Jungles
Water laps gently at both sides of the canoe. Splashes make teardrops run down the muddy residue caking my calves after a week of bathing in the river. José paddles slowly, pushing us down the Beni shoot, one of the Amazon’s many veins linking this roughly five million square kilometer ecological wonder. Having left his family’s cabaña, a room raised on stilts to dodge floods, and his village so micro that Google has never heard of it, my travel partner and I are heading back to San Gabriel. The closest town. A dusty row of one-story shops on a loud street, with adobe houses across a dusty field, on the outskirts. That is where this adventure began. At a guess, it is about twenty kilometers away. Or perhaps thirty? With GPS technology and smartphones still a few years away, it is hard to say. José drives his hand-carved vehicle with one oar. Left. Then right. Then left again. We glide along, in a wooden hammock, underneath clouds that slowly shift shapes. Like big fluffy bits of white bread. Wispy offshoots flee the main clump. My head falls back into my travel partner’s lap, while his rests on our rucksacks: we form a human domino stack.
***
It is 2009 and I am 25 years old. London, one of Earth’s older urban jungles, and home for the past five years, is crippled by a financial crisis. Professionals who thought they were guaranteed a job for life are busy losing those jobs. And their houses, too. Small businesses are folding. BBC News is filled with people reporting uncertainty, unhappiness, and stress. But among the wildlife and ancient trees, people are none-the-wiser. By day, animal noises bounce and echo through the thick foliage. By night, fireflies dance sporadically beneath the canopy that is silhouetted against the smattering of stars in a universe that stretches into infinity. The night sky my dad pointed out to me as a girl from our balcony on Sydney’s northern beaches, by comparison, seems like a sketch that was faded from too much sun exposure. Each day and each night our insignificance is writ, in profound large print. Thoughts usually silenced by the big city—traffic, conflicting demands endured to pay the rent, people in buildings selling the endless stream of objects they endlessly tell us will make our lives complete—have the space to be thought.
***
As his arms dance elegantly from left to right, José starts singing a Yuracaré tune. We absentmindedly join in, fudging the unfamiliar words but generally getting the tune right. It was the song he sang to his children a few days earlier when, on the breathless forest floor, we plucked ripe coca leaves and filled a hessian sack tied around our waist with Bolivia’s national leaf to sell at the San Gabriel’s weekend market, where grateful locals will buy it to be chewed or brewed. Sunlight was filtered through the thick trees, surrounding us with a natural disco ball effect. José's young children, with their nimble fingers and familiarity of the task, filled their sacks quickly and then entertained their visitors with youthful mischief. Traveling down river this final time, I realize this stretch has become familiar. Contours of greens and browns that just last week looked nondescript are recognizable, as if the trees have names and I have learned them. Recognizable faces in a crowd. Vines decorate tree trunks like medals. José giggles at our fudged lyrics, but appreciates our attempt.
I rest my legs on the side of the canoe. My dirty, welted skin stings and itches and sleep deprivation makes my head thick. As José paddles, I feel like a spoiled tourist. You know, the ones who tut at a local who does not speak English, no matter how loudly they have been spoken at. Never mind that it is not an English-speaking country. Or those with chosen dietary needs who loudly insist on menu alterations from locals grateful for whatever food Mother Nature has provided for them. It is my choice that justifies my guilt; the opportunities available to me, as a traveler. The year-long preparation of slogging away at a desk job in London to take this eight-month trip through five South American countries seems indulgent because I know that, when ready, I can pick up where I left off. Get another job. Find a new home. Resume real life. But before that—with the luxury of time carved out of my full-time work schedule, with my possessions either sold, given away or in storage, and a modest stash of Pounds Sterling in the bank—I can temporarily drop into José and his family’s lives to satisfy my curiosity about indigenous Bolivian lifestyle with the luxury of returning to modern comforts when the reality of jungle life bites. It does not matter that it was ‘hard-earned’, my privilege irks me.
***
Six days earlier José had paddled us in the opposite direction down this same stretch of the river. He had greeted us on a Monday afternoon, sitting in his canoe leaning on his paddle that doubled as a moor, where the flooded land intersected with the riverbank. He was easy to spot in his oversized faded red Nike t-shirt and baggy brown trousers worn thin by manual labor in the sun. At 30 years old, José is one of a handful of villagers living in handmade cabañas away from mainstream society. A Yuracaré man, his native language has an estimated two-and-a-half thousand speakers in Bolivia. A couple of decades earlier, his people won the right to continue their traditional hunting lifestyle in this region. His young daughter, Anna, waited with him, nursing a dusty bottle of cola in her lap, I recognized the price sticker as being from the same shop in San Gabriel where earlier that morning we almost cleared out their bottled water supply. She looked up at us and smiled sweetly while her dad asked How you day? slowly, in broken English.
