Peter Allison - How to Walk a Puma

Jesus (pronounced ‘Heyzuz’) turned out to be a taciturn man who kept a bag of coca leaves stashed beside him. Coca (the raw material from which cocaine is manufactured) is perfectly legal in Bolivia, and at any given time more people than not seem to have wads of it in their cheeks, chewing it for the mild buzz it provides, and for its supposed benefits of increased concentration and alertness. Personally, I found it made my mouth taste of leaves and did little else except make my gums a little numb, which meant I spilled even more than usual of whatever I was drinking.

We piled in, and everyone agreed that the Minke should get the front seat with its greater leg room, as she was clearly the tallest of our group. I was scrunched in the narrowest seat at the back with the Dutch couple, a friendly pair who had the blemish-free skin of people who lived healthily and rarely saw the sun. In front of me in a tight knot sat the four singletons, and we all chatted merrily as Jesus set off through the choked roads of La Paz. A wheel well that pressed into my buttock rendered my right leg numb almost immediately, but seven hours would be fine, I was sure. To ensure blood reached my foot I would just need to occasionally shift around as if breaking wind.

We soon left the winding mountain roads and hit the broad, open altiplano. These high-altitude plains have been agricultural lands since the Incas, and are still tended by poncho-wearing Quichua people, accompanied by bored-looking llamas.

As soon as we hit the flat plains Jesus put his foot down, continuing to chew monotonously on his coca. While we were travelling on one of these long stretches there was a sudden bang and our momentum abruptly decreased before the vehicle started to lurch about. I felt a clawed hand clutch my thigh and thought it belonged to one of the Dutch, then realised it was my own. We veered off the road, coming to a skidding halt some metres from the tarmac, where we all got out of the vehicle.

As a guide I’d changed countless tyres so I offered to help, just to give my still-shaking hands something to do. My offer was rejected and instead I threw one arm around Lisa, who I feared might already be regretting coming on this trip with me. Jesus and Cesar got to work changing the tyre, and recommended we walk to the town a kilometre down the road, where they would join us for lunch.

The air was chilly, but we were all keen for a walk to stretch our legs, and the views were so spectacular nobody much noticed the cold. We were in an elevated valley, and from the dead-flat altiplano the Andes loomed on each side of us, rising to impossibly high snow-capped peaks.

Only a few minutes down the road we were sprayed with dust as Jesus skidded to a stop in front of our strolling group, and urged us back into the vehicle. After a bland café lunch of maize soup and a meat probably best left unidentified, we were on the road again.

By now we’d been driving for about three hours, and my back was already jarred from the uneven road and my right leg was so numb it felt detachable, so I was comforted by the thought that we must be close to halfway through the journey. So when Cesar said, without explanation, that the journey might take ten hours, we were all moved to a frozen silence, broken only when, for no discernible reason, Thema started singing a few lines of a Spanish song in a deep off-key voice, before muttering something unintelligible.

We had ended up leaving La Paz at ten in the morning, so the original estimate of seven hours would have had us at our tyre-tube launching point at around five in the evening, maybe as late as seven allowing for the usual elasticity in Bolivian estimates of time. But Cesar bumping up the total trip time by another three hours made me wonder if we’d be on the road far longer again. Periodically I postured up, had a shake-shake of what my mama gave me, and settled back down, bloodflow assured for the next little while. To pass the time I started a sweepstake: the estimates of our arrival time ranged from the Dutch couple’s optimistic seven pm, through to my cynical one am.

As it turned out we were all optimists, and getting through the night would be one of the most frightening experiences I’ve ever had.

We left the altiplano in the mid-afternoon and were soon on pure mountain roads again, a mix of dry dirt and gravel that pinged against the bottom of the vehicle, the dust kicked up by the tyres permeating the leaky seals and forming a paste in our mouths. There were few other cars to be seen, but plenty of trucks, which flew past us on the narrow roads at suicidal speeds, rocking our four-wheel drive on its springs with a blast of wind and a toot of the horn, then enveloping us in blinding dust. Although unable to see through the dust, Jesus wouldn’t even slow down; he just drove on at the same pace until we emerged at the other side, miraculously still on the road and not flying off one of the sheer cliffs above which the road wound.

‘ Murciélago … what is murciélago in English?’ Cesar muttered from the front at one point, his voice so deep it carried all the way to the back. While my Spanish was still far from expert, one of the first things I learn in any language are animal names, so I was able to reply, ‘Bat.’

‘Yes! Bat! Who wants to see a bat?’ Cesar rumbled pleasantly.

The other passengers and I all looked at each other blankly. Though the idea of a break from the cramped interior was appealing, I was also keen to reach our destination within a reasonable time. When I said this everyone murmured their assent, which left us nowhere. We needed a leader.

‘I need to stretch my legs,’ the Minke said, and so it was decided.

We turned off the road we were on, the only pass through this section of the mountain yet so narrow it was impossible to believe it was a ‘main’ road. After travelling down what felt like a goat track, Jesus stopped the vehicle near the entrance to a cave, where for a paltry entry fee we were shown some stalagmites, stalactites, and bats that looked down at us with an indifference that possibly mirrored our own.

‘Nobody knows where this water goes,’ Cesar intoned, gesturing towards a decent-sized body of water covering much of the base of the cave. ‘According to legend, the Incas used to throw golden idols in here, along with human sacrifices, to please the gods. Lots of people have looked for the gold, and some have tried to explore further to find out where the water goes. The last group to do so were Japanese. None of them came back.’

I felt the creepy tingle a good story can produce and was also glad to be out of the cramped vehicle, but that was all Cesar had for us and in a short time we were herded back to where Jesus was waiting, and squeezed back into his chariot. After heading back up the goat track we rejoined the main road, but the two roads met at an angle that meant we were facing the wrong way. Any sensible driver would have continued along a little distance until they found a section wide enough to do a three-point turn.

Jesus didn’t.

With no discernible change in the rate of his cud chewing, he yanked strongly on the wheel and we slewed sideways, just as we had when the tyre had blown, and nudged into the gently sloping bank that defined one side of the road. The other side was more abrupt, dropping several hundred screaming metres to life-eating rocks below.

Jesus backed up towards the edge of the cliff.

I have two default behaviours when scared, each aimed at distracting myself from whatever it is that frightens me. One is to make the crazed grunting of an aroused baboon and the other is to be sarcastic. This time I found myself reverting to sarcasm. ‘Oh goody, Jesus thinks he can drive on air,’ I said.