The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

by Rachel Friedman

  Carly and I spend much of our time juice-stall-hopping in the crowded markets. We start to forgo meals altogether in favor of the thick, fresh, pulpy drinks with muesli and seeds mixed in. Women in white lab coats and chef hats serve us while we perch on bar stools among the papayas, mangoes, watermelons, and pineapple. One day we pop into a store selling musical instruments, and the blind owner shows me how to play the zampoña (the panpipes). Carly snaps a picture of us, him in a thick red jacket with black stripes and me in my gray poncho, a row of guitars and charangos (similar to a ukulele) hanging from the ceiling above us. Next door a girl no older than eight bargains with us for a pair of alpaca gloves.

  Gone are the friendly, easygoing locals of Bolivia’s countryside. As in any major city, they have been replaced by greater extremes of humanity: the poor, crazy, and ambitious all crowd in together, vying for space and clean air. We shuffle along with them, trying to keep out of the way. One afternoon when we are leaving the markets, something wet smacks my neck. Instinctively, I touch it. The crowd around me seems to get tighter, and I am sucked into the vortex. “Arriba, arriba!” people are shouting at me. Hands dig into my back and shoulders, shoving me forward.

  I lose sight of Carly, who is up ahead and has not yet noticed I am no longer a step behind. When the crowd parts, I am somehow next to her again, disoriented, until I notice the zipper of my money belt is open. My wallet and camera have been stolen. I realize the locals shouting at me were trying to help. They understood what was happening and were trying to get me to run away. But it happened too fast; it was over in seconds. The most frustrating part of getting robbed is that I read about this exact scam in the Bolivia section of my guidebook. Someone spits on you or—and I don’t know if this second option is more or less appealing—dumps liquid down your back. Distracted, you stop to examine yourself. While you’re wondering what the hell kind of bird poops orange soda, the thief swoops in and nicks your stuff. Easy.

  Reading about something doesn’t mean you’re prepared for it, though. Luckily, I had stuffed the five hundred bolivianos I had just gotten from an ATM inside my bra and left two of my three credit cards in the hostel. I lost my driver’s license but not my passport, a roll of film, a little bit of American cash, plus a few traveler’s checks I’ll have to cancel and have no idea how to replace while in Bolivia.

  Back in the hostel, Carly and I lie side by side on my bed, me wallowing in self-pity and berating myself for not having synapses that fire quick enough.

  “Don’t worry, it happens,” Carly says.

  What I want her to say is “It could have happened to either of us.” But we both know this isn’t true. And Carly is nothing if not honest. Sure, she might fib to me about something trivial to lift my spirits, like when I came across a picture of myself taken my last week in Sydney, my stomach spilling in rolls over my struggling bikini. “Uggh, I’m huge,” I grumbled.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, laughing. Then, to make me forget about my chubbiness, she pointed at the photo and said, “Look how tan you are, mate!”

  But something that matters, something like being the kind of person who gets robbed versus the kind of person who doesn’t, is something she would never gloss over. Carly always looks like she belongs, like she’s in control. I’m jealous of the way nothing ever seems to faze her. I haven’t yet realized that this is a misperception on my part—just because she reacts differently does not mean she is wholly unaffected—or that it would be much better to accept who I am, different as it is from Carly, and give myself credit for doing the best I can.

  I call American Express. “Have you filed a police report?” the woman asks.

  “Lady,” I reply, world-weary all of a sudden and running low in the optimism department, “have you ever been to Bolivia?”

  I pull out of my funk by the afternoon, in time to walk out into the streets of La Paz and get groped. As a tall, angry-looking man and his companion pass us, he reaches between my legs and grabs me hard. Then he just keeps walking. I’m filled with such intense anger and shock that my body feels like it’s on fire. I scream at him, something in unintelligible half-Spanish, and he turns around to face me. His face tightens. I do not look away. But then, fingers curling into fists, he begins to walk toward us again. On his face is the expression of someone who wishes to do real harm, someone who feels it is his right to touch women in the street, or maybe just foreign women. There are others nearby but no one comes to our rescue. No one seems to notice or care. What can we do? We run. We sprint two blocks to the hostel, where I collapse on my bed in tears, robbed, violated, and angry at the whole city of La Paz, angry at Carly for making me come here, angry at myself for agreeing.

