Amboró National Park, Bolivia, 8-9 Sept 2003

Amboró National Park, Bolivia, 8-9 Sept 2003


I waded trouserless into the turbid river. A couple of metres in, the water was waisthigh and flowing powerfully; I dug my feet into the silty bottom, fearing I'd lose my footing. But a couple of steps on, the water shallowed, sloping upwards to the white sands on the far bank. I trod barefoot along the sand, and then through a mucky channel where 14 million dollars had been "spent on" a failed river diversion project. Bamboo stands leaned and creaked; a blue iridescence flashed into the corner of my eye - a saucer-sized butterfly folding and dropping, opening and rising. Fields of squat palm trees had replaced the crowding rainforest.

Don Wilfredo had built his house from bamboo and ferns; his grandson Daniel, 4, gleefully chased chicks from kitchen to yard and back again. His calm, fine-featured grandmother told him off for squeezing them too tight. The house's puppy playfully dropped its shoulders - paws outstretched, looking up at Daniel. His grandmother warned against touching the dog; like all the village dogs at this time of year, it was mangy and wretched: hip bones jutting, ribcages pushing through inflamed, erratically tufted skin.

Don Wilfredo was a slight man with a baccy-yellow moustache and a thoughtful expression. His face was weathered and deeply wrinkled, but you could tell he'd been handsome once. His left foot was bandaged - he'd accidentally macheted it while off on the farm. Don Wilfredo had come to El Carmen over 30 years ago, when a drought drove his family off their farm in the southern lowlands. Unlike many uneducated people in remote areas, he was extremely interested in the world outside - his intelligence allowed him to visualise and relate to things beyond his own experience. He'd built from scratch an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local creatures - the other villagers respected this expertise, even if Wilfredo was a 'camba' (lowlander).

Almost everyone in El Carmen is a 'colla' - a highlander, a refugee from the mining communities of Bolivia's altiplano. These miners had worked in primitive, unstable tunnels at altitudes that sometimes neared 6,000 metres. For most of us, it is difficult to form an idea of just how unbelievably tough these conditions would have been. Centuries ago, the Spanish had tried getting African slaves to do this work - but they died like flies in the thin air and the savage cold. The descendants of the few African survivors now live in temperate parts of the Yungas - awesomely steep valleys that drop from Bolivia's great Cordillera del Este right down to the Amazon rainforest.

In the 1980s (I think), the government sold off a failing industry to the multinationals. Machines took over, wages plummeted, and migration accelerated. Miners left the gelid altiplano to begin a new life as farmers in the bug-infested sauna of the 'Oriente' - in place like El Carmen.

Urbelinda Ferrufino, who runs a local NGO, says that "in one way, it was kind of a sport - really interesting, because they'd been living almost in a desert, without anything green - they'd never farmed the land. Well, that was all nice and romantic. But once they'd finished their savings, they didn't have anything to eat. They'd be trapped by the swollen rivers for weeks during the rainy season. And the illnesses began to spread. Yellow fever, malaria, tuberculosis because of bad diet and the climate - pretty soon after they arrived, it was a public health disaster."

But the collas are still down in Amboró, their culture being gradually reworked by the unrelenting demands of the rainforest.

I slept on a pile of rice in the loft above the kitchen. No beeps, drunken shouts or thudding bass in the distance; just waves of wind swishing millions of leaves - vast sonic entities moving through the trees around me. Every so often, the crowing of cocks burst indelicately into this symphony, subtle as a drunkard spewing onto a log fire.

Walking before first light - circle of torchlight jerking across dark trees; slimy holes in the dirt road; curled dogs, horses standing quietly in the darkness. Luis, Don Wilfredo's son, opened a shack door where the owner of a horse was lying in bed with 'the other woman.' He squinted puffy-eyed away from the torch glare, swinging his legs from under the coarse grey blanket. I wandered behind the two men on thin paths through fields of rushes and along the leafstrewn jungle floor, calling for the horse in the cool predawn of a rainforest winter.

