with the rain drumming steadily on the zinc roof. I stayed a few days.  And then was told that the relentless rain had rendered the road impassable and that I couldn’t get back to Johannesburg by mine vehicle the next day as planned.

I had told myself that the reason I had to return was to get back to Johannesburg to register for university. But I believe that the rain came (or I came to the rain), to give me the opportunity to have a consciousness raising experience, one of those critical happenings that stand out like beacons in our lives and enable us thereafter to dimly trace our own spiritual evolution if we are open to them.

Justin and I then decided that if I couldn’t drive north to Leribe, the way we had come by Land Rover, I could walk northeast and over the Drakensberg Mountains into Natal, the shortest way back into South Africa. This meant hiking across an uninhabited landscape of breathtaking steep heights and valleys with no roads and few tracks. After two days walk, I would be at the mountaineer’s hut beside Mont aux Sources, the highest mountain in South Africa from where one looks out over a sheer 1500m drop known as the Amphitheatre onto the lush plains of Natal. The Tugela is one of the major rivers of South Africa which has its source at Mount Aux Sources, leaping the almost sheer drop into Natal in a series of cascades known as the Tugela Falls. Another major river which has its source on the west slope of the mountain is the Orange, known as the Sinqu in Lesotho. In the next couple of days I was to experience these two rivers as little streams, as I drank from them, straddled them, and stepped back and forth across them. Then from the mountain hut I would take the trail down, a 22km hike around the north side of the amphitheatre, doubling back into the Royal Natal National Park, from where I would try to hitchhike back to Johannesburg.

That was the plan. The next day the weather cleared but the road was still impassable. Justin gave me a 1:50 000 map and I was confident I would be able to steer my way across its uninhabited face by tracing my course on the watersheds. He lent me his back pack, and with optimistic faith in my youthful immortality, for a three day hike I only took a sleeping bag, a packet of rusks (dry coffee biscuits) and three small cans of tomato juice. No knife, no matches.

And so I set out. I was immediately assailed by the vast emptiness of the landscape. There was no sign of human habitation. The steep slopes were covered by green tuft grass; there were innumerable sponges or small bogs becoming streams. The sky was vast and blue, the breeze cool almost chilly. And there were no sounds apart from it. Not even birds. I found myself talking to myself, puzzling things out. And after a few hours I realized I was talking aloud and answering myself, to shut out what I realised was loneliness. I had never before been so long out of reach of human references. I felt a bit desperate I think, and started noticing the mountains. Mystics say that when you drop the labels from objects or landscapes, they start to live, to vibrate. Well this happened unconsciously to me. Suddenly the mountains around were alive, but in a serenely uncaring inhuman way, as if they were saying: ‘We’ve been here hundreds  of millions of years. What are you to us, a mere flea crawling across our bosom?’ This was frightening to me. I tried to sing to myself, hum tunes, anything to keep their mocking presence at bay.

This went on all day. That night I slept under an outcrop and woke up shivering in the morning, my sleeping bag sodden with dew. But I had to go on. The landscape was getting steeper, and I found the trail that would take me to Mont Aux Sources. I stumbled on in anticipation. I realized I had taken far too little food with me. I had drunk one tomato juice and three rusks the day before (after a good breakfast). Today? Another tomato juice and three rusks, after no breakfast, was all I had to eat. And tomorrow would be the same.

All morning the clouds had been building. I identified the Orange River on the map as a small stream flowing towards me, and the trail seemed to follow it towards its source. I remember resting on its bank, woefully eating my rusk ration and sipping handfuls of water, when suddenly the mist came down the mountains and enveloped me.

Lesotho man like Thomas as I remember him

Now I had been warned not to ever go wandering around in the mist in the mountains, and this time I obeyed the warning. I sat shivering on a rock, wondering when it was going to lift and feeling so lonely and alienated, I thought I was losing my mind. Then I saw a shape coming towards me through the mist. It was a dark triangular shadow, and was drifting slowly some feet above the ground. I stared at it in fear and wonder. Had I perhaps wandered off the path, fallen off a cliff and was now in some sort of purgatory, seeing wraiths and ghosts? Or was I still alive, but mortally injured and was this the angel of death approaching? The shape drifted closer, and I saw it resembled a man on a pony. A man dressed in traditional Basotho garb, a blanket over his shoulders and a pointed wide conical woven straw hat on his head. He stopped before me and in a deep voice asked me in English if I believed in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

So this was it, I thought. I was dead and this was an angel come to test me.

Then I noticed that he wore dirty sandals and had withdrawn a tattered bible from under his blanket, and with it a half eaten loaf of bread. ‘Strange Angel!’ I thought. He repeated his question, and offering me a handful of bread, told me his name was Thomas. I realized that I was hungry. So that meant I wasn’t dead?

