The slow way round

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Well I have completed my final adventure in Bolivia.... a 7 day trip up river from Guayaramerin to Trinidad followed by a 3-bus, 27hr journey to La Paz.
After a run-in with one of the afore mentioned swarthy sailors on a boat called the San Luis, I had to find myself another boat going to Trinidad the next day. This time with a captain called Jesus, so I thought I should be safe enough until he mentioned that this boat was only rented because his previous one sank.
The only other female on board was a young girl called Maricela who was also the cook, I quickly made friends with her incase I needed any female back up, which wasn't hard as she was a very giggly, whispery and easily amused 22 yr old.
I find all the women in Bolivia to be fairly immature and naive, but also completely untrustworthy. You can’t tell them anything, or confide in them, as they immediately tell anyone else within earshot...whilst you are still sitting there!
By the time we finally left the port we had collected a few other local passengers who would be dropped at their respective villages upriver and who all had their hammocks below decks next to the engine, while I had been told to put my hammock up in the dining room, suffering again that uncomfortable gringo special treatment which isolates you from everyone else.
I tried hard to ingratiate myself though and show them all I was not some alien being by chatting to the captain, crew and passengers and offering to help Maricela out in the kitchen. Most of the crew stayed fairly timid and distant though other than Chato, and the odd one when they plucked up the courage for a few words. I was happily recruited however by Maricela as galley slave, fellow conspirator and giggler, and spent the rest of the trip following her around like a fool but the bonus being that she used to sneak me a few of the captains beers every now and again, and share her stash of sweets with me. She always spoke at the rate of an express train and just giggled hysterically when I'd tell her to slow down. I had imagined that the trip would be a great chance to practice lots of Spanish whiling away the hours in conversation, but in reality the noise of the engine prevented much chat over dinner and the only quiet place was up on the roof where I would sunbathe everyday, but only mad dogs and English girls go and sit out in the midday sun so I didn't get much company (the boys were probably too shocked by the expanse of white skin exposed by my bikini anyway), but after 9 months of traveling I have finally got a tan.
The crew were working in set shifts of 6 hrs on, 6 hrs off in order to sail night and day and meals were organised around this so we'd eat breakfast early, after which I'd sunbathe, a big lunch at 12 ish then siesta and dinner at 5. We all settled in quite easily into the routine which gave an otherwise endless stretch of time some structure and meant that the days weren't as dull as they might have been. I have always been at home on boats and find this kind of thing quite soothing, I can also stare at the passing water or land for hours quite happily in a trance like state. The best time of day by far was just after dinner when I would go back up on to the roof where it was now cool enough in the breeze to be comfortable. The fading light gave the jungle banks a much more romantic quality, like a Henri Rousseau painting and the horseflies had stopped biting (the little buggers were impervious to any repellant and very unsubtle so you felt each one biting you and quite often managed to kill it but not before they'd given you a painful bite which lasted ages). I would watch the sky turn into pinks and purples which were reflected back off the water and then as each star peeped out, searching for any constellation I recognised, until the mosquitoes forced me back inside to find my repellant.
The rest of my time on board I spent reading, relaxing in my hammock or washing myself or my clothes, on a small wooden platform hung out over the water, and sacrificed a number of items to the water rushing by, including the soap, my penknife and the half gourd we used for rinsing ourselves. These losses were not half as terrible as watching Maricela throw all the waste overboard. It all went in, leftovers, bottles, plastic packets, you name it and I daren't ask where the basket of used tissues next to the loo went when it was emptied. When she handed me things in my role as kitchen assistant with a flippant "in the river", I had to sneak off and hide them with my stash of plastic bottles that was growing in my corner of the dinning room to take off with me when I left.
The rest of the crew all drank the water straight out of the river of course without any treatment, the same river into which all the diesel, toilet waste and rubbish was going. When I ran out of the 6 L of bottled water that I brought on board, I managed to collect another 4 during a heavy downpour one night by leaving a bucket outside and only had to use my iodine tablets on the very last day.
The only other traumas were the food and the turtle fishing. The food wasn’t so bad actually but I really like my cornflakes for breakfast, or at least fruit or something sweetish, but we had lots of fish and rice or mashed plantain and turtle eggs which are really weird. They have soft shells are about the size and shape of golf balls and squirt watery liquid at you when you try and break into them. We also had various soups for dinner, the colour of dishwater with hunks of bone which held stringy, jellyish scraps of meat on them. I was determined to try everything so by the time it came to eating the turtles I was pretty much immune to the general weirdness of the meals.
Unfortunately we had to go off and catch the dinner first and, although fascinating in a hunting to eat kind of basic animal instinct way, it was also quite sad to be part of.