Back at Don Wilfredo's, I washed my face in one half of a 10-inch fruitshell. Adult and juvenile chickens began flurrying down to earth, hopping down from branch to branch before making the last big fluttering jump. The chicks, of course, couldn't fly up to roost, and some wild animal had been taking them at nighttime. But the factory churns them out for about five cents each, so the loss was manageable.

Don Wilfredo asked if I'd like some yucca to bring back to my country - he'd dig it up for me while I was off looking for evidence of illegal tree felling with Luis. Yucca is a tuber a little like a potato - delicious when cut into fat strips and deep fried.

Once up on the horse, I quickly realised a 7-hour horse ride would destroy my bony ass, so I walked along as Luis rode one of the horses; the other was manned by his friend, whose buck teeth added pizzazz to his hillbilly mien.

The jungle thickened as the communities died out. Luxuriant plant life fought slow, merciless battles for sunlight, water, minerals. Trees in the twisting, suffocating embrace of vines. A caterpillar: a flexing sea of curved whitish bristles. A beetle, geometrically patterned in shining hues of green - it daubs would be predators with sticky, retch-inducing anal extrusions. Treetrunk metropoli - tiny, slender bees, chambers oozing with dark honey, rich as a liqueur.

Inside Amboró Park's no-go protected area, the path narrowed, occasionally blocked by fallen trees riddled with holes.

At the river, I was about to turn back, but Luis spotted some planks of wood cut from the endangered mara tree. They'd probably only been there since last night - on a sandbank in the middle of the river, we could see footprints where young men had run barefoot and barelegged, shepherding the mara planks downriver in the darkness. This could only be done after rain, when the river was high enough.

I got my photos and headed back to collect my yucca off Don Wilfredo. I had to get moving - the next day I'd be on a plane back to Dublin.

Desaguadero, Bolivia

On the shores of Lake Titicaca, on the border between Bolivia and Peru, I was simultaneously hot and cold - as the sun burned through the meagre highland air, a glacial wind streamed across the great lake from the snowpeaks to the east. I sat at the end of a pier on the Peruvian side of the border, reading 'The Exorcist' and watching taciturn highlanders rowing their small fishing boats.

A barefoot girl of about four walked along the pier towards me, holding her 2 1/2 year old sister by the hand. "¿Quiere regalarme plata?" (do you want to give me money?).
I asked her why she was asking me.
"My mamá told me to", she piped.
"I'm not going to give you money", I told her gently, and gave her a couple of slices of my mandarin. She walked back along the cold sunny pier towards her mother, who was sitting on the slimy green steps down to the lake, washing the family's clothes. The little girl offered a piece of mandarin to her baby sister, who shook her head and agitated her chubby arms in confusion.

The sisters came back twice more to beg from me; I decided that when I was passing by their mother, I'd have a word with her. I'd ask whether she only saw gringos as a potential source of cash. But as often happens, I chose the path of least resistance in the end, and walked past the trio in silence. The little girl asked me where I was going; I told her, resting my hand on her head. The mother shone me a disarming, gap-toothed smile, and said goodbye. I ignored her, and waved at the two children on my way to shore.

At the Bolivian side of customs, I asked a youth for a loan of his pen. He handed it to me, and grinned unpleasantly. "Monay", he demanded.
"Well, take it back then", I told him, adding "there are always people like you at borders." It's true, in South America at least; you always meet nasty hustlers who don't come close to seeing you as a person. The youth watched me as I wrote, his features denoting a strangely contemplative malice - as if my insult hadn't affected him on a personal level, but that he'd be rather pleased to see me dead all the same.
"Have you got a problem?", I asked him.
"None", he said, and turned towards his friend.