Thomas told me that he had heard about the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth from the Jehovah Witnesses when he worked on a mine near Johannesburg. He took my back pack onto his pony and  we walked together up the trail; two men, a human island surrounded by mist and mountain, drifting up the west slope of Mount Aux Sources discussing God and destiny and utopia. When we got to the top, the trail divided. He took the left fork to go to his brothers who were herding their sheep nearby; I took the right fork which descended gently to the mountain hut, a roughly built one room building with a mud floor covered in dirty straw, where I was to spend the night. From there it is only about 200m to the edge of the amphitheatre. It was late afternoon. I left my backpack in the hut and went outside.

The mist had cleared and the sun shone behind me as I walked towards the amphitheatre rim hoping to sight the famous view. I stepped over a small stream, (the Tugela River), and approached the edge.

But there was no view. Only a wall of mist welling up from below.

And then for the second time that day I saw a grey triangular shape; this time it was imprinted on the wall of mist. It had a small round ‘head’ on top, and above the head was a rainbow coloured arc.

I stood gaping in amazement. Again I thought that perhaps I had fallen over the edge, and here was a much more plausible angel; it had at least half a halo. But when I looked back, I could see the hut behind me. So I concluded that I must be alive .When I turned around again it had gone, and so had the sun, and the hut and I was enveloped in mist, a few metres from the edge of the amphitheatre edge.

The figure I had seen was my own shadow on the mist, the sun being behind me. I have since heard mountaineers tell of this phenomenon, a rare and beautiful sight. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I desperately wanted to see it again. So I started walking around in the mist, forgetting all the advice I had been given. I don’t know how long I wandered, probably only a few minutes, then the mist cleared, and I saw I was heading for the edge, two steps from oblivion. Heart pounding ,I turned around and sighting the hut made for it with all speed, (jumping again unthinking over the Tugela) as if a thousand angels or devils were at my heels. ‘Enough shocks for one day’, I thought, and wrapping myself in my sleeping bag on the dirty straw floor, tried to go to sleep. But I was due for one more experience, which was to signal what was to happen the next day.

Suddenly I woke up. There had been the sound of rustling. I shook with fear. Had Thomas perhaps come with his brothers to rob me or murder me? The rustling stopped immediately. I lay still and dozed off. More rustling. I jumped out of the bag and went out into the starlit night. I called out .But there was only wind and stars and the dim outline of the peak of Mount Aux Sources. I got back into my sleeping bag. Then I heard more rustling and something scurried across me .A rat! It was after the rusks! With a sigh of relief I lay back. A rat! Another living creature keeping me company! And so I went to sleep.

The next morning was bright and sunny. The rat had left me two rusks, I still had a can of tomato juice, and the trail down the mountain to the hutted camp in the royal Natal National Park led invitingly away to my left.

As It Was when I Started the Descent

I descended a rope ladder which had been put up over a wall of basalt by the Natal mountain club, and then descended on the trail. It was easier going, the sun was warm, there was no wind and I was descending. But I was very hungry and starting to feel weak, and there were no streams for water. I looked carefully at the map. I was walking east parallel to the northern spur of the amphitheatre that rose perhaps 40 metres above me on my right. If I continued with the trail, I would eventually get to the Royal Natal National Park hotel. But it was still 20 kms away, and the path would go around the spur and double back west into the park, an unnecessary added distance I thought. However if I climbed onto the spur and slid down the steep face of the amphitheatre, I would only have a few kilometers at the most to go.

I decided to risk it.

I climbed up onto the spur and found the beginning of a depression on the other side, the wall of the amphitheatre. Far below me I could see Ntendele, the camping site of the National Park. I scrambled and slid down the depression. It was of course steeper than I had anticipated, so after a few minutes, tearing the seat of my jeans as I slid, I realized there was no going back. Gradually the depression turned into a gully with a trickle of water. But the walls of the Drakensberg are not of uniform hardness. At intervals the basalt is traversed by parallel bands of harder more silicacious rock. My little stream would then drop over the ledge so formed making a small waterfall. I then had to climb up the side, and go down the spur between it and the next little stream gully, and rejoin my stream below the waterfall. I did this a couple of times. The third time I was confident enough to throw my pack over the ledge to make my climb around the waterfall easier.

Just as I was pulling myself up the side of the gully, I heard a loud bark. An enormous male bull baboon with long yellow fangs was standing on the edge of the waterfall just below me. I was balanced halfway up the stream’s bank three metres away clutching a shrub for support. I froze, and we stared at each other silently. But I couldn’t hold my position long. Slowly I tried to edge up the slope. Each time I moved he snarled and his bark echoed through the mountains. Any moment he would spring and that could be the end of me. No knife, no matches, I reminded myself dolefully.

Then without at first realizing, I found myself talking to him. In a soft almost musical unthreatening tone I told him what a big beautiful chap he was, and what a fine job he was doing guarding the troop. On and on went my voice and he sat down, and stared up at me, as if he understood what I was saying, His hair no longer bristled, his expression had lost its aggression, and he began looking around, relaxed. Cautiously I started to move up the slope keeping up my monologue. He followed me with his eyes, but did not bark or snarl. I got to the top of the spur and saw another baboon in the next stream bed. He was sitting on his haunches also watching me with a bemused gaze. I descended the spur beyond the waterfall and climbed back into my stream bed, continuing my descent.

