Wooden, half covered with flaking green house paint, the tour boat has a few boards nailed to the roof as makeshift seats. Below is blackish water thickly laden with reeds, yet to be lit up by the rising sun. Cold wind whips off its surface and chills us to the bone.
Far enough out so that Copacabana appears in full on one side, the distant Island of the Sun on the other, I feel my excitement begin inexplicably to melt away, as though I were suddenly reminded of having seen all of this before. I fall silent and she is silent and conversations in Norwegian and Swiss German become all I can tolerate, simply because the words are not words to be, only sounds interspersed with the occasional and jarring familiarity of a´Ja´. My head is empty, save for a vague flicker of images and thoughts, those inextinguishable, pulsing reminders of being alive. And then she she turns her back to rest on my left shoulder. I am startled but soon go back to nothing.
Those gulls, those black-billed ducks; can they diffrentiate between lake and sea? Out here I guess no-one can, for it is endless azure water on either side of this, Isla Del Sol´s highest peak, overhung by clouds low enough to blow away with a birthday puff, distant currents like silver oil slicks, cows eating withered waterless bushes on precipitous slopes, lambs with red ribbons quietly listening to their elders bleat. Nomadic sheppards padlock huts, perched like lookouts over the water, while sowing crops on flatter land; as I walk along, alone, sometimes silent, sometimes singing, the full force of my imagination rushes back, my thoughts in all their shambolic entropy, and I tug padlocks on those clay idyls and from open, deserted guesthouses steal bafs of coca tea. Stopping only to piss or reapply sunscreen - the day is cloudless and at maximum heat, not to mention my relative proximity to the sun - I have torn away from the other tourists and from her.
This path undulating through the island belongs to me, rouses me from my morning torpor and trips me up on glittering ore-stone and burns me with its charity. Birthplace of the Incas! But what does the word Inca mean to me? Referent to a great civilsation, or the name of a type of soft drink? Part of the puns above butcher´s shops, bus terminals, restaurants, or indexical launching pad into history?
...
The road to Coroico twirls like a pinwheel, paved and then unpaved, rounding mountains or tunnelling through them, opaque in the film of morning cloud still lingering amongst the Yungas. Like its sacred Peruvian counterpart, this subtropical valley abounds in verdant greenery, the air heavy, the scale one of hair-raising enormity. And like enormous colanders, scores of thin waterfalls spurt from these mountains, carving out sharp gullies to render their sides wonderful puzzles of geometry, white miracles running a thousand meters down before drying up not three from the dead riverbed far, far below. Giant banana leaves canopy the road and the skies are policed by gliding birds.
We share a collectivo with twi Boliviano families; the only other vehicles encountered are trucks, tour buses, anti-narcotics four by fours - this area was understandably a haven for cocaine production - and the odd banged up taxi with its bonnet up on the roadside. Chulumani and Chuspipata come and go. Stopping to refuel, I am about to enter the baño when an hombre, wearing black gumboots and gold aviators, signals ominously with his index finger: 1 Boliviano. I hold it in.
Soon both families are gone. The first to leace consists of a mother, father, two young children and grandparents. They are dressed in the latest western fashions and alight at a five star resort. The other family is a mother with one boy and one girl, possibly twins, enigmatically carrying plastic bags full of flowers. They disembark at a windowless roadside shack. And though I didn´t notice, she tells me later than, sitting side-byside. the first family had looked upon the second with utter disdain, as though they were of a lower order entirely. Not in a touristic sense either, which is closer to the way one looks at a different, but by no means inferior, race of people; no, like overlords upon the mastered. It saddened me to hear this- my conception of Bolivia as a bitterly poor country but one poor in solidarity - poverty after all being the world´s great unifier - was irretrievably changed. With what frequency must that first family have cast those subjugating eyes! Knowing nothing of their situations I nevertheless worried for both sets of children but for the wealthier two in particular; everything this country did not need - nor does any country - was already impregnated in their helpless little minds. The archway bidding us Bienvenidos to Coroico also displays the slogan, ´Welcome to Paradaise´. I laugh at the unusual spelling, though I will never know if it is intentional or just a pitiable gaff.
