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.

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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