The first time we traveled up the river, the sun sank behind the canopy. By staying still while drifting, the jungle life presented itself. Mira! Hay un mono. José’s thin honey-colored arm pointed out a monkey hanging by its tail from a low-lying branch. The leaves above it rustled white it cupped its hands to drink from the muddy brown flow. As one stretch of trees were gradually replaced by another, a feeling that can only be described as sheer awe hit. Aside from trekking in the Nepalese and Peruvian hills, and driving across the Salar de Uyuni, this was the most remote part of the planet I had experienced. But also possibly the most claustrophobic. It is high-density living, without man-made high-rise apartments and a cramped underground rail network. Without man, for the most part. Other creatures then became apparent. What, at first, seemed a motionless tangle of green and brown was now the complex and intricate ecosystem it is. Seen and unseen creatures made an absolute racket, to the point where it seemed perfectly within reason that David Attenborough should begin narrating ...the creatures who call this place home evidently unlock the mystery of life as we know it... From the cacophony, I could not make out individuals, but José could. ¿Qué pájaro está arriba del mono? I ask, curious about a bird looking ready to swoop into the river. It was large and black, with a yellowish beak and light-colored eyes. My imperfect Spanish was adequate. As a student of the language for a decade, it was the invaluable key to understanding life around me. He replied with an unfamiliar word and imitated its call to help answer my question. While it did not, it certainly made him even more endearing than he already was. We giggled as the bird stopped in its tracks and looked our way.
***
Getting to José's house at all was an overwhelming relief. Physically reaching the meeting point was not anything Lonely Planet would advise in their South America on a Shoestring guidebook. This was pure grassroots. Off the beaten track, I believe is the buzz phrase. Or cultural immersion, an academic might say. About one month earlier, from a tiny town in northern Argentina, a Google search for keywords immersive cultural experience indigenous culture Bolivia returned a not-for-profit organization in Cochabamba who offered—for 1,500 Bolivian pesos, roughly 300 Australian dollars—the opportunity to be hosted by an indigenous family for ten days. To walk in their shoes. To live the way they do. It sounded irresistibly unique. An arrangement was made to meet a man named Louis in San Gabriel who would drive us to the meet José at the riverbank. On the agreed date we arrived in San Gabriel mid-afternoon, six hours after leaving Cochabamba by local bus. Among the colorfully-dressed Cholitas—in their iconic bowler hats and big skirts, nursing handmade mantas stuffed full of fresh produce and the occasional live chicken—two disheveled Westerners in their mid-twenties living out of rucksacks was somewhat a novelty. A small Bolivian child held my hand and rested his head on my arm as the bus edged along the winding mountain road surrounded by lush jungle and valleys, somewhere in which—according to my guidebook—Che Guevara was assassinated by the CIA back in 1967. It is only natural to develop an interest in local history while traveling and with my roughed-up Motorcycle Diaries in the top of my rucksack, underneath my resting calves, I was a shameless backpacker cliché.
Climbing onto the pavement in San Gabriel, Louis greeted us with some bad news. The ten-kilometer dirt track leading to the river was badly flooded, no car could get through. There were three options. Stay the night and try again tomorrow. Return to Cochabamba. Travel somewhere else. The first option might as well have been the only. Louis led us along the dusty street to a concrete building site where we could sleep. It was accessible through a small shop, selling potato chips and mobile phone credit, up a ladder, and along a balcony with no railing built yet. The room was an empty concrete shell, with mosquito nets suspended from the ceiling and bars on the window. Louis invited us for dinner at his adobe hut across a large field. While his chickens pecked at our knees we gratefully ate noodles and vegetables prepared by his wife and made small talk until the vocabulary ran out, so we traipsed back across the field, through the shop, up the ladder, and around the balcony to our squat. A few hours later—while the streetlights were still on, before the sun had risen—car horns and music blared as the market below the window got started.
At daybreak, Louis poked his face through the bars on the window. Again, he had bad news. The flood was still waist-high. The options were to set out on-foot and find the river from Louis's basic hand-drawn map, or return to Cochabamba. It was decision time. Abandoning our host family was not an option, that much was clear. Their livelihood, in part, was reliant upon the few visitors they hosted each year. With no mobile phones there was no way of sending a sorry, can’t make it message. To contact anybody outside their village, they needed the payphone in San Gabriel. So without any line of communication, the decision was made: we had come this far and were this close; we would persist on foot.