The two baboons followed me down the mountainside, occasionally barking as if telling each other how I was doing. I felt I was being escorted, not chased, and felt a deep empathy with them, strangely not unlike that which I had had with the rusk- eating rat of the night before. I knew I was not alone.

That day I learned how to relate to animals in this special way; by using my voice, since then  I have often been  able to break through the barrier separating our species. It has given me great joy. This and learning of the illusory nature of fear, aloneness, and hunger were the legacy of this journey through the Lesotho mountains.

When I got near the bottom, the baboons left me, and shortly after I found myself staring at the back of a notice pinned to a barbed wire fence. I climbed through the fence and read:

ROYAL NATAL NATIONAL PARK.

ENTRY BEYOND THIS POINT FORBIDDEN.

DANGER: LEOPARDS AND BABOONS.

But this was the way I had come! And two of these ‘dangerous’ animals had accompanied me! I suddenly understood then that danger when it exists is always self created. All depends on one's attitude.

THERE IS NO DANGER EXCEPT THAT WHICH OUR FEAR CREATES

Is the notice I wanted to put up on that fence.

View From the Royal Natal National Park  of the Mountain face I had scrambled down .

I walked through the park and finally hit a dirt road that took me to the Hotel. It was Sunday afternoon and tea was being served to elderly people on the immaculate lawn in front of the reception building. I was by now very weak from hunger as I staggered through them .They must have stared at this unshaven, dishevelled dirty young man, torn jeans spattered with mud. The woman at reception hid her surprise, and after I gave her my name, she asked me where I had come from. I thrust out my arm, and pointed through the window at the mountains.

‘From Lesotho, I have walked.’

She nodded politely without comprehending, and gave me a room with a bath. I ordered some food, undressed and got into the bath and instantly passed out. I woke up still in the empty bath hours later and ate the cold food. Then I crept into bed. The next morning I phoned my girlfriend in Johannesburg. But she refused to believe it was me talking. I got myself a lift back to Johannesburg with one of the hotel guests later that day and duly re registered for University.

Stories 2 - Death Road and Beyond

Death Road and Beyond

                                        'Death road'  La Paz  to Coroico  in Bolivia

Recollections of the Unexpected, the Shocking and the Beautiful on a Trip down the Andes and through the Bolivian Rain Forest

By Kenneth Margo

‘Do not wander without a purpose, but in your impulses render what is just, and in all your imagination preserve what it is you apprehend’. (Meditations – Marcus Aurelius Bk 1V no 22)

‘Humility is to accept the truth from whomsoever and from wherever it may come (Ibn ben Sar- Sufi master)

In July 1977, a few months after I had recovered from a bout of typhoid, my cousin Romy and her husband Ben arrived to visit me in La Paz from South Africa en route to San Diego to see Ben’s sister. I believe that their visit was governed by affection, real curiosity to see and experience a new and strange place, and also to check out on behalf of the rest of the family how cousin Ken, who was now living in Bolivia (of all places), was doing.

Down the Andes  - The Road of Death

Romy and Ben had about a week to spend in Bolivia, and asked me what there was to do and see. I told them of the glories of Lake Titikaka, the Inca Island of the Sun, and the pre Inca ruins of Tiahawanaco, of the fiestas, the weavings, and the music of the highlands. All relatively safe options and easily accessible. They were politely interested but not enthusiastic.

Then Ben asked me whether it was possible to visit the Amazon rain forest, and was it accessible from La Paz? Actually yes, it is very accessible. Not the Amazon River itself, but one of its large tributaries which runs through the virgin rain forest of North Eastern Bolivia. A mere 80 kms from the high dry canyon in which La Paz lies, one is already in tropical mountain forest, and 60kms further on  one can take a trip through the rain forest by boat on the River Beni.

I tried to warn them that the rain forest is very hot and humid and boring when viewed from a river. One travels smoothly on the water enclosed by two green walls of impenetrable trees and vines. You almost never see animals because there is plenty of water in the small streams, so there is no need for animals to come down to the bank of the large river and expose themselves (unlike in drier savannah environments where the river is the only source of water). Also the rivers are wide so you don’t see much. And the Amazon basin does not have the large game of the African savannah. The largest animal is the Jaguar which is almost never spotted as it hunts mainly at 

night; the others are mainly wild pigs, small deer, tapirs and monkeys. There are no large antelope or large apes, and the crocodiles are small. There are plenty of birds of course, but they are best worth watching from the few open spaces of land. Not from the middle of a river.

But Ben was adamant. So we decided to take a trip to Rurrenebaque, a small town on the river Beni on the edge of the last foot hills of the Andes. We would have to take local land transport from La Paz over the east slope of the Andes to Puerto Linares. Then a day long trip from there by small boat on the Beni to Rurrenebaque, from where we could take a light plane back over the Andes to La Paz.

