Llama for Lunch (23 page)
The country we traversed looked sad and burned. It had been cleared to graze the large herds of mainly white cows that I saw on it. The occasional pocket of original, beautiful, dense shady forest only emphasised the bleakness of the spoiled land, which was spiked with dead sticks that had been trees. But behind the cleared areas the forest stood tall, as though it was waiting for a chance to march in again. An occasional grand hacienda and many palm trees dotted the cleared areas. The palms were shaped like half-opened umbrellas pointing upwards.
Porto Velho is a huge town. A taxi drove me through the soft warm air from the smart bus station to the Hotel Tia Carmen. Scrambling out of the taxi in the dark I stumbled over a live object that set up a great barking. I jumped backwards thinking I was under attack from a fierce guard dog, but started to laugh when I saw that the minuscule object going for my ankles was a tiny black Chihuahua. An old lady sitting on a stool outside the entrance called it off and saved my life.
The room I found was a dump but, although it smelled musty, it was clean. And for once the sheets stayed on the bed – even though the bed base was flattened cardboard cartons. The air-conditioner had its face off – a face lift extraordinaire – and made a shocking row. The bathroom was an afterthought that had been bunged in a corner of the room and was separated from it only by a curtain on one side. But this room had another of the attractive wooden ceilings, a pot of artificial flowers on a natty mat on a table and a TV that was showing a dubbed Australian film featuring none other than ex-footballer Jacko speaking Portuguese – a vast improvement on his English.
The agreeable hotel owner and her darkly beautiful daughter served a good breakfast outside on the sidewalk, where I luxuriated in the lovely morning. But I was given the terrible pre-sweetened coffee again and when I asked for it plain I received another just the same. I tried again and this time I got coffee with milk. Giving up, I fetched my own from my room.
Walking a long way to the river’s edge to investigate the boat situation, I found there a pleasant area in which drinks were sold from huts with thatched roofs alongside the place where two smart riverboats were moored. This was not the commercial boat dock, though – I had to walk further to reach that. I bought a coconut to fortify myself and, among much rubbish and litter, hiked along the train track, passing a railway museum where many old steam engines sat rusting in open sheds. One restored steam train does run from here, but unfortunately not on this day. I noticed thankfully that there did not seem to be many dogs in this town. Apart from the hotel Chihuahua that I had almost exterminated, I saw only a couple.
I didn’t need to look far for a boat. As soon as I appeared on the scene I was grabbed and hijacked by waiting riverside pirates. Taken to view a boat, I negotiated a price for a cabin at very reasonable rates. The cabin was coffin-sized but it was clean and it had an oscillating fan attached to one wall. The boat was loading cargo, which was either fired down a wooden chute or carried down very steep, narrow and slippery steps cut in the earth of the bank. I was apprehensive that I might fall as I picked my way down, and stepped gingerly with my parasol aloft. Don’t laugh – my umbrella saved me from a box of bananas that fell off a truck and hit my brolly instead of my head.
It was hot as blazes on top of the riverbank and the workers were all barefoot and shirtless. I gravitated to a nearby stall, a narrow table covered overhead by a tattered blue tarpaulin, that sold drinks and snacks cooked on a brazier made from an old wheel-rim on a makeshift stand. I sat on the long wooden bench and ordered an orange juice. Six oranges were put through the juicer with ice and the results poured into two plastic bags with straws. Not being thirsty enough for two I gave one bag to the enterprising gent who was procuring my ticket. An old man sat on the other end of the bench munching a bowl of rice. I got up and tipped him off.
I transported my bags to the boat then walked back up to the main street for supplies. Porto Velho was the biggest town I had been in since Lima and it had many shops. Prices seemed about the same as in Australia but food in cafes was cheap. I ate lunch at a kilo place and, once I’d managed to put my card in the right way, extracted some money from a machine in the Bank of Brazil. When I put my hand in the slot to check that I had taken all the money, the machine grabbed my hand with its teeth. I shrieked and all the people standing nearby laughed.
By the time I returned to the boat rain was falling, and the steps down the bank were becoming increasingly slippery. I stood pondering the descent and wondering at the amount of rubbish that had been thrown down the riverbank and into the river. It took a while to muster the courage to tackle those steps, but eventually I made it down. Then the rain became heavier and four or five people slipped and fell. Shrieking and sliding, covered in mud, they provided great entertainment. I also watched as three large engines were manoeuvred down the mud steps to the boat next door. One escaped and slid away a distance before being recaptured. But the rain was a welcome relief as the weather then became refreshingly cool.
Departure time of six came and went; at eight o’clock cases of tomatoes were still being loaded down the chute. The boat already seemed to be full of tomatoes and bananas when a truck piled high with huge hands of green bananas arrived. Labourers took these on their shoulders four hands at a time and ran surefooted down the steps of the bank with them. These bananas were stacked on pallets on the lower deck – and very neatly too, considering that they were thrown in with a whump.
Half past eight was dinner time. Two huge aluminium cauldrons were boiling a nasty mess that looked like baby sick – and had been since six o’clock when I had first ventured down to the galley investigating the possibility of food. The cook was a cheerful young man but his off-sider was a cranky woman, the only person I encountered in South America who was not friendly and smiling. For all her ferociousness she was exceedingly tiny, like the hotel Chihuahua. She was youngish, with nut-brown curly hair, and she would have been pretty except that her mouth was set in a thin, lipless, turned-down line. For the entire trip she wore shorts and singlet and stomped about with her teeny feet in thongs. She snarled at me but finally let us at the food.
