Reminiscing with a River

O Mamoré, generous sustenance giver, tributary, great earthworm of a river: I see you from above, pushing off and pushing on, northwards flowing, northwards growing, like an uneven, winding hem across the landscape. I see you from the plane, ever the direction shifter, you turn and return, loop and loop once more – almost full circle, several times, before you go about switching course again. Of the Beni, of the lowlands of Bolivia’s east you are a lifeline: the cargo boats ride you as their highway while as ecosystem extraordinaire you shelter creatures – in you the pink dolphins find their home. And with these important tasks, I ask, is it any wonder that as you weave across the savannah you are as commander of the Moxos Plains? What a view! O wild and majestic Mamoré, I know it too, that beyond the horizon the Amazon waits for you. So, below the patchy cloud in the day’s midst I see you twinkle as though winking at the sun, as I ready to re-embrace the jungle heat, as the tiny plane like a careless sparrow drops from the sky – and in, to land, at Guayaramerín.

O Mamoré, do you remember when we met? It was as that open-air truck, the camion from remote San Ignacio de Moxos, cautiously sidled down your muddy bank trying not to overturn in a rut, as it took to the ferry on its way eastwards to the Holy Trinity, Beni’s capital, La Santísima Trinidad. As you well know that was towards the end of the few-hour journey, for of course Trinidad was first established on your very bank, until, it seems, you tired of the dizzy distraction of the town-dwellers and urged them on, was that it? Through flooding and disease you pushed them back, not far, to relocate in 1769. What you might not know is how in the wild ranch-and-mission country of San Ignacio that morning I’d gone to meet the bus only to be confronted instead with that camion, arranged with loose-fitting wooden plank benches to sit on; and it was before we met I faced the dirt highway. But there were blue and yellow macaws in a towering dead tree and caimans lying in the open by the ponds in the cattle paddocks – not sure how the cows could drink there beside all those teeth – and rheas, those South American ostriches, with purpose they went strutting through the grasses beyond the road – and to find these animals without even trying made Beni seem a wildlife wonderland. So it didn’t matter about the patchy rain that fell on us or the dust kicked up that teased our eyes. When we met, if I wasn’t smiling it’s because the wooden plank seating, after hours, bumpy road, does little good to the posterior.

O Mamoré, what do you really think of Trinidad? The low buildings around the central plaza, the palm trees and the melting in the day’s heat, is it to your liking? It can be the sound of the town – the groan of pick up trucks and the buzz of moped and motorbike that swarms the air is unsettling but the Benianos are resourceful people, in tank tops and jeans, removed from the centres of Bolivian power in the Andes, neglected they may say, and proud of their lowland camba Spanish and their camba culture that inherited more from El Andalus than from La Paz. And I need a hat for the sun is fierce. Do you know that in the evening when the locals promenaded and moped-buzzed around the plaza I pondered how it would be to run a little English school there?

O Mamoré, tell me how it was, the Beni, for you saw the Spaniards arriving late, one of the last blank spots in South America on the European maps. You knew the pre-conquest civilisations, the people without a name who built vast canals and mounds across the savannah in a system of agriculture unique to the Amazon basin – they fooled the scientists, didn’t they, who thought that because Amazonian soils are infertile, despite the jungle, humans in any numbers could not subsist there. Isn’t it strange how they’re trying those old ways again, the farmers growing crops on mounds, raising fish in the canals, facing the annual flooding with that prehistoric methodology that reduces the need to slash new areas of jungle every few years when the soils become depleted? You saw the indigenous peoples who came later, you watched as they faced the missionaries and their languages merged, as diverse groups they were reduced to the singular Moxeño people, old ways forgotten. Did they really benefit from Christianity? You saw the nineteenth century rubber boom and best of all you must know the truth of El Dorado: that legendary city of gold that many a fortune-seeker staked their future on, the city that was never found. But perhaps the only El Dorado was always, rather, the twisting and turning you!

O Mamoré, do you remember my little adventure in Guayaramerín? You’ve become the Brazilian border by then, isn’t it? And apart from that little disputed island it’s clear that on your far bank the Portuguese starts, in the Brazilian co-town called Guajará-Mirim. So I took the boat, do you recall? I saw how broad and fine you are –and from the heat I wished to, ill-advised, dive into you. There was ill-ease, did you sense it? I’d read I could enter the Brazilian town for the day without a visa and return but it wasn’t certain what would happen. I tell you, when I went inside the immigration building on the far bank I paused with a kind of dumb, innocent smile waiting for the official to acknowledge me, wanting to humbly ask if Brazil wouldn’t mind much if I slightly entered its territory for just a short while. The official quite deliberately turned his back which I took as quiet permission to wander past the desk and out onto the street – I’m sure that’s what it was about – overlooking the formalities, just as he’d undoubtedly done for foreign tourists before. I liked Brazil for that, not hung up and welcoming. Guajará-Mirim was not by appearance so different from the Bolivian side, as you know, just an outpost town in a remote pocket of that other country. It was hot, more than hot, I needed water and the shops were closed, even if they would accept Bolivianos in payment.