And so we walked—or waded, to be more accurate—all day through knee-or-waist-high flooding far worse than the mud at the music festival in Glastonbury. In intense heat, with 70 percent humidity. Any airborne bugs that dared to fly within a few centimeters of our petrol-scented skin, slathered with 100% DEET, fell dead. And the harsh reality was, we would rather it was them than us. In a malaria zone, you cannot be too careful. The anticipation of the jungle drove us forward, step after saturating step. Our 48-kilogram rucksacks, plus enough bottled water to survive ten days of dehydration, anchored us firmly to the sludgy ground. When we infrequently passed a cabaña, the residents watched us passing in amazement. A few even called out to us checking we were not lost. In the rare parts where the flooding had not reached, people stay, waiting it out. Children carrying either side of a bucket carrying local fruits. This was far from Manaus—the tourist wonderland on the Brazilian side of the jungle with its colonial streets, city conveniences and well-structured group tours catering to a busy flow of visitors.
***
On that first day, at a seemingly indistinguishable gap between two seemingly indistinguishable trees José gracefully veered the canoe to the left and up onto the bank. Like a homing pigeon, he knew where he was. One by one we disembarked, splashing our feet through the mud to stand on dry land—the first time in hours. We unloaded the rucksacks and Anna dragged the canoe between some trees and secured it with rope to stop it from floating away downriver, not to prevent theft. There it stayed until the following morning, when José took us fishing for pirañas. Out here, if you catch or grow nothing, you also eat nothing.
As we traipsed between trunks and vines in our soggy shoes and light-weight travel trousers, the jungle floor engulfed us and nocturnal creatures shook themselves awake around and above us. After about ten minutes, the village gradually appeared. About ten cabañas scattered in amongst the dense jungle. No more land cleared than was necessary, so some branches bent their way in through rooms. The roofs were large fronds skillfully woven together to keep the rain out. The only indication of human life was smoke from the campfires, cooking smells and some low chatter. There were no post boxes, or garden gnomes, or push bikes leaning against verandas. These homes, made entirely from local materials, were in camouflage. There was no convenience store, or bus station. No tourist office or internet café. No restaurants or banks. And, if you ask José, there is no need for any such thing.
Emerging from the thickset trees, Clara called to us in a big cheerful voice, as I imagine she might old friends. A smile took over her whole face and her arms extended wide so she could warmly embrace us—a kiss on each cheek —and then her husband. She introduced herself joyfully, and proudly clustered three children in front of her for presentation in order of age. Esto es Anna, she said of the pretty girl with long brown hair and wide eyes, who had run ahead of us from the canoe. The cola had been placed beside the open camp stove that boiled a pot of root vegetables for our dinner. Next was George, a small boy of about five, with a bowl haircut and mischievous smile. Y Silvia. She then bent down and picked up an adorably podgy toddler from the ground and offered her into my arms, Silvia, la bebe. Clara beamed proudly at her beautiful family. Sitting on my right hip, Silvia stared curiously at my lips as I spoke to her and grabbed my dirty hair with one grubby hand while the other firmly gripped on a large knife that Clara had used to chop yukka, which I gently released and returned to her, whose scolding had the tone of reprimanding a recurring offence, No, bebe!
The children took to us immediately. They sprawled across our laps, open and eager to learn and play. George took my big hand into his and excitedly guided me to his favorite tree, about ten minutes walk inland. It had clearly stood in its place for thousands of years, with a trunk so wide that four adults and two children could not link hands when their arms stretched around it. They were patient with our frequent pauses-for-thought and consultations to clarify a word’s meaning or form the correct conjugations in Spanish, often stumped by the past tenses and having to explain things in a roundabout way.
I was struck by the children’s English names, and Clara gave a small look and replied simply para sus futuros. As a former recruitment consultant in London during my early-twenties, and a reader of the best-seller Freakonomics, I objectively know about the subconscious bias that can unfortunately shape what opportunities are made available to people in Western societies depending on the familiarity of their given name, but to hear this in such a remote part of the world was unexpected, to say the least.
Clara's style was noticeably different from her husband. Small gestures and reactions signaled someone not as naturally at home among the trees. Not so at-one with her surroundings. After our first dinner together, she divulged that was born and raised in La Paz. An urban metropolis. The opposite sort of jungle sitting a few thousand meters above sea level. A colorful maze of shanty buildings in the steep foothills of the impressive Cordillera Real mountain range, where birds and insects are drowned out by construction sites and competitive bus touts loudly trying to persuade anybody within earshot to travel to other Bolivian towns, including Oruro and Uyuni. A Oururo Oururrrroooo, they shout, Uyuni Uyuuuunni. La Paz, home to the Mercado Negro—where vendors sell second-hand gadgets they fleeced from tourists—and the notorious prison of Rusty Young’s Marching Powder, where inmates famously produced top-class cocaine and encouraged tourists to visit—stay, even—on the inside, with the entrepreneurial criminals-cum-tour guides. Before meeting José in Cochabamba and moving to the jungle after marriage, Clara was a city slicker. Now, as a mother-of-three, the remoteness of Amazonian life presents some challenges. As the fire dies out, she declares her dream of relocating the family to Cochabamba, where a reassuring proximity to other humans is found in ways that frustrate many urban dwellers, like a traffic jam. But the convenience is alluring. The new clothing, running electricity and fresh water—though not without dramas, for instance the water war at the turn of the millennium. After starting her family in relative isolation, the polluted air of the big city seems almost glamorous because it is the antithesis of subsistence living. The children’s education is a factor. The village school, a one-story room with doorless doorways, has sat derelict, being absorbed by the jungle since the last teacher returned to the city, more than a year earlier.