Once I'd filled out the form, I handed it to a border official, who sent me on to another functionary. I'd only spent an hour on the Peruvian side of the squat, dusty border town of Desaguadero - it was obvious that my only reason for crossing over and back was to extend my Bolivian visa.
"Why did you go to Peru?", he asked me.
"To see the lake."
He looked at me, irritated. "Don't give me that. You did it just to get your visa extended. You have to spend at least 48 hours in Peru before you can come back in to Bolivia."
I'd never heard of this rule, and guessed that he was angling for a bribe. "Isn't there some fine that's applicable to this situation?", I enquired. He shook his head, at which point I realised I'd entered a parallel universe only superficially similar to our own. I persevered all the same, resorting to the string section: "Please, help me out here - I start a teaching job on Monday. I might get fired if I don't turn up for the first day."
"You're a teacher?". This appeared to strike some chord. He stamped my passport with the green ink of Bolivian customs.

I walked through the cycle rickshaw men clamouring to give me a ride, and got on a bus back to La Paz. By the time we arrived at the rim of the La Paz crater, night had fallen; the city glittered below, like a great multicoloured jewel from the wildest dreams of Imelda Marcos.

Highwaymen (Bolivia)

I bought myself a bicycle after the bout of typhoid I had a month ago, and have since then been getting back into shape. At 4,000 metres and with fantastic mountains nearby, the La Paz area is not a bad place to do this.

This afternoon, I set off through the humble red brick houses that extend almost vertically up along the flanks of the La Paz gorge. The houses thinned and were left behind; my bike's jolting eased as cobblestones gave way to dirt track. The sun filtered gently through rustling, fragrant eucalypts. As I neared the rim of the altiplano (high plateau), the snowpeaks of the Cordillera del Este began to emerge from behind.

Just past a tiny, unwalled cemetery, a man wearing a dirty camouflage jacket stepped onto the road in front of me. I saw a knife flash in his left hand, and got ready to turn my bike around and flee. Then I saw the pistol in his right hand. It was so old-looking it could have been genuine, even though it might have blown his hand off if he tried to shoot me. As I was deciding not to put these considerations to the test, his cómplice (accomplice) stepped out from behind a small bush to my left.

Some of what followed is a blur, and I can't remember if 'Pistol' told me to get off my bike; anyway, I dismounted. I suddenly wanted to ask them could I take a piss; then I realised that this was the fear, and told myself to stop it, think straight.

"Sit down", they told me. I obeyed.
"Where's your passport?"
"Amigo, I don't have it with me. I'm going to take everything out of my pockets so you can see what I have."
"Why don't you have your passport?"
"I never bring it with me, in case..." I trailed off, not wanting to imply similarity with the ne'er do wells who generally steal passports.

All of Pistol's face bar eyes, nose and mouth was covered by a thick woollen balaclava. He caught me looking at him, and told me to pull my hat down and look at the ground. I did so; my fear grew as I strained to hear what the unseen figures were doing.

The cómplice took the pannier bags off my bike, and started going through them; meanwhile, Pistol began a vociferous justification of the theft.
"There are people dying of hunger in Bolivia", he fibbed; "I have four children".
"I have five", chimed in the cómplice.
"I need to put food on the table", continued Pistol. "Give me 100 dollars and I'll let you keep your bike". My ears pricked up - maybe if I got talking to these guys, got them to like me, they wouldn't take everything. Anyway, why was the cómplice going through my bags checking for valuables, instead of just taking the whole lot?

"Where are you from?" "How long are you going to stay in Bolivia?", the thieves asked me. I chatted to them as naturally as my tension would allow.
"You must have a lot of money. How are you paying for this trip?". My savings were down to just over 300 bucks, I explained.
"But you're from Europe, there are lots of jobs and money there", objected Pistol. Not all Europeans are rich, I told him.

"Why didn't you bring your passport?" Pistol demanded again. Assuming they weren't avid collectors of exotic immigration stamps, I wonder why they were so keen on passports.

"Can you do me a favour", I asked the cómplice, "and give me the roll of film that's in that camera?". He fiddled with the camera, found the button for winding the film, waited for the whirr to finish, and handed me the film.

