What prompted this post was this short: from The Bigger Truth Behind The Matrix.
This was the last time I really communicated with my friend Rachel, a decade ago. Although I did later send her some mad rant about Socrates, his wife and God knows what else, ...
Hi Rachel,
I've just screwed up my computer whilst trying to do something not so
clever. It doesn't have an operating system at the moment. The
computer has all my reading material on it so I haven't got anything
else to do this evening except write, so this is going to be long!!
I don't have access to your e-mail so I can only reply to what I
remember you said. Was the town you were in Uyuni? It's a bit of a
dump, literally! And yes there are flamingoes of note down that side
of Bolivia. There are a lot of photos of the place on
http://wilderness-bolivia.info/blog/?m=200911
I was going to go to Sorata for New Year but I wanted to take the
computer and do some work. I don't know what to do now. Maybe I'll go
down on New Year's day instead. Sorata is a little town at the other
end of the Cordillera Real from La Paz. It used to be a big climbing
centre and a popular spot for tourists. But some local villagers took
to pulling tourists off buses and robbing them, and although this has
stopped, it killed the tourism fairly comprehensively. I've never been
there, but my friend Stefan who I worked with for a month in Chile,
lives there. He's a Swiss-German (actually a real German, who lived in
Switzerland most of his life). Stefan runs Cafe Illampu, which is a
little restaurant/cafe a little way out of town. He looks up at
Illampu, which he loves, from his bedroom window. But he's not a
climber, it's a stricly hands-off thing for him. I am not sure I want
to climb Illampu though. The usual summit day is 18 hours and the
weather is tricky so most people get turned back a few times.
I didn't get to Patagonia. After spending so long in bloody Chile it
seemed stupid to go straight back down there again, albeit through
Argentina. So I went down to Rurrenabaque in the rainforest. I needed
to do this because I'd actually collected donations from people to
support my forest conservation project and I'd promised them I'd go
down in July. I delayed it because Ursula was going to come to Peru,
which didn't happen, and then it took two months to get the visa and
another two weeks to get the driving licence and then I had this work
for a month. I was feeling a bit guilty about it. As it happened
though I had really good weather and mid December was exactly the
right time to go. The loggers had all stopped and gone home for the
rainy season, but the roads were still passable, just.
I went to a town called Ixiamas which is in the northern part of La
Paz province. Ixiamas is a logging town, it has only been a town since
the forestry industry started. The people down there are mostly
indians. They look quite different from the Aymara and Quechua people
in the highlands. Until the 1930s they used to wear tribal dress and
they were identifiable by this, but now they all wear t-shirts, jeans
and baseball caps. To get to Ixiamas you first have to get to
Rurrenabaque, which is 18 hours from La Paz on the bus or a couple of
hours on a plane. From Rurre you cross the Rio Beni on a little ferry
to San Buenaventura. Then you get a bus or a taxi for three or four
hours north along a dirt road cut by little rivers which the vehicles
make into little quagmires.
When I went across to San Buenaventura to get a bus I met a slightly
odd-looking couple. The guy was a bit taller than me, in his mid
forties, well-built but with a bit of a belly and a greying beard. His
companion was a slim woman, a good foot shorter than him, wearing a
long dress down to her ankles and a white head scarf. She looked much
younger, in her early thirties. I wondered if she was his daughter or
something. They obviously weren't tourists because amongst their
luggage they had jute sacks full of small citrus trees. I heard them
speaking English to each other and he had a clear American accent.
They arranged for an express taxi and loaded their bags into it. I'd
already bought myself a cheap ticket on the mini-bus and I was waiting
for some more passengers to turn up: the buses don't leave 'til
they're almost full. Well not much happened for half an hour, and I
went to the office to ask about the bus. They said I could go in the
taxi if I paid another Bs. 20, so I loaded my bags in the back and we
all set off for Ixiamas. We got talking and they told me they were
living on a smallholding a few miles past Ixiamas. They knew a lot
about the logging industry because they live on a logging road. They
see all the trucks going past and they hear all the stories about
gangs stealing lumber etc. They also knew a lot about wood because
they built their house from trees they felled and rough boards they
bought straight from a sawmill. They had only been in Bolivia for a
year and a half. They said they were associated with a Mennonite
community in Santa Cruz and they and their six children were hoping to
get permanent residency on a special visa for religious communities.
