The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (32 page)

After my sleeping-pill-induced epiphany, I've vowed to embrace all that backpacking in South America has to offer, even if it scares me, not because I want to be like Carly but because I want to test my own limits and also experience all that I can on my travels here. That is why I am currently venturing out into the
creepy-crawly jungle for a night walk. But I'm doing it my way—properly attired. I do not want some heinous bug on me, or down my socks, or in my ear even, so I cover myself from head to toe. I tuck my pants into heavy socks. Diego lends me his rubber boots, and I slip these over my sneakers after tipping them upside down and shaking furiously. I wear a long-sleeved T-shirt. I tuck the sleeves into a pair of alpaca gloves left over from our days in the Andes. I wrap a scarf around my neck and mouth. I throw on a hat, tying it below my chin like a bonnet. Have I mentioned it's rather toasty in the jungle? When I emerge from the cabin dressed to summit K2, everyone is waiting for me.

“What about your nose?” Carly says, and we all laugh, but I consider it. Other than my eyes, it's the only piece of me left exposed. I have a quick malaria-pill-laced terror about a poisonous spider scurrying down a web and landing gingerly on the tip of my nose.

Our flashlights stream through the trees. Diego leads the way, Carly behind him, me behind her, the Wild Thornberrys bringing up the rear. The Brits have begged off to start the vodka-fest back at camp. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Diego brandishes his machete, dismembering chunks of the jungle whether or not they are in our way. The path is well trodden, maintained for these kinds of night walks with backpackers. Even though the accommodation is basic, the conditions au naturel, the tour companies that operate here are mostly established. Sure, the occasional female tourist gets molested by one of the guides, some twenty-year-old smart-ass goes missing once in a while, an unlucky pair emerges with a wild-eyed case of malaria. These mishaps are swiftly reported to the tourism board in town, which maintains an enormous scoreboard listing each company's rating in a variety of categories, wielding enough influence to sink any particularly marred agency.

One of the ways our own tour company might find itself in hot water is over the fact that a massive poisonous snake has just
brushed by Carly's left boot. Diego notices it first. He jumps, backs into Carly, and starts pushing us, Carly into me, me into the Wild Thornberrys. If a black adder sinks its venomous jaws into you, you have twenty minutes to contemplate life on this earth before you leave it.

We pause in a clearing. Diego is panting. He is saying something about not knowing the snake “lived there.” Kevin wants to go back to have a look, but Anne cautions, “Don't listen to him, girls. He's not very good with snakes.” Whatever that means.

“That's plenty of jungle for me for one night,” I say, my voice muffled by my scarf.

For once Carly agrees with me. She is looking around, nervously glancing at her foot every few seconds, no doubt imagining vicious snake fangs dangling from her ankle.

Our return to Rurrenabaque from the jungle is a test of patience and endurance. I've convinced Carly we should fly back to La Paz, but when we show up for our scheduled flight, we're told our seats have been given away. Apparently, we were required to confirm our booking twenty-four hours in advance, a small detail our booking agent forgot to mention. We must finagle our way past rebooking fees (a cynic might suggest this is
why
our agent neglected to relay the minor detail) to get a seat on tomorrow's flight, and we settle in to spend another day in Rurrenabaque. Back at the hotel, we pay five extra bolivianos for a room with a private shared bathroom that doesn't abut the karaoke bar.

The next morning our flight is canceled because of more flooding, and we spend the entire day waiting around at the airport before that key piece of information is offered. The day after that, the airline office is positive our flight will be canceled again, so they put us on the one other flight leaving that afternoon. We arrive excited at the airport, no more than a sludgy
strip of field. We sit there for many more hours. Our original flight takes off, but the new flight is eventually canceled.

By now the locals have started to recognize us. They wave with confused looks at seeing us pass by yet again. On our third day stuck in Rurre, my sandals inexplicably fall apart, as though the heavens themselves do not want us to leave. When I go to the market to buy some new ones, the hunched saleswoman asks my size.

“Ocho,”
I tell her, not sure how this translates into Bolivian sizes.