"Take your bike, put the bags on it", said Pistol. I started the awkward task of putting the pannier bags on an unsupported bike.
"I'll hold the bike", said the cómplice - "don't worry, we're not going to hurt you. You've been good with us, so we'll be good with you".
"Can you do me another favour and give me the cassette that's in that walkman?"
"Sure", he said kindly. Pistol threw the cassette over; it bounced against my tense fingertips and fell onto the dirt. The cómplice stooped down and handed it to me.

'Well, I might as well continue this fucking cycle', I thought.
So, I asked, does this track go all the way up to the altiplano?
"No, it goes down to Villa Fatima after a while."

"Take the bike. There no badness." said Pistol. He spoke the childlike Spanish of someone who's never been to school in his life. In Bolivia, this is not uncommon. (He was about 30, and I've never seen anyone that young who only speaks the local language Aymara, and not Spanish).

I cycled off downhill, a little scared at first that Pistol might for some reason shoot me in the back. I jolted down the dirt track and then the cobblestone.

I even considered not reporting the two men, but decided to call into the first settlement on the way down. In the bus coop's store, the coffee-drinking bus drivers were quite helpful, dialling 110 and 120, the police emergency numbers. No reply from either.

"This is a real shame" said the most forthcoming driver (Bolivians - especially the indigenous - are some of the most reticent people I've ever come across. It's easy for a European to interpret their extreme reserve as rudeness).
"This kind of thing is very rare here. It will give Bolivia a bad name."
"Although", he added, "it might well have been Peruvians come over the border, passing themselves off as Bolivians." He wasn't the last person to suggest this to me today. Bolivians generally see Peruvians as blackguards who cause many of the country's problems.

The bus drivers eventually got through to the police, who said they'd come right away. I have some experience of South American police, so I didn't take this too seriously.

Sitting down and waiting didn't agree with me; inactive and mostly alone, I started replaying the fear I'd felt.

"I'm bored waiting for the cops", I told the chatty bus driver, and set off to cycle for a couple more hours.

Because some of my attention was devoted to the beautiful views and the effort of cycling, I was able to replay and analyze the theft gradually, without being overwhelmed. When the robbers first appeared, it seemed like pure danger - I was afraid I'd be nastily cut up or even killed. But these guys weren't junkie nutters. In the end, the experience was a strange mix of sweet, frightening, and human.

An Extended Account of Sickness and Pain. In Two Parts. (Peru & Bolivia)

Part One: "A Grim Tale Featuring Illness and Little Human Contact"

I left Quito (Ecuador) 8 days ago. After 2 nights on buses, I reached Lima (Peru) a coastal city where a few pleasant green boulevards lie among huge wastes of sand and brick and corrugated iron.

Decades' worth of immigrants - mostly highland indigenous - live in shanty towns on parched, dun hillsides. They fan out each morning to beg, work as maids, or sell sweets and assorted junk at traffic lights. My experience of South America is that you can tell how screwed a country is by the amount of people working the traffic lights.

That night, on a bus south from Lima, I sat cursing all the sleeping people around me, watching horribly tired as a near-full moon inched down towards the barren desert hills. The Pacific lay below to my right; a low arch of breakers thudded onto the shore, thin jets of water spurting back seawards.

The next night found me in a hotel bed in Puno - only 6 hours from my final destination of La Paz, but too wasted to finish the journey.

Puno is at 4,000 metres on the shored of Lake Titicaca, "The Highest Navigable Lake in the World". The lake is home to what's left of the Uros, a people who build floating islands and boats from the reeds fringing the lake, and who used to live off Titicaca's birds, algae and fish. The Uros have intermarried with the landlubbing Aymara indigenous, and those who still live on the islands earn their crust by selling souvenirs and showing gringos around their homes.

My fatigue soon found an ally in uncommonly severe diarrhoea. At 7:00am, I staggered downstairs briefly to pay off the tricycle rickshaw man I'd contracted to bring me to the bus station. A long, liquid day followed, reaching its high point as I raced desperately back to the hostel after a foray to the "Mercado (market) de Contrabando". The owners of the hostel were out, and I sat on the hostel steps in the chill of the altiplano (high plateau of Peru and Bolivia), hoping my hosts wouldn't whiff me when they arrived.

