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 Bolivia
Down the Andes - The Road of Death
Romy and Ben had about a week to spend in Bolivia Lake Titikaka , the Inca Island
Then Ben asked me whether it was possible to visit the Amazon rain forest, and was it accessible from La Paz rain forest of North Eastern Bolivia
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 La Paz La Paz
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
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
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
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
. 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
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
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
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 La Paz
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
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
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