The trip turned out to be not at all boring. And we did see a lot. And we experienced the beautiful, the shocking and the unexpected, largely unplanned. And learned from it.

The first leg of our journey took us to Coroico, on the Eastern slopes of the Andes, a mere 85kms from La Paz. The road ascends east out of La Paz through interminable adobe houses. There is the usual roadblock at edge of the city where vendors sell bread, Pan derumbe they call it. Landslide bread! Meaning you will need bread while you wait who knows how long for the authorities to clear the road if there is a landslide. Landslides are very common on the steep soft sedimentary Andean slopes after rain when the soil above bedrock gets saturated and starts to slide. Fortunately there was no landslide that day. Only 20 kms from La Paz, the minibus reached the top of the pass (called the ‘cumbre’) at 4800m. We were almost at the snow line, in a bleak tundra like place beside a round glistening lake. Even in that cold (It was about 3 degrees centigrade,) there were llamas and alpacas grazing on the swamp grass by the lake shore.

From there it was all downhill. Today one travels down to Coroico by a safe two way paved road. But in 1977 there was only that one lane dirt road which in only 60 kms drops from 4800m to an altitude of only 1200 m. This road is now used mainly for tourists who cycle down it from the cumbre for the thrill in organized groups. But in 1977 it took all the traffic between La Paz and the lowlands.

It is one of the great scenic journeys of the world. Within a short distance of 60 kms, there is a 3600m drop in altitude. One can witness all the vegetation types, from small tuft tundra grass and lichens to tropical mountain forest , that one would see if one travelled from the Arctic tundra to the equator in regions of high rainfall!

At about 2300m one passes through a region of mist and ghostly trees festooned with orchids clinging to their branches as parasites. The route is so precipitous that most of the way the road is cut into almost sheer mountainside. The slope across which the road traverses is so steep, that at times water pours onto the edge from a rock overhang above. And the scale is awesome. Standing in one place one can look above at snow - capped mountains and below at tropical palm trees.

 The road has since been called the 'Road of Death' and cited as the most dangerous road in the world. Because it is so narrow ,it is extremely dangerous for four wheeled traffic, there are extra widened places cut into the rock. They are barely the length of a vehicle, but are the only places where two vehicles coming from opposite directions can pass each other. There have been frequent bus disasters on this road and its fork to Chulumani; which is still exclusively used, the most recent in January 2012. Here and there one sees little crosses on the side of the road to remind travellers that some vehicles don’t make it.

A couple of times when another vehicle came up the road towards us, we had to reverse into one of these bays. Then we all got out of the bus, and stood about shouting encouragement to the two brave drivers  who were engaging in a life threatening exercise of trying to squeeze past each other on the edge of a precipice.

Finally we arrived in Coroico, a few kms off the main road to Caranavi to where we were headed the next day. It is a delightful little subtropical town at 1700m perched on a saddle 500m above a wild rushing river. That night we slept in a pension in a room which smelled strongly of mildew. The next day we walked down the hill to the main road through coffee plantations. On the way we sampled the coffee berry. Few people know that the coffee bean is actually the pit of a small round brown berry like fruit and is surrounded by sweet pulp.

We waited about an hour on the road for transport. Then a three ton open truck stopped for us. It had come down the road from La Paz and was empty except for four small Ayamara men (indigenous Indians from the La Paz area), still wrapped up against the highland cold and wearing colourful knitted woolen caps on their heads. They stared silently at the three big ‘gringos’ with large backpacks who climbed in and carefully leaned their packs against the wall of the truck. 

We were still in tropical mountain country, and the dirt road, thankfully now two lanes, followed a quite substantial river. But the truck was moving extremely fast. Romy pleaded with me to tell the driver to go slower, but she didn’t understand the weak position we were in as passengers of an open truck. This was no luxury bus. It was the cheapest and crudest form of motor transport available. The prevailing ethos was that he was doing us a favour even if we were paying. I would have offended his macho sensibilities if I said anything to him about his driving. In fact he could have thrown us off the truck. So I said nothing.

The four little men were staring gravely at us, trying to get used to our strangeness. Then one got up and lurched over to me and addressed me in Ayamara. (the pre Inca language  still spoken in the region centred on Lake Titikaka) I replied in Spanish, but it was obvious he hardly understood me. Despite this, our encounter was all incoherent goodwill on both sides, with body language doing the job that the spoken word could not. Elated, he staggered across the truck to where the packs were standing, opened his fly and let loose. Then he swaggered back to his mates, proud of his enhanced status. He had overcome his shyness and had dared to speak with the big strangers. Romy spoke about disinfecting the packs, but the 100kmp hour wind at 30 degrees dried them in less than a minute.