They told me a lot about their house and their land and by the time we
got Ixiamas I'd invited myself to see it. Their names are Jake and
Christina Troyer.
They had to do some shopping in Ixiamas, mainly buying chicken feed,
and they also had to make a regular radio call to another group of
people that lived up on the Madidi river, two and a half days by boat
from the nearest road. This guy Matthew is the son of Jake's sister.
She has been living nearby for about 15 years. It turns out there are
dozens of these people living up there, all related to Jake's sister
in some way or another. Matthew, or Mateo as he's known locally, has
a Bolivian wife and they have ten children and another on the way. He,
his pregnant wife, their ten children and two of Mateo's sisters "Who
didn't care to get married", their mother told me, all live out in the
rainforest hundreds of miles from anywhere. They grow most of their
own food, sell a little, and fish and hunt.
I spent two nights at Jake and Christina's house. It is a beautiful
wooden building. Two floors, with high ceilings. Like most houses
around there they don't have glass in the windows, just mosquito
screen and wooden shutters. It's very basic but also very comfortable.
All the furniture they made themselves, from wood or, in the case of
the hammocks, rope and mosquito screen. They have a huge table in the
kitchen that could seat twenty. Their electricity comes from a solar
panel and a battery, enough for lights and the laptop, but no more.
The kids: Joseph, Josephine, Matthew, Jonathan, Nathan and Timothy
don't go to school: they do 'home schooling' which is some sort of US
program of accreditation for self-study. All except Timothy and
Matthew do their school work at the table on weekday mornings. Jake is
not a fan of education. He thinks basic education is enough.
Christina pointed out that you need more than a basic education to be
a doctor. I kept quiet, not because I didn't want to get into an
argument but because I'm not actually sure what I think about this.
Probably if someone wants to learn they should learn, but if they
don't they should go and do something else. I'm a fan of education
because I think it's fun.
They do grace and we all joined hands around the table while Jake said
a prayer and the younger kids squirmed and fidgeted. That night we ate
tomatoes with slices of onion in bread rolls with mayonnaise. For
afters there was a big slice of banana bread that a friend had made
them. After dinner (and after washing up, which is a pretty big
affair, done Bolivian style, with cold water and a bar of laundry
soap) we all sat around and talked - no TV. They talked about their
trip. Jake and Christina had been to La Paz to get temporary passports
so they could go back to the states without disrupting their visa
application. The kids told them what they'd been doing; they'd made a
gravel path around the back of the kitchen and they'd mowed the lawn
(a couple of acres) and put in some fencing.
There must be some point where if you have more children then life
gets easier, not harder. In Bolivia children are a resource: in a
large family the children bring in more income than the adults. These
people are working on the same principle I think. They were able to
leave their children out there for a whole week: they looked after
each other. They have neighbours too but the kids built most of the
house and laid the pipeline for the water supply, so they can cope
with quite a lot before they need help from the neighbours. The oldest
two are finished school now and can work full-time.
The first night was hot and I slept with the shutters open. There is a
pretty good night-time chorus of frogs and insects there, but not as
loud as in the forest. The next day was Sunday. I got up at eight, but
some of them had been up for hours milking cows etc. After a
breakfast of coffee and a mushy cheese and bread bake, we all went up
the road to Jake's sister's place. The kids were mostly barefoot and
picked flowers from a shrub for me to eat. They are very refreshing,
slightly sour tasting and juicy. Jake's sister runs a little school
for the local children and on Sundays they use the school-house for a
prayer meeting. There was no minister; they did a kind of quaker-like
thing where people could call out any hymn they wanted to sing, and
various members of the congregation read sermons. The hymnals were
published by the Mennonites. There were a few Bolivians there, but it
was mostly Jake's sister's clan. After the service pots and plates
appeared and a lunch was served for everyone. It was rice and a stew
of small bits of meat and horribly overcooked pasta, served with aji
(that hot tomato sauce they serve everywhere in Bolivia) and roast
plantains. It was pretty good, even the pasta stew. We ate it in the
schoolhouse and people chatted merrily. Jake's nephew Conrad was a
centre of attention. In his early thirties I guess. He is quiet and
confident and a good sense of humour. He seems to be looking after
everyone. He's spent most of his life in the tropics: before they
moved to Bolivia they lived in the forest in Belize.