The next day, my butt-corking pills got me to La Paz in one dry piece. The last part of the bus trip was really something. To the left of the dark green altiplano was the Eastern Cordillera - a magnificent, uninterrupted line of ridges, snowpeaks, and jagged rockfaces. This was on a whole different scale from the isolated volcanic snowpeaks of Ecuador.

Next up was La Paz itself. You could think of this city as a massive crime against natural beauty. It's almost as if a metropolis of a million people had been plonked in the Grand Canyon. I don't think I've been in a capital city remotely as impressive. Beyond the deeply-rutted tan walls of the canyon you can see one of the huge peaks of the Cordillera del Este.

My diarrhoea was still going strong the morning after I arrived, so I called into the Hospital Metodista, where they told me I was dehydrated and they should test me to see what kind of infection I had. Result: typhoid. Hurrah!

Luckily, the hospital isn't too expensive, so the days ahead won't empty my wallet like a 10-foot mosquito would empty a mouse. The diarrhoea stopped at the time I entered the hospital, and I don't feel all that bad. In fact, the main source of consternation has been a lad of 17 who was brought in this afternoon. He had been out with his friends and taken absolutely the wrong drugs. Every so often, I hear him from down the corridor, screaming mad fragments and curses, howling in a deep, unearthly voice. He actually sounds possessed (that's not just writerly crap). In between attacks, his family stand in the corridor, out of their minds with fright.

But over the last half hour or so, things have quietened down, and outside my door I can hear the family talking more, and some of the tension has drained from their voices. So hopefully the guy will be ok.

I'm out of here tomorrow (Easter Sunday - on the third day I'll rise again).

(Written in my hospital bed in La Paz, Bolivia, Saturday 19th April 2003.)

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PS The possessed drugtaker turned out fine.

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The day I got out, I went to get some dinner near my hotel. I finished off the meal with a juicy, gooey piece of cake. I almost immediately started breaking out in a rash.

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Part Two: "The Great Itch"
(Written in my hospital bed in La Paz, evening of Monday, 21st April 2003.)

At first, as the rash spread across my body, I was intrigued by its strange bisymmetry, its raised whitish plateaus flanked by rounded orange crenellations. However, the aesthetics of the situation were soon definitively overtaken by a sensation that thousands of tiny ants were scattered under my skin, darting from nerve end to nerve end, gnawing and tweaking. There was no chance of sleep.

I put on some cream and tried not to scratch, but every few minutes I lapsed, nails digging, moving frantically from armpits to scalp to soles of feet. My frustration grew as the itching stopped my typhoid exhaustion from reaching sleep. By 3am, it was too much, and I got a taxi back to the hospital. By the time I arrived, the rash was raging - every second, my brain was receiving scores of messages from all over my body, screaming "Scratch me!" "Scratch me!".

I was put on a cortizone drip. This calmed the neurological frenzy somewhat, but not enough for me to sleep. The ants crept down to the soles of my feet and began to chew, raising inflamed spots. The itching was vicious, as if some malign reflexologist were trying to drive me out of my wits.

By 9am, I was crying from pain and frustration at my sleeplessness. A doctor came and prescribed me antihistamines. As they flooded into my vein, the itching vanished in an instant, and my mind became peacefully groggy. I carried my drip frame to the toilet. When I lowered my trousers to take a pee, I noticed with shock that my foreskin had ballooned horribly.

"Nuuurrse!!!".

A urologist came to my hospital bed and prodded my distended conkerbill. It would go down with the rest of the rash, he reassured me. That was what I needed. I slept.

That afternoon, I lay gazing out the window at a stretch of the great canyon walls of La Paz. The occasional thought flickered through my tranquil brain.

