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Published: March 25th 2024
A low, slow, eery murmur fills the air.
A weird, wakening, growling whisper that intrudes out of nowhere.
Prompting part-parched eyelids to eke apart as the first flirtations of early morning pink filter through a canopy of Amazon trees.
See the dozen fat mosquitoes, content, inside the peak of the mosquito net, having earlier snuck entrance, and supped.
Instinctively move limbs away from the dropped sides of the mesh protection, away from the five dozen, and more, ravenous insects sitting outside eagerly waiting to take their own sip from a misplaced forearm or calf. Touch the screen, and lose a drop.
Again, the strange moan from beyond rises, like the lowest low of a cow driven by the sound of a breeze through a forest of leaves.
Sounds are generally processes of orientation. They let you know where you are, what is afoot, or about.
Unknown sounds, at a certain age, are rare, especially those that hint at spirits of a forest issuing an early morning call to their habitants.
The murmur rises, rumbles and drifts out for 30 seconds or so, recedes for the same time, and repeats, across a 15 minute
period.
Shake twigs off the edges of the sleeping bag, crawl out from under the net ... slap, slap, slap as the blood-suckers waste no time enjoying fresh, early morning flesh ... and ask a local Bolivian in a nearby tent what the hell the sound is.
"Manechi," is the meaningless response.
Could be anything from manifested archangels to a rare, exotic bovine, very localised whirlwinds whizzing through the branches, or an unseen group of deep forest dwellers.
We're literally up a very long creek without a paddle, central/northish Bolivia, on the Isiboro River 200km away from the closest town, Trinidad, on a 6m 'tinny' (open, sheet-metal boat) carrying 400 litres of fuel. (And, no spare oar, 'just in case'.)
Deep south-west fringe of the greater Amazon jungle, in the middle of the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory, 1.4 million hectares and a population in the hundreds, or very low thousands.
Jungle, jungle, riverine forest, swamp, tributaries, tributaries of tributaries, on an eight-day ride, seeing perhaps two long-boats powered by long-shafted, fan-tail engines and half-a-dozen lopsy, rough-planked riverside homesteads each day.
And, the moment the boat stops and comes within 10m
of the shore: mosquitoes.
Part petrol-head blast into the middle of nowhere, and part mission to find the local holy grail: the most concentrated gathering of near the largest Golden Dorado fish on the continent.
Expectedly, beyond, nothing is ever quite as it seems.
Mr Big had eluded me in my hunt, months back, in north-east Argentina, along the Parana River, where the average fish weighs in at somewhere around 4-7kg.
Seeking a second shot, much research pointed to the Secure River, near Trinidad, where the monsters live, between 10 and 25kg.
Depart the horizonless salt lake of Uyuni, but not without a two-day delay following an 'unfortunate' chilli-con-carne.
"That kitchen is full of cockroaches, I told you to go the restaurant next door," my kindly accommodation hostess admonishes.
Helter-skelter road inland, around mountain-tops and through Potosi - home to much of 16th and 17th-century Spain's riches thanks to its infamous mountain of silver well-known for its slavery, child slavery, and funds for the ruthless Conquistadors.
The 'gringo route' takes most foreigners on this road further north-west to capital La Paz. Take a 'blue highway' (apologies William Least Heat Moon),
and head in exactly the opposite direction. Beni province: low altitude, steamy, humid, history of a gold rush, and pandemic malaria to its north, bordering Brazil.
Trinidad is as close as one can get to the tributary I seek. Still a few hundred kilometres away. There are no roads closer. Only waterways.
The smallish town has an old-fashioned, quiet-business feel to it. Cobblestone streets, shallow open concrete gutters hopelessly unable to cope with each afternoon's torrential downpour (it is rainy season), and scores of motorbike taxis uniquely adorned with an extended parasol that covers both driver and passenger.
Don't be fooled. The protection is not so much against the seasonal rain, as against the year-round sun.
Not ridiculously hot, generally in the low-mid 30C's, but with humidity delightfully in the 90 percents. You're not acclimatised, you walk, you sweat, you drip. Near constantly.
Out for a few hours, back to the room, shower, rinse the shirt, squeeze, put damp shirt back on to cool down. It is dry in half-an-hour. Out, again, repeat, repeat.
It's a jungle-entry town. Streets of shops selling gumboots. Slosh city and surrounds. Bridges criss-cross the town, traversing swamp, bog
and stream. Gaze down at the detritus between heavily hyacinth-choked flows (barely a trickle), and spot lounging, urban juvenile caiman alligators or jacare, with the odd capybara mooching between thick, bright-green grass thickets.
Strange days near an old silver mine.
No boat operator offers to entertain the holy grail quest.
Stumble upon the official guardians of the local indigenous reserve. The department that oversees matters that need to be overseen, they are not a tourist agency nor operator, yet kindly offer, for a fee to take one on a boat ride roughly in the direction required.