We got to Caranavi late that afternoon. In those days it was a disorganized little frontier town on the edge of freshly cleared rain forest. When I visited it 30 years later in 2007 it had grown into a small modern city, with rush hour traffic and street lights. I am told that it is now the centre of the Bolivian cocaine trade. We were directed to a residencial, (cheap hotel), a cluster of modest buildings. While I negotiated accommodation with the owner, Ben went to inspect the communal pit toilets and when he returned he announced that they were filthy and we could not stay there. He proposed setting up his two- man tent in the town plaza, but I persuaded him not to. Thieves and corrupt police would ensure that we wouldn’t last the night camped out in the middle of town. So we settled for the residencial and slept on beds with linen under mosquito nets. For $1.50 each!

The next day we travelled again by truck to Puerto Linares, a straggle of wooden buildings on the bank of the 100m+ wide River Beni. It was midday when we got there, and I was told that we would be able to arrange a passage on one of the boats that were arriving from Rurrenebaque that evening. The boats carried produce back and forth on the river, and also took three or four passengers. That evening I secured a passage for us for the next day on a small barge like boat, more like a large flat bottomed canoe with an outboard motor. We slept badly that night in a room in the grandly named Residential Beni, kept awake until the early hours by somebody’s radio blaring irritating schmaltzy Latin American pop through the thin wooden walls.

On and in the Beni River

Motorised canoes  used for transport in the Amazon basin- Like that which capsized   

There was a warm mist over the river at dawn when we made our way to the boat. It was piled with sacks of sugar and maize meal, and we sat on top of them. The other passenger on our boat was a tiny elderly peasant woman with numerous bundles. She told me she was travelling to Rurrenebaque to stay with her son. The pilot manned the motor at the rear, while his assistant navigated by watching the river at the front.

They took the boat skilfully onto the river. The trees on the opposite bank showed as dark faint shapes. It was very silent and peaceful. The rising sun shone red through the mist, and the water shimmered like liquid gold. Ben and I took off our shoes and shirts and we lay on top of the sacks as the boat moved smoothly through paradise.

But this was not quite a drift through paradise. It was the short dry season, the river was lower than normal, and we weren’t yet out of the Andean foothills. From time to time the channel narrowed and we would enter slight rapids. When this happened, the pilot would turn down the motor and allow the boat to drift with the current. Then as it entered the middle of the rapid he would turn the engine on hard, and we would swing through on the deeper outside bend. This was necessary because the rapid almost always occurs in a bend of the river, and there was a danger of running aground on the shallow inner side of the loop.

On one rapid however, the tactic didn’t work. When he turned up the motor to shoot round the bend, the front of the boat swung towards the shallow bank at right angles to the current, and the boat grounded, stuck in the sand and stones. The pilot motioned for Ben and me to wade into the water to help them free it. Romy remained sitting on top of the sacks surrounded by clothes and passports and our packs. With water to our waists, we pushed and pulled and succeeded only to well. The boat came free and started to slide back into the water, engine end forward. But the weight of the engine pulled it down, and it started shipping water.

And then it sank.

My adrenalin must have kicked in then. I became a spectator of what seemed a dream or a movie. Suddenly there was no boat anymore, and we were all in the water like Alice in the pool of tears or Titanic passengers. I remember the assistant pilot splashing past me carrying the wailing old lady on his shoulders. I saw Ben wading or swimming downstream following his floating backpack. Mine had disappeared, but unaccountably my sleeping bag was floating next to me.

. And so was Romy who was crying that she was drowning.

‘Swim’, I shrieked. I knew she was a good swimmer.

‘My boots are pulling me down.’(She and Ben had bought matching leather boots for their South American trip).

‘Take them off!’

‘I can’t,’ she sobbed, ‘and they cost R50’ (about  $300 today's equivalent)

Then the assistant pilot having deposited the old lady on the shallow bank, was back, and grabbed Romy and pulled her across the river leaving her unaccountably on the steeper opposite bank. By now Ben had disappeared downstream around a bluff, as had the pilot. I swam to the shallow bank with my sleeping bag. I had lost my back pack with my clothes, my shoes, money and Bolivian ID. I had nothing except the shorts I was wearing and a wet sleeping bag. The old lady was with me on my side of the river, weeping under a bush nearby. There was no sign of her bundles, her life possessions. Romy and Ben were on the opposite bank about 150 m apart and separated by a steep promontory. I could see both of them, but they were out of sight of each other. Ben was downstream while Romy was directly across from me. I could also see the pilot and his assistant downstream beyond the rapids where the river was calm and wide. They had found the boat and had beached it on a sand bar and were trying to rescue as many sodden white bags of sugar and maize out of the river as they could find.

It was now about midday. The sky was cloudless and it was very hot .And there we were, stranded on the banks of a river in the remote rain forest of the Bolivian Amazon. Like castaways, I reflected. But if so then where was the Lord of The Flies to stop the relentless sand midges from biting my bare feet?

