by John Higham
I began to understand. The water is so black, the piranhas can’t see their food. A piranha needs to smell blood in order to find its dinner.
“Got it, René. Don’t slit my wrists and then stick my arm in piranha-infested waters. Important safety tip.”
So how do you catch a piranha? You don’t “hook” it, and then reel it in like a normal fish. When you feel it tearing at the bait you have to pull it into the boat with one quick yank. Before they know it, they’s a-floppin’ and a-twitchin’ in the bottom of the boat.
We took the afternoon’s piranha haul back to camp. As soon as Plastico heard the roar of the outboard motor, he climbed out of the water and onto shore. He stood patiently, mouth open, waiting for someone to throw something into it. Of course, Katrina and Jordan each wanted to feed Plastico a piranha.
“Oh, come on, Dad. Everyone else is doing it!” I had been dreading the day when Katrina would say this to me, but I always thought it would be about getting a navel ring or dying her hair flaming red.
I watched as the camp cook, the caretaker, and even René each threw Plastico a piranha. I heard a dramatic CHOMP! as the beast’s jaws caught the offering. René stood close to Plastico, monitoring feeding time, presumably ready to manhandle the beast if things got out of hand.
And so it was that I demonstrated that when it comes to parenting, I have a backbone with all the structural integrity of well-cooked pasta. I let Katrina feed a piranha to a wild alligator. Jordan, too. If someone had told me a year ago that I would be in the Amazon watching my kids feed a wild alligator several flesh-eating fish that they had caught just a few minutes before, I would have told them they were absolutely nuts. But here I was, watching the scene unfold before me, while I took out the digital camera and made an .mpg of it all.
• • •
We had checked into our hotel room in the tiny Bolivian town of Rurrenabaque only ten minutes prior, but I was already showering off six days’ worth of Amazon grime. September came bursting into the bathroom.
“Our return flight to La Paz tomorrow morning has been cancelled. We can either try to make a flight that leaves in 20 minutes or wait two more days.”
Nineteen minutes later, without formalities such as tickets or security checks for derelict table forks, we were shoe-horned into a tiny Cessna. Two pilots emerged in military jumpsuits.
Our mighty steed was built for four adult passengers who knew one another very well, or who were about to get better acquainted. As our party was three adults and two children, we had to do some contortionist acts. I noted that there was an abundance of duct tape holding together the interior upholstery.
I was sitting behind the pilot of a tiny rubber band-powered Cessna that was looking down a short grass runway. I glanced over the pilot’s shoulder to read a sticker on the instrument panel: AEROBATIC MANEUVERS NOT PERMITTED. September leaned over and yelled in my ear so that she could overcome the roar of the propeller, “You didn’t get all the shampoo out of your hair!”
Positioned right behind the pilots, I watched the youngest open what appeared to be a textbook in his lap. The senior pilot appeared to be giving his companion instructions. Our original plane tickets were with Amazonas Air, but there were no such markings on our plane. I tapped one of the pilots on the shoulder and confirmed my suspicions. This was not a commercial flight. It was a military training flight, and our pilot was a new student, so would I please keep my questions to myself until we got airborne? They had a checklist to go through.
Pardonnez-moi, I thought to myself. The last thing I wanted to do was interrupt Junior and his checklist.
Soon we were airborne. The sky was clear and we had front-row seats to the green carpet of the Amazon basin below. As we climbed to the high Altiplano near La Paz, we watched the green turn to the browns of bare earth and the whites of the permanent snow cover of the higher elevations. Our Little Plane That Could couldn’t quite get enough altitude to go over the mountain peaks, so we flew below and between them. We could look out the window and see the sheer rock walls of the Andes only a few hundred yards away. The one-hour flight back to La Paz was thrilling, even without aerobatic maneuvers.
After landing at a Bolivian Air Force base near La Paz, we were escorted promptly out to the street so that we wouldn’t observe that the entire military squadron was made up of Cessnas.
