Authors: Tim Cahill
The French writer Lucien Bodard described the riches of the rubber barons, the madness of Manaus, circa 1895:
Manaus, the metropolis, was the Babylon, the Sodom, and Paris of the borracha, all in one.… A throbbing distracted city of inequable wealth, of extraordinary luxury in the splendors of its vulgarity. Manaus flung its rubber out onto the world and received in return countless billions and all the treasures of bad taste. Steamships from Anvers, from London, and Le Havre made fast mid-river in the Río Negro to floating docks.… Diamonds twinkling on every finger.… Brothels everywhere. Mean brothels, splendid brothels, the most beautiful brothels in the world with the girls from the rue Saint-Denis at a premium.
It was symbolic; the jungle was not far away, but what people saw was a temple of glazed tile, bushes pruned like wedding cakes in the flowerbeds.… There were almost as many palaces as brothels: brand-new palaces in all the ancient styles—Gothic à la Versailles, Venetian, Buckingham Palace.… There was a whole population of flunkies and ladies’ maids who knew how to flatter their mistresses, most of whom were former shrill-voiced whores. Men sent their shirts to London to be ironed.
A new cathedral was built. A court of law. Men competed to construct finer, more baroque or rococo castles in the land of the weeping trees.
When the opera house, the Teatro Amazonas, opened in 1896, Enrico Caruso sang for the assembled rubber barons. The greatest actors and singers and dancers in the world sailed a thousand miles upriver to perform under the four white Italian marble balconies. Sarah Bernhardt. Pavlova.
And then, in 1920, the boom was over. Rubber trees grew in the Amazon and nowhere else, though there seemed to be no reason why the great trees could not be cultivated anywhere ten degrees north or south of the equator, provided the climate was warm and humid with heavy spring rains. The billionaires of Manaus, the men who simply made their living in the forest, the brothel owners, law-enforcement officials, everyone agreed: the seeds of the rubber trees must remain in Brazil. Seed smugglers were executed. Foreigners were followed, everywhere.
Nevertheless, in 1877, an Englishman named Henry A. Wickham,
an explorer and hunter who was trekking the jungle supposedly in search of certain rare orchids, managed to smuggle 2,400 seeds out of the jungle. In the springtime flood, when the river rose fifty feet and inundated the land, when the Brazilians agreed that a man in the jungle would die, Wickham collected his seeds and—“taken by surprise on the plain by the rapidity of the flood”—walked and swam “desperately towards high land that I saw on the horizon.”
He was rescued by an English trawler carrying scrap iron. To this day, Brazilians find the “rescue” so highly providential as to be planned. The seeds were hidden at the bottom of cargo boxes, and the trawler made its way down the river to the final port of Belém, where—it is said—certain hands were greased.
The seeds eventually ended up in the richer soil of Malaysia, and the trees were grown in groves, row upon row of them, so that the latex was easier and more efficient to harvest. It took thirty years before the trees were ready, but when they were, rubber bought out of Singapore was cheaper than rubber from the Amazon.
The grand palaces fell into disrepair, the opera house became a town meeting hall. It would be tempting to report that today the opera house stands abandoned and that monkeys swing from the white marble balconies. In fact, during the Second World War, when Japan conquered much of Malaysia, rubber from Brazil again became valuable. There was a minor boom.
Today, Manaus is now a major inland port, a collecting and distribution center for the upper Amazon. Principal exports are rubber, Brazil nuts, rosewood oil, and jute, the material used to make coffee sacks. Industries include brewing and oil refining (the oil is from Peru and barged downriver). This town of 1.2 million in the heart of the Amazon jungle makes electronic equipment, motorcycles, plywood sheets, and—this is not entirely a surprise—refrigerators. Tourism is a growing industry and there are botanic and zoological gardens, and a natural jungle park on the outskirts. It is the headquarters of the National Institute for Amazon Research and has both a university and a leprosarium.
It is also a town where smuggling is not unheard of; where officials, remembering the lessons of 1877, are likely to look unfavorably upon foreigners with little good reason to be in the country. Even comparatively innocent persons, such as myself, have reason to be apprehensive if they have no visa.