  “Why does it have to be like this?”

  “It’s harder,” Carly agrees. “But that’s how it is.”

  “Do you ever wish you were a man?”

  “No,” she says, which is of course the truth. Carly never wishes to be anyone but herself, whereas I am constantly imagining my life as a different person. I think of the women in On the Road. What is their role? They’re around to be screwed, to be divorced, to be punched in the ribs, to fall flat on their face in the mud. These women aren’t the travelers. They’re the pit stops.

  The idea that something bad has happened to me, coupled with the certainty that nothing will be done about it, shakes my very core. Even with Carly here, I know the two of us represent little more threat together than we do separately. We’re at the mercy of this place. I have the overwhelming urge to flee, but I know that if I do, I will wrap up the whole country of Bolivia in this one bad day and tuck it away forever in some forgetting drawer of my mind.

  I didn’t realize how difficult backpacking could be. In Bolivia, especially, my romantic notion of traveling the world was constantly getting shipwrecked against the day-to-day reality of it. I had witnessed beauty and kindness here, but I was often overwhelmed, totally out of my element. Carly had prior experience traveling in South America. She was a born adventurer who determined early on that she had no use for fear, whereas I was scared a lot of the time. But I didn’t want to let that emotion stop me anymore, not in my travels or in my life. No, I determined, tomorrow I would put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward.

  [19]

  Our heroine and her trusty guide battle the great and mighty Death Road, which is much feared by peoples other than the native inhabitants of the equally great and mighty Bolivia. Descends into a drug-induced slumber and emerges with an epiphany.

  The next day we are off bright and early to bike the Death Road, both of us happy to leave La Paz behind. Although Carly does not display every emotion on her face, as I do, it turns out my misfortunes in La Paz have made her uneasy as well.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I’ll ask her, surprised, when we discuss the incident some weeks later.

  “I thought it was obvious. You’d had such a terrible time of it. Of course I didn’t want to be there, either.”

  I probably would have felt a little less isolated if she had voiced this concern in La Paz, but it’s not her style to spell things out. I was beginning to realize that Carly’s stoicism is the way she copes, like mine is letting my thoughts and feelings all hang out like a beer belly.

  We find ourselves in a van with a German pair, a French couple, and a Spanish girl. It is a quiet group. We stare sleepily out the windows, no one making a move to purchase anything when we pull up to a stretch of open stalls where apple-cheeked women hawk bottled water, fresh bread, and wool sweaters. The wind whips around them, pinning wisps of their long black hair to their foreheads.

  By the time we stop to unload the gear, we are at nearly five thousand meters (15,000 feet), and it is absolutely freezing. It’s also raining. We’re given bright orange rain jackets and matching pants and paired with bikes. Mine is huge; the seat is so high that I have to hop up to get on. I take a little practice ride and quickly realize my brakes don’t work.

&nbs
p; “Ayuda!” I screech.

  The guide looks at me as though I’m rather clever for figuring out this minor malfunction before we started downhill. I grit my teeth as he pulls one of the chains over some spokes and pronounces the problem fixed.

  I make Carly promise to wait for me if I get too far behind, but once the wind is at her back, her word is swept away with it, mocking me from behind. Though her brakes are fine, Carly’s gears don’t work properly, so she’s stuck at one speed: the fastest. The road is wet and windy and paved only for the first hour of our journey. The rain heaves itself at us, and within minutes we are drenched from head to foot. Heavy fog clings to the Andes. I grasp the handlebars with numb fingers and ride my brakes down the spiraling mountains. I want to close my eyes and let go, let someone else take over. But it’s just me, and the terrifying death trap seems to go on forever. All I hear is blood pulsing in my ears. After twenty minutes, we stop to collect ourselves and detach our clenched blue fingers from the frozen handlebars. They’re curled like an arthritic woman’s around a walker. Everyone is smiling and laughing. I intend to throw a hearty chuckle into the mix, but somewhere between my brain and my mouth, it transforms into a heavy sigh, giving away my unhappiness.