Typical Bolivia—spectacular, raw, rugged, and never a dull moment. For the adventurous, Bolivia is a thrill that must be experienced. Just don’t expect a mint on your pillow.
I learned a lot about myself in Bolivia, and maybe something about human nature as well. It may not be possible to get a howler monkey to accept his own brother who fell out of a tree back into the tribe. It may not be possible to get a leaf-cutter ant to take a mental health day. But if I could get comfortable enough to let my children feed piranha to a wild alligator in the space of one day, given the right circumstances, people are capable of profound change.
www.360degreeslongitude.com/concept3d/360degreeslongitude.kmz
World’s Most Dangerous Road. The primary road from La Paz to Brazil is acknowledged by Guinness World Records as the world’s most dangerous. It is also the most fun you can have on a bicycle. Skip the return trip in the van, though.
26.
One Tough Kid
April 20–May 3
Peru
We were anticipating meeting Jessie, our guide for the Inca Trail, but at the moment I was focusing on making dinner at our Cuzco, Peru hostel. This was proving difficult because the burners on the stove were dominated by large cauldrons of a simmering green gelatinous liquid. A plaque on the wall above the stove hinted at the contents:
San Pedro is a sacred plant, a cactus, used in the Andes for healing purposes. Most people drink this medicine to heal on an emotional level, but it is also used to cure physical illness. San Pedro reconnects us to ourselves, and also to Mother Earth.
This plant is a Master Teacher, a great gift from Creator. It helps us to heal, to grow, to learn and awaken, and assists us to reach higher states of Truth and Consciousness.
When you hear this plant calling you, speak to Lesley.
I thought I had gotten used to the Andean extracurricular activities while we were in Bolivia. After reading the plaque, I glanced at the simmering liquid and listened. All I heard was gurgling so I didn’t speak to Lesley.
Cuzco was the seat of Inca power in 1532 when the Spaniards appeared on the scene. The Spaniards found leading from Cuzco a series of roads that supported a Pony Express-like network used for sending communications throughout the empire, which extended down the western sides of the Andes from modern day Ecuador to Chile. One of those roads was to Machu Picchu, known today as the Inca Trail.
The Peruvian government limits the number of people on the Inca Trail to five hundred per day, and demand for hiking permits far outstrips supply so we had made our hiking arrangements several weeks in advance.
When Jessie, a native Quechuan young woman, arrived at the hostel to brief us on what to expect while hiking the trail, the smell of San Pedro simmering on the stove hung heavy in the air. Lesley, the 50-something Australian-born matriarch of our hostel, was guiding a fresh batch of 20-somethings on their journey to reconnect to Mother Earth in the next room. I heard giggling. I really did not want to know what that was all about. I tried to focus on what Jessie was trying to tell us.
“Since you elected to not have porters carry your personal belongings you will need good sturdy backpacks that are up to the task. If you don’t have one of your own, you can rent one of ours.”
Elect? I hadn’t elected porters? My mind raced to understand this information. All I could think of was that I hadn’t elected anyone since the last presidential election, and I couldn’t even remember which candidate I’d chosen.
“Excuse me, Jessie,” I found my voice. “I thought we had porters.”
“There are porters to carry the food and tents,” she replied, “but not your
personal belongings such as clothes, sleeping bag, drinking water, camera, and so on. You can arrange to have a porter carry your personal belongings as well, but at additional cost.”
This was starting to sound familiar. I now remembered thinking when I made our reservation, that I could carry my clothes—they weren’t heavy—and then nixing the personal porter line item all those weeks ago. “Okay, we’ll need to rent some backpacks.”
September shot me a sideways glance, unleashing a death ray out of her left eye. Luckily, I narrowly escaped it. “Jessie,” September asked, “how many hours of hiking can we expect each day?”
“The first day you will hike for eight hours,” Jessie handed out a map of the trail, “then twelve on the second day, followed by ten on the third day. Depending on how far we get, there could be as many as four hours hiking on the fourth day.”
