Around the World in 50 Years (14 page)

Unfortunately, we got there too late for the other half. While we'd been busy canoodling, and only cursorily noting the extensive rain, Belize had been hit by Hurricane Keith, which covered its reefs with sand. A direct hit by a hurricane was an uncommon event there. Most such storms form off the African coast at about the same latitude as Belize, then start heading west, and eventually veer north; Belize is consequently rarely hit, the previous big one being Hattie, way back in 1961.

I was disappointed. I had dived all over the warmer world—Cozumel, Crete, Grand Cayman, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Great Barrier Reef—and I'd been looking forward to this reef Darwin called “the most remarkable in the West Indies.” It's part of the 560-mile-long Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the planet's second largest such aggregation, and featured 35 species of soft coral, 70 hard coral, and more than 500 species of fish. But few were visible when we were there. We tried Ambergris Caye, Half Moon, Rendezvous, and the Great Blue Hole, but all we saw was Keith-stirred sand covering and smothering everything, a sad sight for someone who loves reefs.

AFLOAT IN TITICACA

For an otherworldly experience, it's hard to top the islands of the Uros Indians that float in the heart of Lake Titicaca. Their inhabitants are unique among the world's people in that they
create
the land on which they build their houses. Only the Dutch, with their formidable dikes, and the Dubaians, with their sand-dredged islands shaped like gigantic palm trees, do anything similar, but where they used soil and sand, the Indians used weeds.

Lake Titicaca is the earth's highest commercially navigable lake and the largest lake in South America. (Maracaibo does not technically count as a lake because it's attached to the ocean.) Titicaca is a chilly 12,500 feet above sea level, has a maximum depth of 900 feet, and sits astride the boundary between Bolivia and Peru, on the northern end of the endorheic Altiplano basin. It is the sacred lake of the Incas, the legendary birthplace of the first Inca king, and the watery womb from whose depths emerged their god, Viracocha, to create the sun, the stars, the humans, and, you know, do the whole Genesis thing.

In a clever instance of one-upmanship, the Uros Indians claim to predate the Incas, insisting they lived on the lake when the earth was still unformed and darkness was upon the face of the waters. Hard to say who wins that one, yet the Incas, despite their mighty stone temples and mountaintop redoubts, have long since vanished, while the lowly Uros still survive, two thousand strong, on their humble life rafts, which vary from the size of a soccer pitch to the acreage of three large football fields.

The Uros, bundled up in layers of wool clothing (topped by felt fedoras for the ladies) to protect them from the ever-present cold, the harsh Altiplano wind that sweeps across the lake, and the damaging rays of the high-altitude sun, were extremely welcoming when I and my traveling companion—tall, blonde, blue-eyed, short-shorts-sporting Jamie—disembarked after our two-hour boat ride from Puno. Some of the Uros men were so taken with Jamie that, had she but asked, they would have built her an island of her own.

Walking on these islands was not like anything else on earth. It's akin to striding across a water bed, except that you don't usually get your feet wet on a water bed or risk plunging through to your knees into 50-degree wetness. It feels a bit like hiking atop the quaking sands in the Everglades or the Okefenokee, but with a lot more bounce and no gators.

The Uros constructed these 40 artificial islands in the shallow parts of Titicaca, using the abundant stands of
totura,
a cattail-type, hollow, buoyant reed with thick roots. They pull up extensive mats of
totura
and lay them atop the sturdy living reeds that serve as a foundation, then build their homes atop those mats, regularly replacing the trampled weeds with fresh layers. Their boats and homes are constructed from the same reeds, giving the low treeless topography a monochromatic straw-colored hue.

As a safety measure against a campfire conflagration, the Uros had imported a few medium-sized rocks from the mainland to serve as insulating platforms for their cook stoves. Very few. Because the Uros know that people who live in grass houses shouldn't stow stones.

GOING DOWN THE AMAZON

My first trip down the Amazon was the most difficult because none of us had any idea what we were doing.

I'd made a deal with girlfriend Jamie to take her camping through the Peruvian Amazon if she'd brush up on her high school Spanish and handle the linguistics. It was a no-go from the get-go. She got us completely lost leaving the airport at Arequipa when she confused the direction
al frente
with
enfrente,
and it got worse from there. I got so frustrated that I yelled at her, which made her cry and refuse to try any more translating.