O Mamoré, I found a mid-range hotel, for water, not to stay, and inside there wasn’t a soul at reception but after some minutes a uniformed maid, attractive, came, and all I could say, the only Spanish I found, that I knew, that she would understand was ‘agua’ – water, aside from the hello and thank you I managed in Portuguese.  She took a bottle from a trolley, a bottle that must’ve been destined for a bar fridge and I only wanted a glass of tap, and I showed her, I couldn’t pay unless she would take the Bolivianos she didn’t seem to want. She put her finger to her lips, O Mamoré, it was secret, without language, between us – and there wasn’t much I could do. I was more than hot and more than thirsty – she could see that. Back at the riverside I boarded your ferry to Bolivia and again the Brazilians overlooked, didn’t mind, and I really admired them. It’s the sort of thing that’s beyond Australian comprehension. I imagine you admire them too.

Other Bolivia...

Other South America...

Bangladesh, land of rivers...

Poetic India...

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This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Reminiscing with a River

Do Horses Bite?

Tupiza, Bolivia

Shhh! Do you hear it? Barely audible? Wait… Yes, the thurram-thurram-thurram, that terrible sound, is growing, coming, gaining ground. Onto the horses! The thunder of hooves is ricocheting off the canyon walls. Lightning speed: they’re coming to catch us; no time to lose!

Did you ever imagine how it would be, in the American Wild West, in the movies? I did. Robbing a bank or a stage coach, flying away on horseback in a hail of bullets, red-check handkerchief over the mouth, disappearing in a cloud of desert dust? And if the trail ever became too hot, if the sheriff was too close or the Pinkerton Detective Agency too diligent in their hunt for the stolen loot, for the thieves and the bounty for capture, one could always do as the infamous bank robbers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did in 1901, and escape to South America.

What better way to experience Tupiza, where Butch and Sundance finally met their ends, than to hire a horse and gallop like a train, fly like the wind, through a desert canyon, past a cactus or two? Thurram-thurram-thurram: that was the idea.

Helpful hint: of course it would be better to know beforehand how to ride a horse.

Nong Khai, Thailand

It was just yesterday, several years later, I was remembering that afternoon on horseback, how it had been. It was a world away from Bolivia, with the steamy, monsoon Mekong idling by, beyond the cabana. Tourists gathered to chat and sip on drinks, to take the edge off the Thai afternoon humidity. Across the river were the distant houses and tiny motor cars of Laos; on the river were long canoe-like fishing boats. It’s strange I happened to chat with Annie; that Annie was there: she was exactly the person to resolve the riddle of Sanchez, from that long ago day.

Tupiza, Bolivia

Come to think of it, Tupiza, my first full day in Bolivia, never quite fit with the image of a faraway land. You don’t imagine, for example, finding lunch in a small restaurant by the main square, having to knock on the door to wake up the staff from their afternoon siesta, only to sit at a red and blue vinyl bench eating pizza to the sound of Boney M’s By the Rivers of Babylon. It’s a little off-putting.

Still, I clambered boulders at the edge of town, followed a goat trail past the Stations of the Cross to a hilltop. The mountains are thousand-pleated like the inside of lung, ironic given the altitude’s shortness of breath. To the south, three red rock houses with little stone goat yards clung to a canyon wall; to the east, a cemetery of white crosses, artificial flowers and tinsel. To the west, traffic uninterested in Tupiza’s bridge drove instead along the dry riverbed.

I followed a veinlike gully that zigzagged into the hills, in parts so narrow you could touch both walls at once. The rocks were pebble-filled, the olive green willows lit by the shard of late afternoon sky contrasted with rock red. Shadows climbed canyon walls. The air was still.

There was a stand-off in that canyon, but it wasn’t a pistol-toting Pinkerton detective that found me; rather a Doberman that suddenly appeared from around a bend, barking ferociously and running wildly in my direction. The canyon walls too steep to climb, I tried to recall all I knew of dogs and did the only thing worth doing. I stood still.

Fortunately, seconds short of my leg entering its mouth and needing several rabies shots, the dog baulked. My bluff worked. Soon its human arrived, yelling, managing to ward it off. Did they have wild Dobermans in the Wild Wild West?

Like me, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid started their South American adventures in Argentina. Unlike me, they would appear to have staged their biggest bank robbery of all, in Rio Gallegos in 1905, making off to the north and eventually hiding out in Bolivia. Witnesses recalled two English speaking bandits.