September shot me another death ray, but this time I caught both barrels. I swear I had read that there were no more than four or five hours of hiking per day, which was the story I had told her when I booked the hike.
“What about the elevation profile?” continued September, as though she hadn’t just mortally wounded her husband.
I didn’t need to hear the answer. Looking at the map Jessie had handed out, it was clear that the second day was going to be the worst, when there would be 5,700 feet of ascent and 3,300 feet of descent. In Cuzco’s thin air we were still struggling to get our breath just climbing a flight of stairs. This hike was going to push us to our limits. I wasn’t looking forward to being alone with September, as this had been all my idea.
September then asked the $64,000 question. “Jessie, what age are the youngest children who have done the hike before?”
“Oh, this hike has been done by very young children, as young as twelve or thirteen years old, I think.”
Nine-year-old Jordan beamed at the prospect of being the youngest to do the trail. Forty-five-year-old John was thinking of going into the next room and reconnecting with Mother Earth before September had a chance to unleash more death rays.
“We will pick you up at six in the morning!” was Jessie’s parting, cheerful reply.
Our sole preparation for our hike had consisted of “being at altitude” for over a week. The entire length of the Inca Trail was so high that altitude sickness was a real concern. Now that we had a better idea of what to expect, I felt a little, shall we say, underprepared.
“You know, we don’t have to do this,” I told September after Jessie left. “There’s a train that takes you from Cuzco to Aguas Caliente. From there you can take a shuttle to Machu Picchu.”
I am the luckiest guy in the world because not only does my wife love me, but she puts up with me in spite of all my faults, such as being too clueless to grasp all the details of hiking the Inca Trail. Or boarding the Navimag. Or riding in the Unimog.
We briefly discussed forfeiting the hike and taking the train. Then she said, “Others have done this and we can, too. I’ll bring some Armageddon Pills, though.”
I smiled. I knew what she meant by that. Not that she was going to go out and buy a pack of M&M’s, but that we both understood each other and knew that together we could overcome a lot of uncertainty and difficulty.
Early the next morning we met the other hikers in our group for the first time. There was our group of five (the four of us, plus P) and five others—an Israeli couple, another Israeli woman traveling alone, and two Dutch women traveling together—all in their twenties. The demographic reinforced our notion that the Dutch are the best-traveled group of people in the world.
Jessie was our leader, and supporting the ten hikers and one guide were twelve porters. Normally, the ratio is one porter per hiker, but the two Dutch girls were smart enough to pony up the cash to get a personal porter to carry their gear. By the time I was done packing for our hike, the weight of my backpack had ballooned to 25 pounds. P’s backpack was probably 25 pounds just in Duracells. As I lifted my backpack onto the bus that would carry us to the trailhead, I was more than a little jealous of the two Dutch girls and their porter.
There were formalities involved before we could actually begin hiking. Each of the porters was required to weigh his massive load. They were limited to 25 kg (55 pounds) each. It seemed that in years past there had been some porter abuse so their loads are now regulated, but I’m not so sure that the new and improved 55-pound limit still doesn’t constitute abuse.
After the weigh-in, there was passport control. The Peruvian government takes the regulation of the trail seriously. I was glad we had extra pages put into our passports at the U.S. embassy before we left La Paz, as we were running out of places for stamp-happy officials to make their mark.
Once through passport control, we climbed for about an hour on a smooth and wide trail until we reached a broad plateau. The Urubamba River raged below us.
“We are all a family now,” Jessie told us as she performed an Inca adoption ceremony. After blowing on some coca leaves and then burying them in the ground, it was official.
I would learn more information about the Incas over the next few days as we covered the distance to Machu Picchu, the most significant being that the Inca Trail is proof of an ancient civilization that was advanced enough to have arthroscopic knee replacement technologies, because otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to go out on the blasted trail to begin with.
