Peter Allison - How to Walk a Puma

The Dutch girl looked at me through eyes glazed with terror, clearly wondering how I could be flippant at a time like this.

We stopped suddenly, lurched forward again towards the bank, then shot back once more. This would be no three-point turn. Oh no, this was going to take several bites to get through, and each one was making my internal organs squirm. Finally we got to a point where we were exactly ninety degrees to the road. Heart thudding, I prayed a truck wouldn’t come barrelling along and, unable to stop in time, smash us straight off the ledge; on the other hand, Jesus’s driving might get us there first.

He reversed again, aiming for maximum turning room, taking the rear wheels right to the lip of the ledge. Everyone remained silent, except the Dutch guy, who gave a strangled groan. I didn’t want to look out the window, but my neck swivelled of its own accord. Through the narrow aperture that was the rearmost window I could see down. Straight down, to the base of the cliff which was strewn with mangled cars, trucks and buses. For a brief moment I wished I was blind. We were over nothing but air, and I damn near pooped.

‘You okay back there?’ the Minke asked, not turning around to do so.

‘No,’ I squeaked.

Gravel crunched and I was sure the lip we were on was about to give way, and that we would tumble and freefall to an excruciating death. This road made the Death Road seem wimpy.

But Jesus revved the engine, and after several more scrotum-withering turns we were facing in the desired direction and we zoomed off, the sound of the engine almost drowned by a collective exhalation.

Our relief was short-lived and a general grumpiness set in as the road rocked and rattled us, those trying to snooze cracking their skulls against windows or the heads of others as the vehicle bumped and thumped along the corrugated track. We were still in the high Andes, and every time I took heart from a descent any hope was soon dispelled by a steep climb.

The seven-hour mark we had been promised passed, then the revised ten hours. My right leg no longer felt like it had ever belonged to me. The Dutch couple and I played a game of musical chairs in the cramped back seat. It might possibly have been erotic under other circumstances, but we did it purely to stop gangrene setting in from lack of bloodflow.

‘How much longer now?’ English Nick asked about eleven hours into our journey.

‘Another two, maybe three hours,’ Cesar rumbled, not even attempting to soften the blow.

‘Jesus,’ somebody muttered, but the driver didn’t respond.

‘La, lahlahlah!’ Thema sang, which was odd but not particularly disturbing as by this time I thought I might be going mad too. One of my knees had been wedged into a nostril (not my own) for some time and a seatbelt socket that had been broken off dug into the small of my back, gouging into it with every jolt.

Finally we were granted another break, not due to the kindness of Cesar or Jesus but because the car was overheating, understandable in the circumstances. We stopped in a village, where we ate at a small restaurant, grumbling to one another through the meal, feeling we had been lied to.

‘My legs are so sore,’ the Minke said, rubbing at her lengthy limbs. ‘But I can’t uncurl them or I’ll end up in Cesar’s lap.’

‘Yeah, I’d prefer you didn’t do that,’ I said, not out of any real jealousy, but because Cesar on occasion fed coca directly to Jesus so he didn’t have to take his hands off the wheel. I had a theory that the coca might be all that was keeping him awake and the four-wheel drive on the road.

Back in the vehicle, Cesar turned to us. ‘Only four hours to go now,’ he said.

‘What?!’ exclaimed the Minke in dismay.

‘Yes, we are close now!’ Cesar replied, clearly delighted.

Meanwhile, Jesus just kept on chewing and steering and pushing the throttle, driving us into darkness barely pierced by his headlights, until a truck came by, sheeting us in dust which didn’t seem to lift no matter how much further on we drove. After a while I realised it wasn’t dust hanging infinitely in the air but a fog that had descended, dense and cooling. This was good for the engine, but I rescinded my earlier wish for blindness and hoped that Jesus had been endowed with X-ray vision. As it was we were driving blind without a guide dog, and it was madness.

The fear that overcame us all during Jesus’s earlier lunatic turnaround came back, and silence again dominated the vehicle. Even Thema stopped treating us to fragments of songs none of us knew.

From the back seat I could see only a portion of the windscreen, blocked as it was by the row in front of me, and Jesus, Cesar and the Minke (whose head was oddly angled to avoid hitting the roof), but what I could see was the most frightening vista of opacity, just a blank nothing, as if the world had ended.

‘Keep feeding that man coca!’ I shouted, breaking the silence, hoping that the leaves would somehow impart laser-like vision to Jesus. ‘He must know this road really well,’ I tried to tell myself. ‘So well that he doesn’t even need to see it!’

Soon after this wishful thinking of mine we lurched to a halt once more, ten heads rocking forward then snapping back with the sudden deceleration. Jesus reversed a little, then made a sharp left turn. It took a moment to register what had happened, before it dawned on me that we’d almost driven straight off a cliff. Jesus wasn’t driving by memory, radar or supernatural powers, he was just peering into the gloom and had only seen the turn a split second before it was too late.

Less than an hour later lights appeared ahead of us, not moving; as we drew closer I saw it was a small pueblo (a vague term meaning more than one hut, but smaller than a town) with electricity from a generator. Several buses were parked in the pueblo ’s small scrubby parking lot, their passengers sleeping through the break. But we powered on by, making me more and more terrified. Bolivian buses are famously dangerous, with a safety record comparable to asbestos mining, so if other bus drivers had pulled over because of the poor visibility then continuing on was surely as safe as juggling chainsaws while blow-drying your hair in a shark tank.

It was nearly two am and we’d been travelling for fourteen hours when we finally started to descend. Down, down, we went, down and down, so that I felt we must’ve finally punctured the Andes and would start heading into the lowlands, where the jungle and river began.

I was right. Less than an hour later we burst from the fog into fetid and humid air, air that had oxygen in it, and a tang. It smelled of bananas, papaya and other, more exotic fruits, and pricked sweat beads from the skin. The change was no less dramatic than waking up to find you’d turned into a kangaroo. Spontaneous conversation began, jaws unclenched, fists unballed, shoulders relaxed, and Thema sang a snatch of song before breaking into his standard encore of unintelligible muttering.

Three hours later the euphoria of survival had worn off, and it was a grubby, grumbling bunch of travellers who disembarked from Jesus’s jalopy in a bland little town somewhere between two places not marked on any maps. The muss-haired woman we’d woken up at the town’s hostel was surprisingly chirpy for the hour, and with good humour chased a mangy cat from the spartan room that the Minke, myself and the Dutch would share for what was left of the night.

‘I just need the bathroom,’ the Minke said to me after we had had a much-needed hug, curtailed because we both felt gross covered in sweat, dust and road grime. ‘Then bed. So I can straighten out.’

I smiled at her optimism as I checked out the beds, which were visibly banana-shaped. Turning down the unnecessary blanket on my bed I found a chicken’s egg on my sheets.