Both Romy and Ben wanted to get into the water to swim over to my side. They were frantic because they thought the other had drowned. The river was just too wide for them to hear me yelling that I could see them both and that they were ok. Finally I got them to understand, and they decided to wait until they had got over the shock of the accident before attempting to swim back. Then the pilot and his assistant returned from downstream and told me that the boat engine was flooded and damaged and that although there was no hope of re-launching it , we were not to worry, as there were plenty of other boats coming down the river which would rescue us.

And sure enough about an hour later, I heard a motor. And in that unexpected almost surreal way I have come to expect from scenes in South America, there came chugging down the untamed river Beni, a small blue and white boat with a high shade canopy. Sitting in it was a fat balding middle aged man with a clipped black moustache dressed impeccably in white pants and shirt. And next to him was an equally fat middle aged woman in a pink and white dress with perfectly coiffured hair. It was as if they were taking a Sunday cruise on the Seine or around a lake in a park in Buenos Aires.

We yelled and gesticulated and he brought the boat over. The pilot explained to him what had happened, so he crossed the river and fetched Romy and Ben. It turned out that this man, Diego Rodriguez, was a sort of minor Onnasis of the river Beni. He was the owner not only of our boat, but several others. In those days boats were the only means of transport on the surface between the populated highlands and the flat largely uninhabited rain forest and pampa (tropical grassland) of La Paz department. (I wonder what happened to the river transport business when they built the road from Caranavi to Rurrenebaque in the early 1990s.)

But we still had to wait a while longer, because Rodriguez refused to take us in his boat. He obviously did not see himself as a heroic captain rescuing survivors. He just regarded us as a nuisance. He agreed to take the old lady, but told us that there was no room for us, however another of his boats was coming soon and it would take us to Rurrenebaque. I protested that we were traumatized by the accident and showed him my feet which were starting to swell from midge bites. But he disregarded my pleas. He said he would ‘fix us up in Rurrenebaque’ when we got there and chugged off down the river.

It was dawning on me that this man was responsible for us because we had capsized in his boat. I would have to make sure that he would compensate us adequately and get us back to La Paz. I had lost my back pack and all the money I had brought with me as well as my clothes. Romy had lost her passport. Ben had managed to keep his pack with his clothes and two- man tent, but had lost his watch, a family heirloom, and one of his boots. But what good is one boot to a two legged man? He carried it with him for a couple of days, forlornly hoping either to find the other boot somewhere down river, or a one legged man to give it to. Eventually he threw it away.

Ben also still had his traveller cheques which were in his money belt which had stayed around his waist. I determined then that I was going to make Rodriguez pay at the very least for the remainder of our trip, and also buy me clothes. So it was important that he shouldn’t know that we still had money. I suspected that he had to think we were destitute if we were to get any compensation out of him. The pilot advised me to report the matter to the ‘port captain’ or police chief in Rurrenebaque and to enlist his help in negotiating compensation.

Dynamite Gorge

 Bala Gorge, River Beni . This could well be the very spot where this drama took place

Not long after that, as the fat man had promised, another boat similar to ours came by and picked us up. We proceeded down river towing our incapacitated boat which now was reloaded with some of the rescued sodden sugar and maize flour bags! Were they going to still try to sell them soaked in river water? I wondered. It was by now late afternoon and we were still some hours from Rurrenebaque. As boats didn’t travel the river in the dark, we would have to find a place to camp that night. More midges, I thought, looking at my swollen feet. But the danger to us that night was not to be from midges.

The river was narrowing and we entered what appeared to be a fairly long gorge with steep walls. Suddenly the pilot swerved the boat and made for the left bank. Two men had appeared out of the bush and were hailing us. As we got nearer, I saw big tough fearsome looking individuals with bloodstained clothes and rifles slung over their shoulders. They carried two dead howler monkeys which they must have recently shot. They told us that they were professional hunters, and asked the pilot for a ride back to their camp a few kms downstream.

‘No!’ exclaimed Romy, 'These men cannot come on board. They are cruel. I disapprove of hunting poor defenceless animals!’

But of course they came on board. They after all had the guns. And it wasn’t our decision to make but the pilot’s .Like on the truck to Caranavi; I was becoming aware of our role in the unfolding drama of this trip. We were not decision makers but also we were not mere spectators as tourists usually are. We were guests or passengers. We were not determining events, or just watching them, they were being thrust on us, and their real significance lay in how we chose to react and what we learned from the experience. The way they were presenting themselves seemed to be to teach us the importance and sheer necessity of shedding preconceived ideals and conceptions in the face of the reality of basic survival. I thought how strange it is that tourists subconsciously crave ‘experience’ and ‘excitement’ in their paid for travels, but at the same time demand absolute safety from their guides and tour companies. A contradiction. Of course you can’t experience anything new or meaningful unless you engage, and that means taking the risk of losing. Otherwise you may as well stay home and look at photos or watch a travel movie.