We eventually found our way to Iquitos, a bustling Amazon port more than 1,800 miles upriver from the Atlantic Ocean, which I'd picked as a good put-in point. I proceeded to search for, and attempt, in my pathetic pidgin Spanish, to arrange with someone who owned a safe boat with a powerful outboard to take us on a weeklong cruise downriver and back.

I finally found a skinny kid of about 20 ferrying a load of bananas to Iquitos from the far side of the river in a sturdy, canoe-shaped, square-sterned, shallow-draft craft some 30 feet long. We agreed to meet dockside the next morning and commence our seven-day adventure.

I was puzzled when he showed up for departure with only the clothes on his body, and when I had to insist that we stop at the riverside gas station and fill up an entire 50-gallon drum. But it was not until nightfall, when the kid began to hyperventilate and Jamie condescended to translate, that our misunderstanding was revealed: He thought that I had hired him to take us on seven
separate
one-day jaunts on the rivers around Iquitos instead of one long, continuous trip. Even worse, he was strictly a cross-river ferryman and had never sailed more than half a day downriver in his life, had no idea where he was, and had no map, no compass, and no sense of direction.

I did have all those, so I told him, through Jamie, to calm down, and assured him that I'd get him safely back to his home within a week, ten days tops, as long as he kept the engine running. I marked the 50-gallon drum to keep track of our gas consumption, gauged the strength and speed of the current, and reckoned we'd need two days to chug back upriver for every day we went down.

And so we continued down our planet's second longest river, a tea-colored torrent of silt and rotted vegetation in that rainy season, so wide that we often could not see either side, which can be 30 miles away during the wet season (less than six miles during the dry season). So much water flows down the Amazon, which drains most of the rain forests of South America, that its discharge is greater than that of the world's next seven largest rives combined! Twenty percent of all the fresh water entering all earth's oceans came from the Amazon in those benign days before the polar ice started melting.

I had a great time. But Captain Kid was scared for the whole trip, especially when I coaxed him out of the main river to explore some of the tributaries, and then some of their channels. He absolutely drew the line when I asked him to take us down a drainage ditch. Poor Jamie vacillated from fascination to fright.

We saw leaping Amazon river dolphins, and manatees in clear pools, and we exchanged friendly waves with the scores of boats coming upriver each day. I bartered for fruits and vegetables with the few farmers who were trying to eke out a living along the riverbank, giving them sewing kits, cigarettes, candles, matches, and salt I'd brought along for this purpose; cash did one little good so far from civilization. We also bartered for tasty fillets of fresh river tilapia; a bit of beef; gigantic, mud-colored, mud-tasting catfish; and some monkey meat, all of which we roasted at night over driftwood fires laid in pits we'd dug in riverside sandbars. Jamie and I slept in my tent and one night on the wide porch of a hospitable local whose first floor was built on poles 20 feet above the flood-prone ground. We never lacked for a variety of fresh food, and the river provided all the water we needed once we'd popped in purification pills.

The seasonally flooded forest (called
várzea
) through which we sometimes drifted, and the capacious jungles behind it, contained one-third of all the species of creatures on earth. We awakened daily to a kaleidoscope of curious butterflies and an enchanting symphony of chirps, warbles, caws, grunts, whistles, tweets, hums, howls, and ardent early morning mating calls, nature's paean to the dawning day. I was in my element, happy as a coonhound off the leash and on the scent.

One afternoon, in a stream no more than chest height and relatively clear, I impulsively did something that might seem stupid. (Okay, it
was
stupid.) I jumped overboard to wash off a week's accumulation of sweat and grime, then grabbed the knotted rope that trailed behind the boat and let it carry me lazily along for an hour under a sheltering canopy of tropical trees.

Captain Kid freaked out and kept excitedly gesturing for me to get back in, but I was pretty sure I was safe. I doubted that any bull sharks wandered this far from the ocean, and I'd tested the stream for carnivorous piranha by dangling a piece of meat over the side. I had, however, forgotten about the anacondas that lurked by these streams. When I saw a 15-footer slither along the grassy bank toward me, I quickly pulled back into the canoe.