After lunch we went back to the house and planted 45 orange and
tangerine trees out in the garden, all in neat rows. Later in the
afternoon people started turning up on motorbikes (the most popular
form of transport out there because they handle the roads better, and
a family of three can get about on one easily). They were all people
we'd met at the school that morning but they were here for Sunday
dinner which was the tradition. The talk was about farming of one sort
or another, and about liberty. More than once people told me they were
here because they couldn't live in the states anymore in the way they
wanted to. The sort of life they live is a bit like the settlers. I
read Laura Ingalls Wilder books voraciously when I was a kid, so I
know a bit about it, and these people live like that. They grow their
own food, make their own furniture and fence-posts and whatnot. The
kids have their own land to farm, they can go hunting with rifles,
they can drive cars and ride motorbikes as soon as they're tall enough
to reach the pedals, and they don't have to go to school.
Conrad's sister is married to another American whose name I forget,
and he and Conrad told me about a three day hunting trip in the Madidi
park in 2001. They had come across a group of huge spider monkeys "as
big as we are" Conrad said. They had shot one in the chest and it just
climbed back into the tree they said. That's not a nice way to treat
monkeys, but I was interested because I have a friend called Simon
Chapman who wrote a book about his search for DeLoy's Ape or "The Mono
Rey", a legendary huge monkey that lives down there. Simon's
conclusion was that it was a species of very large spider monkey
'unknown to science'. Simon also claims to have seen a troop of them
in the Madidi park (the border of which is just on the other side of
the road they live on.)
The next day Conrad gave me a lift on his bike back to Ixiamas. I'd
never ridden pillion on a motorbike, never- mind with a 20kg pack on
my back on a muddy track fording quite swift rivers. I had to use some
muscles I've never used before. If you're not already bored you can
read about the forest part of the trip here:
http://wilderness-bolivia.info/ecology/trip-report1.pdf
I'm looking forward to going back down there in March/April. I want to
go up to the Madidi river and spend a few weeks there. I think it's
possible to buy little bits of land from people who've already worked
it. If I find something then I will probably buy it and float some
planks down to build a house.
Rachel, do you want to come and live in the rainforest with me? We
don't have to have ten children if you don't want to; as long as we
can figure out how to grow rice and catch fish within a year or so
we'll be OK. The mosquitoes are a nuisance, but think of the upsides.
Blue sky and big white fluffy clouds most of the year, and huge trees
everywhere. Jaguar footprints in the garden, golden macaws flying past
every day, monkeys in the trees, tree-snakes in the shower. We would
complain about the cold when the temperature drops below 20 degrees.
Imagine having your very own dugout canoe! You could shoot bush
turkeys from it. We'd have no neighbours less than a day away by boat
and we'd only have to lock the door if we were going out for more than
a week. There would be no cars, no street-lights and no council tax.
We'd have no electricity bills and we would never have to clean the
fridge or change a lightbulb. There would be no work stress: if a
jaguar kept us awake with its growling all night it wouldn't matter.
No two days would be the same, but on a busy one we might have to wash
a few clothes, patch up a leak in the roof maybe and catch a fish for
dinner. Every couple of months we'd do a 5 day trip to town to check
e-mail and a couple of times a year we'd have to do a marathon
two-week expedition to La Paz. Three months of the year there are huge
thunderstorms almost every day when it rains buckets and the whole
place floods; so coming back we might have to swim across flooded
rivers half a km wide, in the dark! Wouldn't that be fantastic!! You
could write a book about it and become famous and because you're so
beautiful the National Geographic would want to make a film about you,
so you'd get even more famous. Then you'd get bored and move to New
York and I would become an alcoholic, start smoking cocaine base and
die in a squalid shack in Ixiamas buzzing with flies. But that's life!
How about it? You've nothing to lose except your job and your sanity,
and jobs and sanity are overrated.
I think I'd beter stop here! Happy New Year when it happens; raise a
glass to life and liberty and forests and jaguars.