At San Vicente outside Tupiza in 1908 came the showdown. Trapped in a house, three soldiers of the Abaroa Regiment of the Bolivian Army’s cavalry, the police chief and local officials sought to arrest the fugitives. The bandits opened fire. There was a gunfight until, at 2 a.m., from inside the house two shots were heard, minutes apart. Two dead, bullet-ridden bodies were later found. It appeared that one had shot the other, who was probably already mortally wounded, before turning the gun on himself.

Tupiza: there should at least be a bit of galloping.

Like Butch and Sundance we were two: there was another Australian tourist, Richard. The hostel offered a lazy triathlon: a first leg by bicycle, all downhill, the second on horseback and the third by jeep, along a dirt road far up into the mountains.

I had only one question. ‘Do they have a really docile, placid horse available?’ I’d barely ridden before. They said they did: a dirty-white horse with a kindly disposition and his name was Sanchez.

We were led into empty country, from a stretch by the railway into just the kind of dry, rocky terrain where an American movie about the Wild West could be filmed. It was picture perfect for galloping, flying off in a trail of dust. But of course, there’s a difference between how things are imagined and reality.

Thurram-thurram-thurram, imagined, is not always how it turns out.

Sanchez was quite good but it wasn’t without trepidation that I sat up there on his back. I was pretty strong on the reins, thinking he should know I was in charge, and far short of galloping, if Sanchez even attempted a light trot, much less a canter, I became nervous and pulled him back. In the country of Butch and Sundance, there was a lot of slow walking that went on. On that day, Sanchez may as well have been a donkey.

Yet there was something more worrisome about his behaviour. He kept trying to twist his head around towards my leg. I didn’t mind if he only wanted to sniff it but I couldn’t be sure of his intentions so I pulled his head back to the front with the reins, just in case. If Sanchez is the placid horse, I’d hate to try the other ones.

‘Do horses bite?’ I wondered.

Nong Khai, Thailand

It’s not often that one needs to consult a horse expert. They’re not like doctors or hairdressers that everyday people visit time to time. Even the tom-tom owning Dhakaiyas probably know enough about horses not to spend much time consulting experts. Indeed, should I require a horse expert I wouldn’t know how to go about finding one.

So it was odd that as I was re-considering Sanchez and the day in Tupiza, Annie sat beside me. She was a British horse-riding instructor living in Hong Kong, where she taught at a riding school. She was on holidays in Thailand. It was the perfect circumstance to clear up that Sanchez issue. ‘Excuse me, but do horses bite?’

She was polite enough not to laugh when I explained the afternoon I spent onboard Sanchez. ‘Horses do sometimes bite,’ she said, ‘but it’s usually when you’re standing in front. It’s very hard for a horse to twist its neck to bite when you’re sitting on it. Maybe you were pulling on the reins too hard?’

Tupiza, Bolivia

Of course there are rumours about Butch and Sundance. It’s said they didn’t actually die in San Vicente. There are people who said they met them, years later, living discreetly back in the United States. It’s said they lived full lives and knew old age, and maybe it’s true: perhaps a final showdown, imagined, is not always how it works out in reality.

Travel by...

boat...

             boat...

                      boat...

    train...

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This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Do Horses Bite?

Oxygen

I

Three thousand, three thousand two hundred and beyond… In the Humahuaca Valley in northwest Argentina the altitude sets in and the human body’s resilience is tested. Just how much oxygen does a body need, anyway?

Normally there’s a mild headache that stretches on from several yesterdays. Normally there’s shortness of breath and lethargy. On a first occasion though, during a first clash with the heights, it must be usual to wonder through the night if the symptoms remain within that normal range. As there’s no past experience, nothing to compare an individual reaction to, there’s no exact measurement to be had.

Is this how initial acclimatisation should feel? Is it static? Is it getting worse?

What’s known: not all human bodies are the same. Elevations affect people differently and while three thousand plus metres is not nearly as high as we can go, at some point there comes for everyone that stage where the body is deteriorating faster than it can adjust – when, oxygen-starved, a body slowly dies. It’s not clear just at what elevation a body will succumb to altitude sickness. The only way to know about the nature of one’s own body is to try.

It’s supposed to take about a month to fully adjust. The body produces more red blood cells to better grab oxygen at lower air pressure. Usually after a few days the headache will go, and the breathlessness will gradually dissipate over the coming weeks. Usually the lethargy does not last.

But is this how acclimatisation should feel?

II

The country was a galaxy in grandeur, the bus turned into a toy with its passengers as pinheads, ants. In a landscape like that, of soft yellows, reds and browns, vast and empty, the human is easily understood to be not more than an unimpressive bag of chemicals, affected by changing conditions and prone to reactions. We’re no stronger than the wind and the air.

