Guayaramerin, the terminus for the road from Riberteralta, is a small, dusty settlement with a frontier atmosphere. Situated on the alligator-infested Rio Mamore, opposite the Brazilian town of Guajara Mirim, it is a river port and, due to the impassable rapids further on, the end of the line for transport along the Mamore. It is also a rail town where the railway never arrived. The line was planned to transport rubber during the boom days by connecting Riberteralta to Porto Velho in Brazil and thence to Manaus, the Amazon and the Atlantic. The 364-kilometre line from Santo Antonio to Riberteralta, completed in 1912, cost six thousand lives thanks to malaria, yellow fever, gunfights and accidents. But the line to Porto Velho was never finished and no trains ever came. The world price of rubber plummeted and the railway became a white elephant while it was still under construction. Today the road goes across the railway bridges, but the railway line is used only occasionally for short tourist trips from Porto Velho.
My taxi driver helped me find a hotel, took my bags in and shook hands before departing. Everyone seemed happy to see you in Bolivia. A nice girl showed me a room that cost fifty bolivianos, sixteen Australian dollars. The hotel entrance was merely a corridor next to the pizza shop in the main square. The corridor led to a narrow garden with two rows of tile-roofed, stucco rooms either side of it. Guayaramerin was hot and there was no breeze, but my room had a good fan and was comfortable. The bathroom, however, was a fine example of DIY electrocution, with exposed wires hanging out from where the hot water switch had been. I presumed from this that there was no chance of a warm shower.
Lunching on terrible tough meat at a table on the footpath in the plaza, I took my Japanese lacquer fan from my bag to try to combat the heat. This fan has had a hard life and was partly broken. The cafe owner, lovely lady, saw this, went into the nether regions of her shop and, returning with a hot glue gun, fixed it. And she did this even after I had interrupted the siesta she had been enjoying on a mat on the floor behind the counter while her assistant minded the empty shop. The plaza was bigger and smarter than Riberteralta’s and it was graced with many yellow flowering trees and ungraced by many cruising motorbikes ridden by girls and boys.
Guayaramerin was still celebrating National Day and the holiday parade started at half past six that evening. Unfortunately that meant that it was mostly too dark to see what was happening, but days were too hot for such strenuous celebrations. Groups dressed in the colourful traditional costumes of different Indian tribes danced exuberantly around the square to the music of brass bands. To my surprise I saw that they were still at it at eight the next morning, albeit looking more than a little frazzled and some of them drunk, or high on coca. Even when I left Guayaramerin at eleven there was lots of partying going on.
I ate dinner at another outdoor cafe on the plaza and continued to watch the parade. A man at the next table drank his coffee, poured down a glassful of a vicious-looking green concoction and soon after commenced an animated conversation with the empty chair opposite him. I wish I’d known how to say ‘I’ll have what he’s having’.
In the morning I followed the road that leads from the plaza down to the riverfront and port offices. Atop high, wide stone steps there was a spacious area that housed a small cafe and several moneychangers who were seated at wooden desks. I had an excellent breakfast here for a few bolivianos then, at the port captain’s office, made enquiries about a boat to Porto Velho. A sailor in a white uniform took me to the ticket office and showed me how to get to Porto Velho. This operation did not, darn it, entail the use of a boat except the river ferry that crossed from here to Brazil.
I transported myself and bags back to the waterfront with the local taxi system, a three-wheeled motorbike with a seat tacked on the rear. Many ferries, which were really only glorified canoes with a cover on top, lined the bottom of the steps waiting to fill with passengers who wanted to cross the wide river to Brazil. Other canoes constantly criss-crossed the water ferrying freight – including contraband, I was told.
A policeman took me to immigration to get my passport stamped. I’d never have found it alone. I don’t think they expect a lot of foreigners. You could cross over and back without papers but if you were continuing on a visa was necessary. On the Brazil side I took a taxi – a car no less – to that country’s immigration office and continued on to a hotel. It was strange to go from one side of the river to the other and find that everyone now spoke Portuguese.