So we continued downstream with the hunters on board, and a few kms further on the pilot beached the boats at their camp in the gorge. They had invited us all to spend the night there, and the pilot had accepted on our behalf. The hunter’s camp was one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. They had established themselves on a pristine white sand beach wedged between verdant cliffs and the river. A small waterfall tumbled down from the cliff onto the beach and made a pool in which several large fish were swimming. Bags and bed rolls and cooking utensils were lying around, but I didn’t see any tents.

They lit a fire and the pilot told me that we were invited to eat dorado (golden) fish with them. They took them from the pool and were preparing to barbeque them on an open fire. Romy and Ben declined the invitation and seemingly oblivious of the insult to our hosts by  declining their  hospitality, or the irony of  what they were doing, went up the beach and opened a can of tuna which Ben had brought with him from South Africa !

I thought not only of our safety. I couldn’t allow them to ignore our hosts like this. I pleaded with them to join us .

‘How do we know whether the Beni River where the fish come from isn’t polluted?’ Argued  Romy.

I reminded her that she and Ben had already involuntarily swallowed large quantities of the river’s water only that morning, and were still alive. So well grilled fish from the river was unlikely to harm them. But I also tried to make them aware of the rules of hospitality in wild places. You don’t question it, and you have to accept it when it is they not you who control the situation.

I did finally persuade them to join the barbeque. And of course there was no contest taste wise between fresh river fish and tinned shredded tuna!

We sat into the mild night beneath brilliant stars while the hunters and boat pilots regaled us with their stories. I reflected that another lesson we were learning on this trip was to understand that there are some circumstances when you cannot control events and that survival depends on going with the flow. This can sometimes mean accepting help from unexpected quarters. And being destitute actually makes it easier to learn these lessons because you can’t buy your way out of the experience.

When we got up to go to sleep, the pilots and hunters unrolled their bed rolls on the sand. By now my sleeping bag had dried out and I was prepared to sleep next to them beneath the stars, but Ben and Romy insisted I join them in the two man tent to protect  ourselves against mosquitoes. So we three adults tried to fit into Ben’s two man tent. It was stifling hot. We shifted and rolled around trying to get comfortable.

Then just when I was dozing off, We were awakened by a deafening explosion. Something hit the tent and it collapsed. Three adults then tried to escape from the fallen tent. This was the stuff of slapstick comedy, but there was no one around to enjoy it. Somehow we did get out of the tent without ripping it, and Ben found his torch in his pack. Miraculously it was still working. There was no sign or sound of the others sleeping further down the beach. What on earth had happened?

The torch light revealed several pieces of dead fish on the ground. One piece had obviously hit the tent at great speed and knocked it over. There was no other explanation. But how on earth had half a fish flown through the air? And what was the explosion which preceded it? We were too tired to speculate that night, and didn’t link the two events to come up with the only possible explanation. So we pitched the tent again and slept fitfully in it until dawn. It had been a long and eventful day.

The next day we prepared to continue our journey to Rurrenebaque. The pilot told us that the hunters had already left in the night. They had provided food for themselves by throwing dynamite into the river, literally blowing fish out of the water. A crude and cruel way to fish and also wasteful, because spawn gets killed as well by the blast. But men in pristine wildernesses where nature’s abundance seems so limitless don’t consider the longer term ecological consequences of their actions. Until it’s almost too late.

Rurrenebaque

                              Rurrenebaque today much grown,showing parrot island.

So we set out that morning down the Beni for Rurrenebaque, and arrived a few hours later without further incident. The river widens where it leaves the last foothills of the Andes, and it starts to meander across the flat limitless Amazon basin, its channel divides, and the two channels form an island in the middle .On the right bank of the right hand channel lies Rurrenebaque. As we approached the town, I saw several boats were pulled up on the flat sand beach next to a large truck. This was the ‘harbour’. Our boat beached, we said our goodbyes and thanks to the pilots and their assistants, and approached Rodriguez who was supervising the loading of produce into the truck.  He told us to go to the hotel where we were to be accommodated at his expense, and that he would ‘see us later’. Round one to us without even trying!

The hotel was a rambling wooden building with a large verandah overlooking the river. It seemed to cater to tourists, because several careful middle aged people were sitting taking drinks or tea. They were extremely surprised to see us straggle in, Ben and I unshaven, me now at least wearing one of Ben’s T shirts, but still barefoot. Fortunately the owner, a kindly German lady, had been warned by Rodriguez to expect us, and made us immediately welcome with hot soup. The hotel building was full, so Ben and Romy were given a large tent with camp beds, linen etc, while I shared a dormitory room.

That afternoon Ben and I went to the ‘police’ station to report the accident to the port captain. The building was closed. We found his home and roused him from his siesta. He got dressed in his uniform and we proceeded to the station where he slowly and formally typed our report of the accident, and gave me a copy (which I still have).He didn’t seem surprised; obviously word had got around. Then he arranged a meeting for us with Rodriguez for the next morning and agreed to mediate.

We walked the few blocks back to the hotel. There I saw that Romy had put out several things to dry on the lawn in front of their tent. Among them, neatly laid out in full view of passers by, were Ben’s purple American Express traveller cheques. Money which we weren’t supposed to have.