Passengers served themselves from communal plastic bowls that the snarly one dumped onto the long communal wooden table as though she was throwing the pigs their swill. The stuff of unappetising appearance that the cauldrons produced was a thickened soup containing a conglomeration of potato, carrots and beans. On closer inspection, it looked like poster glue. Splashing some into my glass plate with the army-sized aluminium serving ladle, I heavily disguised it with chilli and made it edible, but the cuisine of the
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it surely wasn’t. The dining area consisted of the wooden table at which we sat on chairs perched near the clearance to the loos and showers that were behind on both sides. A sign warned that they were not to be used while a meal was in progress. It was mostly ignored.
The engines started at around nine, long ropes front and back were cast off, and we backed away from the bank. After starting the engines the captain, whose bare hairy chest was festooned with numerous gold medals and crucifixes, crossed himself on the breast and lips and kissed all the medals. Good grief! had he so little faith in his vessel? We chugged a couple of hundred metres, then turned back again. Cripes, I thought, he’s forgotten something, probably forgot to kiss a medal. But it turned out that a yoo-hoo to the port authorities on the bank was necessary.
We finally began sailing upriver at ten. I watched the town lights disappear and then went for a shower. This was good timing as Snarling Dragon Woman had just finished sluicing them out with Omo and a bottle of bleach that she had spread liberally about.
Either side of the ablution areas stood caterpillar-green porcelain basins topped by containers of hand-wash lotion. These basins were scrubbed twice daily by a sailor, but the water that flowed into them was the same mud-brown colour as the river. Alongside the basins were coolers of clear, cold, drinking water. The shower was basic no-frills and the water was straight from the river, but the cubicle was big and clean and had hooks for your clothes. It even had a window, which fortunately opened onto the river not the deck. The toilets got smelly between cleaning because, although they had flushes, people didn’t seem to use them often. The loos were very popular and constantly in demand and you had to guard the door once in situ, as the latches didn’t work.
My tiny cabin was brown polished wood all around and situated at the prow of the boat, directly behind the wheel house. It was very dark inside with the door shut – the window was a small triangle that was covered with a plastic film that was a repellent shade of blue. Two narrow bunks, one on top of the other, filled the cabin from end to end, leaving a narrow space at the side. Apart from the wall fan, the room’s only other accoutrement was an ornate brass light switch. This, however, didn’t work and I had to hot-wire it. There was a power point, but the current was 110 volts – it took a long time to boil a cup of water for coffee with my 240-volt infusor. The bunks had a paper-thin mattress, one clean sheet and a pillow case. The lower bunk collapsed when the drawer underneath it was pulled out and remained with a definite list to one side.
Not long after we started off the engines slowed and there was a sickening crunch, then another and another, as we hit the river bottom. Looking out I saw a crew member hanging over the prow doing depth soundings with a big heavy piece of iron on a string. I recognised this as the implement that I had previously used to hammer some nails in my wall for a towel rack. Well, they shouldn’t have left it so conveniently by my door.
Eventually we got off the sand bar and were on our way again. At four I got up to answer the call of nature and, opening my cabin door, was almost blown away by a cold, howling gale. I wrapped my all-purpose blanket/poncho around me and, clutching it tightly, made it down the deck and back. All the lights were on in the hammock area and people were moving about. It must have been very cold out there on the open deck. A fat man sat writing at the dining table – I guess it would have been difficult to fit him in a hammock.
There was a pounding on my door at seven in the morning and breakfast was announced. Not worth getting out of bed for, it consisted of dry biscuits, butter and the revolting sweet coffee. Rejecting this, I secured some boiled water from the cook, made my own and went back to bed.
The boat was made almost entirely of white-painted wood. Four wooden railings encompassed its decks and the cabin and wash-house doors were decorated with fancy carving. It was not very old and in much better condition than some I saw. The lowest deck contained the hatch for the hold and, looking down into it, I could see that it was filled with cargo. At the far end of this deck was the tiny galley where the cook presided over his two monstrous aluminium cooking pots on a black, iron stove. Cargo, mostly bananas, was stacked so high on this deck that you had to squeeze between it. At the front of the second deck were the wheel house and six cabins. The only instruments the wheelhouse contained were a speedometer the same as a car’s and a large, silver-plated clock placed crookedly, and someone obviously thought artistically, in a wooden anchor on the wall. The captain – who apart from his medals, wore shorts and an open army camouflage jacket – had several assistants in the steering department. The only other crew were the cook, one sailor, and the Dragon Woman stewardess/cleaner.
Down the middle of the second deck about sixty hammocks swung from hooks in the wooden roof, crammed in so closely that they touched each other. The hammocktravellers’ goods and baggage were piled under, in front and alongside them. To get past you had to duck underneath the hammocks and sidle past the bags, tricycles, bikes, pushers, kids and even a dog kennel. At the end of this deck were the showers, toilets, the dining area and a tiny servery. At the very rear, behind the dining area, two windows opened onto the river above a trap door in the floor which, when lifted, disclosed the galley below. Through this ingenious device the bowls of food that were held up by the cook were received by the Dragon Woman, who knelt on the floor. The top deck sported a satellite dish, for the soccer of course, and a massive stereo that blasted out non-stop, ear-splitting music. At the very front of the top deck were two more cabins, behind which was a bar and a small shop that sold large quantities of bikkies and beer. Then followed an open space with a few plastic tables and chairs and wooden benches attached to the sides of the boat. And at the very rear were an outdoor shower, a slide for the kids – not down into the river, unfortunately – and the water-storage tanks that contained brown river water.
Rain was still spitting down when I got up. It stopped by mid morning but the sky remained overcast. The river was not wide here and I could look out on the banks that were both covered in thick green jungle and rainforest. Now and then I saw, half-hidden among the jungle growth, a native house with a thatched roof.