We set off in the little motor boat into the dark with a net and a spotlight wired up to a car battery and headed over to the bank. We would cruise up the side until locating a likely turtle hideout then make tight circles with the engine full throttle. I’m not sure if this was designed just to flush the ‘petas’ out of their hiding holes or in the hope that we would just run over them with the propeller in their panic to escape the noise of the engine. But every now and again a head would pop up in the middle of the circular wake we created and then the captain would try to net it, often almost taking out Chato the spotlight-man with the other end of the net in the process. If we got one it was mine and Maricelas job to get it out of the net, but her squealing and jumping in panic when the things scratched her with their nails threatened to sink us more than once. The combination of a numb arse, spinning in circles a lot whilst trying to stop the netted catch escaping by flipping them on to their backs in the bottom of the boat dint make for a pleasant experience once the novelty wore off. The saddest thing wasn’t watching some of the turtles bleeding from where chunks of their shell had been taken off by the prop and struggling to turn themselves over again, it was when they gave up trying to right themselves, obviously exhausted with the effort. After that I didn’t even flinch when they cut their heads off the next day and left them to bleed to death, stacked up on the deck, I was just glad that they were put out of their misery finally.
Quite a lot of my time in Bolivia I am jealous that we just don’t have the same connection with life and death and food and dirt that they do here. It is all part of the daily routine here and I often see small kids dragging dead animals home for dinner which are almost the same size as them. I feel very silly and squeamish in comparison despite having a relatively unfazable and practical constitution as you all know. I also have conversations where people tell me with hardly any sign of emotion that they are pregnant again after loosing their other 3 kids a few months ago when their house accidentally burnt down. We are all so far removed from the reality of life in the West.
On the last day of the trip we took a side tributary for the last 7 hours up to the port near Trinidad. It was a much narrower channel then before and we were tantalizingly close to the gorgeous tree lined jungly bank but unfortunately it was close to nightfall so I only got an hour or so of tree gazing however it was followed by a hilarious evening bumping into the bank over and over again as the boat was too long for the most of the curves in the winding river but if we went too slow we didn’t have any steerage. In the morning I woke up in Puerto Almacen with the deck covered in the leaves of the trees we'd scraped and the radio aerial torn down!
Now my time in Bolivia is nearly at an end I’m going to miss lots of little things (although many will surely appear in Peru as well).
On my ride back up to the altiplano I was again hit by how different that half of Bolivia is and how much I like it actually. I realized I’m going to miss the chollas and people from the highlands with their wooly hats and stockings under hundreds of layers of skirts, although I still find the sight of them squatting to pee at the side of the bus a little unnerving (actually I’m usually bursting too so it may be jealousy). The way that the young girls look and dress exactly like little 50 yr old women with identical plaits and skirts. The sight of those skirts all hung out on bushes to dry (for some reason the lowlanders all hang their washing on barbed wire instead). The sound of Quechua in the markets, where I always seem to catch them in the middle of their dinner, begging me to ‘comprame’ between mouthfuls of nasty looking stews. The babies in the mantas being swung onto backs of their mother who just miss banging the baby’s head on the door whilst getting off the bus. The palpitations just from turning over in bed in Potosi and La Paz!
I’ll also miss the -ingas and -angas of the lowland Camba conversation, the infectious ‘laidback but ready to party’ Brazilian influence on the life there, the sweet chicha in a bag whilst walking down the street, the good looking and often bare-chested Amazonian/Spanish mix boys, with their high cheekbones and even the harsher looking highlanders. Zipping around the red mud streets on a mototaxi with my big rucksack on my back. Sleeping in my hammock and even managing to sleep on the bumpy but always amusing busses which often leave me and the other passengers on the side of the road for a few hours without explanation. I’ve given up panicking when this happens now and just follow all the other calm looking people who obviously know exactly what the procedure is. I also love the people who run alongside the busses whenever they reach junctions or checkpoints selling meals in a bag, or fruit, ice creams, drinks etc.
However, I wont miss the constant smell of sweat, especially in the lowlands, which for some reason is nothing like normal body odor when it is running off you all day, everyday. I cant put my finger on what it smells like exactly but it’s something like boiling pasta and raw meat, kind of sweet but sickly and overpowering.
Nor will I miss the palaver involved in posting anything, passing through a customs inspection before I can seal the parcel, wrapping it another time in ‘Post office approved’ brown paper, filling in forms and producing copies of my passport (of which they always need at least one more than I’ve made, but are happy to wait while I go make more and come back!!).
The bus station tax which you have to pay at a separate location to your bus ticket, before they let you out on to the platform. It still catches me out after nearly 4 months here. Why!!??
I’m looking forward to real hostels again in Peru instead of the hotels I’ve had to stay in here, something which I’m sure will change pretty soon though as tourism gets a tighter hold on Bolivia. Plus I’m pretty sure that the terrible bad taste in clothing (camel toes are rife) and decorations in general will continue and possibly get worse as I go up through South America.
However Bolivia has turned out to be much more developed than I had imagined, I cant wait to get home and compare notes with my Dad on how much things have changed since I was here in fetus form in 1976. Even though the hassle I got as a gringa was sometimes annoying, especially the constant questions about my solita status, it has been fairly mild and I’m sure when I get back to the UK I am going to miss all the guys who think I am ‘hermosa’ even when I haven’t slept well or washed my clothes (or my hair) in a while. Overall Bolivia has felt safe and friendly, I’ve loved almost every minute and I’m sure I will look back fondly even on those minutes which weren’t so great at the time!

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Photos

Maricelas insecticide empanadas
Note the rolling pin - a can of cockroach spray!!

Comments

[beinak]

Thank you!
Again an inspired and inspiring blog. Thanks!