The country had been creative, with cacti decorated desert hillsides and twisted, multicoloured cliffs that earned their poetic names like the ‘Artist’s Palette,’ and looked as a great wealth of minerals. There were windblown rock formations and it was worth the breathing strain to see it.

Yet from the reaction to the lower pressure it should’ve been some alpine expedition. It should have been on foot with a walking stick, possibly ropes. There shouldn’t have been a bus service at all, nor a highway, nor beyond that open country, buildings.

That the human species has colonised almost every terrestrial environment would account for the two small towns on either side of the bridge. It would explain La Quiaca and Villazon.

It was time to get out and try to stretch one’s legs, because the future was up ahead, across the little bridge, where those bags of cement were, at great speed, going.

III

They were running across the bridge, hundreds of people, without any formalities. What drove their urgency was at first unclear; that they could run at all was a wonder. Where was the oxygen? Well, they say the locals are born with larger lungs.

It was a colourful procession, short indigenous men and wrinkle-faced women with swinging plaits and carefully balanced bowler hats. They lugged bags of building supplies, grain and cases of fruit, more, unknown boxes and baskets carried in multicoloured aguayo blankets slung over their shoulders and across their backs.

Among the bowler hats were several distinct varieties: black, brown or dark green, full-sized, nicely fit on the head or child-sized and looking a bit precarious, balanced at a fashionable side angle.

To the left, another line was coming southwards: people of the same crowd with the same tanned skin and distinctive cheek bones.  They were then carrying nothing but just as quickly. What was all the rush for?

The world has many borders. There’s a winding train line border from Belarus into Vilnius, a muddy channel with reeds between Iran and Iraq, there’s a long line of Tata trucks parked along the road to Haridaspore. And I remember how as another bus had once crossed from Bulgaria to Macedonia the passengers had hid cartons of cigarettes on the bus roof through the skylight as it drove slowly enough not to knock them off, through the checkpoint.

Still, of all borders it’s that one, La Quiaca in Argentina to Villazon in Bolivia, which is one of the strangest of all.

Why were they running? A tourist said they were contrabandistas, desperately smuggling as many loads of Argentina back into Bolivia as they could while Argentine customs officers stopped for lunch and siesta. It was a street market on the run; it seemed as if half of Argentina would be removed and resold before the customs post reopened.

Argentina has a Titanic-sized human border leak that’s impossible to fix; only a few people stood in the official queue.

And although it was but a small bridge it was a border that seemed natural, due to contrast, not least in the human faces to the north and to the south.

To the south was a largely immigrant country with a strong Italian influence that altered the pronunciation of the Spanish language. To the north there was an indigenous majority country still waiting, as at 2005, for its first indigenous president, an achievement which was surprisingly just one year away. His name was Evo Morales and people would speak of the end of Andean Apartheid after his election.

I wondered what it would be like to have an indigenous Bolivian friend, Quechua or Aymara. Would such a friendship have a distinctive Andean shape to it and how would it fit into the rest-of-life jigsaw, so entirely different as to be left waiting to one side, unable to place? What would life be like in La Paz, after I took up my new Bolivian job?

I remembered my mother, who’d warned me to watch out for the multitude sickness. I can only imagine that’s a rare type of affliction which strikes in elevated locations that are also crowded, places just like the La Quiaca – Villazon border.

And there, incidentally, running is certainly not as obvious an activity as stopping to catch breath.

IV

The Bolivian official reminded me, ‘thirty days’ as he stamped my passport. I thought he was fishing for an insistence on ninety for a small unofficial fee, but I might be wrong about that. In any case it was already planned to pursue a work visa, a process into which a week of my life would disappear, later, in the Bolivian capital.

My first Bolivian steps were in the town of Villazon, which, apart from that Andean dust you can’t do anything about, was clean and fastidiously swept. Somehow I’d imagined a more chaotic Bolivia.

They had an organised ticket system at the railway station and with my newly acquired Bolivianos I bought a ticket for Tupiza, the nearest town.

A robust train conductor in a hard cylindrical cap with a tin sign across it, labelling him in Spanish, greeted passengers at the carriage door; and he religiously swept the carriage every half hour or so.

I sat dusty-comfortable, watching the on-train video of traditionally costumed Bolivians dancing around a train, to the eclectic rhythms of Andean cumbias, and the out-the-window movie of banded dry hills, small gullies, distant mountains and a sunset over cactus flats.

There were a few adobe hut villages with washing drying on thorny bushes by a stream. The occasional goods truck chewed up dust and bowler hatted, long plaited goat herders walked from somewhere over the horizon to somewhere else over the horizon. Finally, there was night.

More Argentina...

More Bolivia...

More Mountains, or... 

Getting About by Rickshaw... which is nothing to do with it, really...

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Oxygen