* * *
A
S WE TAXIED
into the cargo terminal, I saw a ruined 707 off to the side of the runway. The on-board mechanic told me that the plane had come down on an incorrect runway, and sheared off part of a wing by plowing into a semi-truck. The Brazilians had simply towed the plane off the tarmac. It would never be airworthy again. There was a scaffold that was little more than a series of stepladders erected against the plane. The insides had been stripped. It was a metal shell slowly going to rust in the humid heat of the Amazon. It sat against a red mud bank, and over the years this shell of a plane would become the color of the Amazon mud. “I don’t think that’s real good for their tourist trade,” the pilot said.
I went down into the cargo hold and looked at the truck. Workers were moving some gear. Two of them simply pushed the truck on its rollered pallet to a different position using mechanized rubber wheels. Moving the nine-thousand-pound truck seemed to cost them almost no effort at all. With the cargo in the hold and the cabin unpartitioned by compartments as passenger flights are, the interior of the plane looked huge. The pilot, a sandy-haired fellow who had come down to look at the truck, said, “Sorta like the Holland Tunnel in here, isn’t it?”
I got into the truck and crouched down in the passenger seat. The pilot leaned into the window and stared at me.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m afraid someone is going to ask me for my visa.”
“You don’t have one?”
“Not for Brazil.”
“I don’t think you’ll have a problem.”
“But I could have one, right?”
“It’s possible.”
“I’ll stay here.”
“And hide?”
“Yes.”
“Then maybe it isn’t such a good idea for me to stand here talking to you. If you’re hiding.”
“Right.”
“It’s going to be hot.”
A team of men moved the insecticide out of the plane. It would be used in those areas where the trees, the lungs of the planet, had been cleared. Slash, burn, then pour a 747 full of insecticide on that land so that the poisons can be washed down the river and flow out into the
ocean, along with twenty percent of the freshwater on the face of the earth.
After the drums of insecticide were off-loaded, electronic equipment manufactured in Manaus was stacked on pallets around the truck. Parts made in the United States or Japan were assembled here in the Amazon jungle and sold in Argentina.
We, Garry and I, had decided against coming up through the Amazon. The road past Kilómetro 85 was now paved, but the rising cost of petroleum, a major component of asphalt, had defeated plans for paving many of the roads that crossed Brazil’s lowland jungles. Instead, we would drive that narrow strip of desert between the Andes and the Pacific. The Pan-American Highway.
It was sweltering inside the plane, hotter still inside the truck, and the special racing seats were not made for slouching with the head below window level. I went through the papers in our document case to pass the time. There was a six-page letter Garry wrote to GMC entitled “Progress Report #5, Pan-American Challenge.” The letter was a report on our recces and conclusions, and formed the basis of our master plan. In essence, what the letter said was that we had decided to go all out, do the drive in under twenty-six days, forgo press conferences along the way, and change the look of the truck. The road through Brazil—the most scenic and difficult route—would be abandoned.
Since my meeting with various associations in northern South America, [Garry wrote] I have been receiving warnings and signals to forget the transit of the Amazon area. Apparently, when the dry season is north of the Amazon, the wet season is in the southern area and vice versa. We have reports of one road of about 1,000 kms that takes up to ten days in the dry season. North of Manaus the road is not much better, so aside from the delays involved in taking the Brazil route, there would be very difficult terrain for the truck, coupled with virtually no service support for thousands of miles. In a nutshell, we are going to forget the Amazon route and stick to our original mandate of obtaining the best possible time for the record by heading up the west coast of South America.
As for security, especially in regard to Central America, Garry wrote that
we have heard of a number of cases where people have safely transited this area in recent months. However, I am concerned with the consequences
of the many … guerrilla groups, etc., knowing our route. For this reason, and the very real threat of kidnapping or attack, I think we should consider a press blackout until we have at least reached Mexico City. There are other advantages in that if, for some reason, problems with the vehicle interfere with the success of the project, then GMC will not be out on a limb with a lot of advance publicity. Also, we will not be hampered with making a number of untimely stops for press conferences while en route through South and Central America. Essentially I feel we would be able to make the best possible time through the areas where there are few advantages and many disadvantages in gaining exposure.
