Peter Allison - How to Walk a Puma

I pushed on as soon as I felt able to do so, the light now a beacon, drawing me towards it. I stumbled into some more mud, my shoes now leaden lumps. I seriously considered dropping to my hands and knees and crawling. Instead I shook my feet, one after the other; though the energy that took almost winded me, I broke into a stumbling trot, making it at least twelve paces before tripping and falling onto all fours, shuffling a while this way before getting up again and, with some newfound will, taking a few more steps.

After a while the light seemed closer, brighter, and I considered shouting but doubted my voice would be any louder than a strangled fart. I stumbled along, my throat raw from dragging at the thin air. It was a ragged figure that stumbled into the communal room and collapsed onto the bed assigned for me.

‘You okay?’ the Minke asked me, looking up from her book.

‘No,’ I said, but before I could elaborate it became apparent from some squeaks and creaks that the Polish couple, not at all mindful of being in a well-lit room with four other people, were engaged in some under-the-blanky hanky-panky. It was hard to believe anyone could have the energy for that under the circumstances; I didn’t think I could even muster the strength to laugh at it, but then a choked guffaw emerged that I tried to stifle with my hand. Soon the Minke and I must have looked as if we were engaged in the same activity as we clutched at each other to try to muffle our giggles.

Waking the next morning I looked out at the lake and berated myself for being a drama queen. It really wasn’t that far to the other side. But after taking my first few steps of the morning my legs went dead and my head pulsed with flares of pain behind each eye.

Mountains are not my thing, I decided: I can’t ski (apparently I was born without a pelvis, as my legs drift apart as soon as I set off on skis and simply will not rejoin), I don’t like the cold, and while flamingos are all very nice, I prefer the jungle, where being a bird watcher might get me killed by something like a jaguar, but at least that had some dignity to it. We had three more days of travel ahead of us, and then some time scheduled in La Paz, perched at an altitude greater than any other capital city in the world. After that it was all downhill to the jungle, and there’d be no more getting high for me.

There’s an old saying in Africa that goes something like this: ‘You’re a bloody idiot, Peter Allison.’ Like many old sayings there is much truth to it, which may explain why I became so excited at the idea of spending five days floating down a tributary of the Amazon on tyre tubes. Lisa and I were in the office of a small tour company, and I hopped from foot to foot like a child with a full bladder, while the Minke, sensible and therefore unsure as to whether the trip was a good idea, prevaricated. Another option was to take a motorised canoe, in which case the same journey could be done in three days. However, that seemed incurably dull to me, and when I added wheedling and puppy eyes to my full-bladder dance, the Minke agreed to go the tyre-tube route. Before she could change her mind, we booked in.

We were in La Paz, the world’s highest capital city, but since my evening of birdwatching at Lago Colorado, I’d become somewhat more acclimatised and the hilly streets only punished me mildly for daring to walk them.

We decided to fill in the few days until the trip began by heading to the small town of Coroico, a few hours downhill from La Paz. The Minke decided to make her way there on a mountain bike, riding along the infamous Death Road, a path with sheer drops that has claimed many lives. My fear of heights precluded me from enjoying such an activity, so instead I took a minivan along a newer, only moderately more sane piece of engineering that was deadly looking for a mere fifty per cent of the time.

After arriving in Coroico via our different routes and modes of transport, the Minke and I relaxed for a few days. Then the power went out, resulting in the whole town’s electricity being switched off. This was clearly such a common occurrence that everyone continued with business as usual, all with a stock of candles at hand. Unfortunately, we were waiting to hear from the tyre-tube people via email about a blockade that might make our departure impossible. Truck drivers, unhappy with some government figure, had blocked several routes out of La Paz, and were beating up any drivers who tried to get through. They were apparently tolerant of foreigners and might let them pass, but the situation could flare up at any moment.

For hours we waited; finally, as the sun dipped beneath the omnipresent Andes and plunged us into gloom, the sound of refrigerators kicking into gear and lights dimly glowing told us that the town’s power was back on. Scurrying back to the internet café we logged on to find a message saying that yes, we were going ahead with the trip, and that the company had a blockade-busting plan in place. All we had to do was be back in La Paz the next day for a five am departure, instead of the previously arranged and far more civilised start time of ten.

‘Buggershitpisswee,’ I said. ‘We’d have to leave here at two!’ We found a working phone and to our surprise someone was still in the tour office back in La Paz. Whereas in the West many such places might have been inflexible with regard to our predicament, the man on the other end merely said, ‘Ah, no problem, we will leave later, how about eight?’

So it was that at four the next morning, we waited bleary-eyed for a taxi we’d arranged the day before to take us back to La Paz. Shortly after we were climbing the switchback road, leaving the pleasant vegetation of Coroico behind for the stripped-bare mountainsides surrounding the ramshackle capital.

When Lisa and I booked the tyre-tube trip we’d been the only people interested, but we arrived back in La Paz to find the tour had filled up with six more people who would be joining us. They slowly assembled: a young English guy named Nick, an Israeli (‘Call me David,’ he said. ‘Not Ishmael?’ I asked facetiously, paraphrasing Moby-Dick . ‘No,’ he replied. ‘My name is Adair. But call me David’), an Italian woman named Gabriela, a Dutch couple, and a Spanish man named Thema with a bald and mottled scalp, who was the only person visibly older than me.

‘Okay, folks, here is the deal,’ said the man from the office, who spoke remarkably good English. ‘We cannot get through the blockade.’

My heart sank. Had we left Coroico at the crack of dawn for nothing?

‘But we can go around it,’ he continued. ‘It will add a day to the trip, which we won’t charge you for, okay?’

We all agreed, happy that our adventure hadn’t been cancelled.

‘Instead of taking just a few hours to get to the river, it will be a seven-hour drive, and I’ll admit that the vehicle is not the most comfortable, but it is the best we can do. Is everyone happy with that?’

‘Seven hours, not a problem,’ I thought. ‘Sure,’ I said.

Sure, the others all agreed.

The vehicle, another four-wheel drive, was built to take only seven passengers, but there were eight of us, plus the guide we met at the office just prior to departure. His name was Cesar, pronounced ‘Chazar’, and he was a deep-voiced man with the weathered features of someone who’d lived most of his life outdoors.

‘And this,’ Cesar intoned in his bass rumble, ‘is our driver, Jesus.’

‘Holy Roman Empire,’ I thought.