The Secure River: "Not possible."
Slowly the facts become clear. There is a commercial fishing operation way up said tributary, that only operates between May and September, when locally there is just enough water to navigate the small boats. The fish themselves hole up in the off season in large pools at the upper extremities of the 'creek'.
The tours, run out of the country's largest city, Santa Cruz, cater only to the world's top-end (read rich, or richest) fly-fishermen. You can basically only get there by helicopter, and then hop over the hard-yards by chopper too.
I had been attempting to infiltrate the protected paddock via the back door, only to discover that only, just perhaps, in May, after a full season of rain, was there the slightest chance, in the smallest boat, over a period of weeks, that I could only maybe sneak a peak at the edge of Dorado Eden.
Nothing's ever as it seems.
The boat-ride offer is to go down the 'mainish' river of the area, the Isiboro, right past the turnoff into the Secure. Logic says that if 'they' live up that creek, then they must live down the mother-creek as well. "Let's go."
Provisions and camping gear.
Required permits take longer than estimated. Hit the water at 4pm rather than noon. .... First leg is a nine-hour ride. A long night-run.
All good and pretty. Nice big river, basically uninhabited, with a 10m high green 'wall' on each side. Blasting along. Only a small hiccup: the rainy season blasts a steady wash of flotsam down the pumping waterway, somewhere between 100m and 200m wide. Flotsam = pieces of forest. Trees, branches, floating wood, submerged wood, islands of wood. The flooding waters rip away at the
rivers' edges, toppling all that had long taken root, then drag it downstream at a steady rate of knots.
(Aside perspective: the distance, as the crow flies, from Trinidad to Belem, Brazil, the mouth of the Amazon River, is roughly 3,000km. The rivers Isiboro and Secure are far-extended tributaries, by water an estimated 5,000km upstream. ... If you fall in here, you could land up in the Atlantic Ocean in about two months time, if you hurry.)
Pelting along at some 30km/h, the helmsman is constantly on the search for floating danger, jinking left or right, or dashing for the far bank, when required.
Dusk dissipates, night falls, cloud cover kills any thought of a clean moon-reflected ride.
Driver keeps going. Fast. His companion on the bow switches a flashlight on, off, on, off, not wishing to waste batteries. 400 litres of fuel is close to 400kg. The weight near swamps the boat each time a hard swerve is called for.
For kilometre upon kilometre, there is no river bank. Only thick forest hard into the water. There is no place even to attempt to land or hole up for the night.
This is
a dangerous game. A submerged log will rip the Yamaha 40hp and the transom off the back of the boat, and we will sink. There are life-jackets on the boat, and after some panic and flap the humans will probably survive, and have to hold on to a riverside tree all night long. But everything else will be lost ... Not funny, even disregarding the 'gators and anacondas.
Three hours into the night, a single torchlight riverside. A man stands on a small boat, next to a 10m high mud stairway cut near vertically into the river bank.
Beg a night. Alight. Slither up the slime bank, dragging packs. Pitch tents and net between his house and the river. Trillions of mosquitoes. Exhausted, dive in, and sleep.
Sunrise, hit the road.
Hours later find intended destination, a homestead. A family, a house, a barn, an outdoor kitchen, some horses and chickens.
Make camp under trees and unused roof.
Everybody carries a small towel. In Asia, these kinds of small towels are worn around the neck, and used to combat perspiration.
Here, these small towels are carried in hand, and are swished, every 15
seconds or so, lashing ankles, calves, forearms, shoulders, neck and head, to beat back the dozens of mosquitoes that settle on one's uncovered skin, or sweat-stuck shirt, constantly. No relief, light or dark. The swish ... almost a Bolivian jungle salute, a thousand times a day.
Day to day, home to home, hosted by gentle, humble families scratching a hard living, with small patches of corn, or bananas ... to trade?
Logic fails ... all tell the same story ... the elusive Dorado does not live along this arm of the rivers.
Final stop before a home run. Sit, swat, eat, swat, and be alerted to a chicken wanting to peck my ankle. Host chuckles. Chicken pecks again, and I see a mosquito disappear. The chickens move between the ankles of the humans, pecking away, eating the little buggers. Then on to the dogs, who lie still in the dust as the chooks have their feed as well.
Out pops a month-old duck, to join in the fun.
Hard ride home, downstream with a headwind throwing up a half-metre chop. A six-hour vibra-session. At sea, one stands and rolls with the
knees. Sitting on the tin seat of a 'tinny' requests much patience of one's innards and rear.
Time for the back road to La Paz, on a back-road bus. (Wanna play in the jungle, you take the jungle roads.)
No bridges across rivers: down the muddy river banks, on to small flat barges propelled by motorboats on either side. You wait your turn, as the stillness of the heat hangs, and little friends buzz and bite.