Ian
This was the last time I really communicated with my friend Rachel, a decade ago. Although I did later send her some mad rant about Socrates, his wife and God knows what else, ...
Hi Rachel,
I've just screwed up my computer whilst trying to do something not so
clever. It doesn't have an operating system at the moment. The
computer has all my reading material on it so I haven't got anything
else to do this evening except write, so this is going to be long!!
I don't have access to your e-mail so I can only reply to what I
remember you said. Was the town you were in Uyuni? It's a bit of a
dump, literally! And yes there are flamingoes of note down that side
of Bolivia. There are a lot of photos of the place on
http://wilderness-bolivia.info/blog/?m=200911
I was going to go to Sorata for New Year but I wanted to take the
computer and do some work. I don't know what to do now. Maybe I'll go
down on New Year's day instead. Sorata is a little town at the other
end of the Cordillera Real from La Paz. It used to be a big climbing
centre and a popular spot for tourists. But some local villagers took
to pulling tourists off buses and robbing them, and although this has
stopped, it killed the tourism fairly comprehensively. I've never been
there, but my friend Stefan who I worked with for a month in Chile,
lives there. He's a Swiss-German (actually a real German, who lived in
Switzerland most of his life). Stefan runs Cafe Illampu, which is a
little restaurant/cafe a little way out of town. He looks up at
Illampu, which he loves, from his bedroom window. But he's not a
climber, it's a stricly hands-off thing for him. I am not sure I want
to climb Illampu though. The usual summit day is 18 hours and the
weather is tricky so most people get turned back a few times.
I didn't get to Patagonia. After spending so long in bloody Chile it
seemed stupid to go straight back down there again, albeit through
Argentina. So I went down to Rurrenabaque in the rainforest. I needed
to do this because I'd actually collected donations from people to
support my forest conservation project and I'd promised them I'd go
down in July. I delayed it because Ursula was going to come to Peru,
which didn't happen, and then it took two months to get the visa and
another two weeks to get the driving licence and then I had this work
for a month. I was feeling a bit guilty about it. As it happened
though I had really good weather and mid December was exactly the
right time to go. The loggers had all stopped and gone home for the
rainy season, but the roads were still passable, just.
I went to a town called Ixiamas which is in the northern part of La
Paz province. Ixiamas is a logging town, it has only been a town since
the forestry industry started. The people down there are mostly
indians. They look quite different from the Aymara and Quechua people
in the highlands. Until the 1930s they used to wear tribal dress and
they were identifiable by this, but now they all wear t-shirts, jeans
and baseball caps. To get to Ixiamas you first have to get to
Rurrenabaque, which is 18 hours from La Paz on the bus or a couple of
hours on a plane. From Rurre you cross the Rio Beni on a little ferry
to San Buenaventura. Then you get a bus or a taxi for three or four
hours north along a dirt road cut by little rivers which the vehicles
make into little quagmires.
When I went across to San Buenaventura to get a bus I met a slightly
odd-looking couple. The guy was a bit taller than me, in his mid
forties, well-built but with a bit of a belly and a greying beard. His
companion was a slim woman, a good foot shorter than him, wearing a
long dress down to her ankles and a white head scarf. She looked much
younger, in her early thirties. I wondered if she was his daughter or
something. They obviously weren't tourists because amongst their
luggage they had jute sacks full of small citrus trees. I heard them
speaking English to each other and he had a clear American accent.
They arranged for an express taxi and loaded their bags into it. I'd
already bought myself a cheap ticket on the mini-bus and I was waiting
for some more passengers to turn up: the buses don't leave 'til
they're almost full. Well not much happened for half an hour, and I
went to the office to ask about the bus. They said I could go in the
taxi if I paid another Bs. 20, so I loaded my bags in the back and we
all set off for Ixiamas. We got talking and they told me they were
living on a smallholding a few miles past Ixiamas. They knew a lot
about the logging industry because they live on a logging road. They
see all the trucks going past and they hear all the stories about
gangs stealing lumber etc. They also knew a lot about wood because
they built their house from trees they felled and rough boards they
bought straight from a sawmill. They had only been in Bolivia for a
year and a half. They said they were associated with a Mennonite
community in Santa Cruz and they and their six children were hoping to
get permanent residency on a special visa for religious communities.