I tried to convince her that our alleged total destitution was the only insurance we had of getting something out of Rodriguez at the meeting the next day. We certainly weren’t in a place where justice would automatically be done. If he knew that we had any money, he would wash his hands of us, and the port captain wouldn’t help either, because it turned out he was married to Rodriguez’s sister. So we were going to have an uphill battle at the negotiations. Finally I convinced her that it would be a far greater dishonesty if Rodriguez didn’t compensate us at least for some of what we had lost, than for us to lie about our true financial state which any way should not be a factor in the negotiation for compensation. So she agreed to put the cheques out of sight inside the tent, and thankfully word of their existence didn’t get to Rodriguez.

Our protracted negotiations the next morning were made more difficult by my broken Spanish, but were helped by Ben’s burly presence. Rodriguez’s first offer was a free lift back to Puerto Linares on one of his boats. This we flatly refused. La Senora esta traumatizada’ (the lady, meaning Romy, is in shock) I remember saying. What I really meant was that there is no way any of us would ever go on one of his boats again. And anyway what would we do in Puerto Linares without money? How would we get back to La Paz? Then I told him that we were tourists in his beautiful country and that the tourism authorities would not be at all pleased to hear how we were being treated. That clinched it. The port captain didn’t want any trouble from his superiors. So he had a hasty conference outside with his brother in law, and the upshot was that Rodriguez finally agreed to pay not only for our stay at the hotel, but also for our air tickets back to La Paz. He then took me to his shop, and I was allowed to pick out a flimsy pair of trousers, a shirt and a cheap pair of tennis shoes.

We spent the next two days recuperating in Rurrenebaque. One late afternoon Romy and I visited the island, while Ben stayed behind to clean his camera. There we witnessed the sudden arrival of hundreds of parrots which unaccountably fly to the island from the mainland every evening before sunset. They weigh down the trees and scream and chatter to each other for about half an hour. And then just as mysteriously they fly back to the forest after the sun goes down. While we were waiting for the boatman to fetch us, a brief shower sent us scurrying for shelter under large banana leaves.

Over the Andes

Rodriguez duly bought us our plane tickets to La Paz. Planes left in those days from Reyes, another town about 40 kms away. We went there by motor bike taxi, (The roads are usually too bad for four wheeled vehicles), and spent the night in a residencial, sleeping in hammocks. Then early the next morning we again took motor bike taxis to the air strip. Reyes airstrip serves a military base. We were not heartened by the sight of the twisted remains of several aircraft surrounding the runway, or by the appearance of our plane. It was grey and shaped like an egg with wings. It was actually an Israeli made military transport plane not designed to take commercial passengers.

We climbed in and sat on canvas ‘benches’ strung along the sides, facing our luggage which was piled in the middle. There were no seatbelts. One passenger was an injured little girl who was being taken to La Paz for x rays. The authorities insisted on consulting with Ben about her health, although he is a vet. I remember there were also two proud young pureblood Indian men in the plane, highlanders who stuck out incongruously amongst the slightly built lowland meztizos.

As was to be expected, we sat waiting an interminable time inside the plane before take off. The heat was stifling, so I was thankful when it did finally take off and the air cooled as we gained altitude. Of course that meant that the cabin wasn’t pressurized, but I didn’t realize that immediately. I did notice that some passengers were bending forward heads between their knees. Then someone next to me suddenly threw up over the baggage, but fortunately missed ours. And the injured girl had started crying. I looked through the open door to the pilot’s cabin and saw that he had an oxygen mask and was motioning to his co pilot to give it to the girl. Ben told me that he motioned to him to keep it. Our safety depended on him having the oxygen! But my mind was still working very slowly. I wasn’t putting together the implications of what I was seeing.

Then I looked out of the window. I saw snow capped mountains about two thousand feet below AND WE WERE FLYING OVER THEM! That meant we were well over 5000m. Without oxygen! It dawned on me that most of the people in the plane were suffering from altitude sickness. So then of course I immediately started to feel nauseous! And all through this, the two highlanders sat serenely, even contemptuously, watching us suffer. Altitude was no problem to them, whose ground level existence started at nearly 4000 metres. Fortunately my dizziness didn’t last long. And then we were descending in freezing drizzle to La Paz El Alto airport.

Postscript

When Ben and Romy left for the USA the next day, they told me that Ben's sister  had recommended that they visit Disneyland in Los Angeles. Romy later wrote to tell me that one ride they took there was a ‘jungle trip’ in a small boat conducted by a man dressed as a great white hunter in a pith helmet, while fearsome  (artificial) snapping crocodiles and hippos followed. I hope that their memory of this safe Disney fantasy experience has palled before the recollection of what happened to us in a real jungle (The word jungle comes from the Spanish jungla, which means impenetrable trees and vines. The correct term for all the environments is rain forest or selva in Spanish.)