Clara watches us interact with her home environment with curiosity, slightly mystified by our excitement at fishing and harvesting vegetables for daily meals. She wonders how her life is fascinating to us when she fantasies about the lives we usually lead, with modern things, fancy clothes, office jobs with titles, cocktails on a Friday night, an abundance of food making the fear of going hungry obsolete.
As the days passed, I sensed our presence might be slightly destabilizing. This forest home—unlike the continent’s hotspots of Iguazu Falls, Machu Picchu, Bariloche, Rio de Janeiro—is never awash with outsiders. In the past six months before our stay, there had been only a small handful of other visitors. Germans, mostly. However well we tried to disguise them, our differences are pronounced. Traditional and modern lifestyles had come into contact, perhaps exacerbating the challenges of jungle life. While Clara collected water from the river and boiled it for drinking and cooking, we were cautious about bugs so drank from the sanitized bottles we carried all the way from town. I thought of a favorite film from childhood, The Gods Must Be Crazy—where the intrusion of the Coca-Cola bottle, a symbol of civilization, disrupts relations between a nomadic clan in the Sahara Desert—and felt spoiled somehow.
City dwellers tend to romanticize the peace and rejuvenation that camping in nature offers, away from the pressures of the nine-to-five. But they usually have glamping in mind. Lots of comforts from home, not rustic down-to-earth style. While washing lunch dishes a few days into our stay, I wondered how our hosts conceptualized our journey from London—a somewhat unfathomable distance—all the way to their patch of the Amazon Basin. Our respect for their culture, contribution both to daily tasks and to supporting their lifestyle was welcome, but perhaps our Spanish language skills caused an uneasy feeling? Being able to communicate beyond rudimentary pleasantries and logistical necessities—where the bathroom is or how much something costs—meant we could go beyond the surface. Were we a disruption? A reminder of the lifestyle Clara yearns for but might not experience?
***
The canoe drifts gently into shore as we arrive at the same place we first met José. It looks different because the flood has subsided so the virgin land is exposed. In slow movements, we hug José farewell and launch our rucksacks onto our backs to prepare for the long walk. Without mobile phones, we are unable to ask Louis for a lift back into town. We leave José in his canoe, waving goodbye, watching for the last time as he slowly glides up the river towards home. Gracias, we call. Adios y buena suerte. He raises a hand, waves and calls out something that sounds muffled.
With the scrunched map from Louis as our reference, we quietly retrace our steps back to San Gabriel. I am disappointed and ashamed to have left José and Clara, and their children, three days earlier than expected. I focus solidly on the ground ahead of me. Did we offend them? Disrespect them? This wonderful family welcomed us with a generous spirit. But after almost no sleep—mosquitoes were not going to pass up on our delicious blood, especially when large tears in the protective net provided no challenge—and with no sanitation, hiking through floodwater and insect bites just become infected, unhappy skin. Adding gastroenteritis to the mix, the jungle very quickly went from an exotic adventure to a claustrophobic danger zone. The bustling station feels overwhelming with people and noises and fluorescent lights inside and outside the buildings and the smell of petrol and the grunt of passing cars. After securing the last seats on the overnight bus from San Gabriel back to Cochabamba we pay no attention to the passing landscape as fatigue truly sets in.
As we regain strength in a three-star hotel on Cochabamba’s main drag, with its hot shower, fresh towels and Peep Show on cable, the adjustment between jungles takes time. Sitting in a small restaurant with a menu of choices and background music and people wearing clean clothing and carrying accessories feels familiar but also cluttered. Much more than a camping trip, our time with the Yuracaré family was a fascinating glimpse into a rare lifestyle, threatened by globalization and climate change. Soon, it might become impossible with devastating fire outbreaks. I drift off to sleep on fresh sheets, wondering if Clara's dream of city life becomes a reality and how José would adjust to the urban jungle, with no place for his canoe.
Contributor
Keira Sinclair
Keira Sinclair is a writer, editor, and occasional actor based in Sydney. Her travel writing is also featured in Wanderlust and her fiction in Cagibi, who nominated her short story, ‘Selfie Swipe’ for a 2020 PEN prize for emerging writers. As a graduate of anthropology, she find endless fascination in how different human societies interact.