There is no sealed road. Only mud, slide and bump. Up, up, from 500m above sea level, heading for 4,000m high.
Buckets of rain in the middle of the night. Four-wheel drifts in a large bus. All the passengers begin to grumble, and move. Half of the windows leak. The floor is wet, bags on the floor draw moisture, seats get soggy. The back windows seem firmer, as are the bumps each time a rear wheel drops into and out of a hole every 50m or so. Another six-hour shock-vibra-session.
La Paz. The ears pop after the amount of altitude gained over a 12-hour period.
A city old and new. A crucial travel/communications link for Spain's
silver lode, en route from Potosi to Lima, and onwards to Madrid.
In the bowl of a circle of mountain tops. Normally the rich live at the top of the hill, for the view, while the poorer forge out their existence below. Not so, La Paz.
There is some 400m difference in altitude between the valley and crest of the city. It gets very cold on the higher plateau, El Alto.
The richer guys decided on the warmer corner of town.
Hundreds of little shops, colourful garments, panpipe music drifts down alleyways, dried lammas hang from shop doorways in the 'witches' market'. Buy one for luck. Or buy a lamma foetus, and build it into your wall, for luck as well. Broadly similar in intent to a mezuzah.
Many buildings in the city centre, and surrounds are classic Spanish 17-19th century style. Filigree and flamboyance, thick walls, handsome doorways and dainty personal balconies. Up the cliffsides, utilitarianism climbs out of the stone. Brick buildings, more brick buildings, no plaster, low maintenance. A brown city.
Physically, exploring brings its own challenges. Geography is up and down. Steep up and down. Unending. And the oxygen content
in every suck of air is 60% that of sea-level. Combine with much ciggo-abused lungs, ambles around the city are curtailed, slow, huffy, with plenty of 'observation stops' at the corners of most blocks.
Fortunately, overhead runs the 'spiderweb', the 'Teleferico'. Perhaps one of the modern wonders of the world. A large-scale urban cable-car system bar none.
Many cities have underground trains as their public transport system, alleviating surface traffic problems.
La Paz has a cable-car system across the length and breadth of the city with 10 lines, 1,500 gondolas that can each carry 10 passengers, one car departing each of 38 stations every 12 seconds - most lines capable of carrying 3,000 passengers per hour. And it is very cheap.
Traffic congestion is so that it might take at least two hours to get from El Alto (the high ground), into the valley, by road. Twenty minutes by cable car, for maybe half a dollar, only fractionally more than one would pay in a bus, and far less were one to burn one's own gas.
And a visitor's fantasy ride. See the entire city, from above in 3-4 hours. A 35km sky-ride, bird's-eye view
for less than $2.
But the road, this road's, not all fun and games.
Climbing a high mountain, a Swiss companion (who conquers the local 6,000m+ peak) informs me, requires, after skill, dealing with temperature, and altitude.
One can prepare for temperature challenges, but the altitude can affect anyone.
After five days in La Paz, a rash irritability overwhelms me. I have never been edgily irritable in my life, and am somewhat startled. Almost each interaction instills a desire to growl. Couldn't understand. Then came the lethargy, mildest nausea and headache. One is meant to have part acclimatised after this tenure.
Rapidly take cover, find comfortable, private lodging, turn the lights low, drink coca tea, barely move, fight through the (mildish, though debilitating) ague when required to go to a local restaurant to eat. Drink water, water, water, as if your kidney stone depended on it. Muscles ache, joints ache.
It's almost like mini-malaria. Just buggered. The main reason I chose not to go prime-jungle-bashing in north Beni. Just wasn't in the mood for the potential aches and chills.
Murphy's law!
Two days later, following months of strikes and violence, it is
national census day. Everything is closed. Everything. All citizens, and visitors are required to stay inside, behind doors (a la Covid), all day. Police, vans, riot cops patrol the streets. A heaving city in total silence, with zero public movement. Shades of Nyepi Day in Bali. My small first floor balcony offers a strange observation point, of nothing. Beyond surreal. Though light aural relief from a noisy street.
Three days later, see the light at end of the man-down tunnel.
Five days later, tell my rambling tale.
On the 7th day? Getting out of Dodge. A 4km downhill slalom to a Peru beach and some of the best ceviche on the block.
Oh, "manechi"? A Bolivian red howler monkey.
They do howl, growl, proper, (as you might imagine) when they feel aggressive.
But also the whole family 'politely' murmurs, in their unique, low guttural way, each morning and evening to let other families know which tree they are in, and on which tree they will be feeding. They eat largely leaves, nuts and seeds, food that does not generate high energy levels. They spend much of their time sleeping and delicately try and avoid
any kind of hassle.
Please do not disturb!
..........
(More photographs below)
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Louise
non-member comment
Search for the holy grail
You are one tough dude, Lancie. I would have scarpered home after the first encounter with a mozzie. Love your writing, Weez.