So here I was in Brazil, the fifth-largest country in the world. It received its name from the hardwood that was its first export. Although Chris Columbus gets the kudos for inventing South America, he really had made a giant boo boo and thought he was in India. He only set foot on South America on his third voyage, in 1498, when he reached the mouth of the Oronoco in what is now Venezuela. Adventurers, pirates and crooks have followed him, and so have I. Brazil, which has taken immigrants from all over the world, won a bloodless independence from Portugal in 1822.
I’d found a decent room that was quite cheap. It had airconditioning, hot water and the first shower screen that I had seen in a long time. And just because I had a shower screen and didn’t really need it, I had the item I’d longed for – a bath mat. It was a limp dish-rag of a thing but it was for real.
After the boisterous gaiety of Bolivia, the Brazil side was deathly quiet. There was no fiesta here. The streets were deserted and by siesta time – one o’clock – everything was shut. I wondered if the locals had closed the town and run away to hide when they saw me coming. For lunch I tried the only cafe I could find open, a pay-by-the-kilo place. Its sign said ‘Lanchonette’, which wasn’t too hard to work out. You helped yourself and then your plate was weighed – what a great idea. There was a good selection of dishes and a big feed could be had for five Australian dollars.
Later I sat by the riverbank waiting for the cool of evening to arrive. Boy, it was hot, humid and overcast, but it did not rain. I could not find a place to change some money. The bank refused to perform this service but a helpful teller came out from behind her cage to show me where the moneychanger hid out.
I ate dinner in a restaurant alleged to be air-conditioned but this luxury had been turned so low it was cooler outside. Still, I had a great fish meal with an enormous selection of side dishes. I realised that I had ordered a two-person meal – that’s the way most come in Brazil. A doggy bag was needed.
I found the internet office. The line was out of order but I met Jose Luiz there. A Brazilian who spoke English, he arranged to meet me the next morning and take me for a boat trip. Dead tired, I was asleep by nine o’clock. Next morning a good self-service breakfast was available in a neat dining area of the hotel. Included in the room price it offered crisp rolls, cheese, ham, juice and a pot of coffee, unfortunately heavily pre-sweetened.
I finally found the elusive anaconda the guide in Rurre had told me about. He had said that it was in the zoo in Riberteralta. In Riberteralta they had said it was in Guayaramerin and in Guayaramerin they said Guajara Mirim. Everywhere I had asked, the zoo was supposedly in the next town. The anaconda was actually in this town, but it was in the museum not a zoo, and it was stuffed. Well and truly. But it
was
bloody big! Seven metres long at least and a tree trunk around, it stretched the length of the main salon. Other museum delights included such delicacies as a one-headed, two-bodied piglet in a glass jar and photographs of an Indian attack on the town in the 1960s. The museum was the wonderful old revamped railway station of Guajara Mirim, outside which stood two beautifully restored steam trains.
At last I discovered, after being given directions many times, that the moneychanger lurked behind an unmarked door in a side street. I knocked and the door was opened a crack by a man who let me in, but stayed to keep guard downstairs while I climbed some seedy stairs. A great place for a mugging, I was thinking, as I approached the hole in a wall through which the money exchange took place. Afterward, the man downstairs unlocked the door and let me out.
To meet John Luiz I did as I was told – sent him a message via the cashier at the ferry ticket office. After I waited three quarters of an hour, he appeared. He hadn’t received the message but was just passing. We took off in one of the covered ferries with its driver and chugged up the Mamore River until it met the Beni. A lodge was being built here. It looked an abomination to me. Huge expanses of wooden walkways meant that more local trees had been cut down, but JL was immensely proud of it.
The river water was calm and dark green. Big white water hyacinths grew along its edge and yellow-brown-blue and black butterflies flitted among the dense jungle. Birds abounded – long-necked white egrets, black and white cranes, big black and white birds that were a kind of vulture and eat carrion, large black storks, small beautiful golden birds and tiny, glorious, blue hummingbirds. I heard dolphins blow but saw none. And way out there in the wilderness there was a bar. Made of grey-brown wood, it was a derelict ramshackle riverboat, the good ship
Titanic
. After a while the driver of our boat got out his delicious Bolivian tucker and a Coke, while I was given a packet of imported dry cracker biscuits and a bottle of water. He did offer me some of his food, but he had a revolting habit of blowing his nose overboard with his fingers and the biscuits started to look better.