I watched the southern sky as night approached. Clouds still glowed in light as the land lay shadowy below. Beyond, the sky changed from white through darkening shades of blue. The evening light moved eastwards from the clouds; their blackening forms merged slowly with the canyon walls, leaving only faint blue streaks of sky.

Do you want to die?! DO YOU WANT TO DIE?! (Ecuador)

I can't believe the holiday my Nepalese friend Narayan has just had. He arrived in my hostel in Quito about 5 weeks ago, along with about 25 other Nepalese men who arrived over the next few days. He's an intelligent, didactic type with burning eyes and a scrawny Indian body. Due to his days as a frequently-beaten cook's apprentice in Nepal, he's a fabulous cook. He has an excellent sense of humour, which proved to be quite necessary over the next few weeks.

On the day he and some of his friends arrived, they treated me and a Danish couple to a combination of whisky and excellent Nepalese food (spicy, with lots of garlic, chillies, ginger and onions). Nepalese are outlandishly friendly and hospitable people, and we Europeans were immediately hailed as their 'brothers' and 'sister'. I contributed some cheap pina coladas to the soiree. One fat Nepalese was stunned by my similarity to his absent brother, and seemed quite fixated on the resemblance. The genial Asiatics began singing a famous Nepalese song about butterflies, and dancing around in that girlish, wrist-twirling Indian way. As my fat 'brother' got drunker, he insisted that I was, in a very real way, his brother. I must have looked sceptical. "You don't believe me? Here!" - opening his wallet and taking out 100 dollars - "Take this money!". I demurred. His eyes narrowed and his lip curled. "Take it!". The situation was becoming unpleasant. I tried to explain how weird this was for a European (or perhaps for any human being). He glowered and tossed his arm up in disgust.

Narayan and the fat man clearly had no ability to take a drink. They started raving at myself and the Danes, and shouting furiously at the other Nepalese. The Danes left, and I and some sober Nepalese bundled the drunkards into one of the bedrooms. I settled down to chat with the manageress. But the shouting continued, and we heard fists thudding on skulls. It was getting late and people were trying to sleep, so after the brawling had gone on a few minutes, I went into the room to try and shut them up. Narayan was crosslegged on the bed, his left eye a livid purple. He gesticulated furiously at the fat man. "This is very bad man! He have to beat us!". The fat man was standing in the middle of the room, shouting something in Nepalese. An Iranian-looking Nepalese was sitting on his bed weeping. His friend explained that 'Iranian' thought the fat man had ripped up his passport, and that he'd never be able to get out of Ecuador. The fat man was clearly creating most of the problems, so I pushed him out of the room and into the adjacent room where some more Nepalese were staying. I instructed his friends to keep him out of Narayan's room. I went back to Narayan's room, and tried to calm down the manic inebriates. Fat man came back into the room, and started shouting at me that his friends had stolen 2,500 dollars from him. He hurled himself at the weeping 'Iranian' and clobbered him around the face. I jumped on his back and threw him onto the floor.

Narayan jumped off his bed and grabbed me and the boss by the collar, insisting that we had to listen to his side of the story. We told him that we really didn't care, he just had to shutup, but he was having none of this. We tired of his caper, and dragged him, flailing and gibbering, towards the door of the hostel. He fell down on his knees and threw his arms wide, begging our forbearance. (Rosa, the manager, later told me that some other Nepalese - friends of the current batch - had been in the hostel a couple of years before, and had also ended up fighting. While asking for forgiveness, they took off her shoes and tried to kiss her feet). We gave Narayan yet another last chance, and this time he shutup. I went to bed, more amused than irritated. About an hour later, I was woken by a hubbub coming from Narayan's room. He was lying in bed, eyes blank, his entire body and limbs jerking in seizure.

He was taken to hospital, and diagnosed as epileptic. He'd never had an attack before. He was in hospital for a couple of days, at a total cost of about 900 bucks. The fat man paid half, and could be seen walking around shamefaced over the next couple of days - I guess he felt, not unreasonably, that he might have brought on the attack by whacking Narayan in the cranium. Or it might have been the stress, or the fact that Narayan, in the fastidious brahmin tradition, had never got very drunk before in his life (brahmins are the priestly caste, the highest caste in hinduism).