It was a wonderful trip, my kind of trip, and I've returned to the Amazon for many more.

PLAYING WITH PENGUINS

I never swam in colder water. But it was worth it.

Amy—Jamie's successor—and I had sailed from Guayaquil to visit the Galápagos Islands, an archipelago of volcanic peaks, made famous by Darwin, that straddles the Equator 600 miles west of Ecuador. They lie directly in the path of the frigid Humboldt Current, which lowers the ambient water temperature to 74 degrees, rather nippy for lengthy immersion. The Galápagos are 97.5 percent national parks, plus a protected marine reserve that was our goal. Most visitors come to see the giant tortoises, iguanas, and Darwin's famous finches, but we went to frolic with the seals and play with the penguins.

We had no room in our luggage for wet suits, but had squeezed in thin dive skins, although whatever insulation they provided against the cold waters was probably a placebo effect—and a barely perceptible one. We plodded backward into the crystalline waters in our flippers and masks, watched by a curious audience of waved (but not waving) albatross, great frigate birds, and a family of blue-footed boobys.

As soon as we submerged, the brilliantly multicolored crabs clinging to the underwater rocks scurried from us and a Galápagos green turtle furiously paddled away. The dark marine iguanas ignored us while chowing down on seaweed attached to partly submerged rocks, the only members of the genus
Amblyrhynchus
to sup at sea. But we did not lack for companions: A raft of penguins and a pod of seals came to cavort.

The Galápagos penguin is the only surviving tropical penguin, and they peacefully swam right beside and below us, as if we were regular members of their raft. (A pack of penguins at sea is a raft, on land a waddle, on their nests a rookery, and their newborns constitute a crèche.)

The Galápagos sea lions, famous for their curiosity, took the opposite tack from the birds and swam directly
at
us, fast-moving, living brown torpedoes, heading right into our face masks, veering away only at the last second, just as we were sure they'd collide with us. Were they trying to scare us? Play with us? Or adopt us?

I can't say whether our aquatic playmates enjoyed us as much as we enjoyed them, but their close camaraderie was like none I'd ever experienced in the wild. I profoundly felt at one with nature and its fauna, kindred spirits sharing a pleasant afternoon by the seaside, a warm, tender, primordial feeling of belonging together on our pale blue dot.

MEDICAL MILESTONE

All these watery immersions gave rise to a condition that, though bothersome, did enable me to advance medical science—by inventing a procedure for alleviating
tinea cruris
, an irritating fungal infection centered in the groin area and commonly called jock itch. It's distantly related to
tinea pedis,
which is also better known as athlete's foot. (But if you have some athlete's foot in your groin area, you're much too hardcore for this family-friendly book.)

Since this malady thrives in hot, moist climes, I reasoned that the obvious way to ameliorate it was to subject it to a chilling and drying effect. To this end, I traversed much of Central America buck naked, balanced on the running board of the Expedition's Land Cruiser, my right leg spread out wide, letting the cooling breeze caress the afflicted zone. (I'm not sure whether this technique would work for a woman as I lacked the proper test equipment.) I have no photographic proof of perfecting this efficacious technique because Steve was not able to simultaneously drive and take pictures—which
must
be the reason the U.S. Patent Office rejected my application to commercialize this technique. (If you want to try this at home, do so only at night, on unpopulated rural roads, and in regions where your outstretched leg is not likely to collide with an oxcart or a jackass.)

Don't have a running board on your car? No problem: Just undress and snuggle next to the AC on max. Be careful not to overdo it and cause frostbite. A frostbitten appendage is not a pleasant sight, nor easy to cure, as I unfortunately had occasion to research one cold and stormy evening in Chamonix after skiing Mont Blanc at a windchilly 40 below. I located an article in a medical journal whose physician/author advised against the old-fashioned method of hopping into a hot tub, warning that the sudden increase in temperature might damage the family jewels. The good fellow recommended gently slipping the frozen member into something soft, lubricious, and at body temperature—and keeping it there for about two hours.