  It’s clear immediately that I am the slowest rider in our group. As I approach the others at one of the many places where they stop to let me catch up, I hear one of the Germans who brought his own bike say in English loud enough for me to hear: “She is very, very slow, ja?”

  Besides being generally embarrassed over my performance, I am aware of being the only American in the group. If I give up, not only am I the girl who gave up, but I’m the American who couldn’t hack it. In my mind, they will immediately associate nationality and competence.

  Often during our journey, we have to pull off to the side of the road to let huge trucks squeeze by, two or three passengers riding high atop them. We stand right at the edge of the cliff, our heels against the abyss, and my head spins from altitude and fear.

  Last night before I fell asleep, I imagined myself gliding downhill in the bright sun of a Bolivian morning, the wind carrying me across the mountains. I didn’t anticipate the rain and mud and the fact that I’m not E.T. Two hours into the bike ride, I have had it, no matter how determined I was the night before.

  “I feel sick,” I tell Carly. “I think it’s the altitude.”

  “That’s no good, mate.”

  She knows I’m faking it and so do I and we both pretend we don’t.

  Ten minutes later, I am in the minivan following behind the riders. This is the one thing I told Carly I absolutely refused to do: traverse the Death Road in an actual vehicle. Now here I am beside the toothy driver, carrying on a sulky conversation in my half-baked Spanish, irked at Carly for making us do this in the first place.

  Later, she will generously strike this wimpiness from the record of our travels. When other backpackers ask if we’ve done the Death Road, she’ll say, “Yup, we went, and it was fantastic. You should definitely do it.” Meanwhile, I will look distractedly in the other direction, pretending to examine some interesting piece of wall in the distance.

  When we miraculously reach Coroico, I swear there are angels singing. At a mere fifteen hundred meters above sea level, I feel the expanding sensation of oxygen flowing back into my starved lungs. Nestled in the Andes, Coroico is a popular vacation spot for middle-class Bolivians, though only in this country would folks willingly cross something called the Death Road for a little R & R. As usual, we are greeted by men advertising accommodations. They carry laminated photos of their respective hotels in large binders, each bargaining with the others so effectively that we have only to look on and wait for the lowest available price. It winds up being twenty bolivianos a night, about the equivalent of three U.S. dollars.

  “Do not tell this to the other guests,” our salesman warns us. “This is a special price. Only for you. Okay?” We nod conspiratorially.

  Hotel Esmeralda resembles a Swiss ski lodge. It’s at the top of a steep hill that we rattle up in his red jeep. When our escort drops us in the lobby and reveals our bargain rate to a woman folding laundry, she looks first at him and then at us with open dismay. He shrugs, and she motions for us to follow her down the hall, refusing to make eye contact. In our room, I open the white shutters onto a perfect postcard view of the Andes. An unobstructed panorama of snowcapped mountains stretches in all directions. We stick our faces out the window and inhale deeply. I feel the stress of La Paz and the trauma of our recent bike ride recede as if it happened weeks and not hours ago.

  “Carly,” I sigh happily.

  “I know,” she says.

  It’s not just that Carly and I often have different concepts of fun (see: Death Road). Traveling with someone isn’t always easy in general. We were “in each other’s pockets,” as Carly put it. So any number of individual preferences and personality clashes were magnified, and we’d been together in close quarters so long that we also knew precisely how to get under each other’s skin. Luckily, we shared a fundamental desire to see the world. So whenever we took in a new, spectacular piece of it, like at this moment, we let everything else go and embraced the awesomeness together. We were always ready to start fresh in a new place and with each other.

  Our shared reverence is interrupted by a floating British accent. We follow it down to a very pale girl in a very pink bikini and a hairy guy floating on his back in the pool.

  “I don’t know what the big deal is,” she says loudly. “It’s just a bunch of ruins, yeah?”