That first day of hiking was strenuous, but it was the second day that really tested us, and proved almost too much for Jordan. It started with a 5:00 a.m. wake-up call so we could have a good breakfast and hit the trail at first light. With twelve hours of hiking ahead of us and twelve hours of available daylight, we couldn’t afford to waste any time.
Jordan simply refused to eat that early. I pleaded with him. “Little Dude, you need your strength to hike in this thin air. We’ll be ascending 4,700 feet in the next six hours, and the lunch stop is over eight hours from now.”
“I don’t want anything!”
Yoda said that the mind of a child is a wonderful thing. Of course Jesus said almost the same thing. I doubt either had Jordan in mind, though, when they were being quoted.
As soon as we hit the trail Jordan’s low blood sugar and the thin air packed a one-two punch. He quickly got physically ill and started throwing up despite his empty stomach. Moving very slowly, he required rest every 15 feet or so.
“There’s no way he can make it like this,” I whispered to September. September and I hadn’t had a private conversation in almost eleven months and this was no exception. Whispering was the most reliable form of communication within our group.
“Don’t whisper about me!” Jordan demanded.
Jordan simply hates to be treated like a little kid. I offered to carry his pack. I offered to carry him. Any offering of help served no other purpose than to remind him that he was little. I may as well have patted him on the head. It didn’t help matters that every other adult on the trail showed equal concern. Every comment only served to increase his resolve that he was going to finish the hike, even if it killed him.
Which, of course, was what I was worried about. Altitude sickness can be fatal. He had vomited several times and between dehydration and low blood sugar, I thought he might go into shock.
“Maybe we should just turn around,” September reasoned, when I shared my concerns.
“There’s just as much elevation gain behind us,” I said, looking at our map, “as there is in front of us.”
The part of the trail we were hiking had local entrepreneurs selling everything from food to shoe repair to porter services. It was Gatorade that saved the day. We bought some for roughly the equivalent of a small three-bedroom home in Silicon Valley.
“Drink this, Little Dude,” I said, handing him the bottle.
“Ugh. I’ll just throw it up. Don’t make me.”
“You got to have some, even if it’s just enough to get the inside of your mouth wet. You have to drink some every time we stop to res
t.”
Katrina and P had gone on and were probably an hour or more ahead of us. Although P is a strong hiker, we had a good idea that Katrina would be running circles around him. With her boundless capacity for nonstop chatter, we also had a good idea that she would slowly be extracting energy from him, like a star orbiting a black hole.
September, Jordan, and I were in the back of the pack of the 500 hikers on the trail: only Jessie and a trail sweeper were behind us. Jessie carried oxygen and other medication for altitude sickness, but Jordan, who refused all of it, was starting to respond to the Gatorade therapy.
Mr. Trail Sweeper’s job was to be sure no one got left behind. He carried a Peruvian pan flute and played a tune as he walked.
We were hiking along the side of a mountain that was part of a steep and narrow valley. The tune echoed beautifully across the gorge. I was huffing and puffing with all my might while Mr. Trail Sweeper played a tune as if he were on a street corner working for tips.
“He’s playing an old Simon and Garfunkel tune,” I said to September. I liked to annoy September with my knowledge of music from the ’60s and ’70s because she couldn’t name anything that was less than 200 years old.
“Actually, it is a 300-year-old Peruvian tuned called ‘El Condor Pasa’ that Simon and Garfunkel put English lyrics to and made popular.”
“Give me a break. You’re making that up.”
“Look it up, if you don’t believe me.”
“I can do better than that. I’ll ask Mr. Trail Sweeper.” Turning to the trail sweeper, I said, “That was nice. Do you know any other Simon and Garfunkel tunes?”
He looked at me as if I was from an alien planet. September has never said the words, “I told you so.” I wish she would, just to get it over with.
Dead Woman’s Pass, at 14,050 feet, is the highest point along the Inca Trail. Through sheer stubbornness, Jordan made it to the top. We found Katrina and P there waiting for us. Katrina was overflowing with energy, the excess coming out of her mouth as one long run-on sentence.