She takes my bare foot in her rough hands.
“¡No le creo!”
she says over and over again.
“¡No le creo!”
(I don't believe it!) I'm not sure whether she doesn't believe my analysis or the actual size of my foot, though the latter seems more likely since she is turning it from side to side as though evaluating a suspect gem. She catches a glimpse of my fly-bitten calf.

“¡Dios mio!”
she exclaims. She points in horror at the bites. Yes, yes, I nod. She fans herself a little, as if my busted-up, big-footed self is simply too much for her.

We spend a portion of every lost day in Rurrenabaque with the cake man, who pedals around town, his delicious homemade treats stuffed with Brazilian nuts and topped with cinnamon icing. The cake man is a native Floridian, former jockey, and current local eccentric going on five years now. Sweets are hardly his only interests. He's also more than happy to provide us with pamphlets outlining his philosophies on microchip implantation and global government conspiracies. He so desperately wants us to understand the true path to Christianity. Most nights we wander over to an elderly woman's stoop, where she is selling simple but delectable fried rice topped with a fried egg, passing the plates through her open kitchen window to customers.

On our fourth morning stuck in Rurrenabaque, we decide to take charge of our destiny. Bolivia is forcing me to be more flexible,
to go with the unpredictable flow. So instead of spending another day moping around the airport, we book a four-day trip into the Pampas, the Bolivian wetlands, a wonderland of wildlife. There we fish for piranhas, swim with pink dolphins who nip at our toes, and prowl for anacondas. Okay, I do not prowl for anacondas because it strikes me as rather insane, but Carly does. From our campground, aptly called Mosquito #3, we hear the howler monkeys yodel at one another. After delicious soups and fried bread, the cook tosses leftover chicken heads to the resident caiman who gamely crawls ashore. Our guide points out the capybara (like an oversize guinea pig) shuffling through the grass a few feet away.

The jungle was Carly's speed. The Australian adventurer in her isn't bothered by the muggy heat or put off by the venomous insects and snakes. She wants to return and delve even further into that mostly uncharted territory. But the Pampas is much more my style. It's more temperate, and the twenty-four-hour ants are replaced with more familiar marine and wildlife. Other than the kamikaze mossies, as Carly calls the man-eating mosquitoes who literally hurl themselves against the windows of our cabin each night, unable to control their bloodthirst for the beer-soaked foreigners inside, I'm totally enthralled with the wetlands.

On our way back to Rurrenabaque, we pull our canoe up to the shoreline to feed bits of banana to big-eared yellow squirrel monkeys that emerge from the bushes to greet us. I extend my hand toward them, and they grip my fingers to balance themselves while they nibble at the food resting in my palm. It is a moment of pure travel pleasure. Carly already knew she was nowhere near finished having adventures, and right then I knew I wasn't, either. This is what I wanted for myself, for there to be more days with the possibility of getting to hand-feed wild monkeys in the future, not fewer of them. This was my real world.

My first impression of Peru is that it surprisingly resembles the Irish countryside, with similar ancient stone walls zigzagging across the green land. But Puno, the Peruvian town at the lip of Lake Titicaca that will serve as our base for an expedition out to the floating islands, is an unattractive locale. It's full of tacky tourist shops and shadowy alleys. The run-down plaza is overrun with angry protesters caught up in the bus strikes that have taken hold of the country.

What Puno does have going for it is food. After a monotonous diet of empanadas and white bread the past few weeks, we splurge on a fancy restaurant our first night there. The word “fancy” is highly relative, of course. The foundation of my outfits these days is a pair of sandstone-colored fisherman pants Carly brought me from Thailand. They are no more than a one-size-fits-all piece of cotton pulled on, then tied loosely at the waist with the top piece of fabric rolled over. Carly has a pair in blue,
and we match them with whatever shirt has been washed most recently. But in Puno we dress in our finery—wrinkled but clean jeans and sweaters. We wash our hair and even put on a touch of makeup. I awkwardly wield the mascara wand, blinking involuntarily as I coat my lashes.