  “I think so,” he agrees. “I mean, we’re on holiday, and I’d rather sit by the pool and get pissed.”

  She nods thoughtfully, then slowly shakes her head again in disbelief. “In the pictures, it just looks like a bunch of bloody ruins. I can’t even pronounce it. Maccho Pichi?”

  Carly rolls her eyes at what is for her an abominable way to discuss the place she has already decided will be the highlight of our trip a few weeks from now.

  “Ugh,” I groan in agreement. These are the loud, ignorant kinds of tourists we try hardest to avoid. It’s an irony of our present situation. Although traveling ideally makes the traveler more tolerant of other cultures, one sometimes isn’t so tolerant of fellow vagabonds, especially when she believes, like Carly and I do, that they are somehow disrupting her own “authentic” experience.

  “Let’s get some wine,” I say, closing the shutters and blocking out the voices.

  Since I now fully appreciate the feat of transporting it, I am not too disappointed that the wine is twice as expensive here as it was in La Paz. We buy two bottles and some fresh bread and make our way back to the hotel. When we get there, pink-bikini girl has joined her friends on the patio, where they are all guzzling beer—except for the back-floater, who is grasping a massive bottle of vodka with both hands. I’m tired and really don’t feel like making small talk. I can tell from Carly’s quickened pace that neither does she, so we politely decline their offers to join the party, not knowing that we will all be together again soon.

  Two white hammocks sway unoccupied at the bottom of a small hill behind the pool. We pour our wine into tiny white plastic cups and settle into the netting.

  “Let’s stay another day,” I say.

  “Okay,” she immediately agrees.

  Partly, I think Carly says yes because she worries I will have a stroke if forced back onto the Death Road so soon (we’ll have to traverse more of it to reach the Amazon), but I know she, too, likes the quiet pace of Coroico. Through the trees, car lights still flicker along the route to La Paz. We learned today that a new, safer road is being built parallel to the Death Road; I hope it will have a more optimistic name. Bolivia is so surprising: dusty desert, endless salt flats, jagged mountains, and the sweaty Amazon all occupy the same vast landscape. Tonight I’m glad we’re here.

  Two days later, peaceful Coroico seems a world away as we race along a supposedly less dangerous stretch of road in a bus. My f
orehead is plastered against the greasy glass as I strain to see beneath the bus, to confirm that the wheels are connected to the road and we are not, as it appears, suspended in midair. I squash my face harder into the window, painfully flattening out my nose while I crane my neck at various angles. But I glimpse only the outer slice of one black wheel hugging the edge of a drop hundreds of feet from the ground; the muddy path is tucked neatly out of sight below the belly of the bus. Next to me, Carly ignores my manic investigation. She leans back against the seat and puts one flip-flopped foot across her knee. Behind cheap aviator sunglasses, her eyes close. She has gotten thinner since we arrived in South America two months ago—we both have. But Carly’s body is a muscular, compact thin, whereas I look more waify and anemic. She wears knee-length tan shorts and a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt. Her blond hair is pulled back into a short ponytail, her Discman earphones dangle like a futuristic necklace.

  I lean over her lap to get a better look at some of the other passengers and accidentally step on her exposed toes. “Sorry, Carlz!” I whisper.

  She reluctantly opens her eyes. “What’s the drama?” Loosely translated, this is Australian for “Why are you acting like such a complete idiot and stomping on my foot?”

  “We have a problem,” I say, and gesture wildly toward the window.

  It has become abundantly clear over the past few months that Carly and I have vastly different definitions of a problem. For her, the word is employed only after something bad happens, as in “Charlie had a bit of a problem last week when that shark bit off his leg.” I personally feel that experiencing actual misfortune is a mere technicality. The real problem began with the idea of the shark lurking in the water, something it would have occurred to me to worry about long before I actually paddled out into the ocean. In my opinion, a problem is the promise of disasters to come, two seconds or two years from now. And considering its treacherous landscape, foreign languages, unpredictable transportation, and total disregard for fixed prices of goods and services, Bolivia itself is, for me at least, pretty much one big problem.