One in the afternoon now; we find ourselves walking uphill again, steeper this time and in extreme humidity, towards a campsite we can seem to find no trace of. Up and up over the tiny town we rise; the terrain is lush and the vistas of the Yungas breathtaking. Banana trees, full of green bunches with their wand-like flowers dangling underneath, mingle with bushes of red hibiscus, ferns beset by some kind of fungal infection, trees with tiny jungle oranges that are the sweetest I´ve ever eaten. It smells of rain, soil. Butterflies of myriad colour and size dart past our cheeks, jumping spiders startle her; hummingbirds; yellowtails; grasshoppers small and bright red; inimitable sound of a certain bird, I do not know which one, who, perhaps streeting towards its prey, will hold its wings close to its body and launch at phenomenal speed down into the valley, trailing behind it a noise that summons, in my mind at least, that menacing whoosh on cartoons when the fuse on a stick of dynamite is lit.
Another hotel but at last a sign, an arrow; we are headed in the right direction. Excitedly we round a bend, haul our heavy packs over the next rise. There is a small military compound but no campsite. I look back at her; cheeks purplish red, fringe, stringy with sweat, stuck to her forehead. Put your things down, I tell her, while I go ahead and make sure it´s there. She nods and I give her a kiss and water. Thirty seconds after setting off I stop; it is there.
Once the tent is up I pass a quiet hour absorbing what is truly an ample reward. Officially an ecolodge, the grounds command unparallelled view, set on the hillside in segments connected by wooden stairs strwen with tiny purple flower. The relative altitude obscures the rest of the town as if it were not there at all. And opposite us the Yungas plunge down into a gorge and rise again sharply in green mountains, staggeringly high, leaking more miraculous water.
There are two swimming pools, hammocks slung from bamboo, a mediation room - glass panelled - where the view alone is enough to put one in a trance. The stone hot tub, however, is empty and fire wood costs extra. We pay $5 per night to camp. For four days her tent is our home. Cramped, without mat or sleeping bag save for a colourful Boliviano blanket bought in La Paz, the tent, pitched in the shade of a huge banana tree, affords me little rest but I hardly care. Roosters crow at around 4; stirring then, I rise soon after. And in the early hours all is shrouded by thick cloud. Even the sky looks hopelessly overcast. What a transformation to be awake for then; slowly the sun imposes itself on the shadows, slowly there appear things - objects, plants, insects, birds - invisble before. And by midday, after I have sat in the Sala Mayu for an hour, never able to vanquish a last thought from my mindm usually the most untapped and trivial (this morning it was the lyrics to Britney Spears´ ´Sometimes´) swam, showered, eaten breakfast and chosen a good vantage point, at last the valley and sky become clear, cloudless, bright as stars, and all the inhabitants of the jungle are again in full song.
One afternoon, thunder claps from far off down the gorge. We have just washed our clothes in the stone sink at camp and have them all spread out to dry- on seats, logs, the rafters of a small communal hut with thatched roof and walls made from mud and beer bottles. In the middle off the bottle-butts there stands, on the back wall, the figure of a Frangelico monk, which I find an inexpensive and cool display of piety.
Before long half the sky has turned black. Asleep in hammocks, we are finally raised to our feet when one bout of thunder sounds as if the sky is breaking in two. She rails against me for saying the clouds were going the other way until I point out that they are, in fact, going both ways, bad coming toward us and benign floating out to other lands. She rails against me for making that mistake. We rush to put everything in the tent. It rains hard all afternoon and all night. Under the hut´s thatched roof we play cards, drink whisky, eat fried bananas and take in the spectacular deluge. Later, when the tent has cooled down, we make love. And in that sobering after-effect of sex I realise we would stay here for months if we could. This is a dangerous thought; only weeks left and still so much unseen. Next morning she asks me will we stay another night, but scrap our plans for Cochabamba and head directly to Sucre instead. I agree to everything.
No comments:
Post a Comment