They told me a lot about their house and their land and by the time we
got Ixiamas I'd invited myself to see it. Their names are Jake and
Christina Troyer.
They had to do some shopping in Ixiamas, mainly buying chicken feed,
and they also had to make a regular radio call to another group of
people that lived up on the Madidi river, two and a half days by boat
from the nearest road. This guy Matthew is the son of Jake's sister.
She has been living nearby for about 15 years. It turns out there are
dozens of these people living up there, all related to Jake's sister
in some way or another. Matthew, or Mateo as he's known locally, has
a Bolivian wife and they have ten children and another on the way. He,
his pregnant wife, their ten children and two of Mateo's sisters "Who
didn't care to get married", their mother told me, all live out in the
rainforest hundreds of miles from anywhere. They grow most of their
own food, sell a little, and fish and hunt.
I spent two nights at Jake and Christina's house. It is a beautiful
wooden building. Two floors, with high ceilings. Like most houses
around there they don't have glass in the windows, just mosquito
screen and wooden shutters. It's very basic but also very comfortable.
All the furniture they made themselves, from wood or, in the case of
the hammocks, rope and mosquito screen. They have a huge table in the
kitchen that could seat twenty. Their electricity comes from a solar
panel and a battery, enough for lights and the laptop, but no more.
The kids: Joseph, Josephine, Matthew, Jonathan, Nathan and Timothy
don't go to school: they do 'home schooling' which is some sort of US
program of accreditation for self-study. All except Timothy and
Matthew do their school work at the table on weekday mornings. Jake is
not a fan of education. He thinks basic education is enough.
Christina pointed out that you need more than a basic education to be
a doctor. I kept quiet, not because I didn't want to get into an
argument but because I'm not actually sure what I think about this.
Probably if someone wants to learn they should learn, but if they
don't they should go and do something else. I'm a fan of education
because I think it's fun.
They do grace and we all joined hands around the table while Jake said
a prayer and the younger kids squirmed and fidgeted. That night we ate
tomatoes with slices of onion in bread rolls with mayonnaise. For
afters there was a big slice of banana bread that a friend had made
them. After dinner (and after washing up, which is a pretty big
affair, done Bolivian style, with cold water and a bar of laundry
soap) we all sat around and talked - no TV. They talked about their
trip. Jake and Christina had been to La Paz to get temporary passports
so they could go back to the states without disrupting their visa
application. The kids told them what they'd been doing; they'd made a
gravel path around the back of the kitchen and they'd mowed the lawn
(a couple of acres) and put in some fencing.
There must be some point where if you have more children then life
gets easier, not harder. In Bolivia children are a resource: in a
large family the children bring in more income than the adults. These
people are working on the same principle I think. They were able to
leave their children out there for a whole week: they looked after
each other. They have neighbours too but the kids built most of the
house and laid the pipeline for the water supply, so they can cope
with quite a lot before they need help from the neighbours. The oldest
two are finished school now and can work full-time.
The first night was hot and I slept with the shutters open. There is a
pretty good night-time chorus of frogs and insects there, but not as
loud as in the forest. The next day was Sunday. I got up at eight, but
some of them had been up for hours milking cows etc. After a
breakfast of coffee and a mushy cheese and bread bake, we all went up
the road to Jake's sister's place. The kids were mostly barefoot and
picked flowers from a shrub for me to eat. They are very refreshing,
slightly sour tasting and juicy. Jake's sister runs a little school
for the local children and on Sundays they use the school-house for a
prayer meeting. There was no minister; they did a kind of quaker-like
thing where people could call out any hymn they wanted to sing, and
various members of the congregation read sermons. The hymnals were
published by the Mennonites. There were a few Bolivians there, but it
was mostly Jake's sister's clan. After the service pots and plates
appeared and a lunch was served for everyone. It was rice and a stew
of small bits of meat and horribly overcooked pasta, served with aji
(that hot tomato sauce they serve everywhere in Bolivia) and roast
plantains. It was pretty good, even the pasta stew. We ate it in the
schoolhouse and people chatted merrily. Jake's nephew Conrad was a
centre of attention. In his early thirties I guess. He is quiet and
confident and a good sense of humour. He seems to be looking after
everyone. He's spent most of his life in the tropics: before they
moved to Bolivia they lived in the forest in Belize.