At the restaurant, we savor gooey calzones accompanied by copious, cheap pisco sours—a regional drink made with pisco (a type of brandy), simple syrup, egg white, lemon or lime, and a splash of bitters. It's served in a small, squat glass with a green body and a frothy white head: Peru's version of Guinness.

Our ugly Puno hotel room with stained curtains and bars on the windows costs us ten soles (around five U.S. dollars), but it has a private bathroom. In the morning, we discover it also has bedbugs. Tiny bites run the length of our thighs. Carly wakes to her own futile scratching and then shakes me out of bed. Downstairs, we express our extreme dismay to the owner, a sweating beach ball of a man who insisted on keeping our passports overnight as ID.

“Bring us our passports,” Carly demands. “And we want at least a twenty percent discount off the rooms.” I cower nearby, trying not to scratch my irritated legs.

“No, no, no,” says the owner. He salivates angry Spanish at us. “Full price.”

“You're dreaming,” Carly says.

Their faces grow redder and redder, as if it's a contest. Then the man moves out from behind the desk to block the lobby door. Carly and I stand side by side, a tiny wall compared to his impenetrable fortress.

“Let us out,” I whisper.

“Full price, no discount.”

While Carly and the giant brute who has trapped us face off, I have a momentary out-of-body experience where I float above the fray and look down at us foolishly trying to assert ourselves.
The fact is, we need our passports. We need to get out of here. And we need to appease a greasy three-hundred-pound sentinel in order to accomplish these things. Our personal philosophies of fairness no longer signify, and we'll have to get over the delusion that they do. I look at Carly, try to convey all this telepathically in the scrunching of my eyebrows. She scratches furiously at her thighs.

“Fine, okay,” she finally gives in.

We slam the money on the counter. Like a thousand rancid pisco sours, the hefty owner's pungent stench assaults my nostrils as we push by him.

For most, a house represents stability. Your home is the place you return to, a solid force amid life's fluctuations. For the Uros people of the Islas Flotantes (Floating Islands), however, it's a flexible structure that must be rebuilt constantly. This colony of islands that spring from the surface of Lake Titicaca are man-made structures initially built by the indigenous people of Peru forced to desert the mainland or become enslaved by the Incas. They fled to the open water and constructed a series of islands out of the
totora
reeds, which grow plentifully in the shallow areas of the lake. The reeds become soggy at the bottom, forcing the residents to perpetually insert replacements. Imagine your bed rotting beneath you while you sleep. There are currently about three hundred Uros/Aymara citizens who call the Floating Islands home.

We pass by young boys standing tall on reed boats they push through the shallow green waters. A small girl runs to the edge of her family's island to wave at us. When we stop on a designated tourist floating island, we're offered the tasteless
totora
reed as a snack, giving new meaning to the phrase “eating me out of house and home.”

Our destination is Isla Amantani, a circular anchored island amid its more fluid neighbors a three-hour boat ride from Puno, where the terraced hillsides grow abundant maize, wheat, and potatoes. Ancient Incan ruins dot the highest points of the island, some 4,200 meters up. We're spending the night with a local family.

The women who greet us all have long black braided hair covered by a waist-length black shawl intricately embroidered around the edges. Different-colored skirts are paired with stiff white shirts decorated in more delicate embroidery. Our host, Benita, looks somewhere in her thirties, but it's difficult to tell; the harsh climate ages people prematurely. She's fit and small: her head barely reaches my shoulder. After we follow the winding, rocky path up to her house, she shows us to our room, small and sparse and painted a cozy pink with two beds and an unlit candle on the dresser. We leave our things, then make our way to the kitchen, where Benita is already busy preparing the afternoon meal. Her one-year-old daughter crawling along the dirt floor examines us shyly as we approach. Our curiosity is more overt. The kitchen is tiny and unventilated, with ceilings so low our short host is half hunched over. She's stirring five or six pots emitting various steams and aromas, adeptly preparing an intricate soup. We watch her cook until our eyes tear up so much from the stifling smoke that we're forced outside into the cold, though we know Benita spends most of the day in there.