Narayan came out of the hospital and seemed to be gradually recovering. As always, he sat in the kitchen for hours on end, giving instructions on how to prepare the huge Nepalese meals with their multitudinous ingredients. As his health improved, he took more and more part in the cooking, to the delight of everyone's tastebuds.

6 days or so after he came out of hospital, he went into the toilet to take a leak. His vision narrowed, and everything turned dark and spinny. After a couple of minutes, another Nepalese, Bhisma, realised there was no noise coming from the bathroom. After calling with no reply, he got ready to break the door down. Narayan started to come round - first his mind, and then, slowly, his senses and vision. When I came in to translate for the Ecuadorean doctor, Narayan was lying in bed, sunken-cheeked, whimpering. "This holiday...". He was brought to a private clinic, where he was diagnosed with typhoid (http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/typhoidfever_g.htm) - contracted in Singapore earlier on in his holiday.

He stayed in the clinic for about five days, setting him back another 1000 bucks.

He came back to the hostel and started the recovery process again, returning by degrees to his normal alert, quick-witted self. He decided to wait out the remaining couple of weeks in the hostel, just taking it easy. It's quite possible that he would have done this even if fully healthy - I have rarely seen such useless tourists as this group of Nepalese. They pay thousands of dollars to come to Ecuador and sit in their room playing cards! The concept of tourist attractions seems beyond their ken.

About a week ago, a group of four Ecuadoreans, three men and a woman, appeared at the door of the hostel. One was dressed in the uniform of the Ecuadorean immigration police. Maria, the maid, let them in, and they asked what room the Nepalese were in. They went in, and looked at the holidaymaker's passports. They singled out Narayan and another Nepalese, and insisted that their perfectly valid 90-day visas were in fact defective. Ordering them to accompany them to the immigration office, they bundled them into a car. They drove them around Quito for hours on end, snarling at them in Spanish and broken English, drawing their fingers menacingly across their throats.

Meantime, either the Ecuadoreans or some associates had contacted the rest of the Nepalese and demanded 20,000 dollars in cash. The panicked Nepalese managed to get together about 10,000 dollars and handed it over. Narayan and the other hostage were dumped in the carpark of the nearby Supermaxi supermarket, minus passports. A concerned Pakistani approached them and asked what the trouble was. When he heard the story, he offered to do whatever he could to help.

Later on, this good citizen contacted the Nepalese. He demanded more money for their passports, which he now had in his possession. The Nepalese were somewhat peeved. Their situation was difficult - there is no Nepalese embassy or consul in Ecuador, and the Ecuadorean police are legendarily corrupt and un-public-spirited.

Bhasanta is the leader of the group of Nepalese. He's quite an interesting character. Sometimes he locomotes on crutches, and sometimes he's pushed around in a wheelchair by Kumar, his helper, who belongs to the 'Mongolian' caste in Nepal. Bhasanta is, naturally, a brahmin. He is quite friendly, though his manner is almost as strident as his orange-and-black Nehru cap. He spends a lot of his time travelling the world, dividing his time between playing cards and seeking out "transit wives" to whom he can "make deep love for entertainment". He got me to translate some phrases into Spanish for him, so that he could romance a local woman over his mobile. The phrase "quiero comer pollo organico en tu casa" - "I want to eat organic chicken in your house" - struck me as particularly romantic.

Anyway, the day after the Pakistani called, Kumar wheeled Bhasanta into the internet cafe where I was doing some work for my company. Bhasanta phoned the Maharajah restaurant where the Pakistani works. A torrent of invective ensued. Most of it was in Hindi, but there were occasional passages of English. "HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI Motherfucker!! Do you want to die?! Do you want to die?! HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI HINDI Muslim bastard!!"