After lunch we went back to the house and planted 45 orange and
tangerine trees out in the garden, all in neat rows. Later in the
afternoon people started turning up on motorbikes (the most popular
form of transport out there because they handle the roads better, and
a family of three can get about on one easily). They were all people
we'd met at the school that morning but they were here for Sunday
dinner which was the tradition. The talk was about farming of one sort
or another, and about liberty. More than once people told me they were
here because they couldn't live in the states anymore in the way they
wanted to. The sort of life they live is a bit like the settlers. I
read Laura Ingalls Wilder books voraciously when I was a kid, so I
know a bit about it, and these people live like that. They grow their
own food, make their own furniture and fence-posts and whatnot. The
kids have their own land to farm, they can go hunting with rifles,
they can drive cars and ride motorbikes as soon as they're tall enough
to reach the pedals, and they don't have to go to school.
Conrad's sister is married to another American whose name I forget,
and he and Conrad told me about a three day hunting trip in the Madidi
park in 2001. They had come across a group of huge spider monkeys "as
big as we are" Conrad said. They had shot one in the chest and it just
climbed back into the tree they said. That's not a nice way to treat
monkeys, but I was interested because I have a friend called Simon
Chapman who wrote a book about his search for DeLoy's Ape or "The Mono
Rey", a legendary huge monkey that lives down there. Simon's
conclusion was that it was a species of very large spider monkey
'unknown to science'. Simon also claims to have seen a troop of them
in the Madidi park (the border of which is just on the other side of
the road they live on.)
The next day Conrad gave me a lift on his bike back to Ixiamas. I'd
never ridden pillion on a motorbike, never- mind with a 20kg pack on
my back on a muddy track fording quite swift rivers. I had to use some
muscles I've never used before. If you're not already bored you can
read about the forest part of the trip here:
http://wilderness-bolivia.info/ecology/trip-report1.pdf
I'm looking forward to going back down there in March/April. I want to
go up to the Madidi river and spend a few weeks there. I think it's
possible to buy little bits of land from people who've already worked
it. If I find something then I will probably buy it and float some
planks down to build a house.
Rachel, do you want to come and live in the rainforest with me? We
don't have to have ten children if you don't want to; as long as we
can figure out how to grow rice and catch fish within a year or so
we'll be OK. The mosquitoes are a nuisance, but think of the upsides.
Blue sky and big white fluffy clouds most of the year, and huge trees
everywhere. Jaguar footprints in the garden, golden macaws flying past
every day, monkeys in the trees, tree-snakes in the shower. We would
complain about the cold when the temperature drops below 20 degrees.
Imagine having your very own dugout canoe! You could shoot bush
turkeys from it. We'd have no neighbours less than a day away by boat
and we'd only have to lock the door if we were going out for more than
a week. There would be no cars, no street-lights and no council tax.
We'd have no electricity bills and we would never have to clean the
fridge or change a lightbulb. There would be no work stress: if a
jaguar kept us awake with its growling all night it wouldn't matter.
No two days would be the same, but on a busy one we might have to wash
a few clothes, patch up a leak in the roof maybe and catch a fish for
dinner. Every couple of months we'd do a 5 day trip to town to check
e-mail and a couple of times a year we'd have to do a marathon
two-week expedition to La Paz. Three months of the year there are huge
thunderstorms almost every day when it rains buckets and the whole
place floods; so coming back we might have to swim across flooded
rivers half a km wide, in the dark! Wouldn't that be fantastic!! You
could write a book about it and become famous and because you're so
beautiful the National Geographic would want to make a film about you,
so you'd get even more famous. Then you'd get bored and move to New
York and I would become an alcoholic, start smoking cocaine base and
die in a squalid shack in Ixiamas buzzing with flies. But that's life!
How about it? You've nothing to lose except your job and your sanity,
and jobs and sanity are overrated.
I think I'd beter stop here! Happy New Year when it happens; raise a
glass to life and liberty and forests and jaguars.
Ian
No comments:
Post a Comment