Garry wrote that we had learned of an unpublicized, self-financed drive from Prudhoe Bay to Tierra del Fuego in twenty-six days. “Although the forty-day time period had been discussed, this was in the event we took the Amazon basin route.” We would be shooting for twenty-five days or less. “With this approach to the project, there are a few changes to the project vehicle which would alter the image of the truck somewhat from an expedition vehicle to a very serious road machine.”
Those recommendations were:
Take [spare] tires from the roof and install inside box on each side behind wheel wells.
Remove roof rack.
Install one-hundred-gallon fuel cell which will increase range from about five hundred miles to over two thousand miles. Removal of the gear from the roof will also decrease fuel consumption.
Place one bunk only in the pickup box running down the center as low as possible.
Keep the truck as aerodynamic as possible.
The results of this treatment, Garry wrote, “will considerably cut down on fuel stops, lower the center of gravity to substantially increase stability and handling, and produce a vehicle more in line with the ‘it’s not just a truck anymore’ slogan.”
And then Garry went right ahead and told them what it was. “It’s an aerodynamic, one-ton, long-range, high-tech, head-turning, fuel-efficient, record-breaking, one hell of a road machine.”
The public-relations plan was proceeding apace.
I finalized an arrangement with
Popular Mechanics
magazine to do a feature story on the project. They will do their cover photography in
Tierra del Fuego prior to departure and have a writer traveling with us for a few days.
Tim Cahill has finalized a deal with Random House to publish the book on the project.
Considering the proposed new strategy for the press, I feel we should be set to go with an on-the-fly press announcement when we hit Mexico City or Texas. I think we could possibly do press in Las Vegas or Los Angeles, then Calgary, Fairbanks, and possibly at the finish in Prudhoe Bay. We could also consider airfreighting the truck immediately from Fairbanks to either L.A. or Detroit for a final wrap-up.
I think this new strategy is safer for the drive team and GMC, provides a more honest approach to our mission, and could be quite a bit more cost-effective to GMC. This new plan allows us to operate stripped of ancillary commitments until we reach the prime area for marketing the Sierra, all of which results in a more impressive, safer, tougher-to-beat world record.
The paper was sticking to my fingers, which were damp with sweat. I had been slouching in that seat for more than two hours. It was very quiet in the cargo hold. The workers seemed to be gone. I glanced up into the side mirror and saw, in the distance, a man wearing a short-sleeved uniform shirt and carrying a clipboard. He was walking toward the truck. His face was bronze and he wore a thin black mustache: just the sort of man who might ask a stowaway for a visa. I slipped lower in my seat. All this thought poured into the project and here I was, hiding in what amounted to a Dutch oven. When I checked the side mirror again, all I could see were an enormous pair of sunglasses above a bunch of white letters that read:
OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER
THAN THEY APPEAR
“
W
HAT DID HE SAY
?” the pilot asked. We were airborne, flying south over the jungle, toward Buenos Aires.
“I don’t understand Portuguese,” I said, embarrassed.
“He didn’t speak English?”
I had to admit that he did.
“So?”
“He asked me if it wasn’t hot in the truck.”
“That’s all?”
“I told him it was real hot in the truck.”
“Ah.”
Irregular regulations: it’s a pattern of frustration familiar to people who travel in South America. Someone who ought to know, someone like a cargo agent for Flying Tigers, tells you something—like you need a visa for a cargo stopover in Manaus—and the information turns out to be entirely incorrect. In Latin America, it is best to ask several different people familiar with important regulations what will be required. In general, you will get as many interpretations of the rules as you have informants. These conflicting bits of information are collated and considered until you arrive at a reasonable matrix of expectation. Formalities in South America are rather like IRS regulations in the United States: no one can know all the intricacies or keep up with all the changes, so that everyone is at risk. This puts the government in the catbird seat.