On the return trip we rounded the junction of the two rivers and, turning into the very wide Mamore which flows all the way from the Andes, the driver whizzed up the speed and put on his lifejacket. Nice captain – never mind about the passengers. Approaching the town I asked about the several riverboats that were apparently abandoned in a compound at the water’s edge. JL said that the compound belonged to the drug control department and that the boats that lay there had been impounded for drug smuggling. There was much smuggling across the river from Bolivia as well as up and down it, he said.
JL told me that he had once gone to Coroico by road and had never been more frightened in his life. I was glad to hear that the locals felt that way too and not just us wimpy tourists. He took me to his office and showed me a postcard someone had sent him from Australia. He wanted to know what Uluru was. Then he gave me a letter to a friend in Porto Velho who, he said, would help me find a boat to Manaus.
JL said that the river from here to Porto Velho has twenty waterfalls and that the railway had been supposed to by-pass them. He reckoned that the town, which had been a short while ago a bustling, thriving place, was now on its uppers since recession hit and the road obliterated a lot of the river trade from the south. Walking around I noticed that half the buildings were derelict or empty. On the buildings in use, the evidence of slap-dash work was everywhere. Exposed live electric wires hung waving in the breeze from exterior walls on the street. The only traffic I saw on the road was an occasional bike. There was a queer, ghost-town feeling in the wide deserted streets, the middle of which had no median strips, merely a big tree every now and then with its base painted white to prevent cars climbing up it. Some of these trees bore massive, bright-yellow blooms that flowered on their bare branches and fell to make a golden carpet on the ground. To look up a street and see this dazzle of yellow at each end of it, as well as in the middle, was a beautiful sight.
A magnificent cathedral extended from one main street through to the other. In a style that was strange to me, it had twin white-painted belfries. Another church was painted blue and white and had a pointed tower like those depicted on Dutch Delft china. The cathedral’s interior was a stark contrast to those of Bolivia and Peru. There was paint, not gold, behind the altar and simple plaster statues stood around.
The town was deserted at night and I couldn’t find a place to eat apart from the fish restaurant where I had dined the night before. A drum band followed me home, banging up the street, and it continued to boom for hours. It sounded like the execution squad marching a prisoner to be shot at dawn against a wall. Some of the walls around town looked like they had been shot at, often. The back streets were lined with derelict dumps of houses and filth and rubbish, but rampant yellow flowers with black centres cascaded everywhere over the mess.
I took my bags to the bus depot in the main street and – on the riverfront where there was a slight breeze – filled in the time to departure drinking the milk from a coconut and eating the fleshy fibre. The bus arrived and what a shock it was – sleek and modern and no baggage on top. It even had seat belts, tinted windows, air-conditioning, beautiful seats that reclined way back, foot rests, leg room and a loo that flushed and had toilet paper. I struggled manfully with the door of this wonder for a good while before I realised that it pushed in not out.
We took off on a good bitumen road that later had metrewide holes in it but was still okay. We progressed only six kilometres before stopping at a bus station where a crowd of people got on, but the bus was still only half-full. This was not much of a place but it was the forerunner of four more stops that we made in the five-hour trip. The purpose of these stops seemed to be mainly for passengers to gallop off the bus and get food. I bought a hot roll during one stop. It contained a fine sliver of a ham-like substance and was dead boring. At about the fifteen-kilometre mark we were pulled up at a check point – after all, this road
is
called the Trans-Coca Highway. Everyone was made to get out of the bus and our documents and baggage were minutely examined. The customs’ men were greatly intrigued by the two stones I had souvenired from the Beni river and highly suspicious of my spray bottles of insect repellent, possibly because there were three of them. It was embarrassing to have all my clutter and paraphernalia spread out on a bench by the roadside for all to see.