I left the internet cafe after uploading some stuff to the internet, and turned the corner for our hostel ("Hostal Adventure"). Kumar and another Nepalese were standing at either side of the street, guarding against Pakistani incursions.

The next day, the Pakistani's older brother, who appeared not to be as maleficent as his sibling, handed the passports back to the Nepalese. But not the money. Narayan and Bhasanta left Quito the same day.

The Great Wall & western Beijing province

Beijing.

Building at the south of Tiananmen Square, central Beijing

My remaining traveller's cheques had got damp in the Sichuan rain - this caused big hassles in Beijing, and I had to run around the city's banks and offices for a day. I got replacements just before office closing. One great thing about the big cities is that foreigners are nothing new; you can walk around in relative peace. The Beijingers were very amused by my peasant's straw hat, though.


7th June.

I started out for the Great Wall on a hot, clammy morning. The roadside display read 36 degrees, and 60 decibels. Not a bad idea for cities - drawing attention to noise pollution. For once, I wanted it to rain on me; I was topless and in cycle shorts, but still sweating. Some kids cycled after me for a few kilometres, giggling at the spectacle. If I even waved at them, they'd collapse in fits of laughter. Pity I left my dogstick behind in Chengdu. The locals' estimates of distance seemed even more awry than usual, until I realised that they were using their own measure of distance - the li, which is about half a kilometre.

That evening, the wind rustled the tree canopy; the stifling air promised an electrical storm. I moved into the thunderous dusk, watching the great veined flashes start up ahead. It began to lash. I cycled happily in the downpour, smelling the freshness sweep away the sticky heat of the afternoon.

I reached the Huanghua part of the Great Wall at around nightfall. At a little shop by the Wall, I had a funny conversation with a giggling fat woman and her equally cheerful friend. We mimicked foreigners' Chinese accents and talked about how with the excess baggage rules for the plane back to Ireland, I'd end up cycling stark naked onto the flight.


8th June.

Woke up to the hotel owner shouting at his wife. He kept it up for about three hours. Maybe he's spent too much time near his tethered Alsatians - they're even more psychotic than him. This is not surprising - when they're not tied up, they're kept in little cages. There are lots of these animals around - it doesn't seem like many of them get the exercise a big dog needs. Usually, the only dogs you'll see being walked are the tiny, unathletic Pekingese (which of course are originally from this area).

I hadn't been expecting too much from the Great Wall; even so, I was a little disappointed. It isn't all that imposing - not very wide or tall. But as I scrambled along the crumbling wall, my opinion changed. The thing just goes on and on, along tall, undulating mountain ridges; every one or two hundred metres, there's a watchtower. The Wall was a colossal investment, and apparently was never very effective at keeping out the slavering savages. The resources would have been much better spent on training soldiers or making better weapons. But I can see the appeal of the project: an endless barrier, leaving nowhere vulnerable to the enemy. It just didn't work like that in the real world.

Cycling that afternoon, I saw a naked alcoholic on the canal bank - a filthy wild man. It's not often you see these outcasts around; I reckon the government plonks them all in institutions.

In the evening, I asked a farmer if I could camp on his land, and he offered to put me up in his house. I thanked him, but declined - I had enough experience of these early risers to know I wouldn't sleep very well. He invited me to join himself and his friends for supper; I sat on a brick, sharing their rice and pickled vegetables. He was an intelligent guy, and was interested in the world outside. He'd seen a programme about Irish travellers, and thought they seemed a tough, admirable people.


9th June.

My last day of cycling. I headed into the hills of western Beijing province. It was hot and close. The air was full of the shrill, multilayered hissing of unseen insects. A birdcall sounded like the first creak of a falling tree. On the road were two-inch grasshoppers and insects.

After a few hours' climbing, I began heading down, Beijingwards. Fat guys walked around shirtless, absentmindedly kneading their doughy bellies. People cooled off in the river, or skipped stones from the bank. I wished I could join them for a cool soak. I dipped my t-shirt and hat in the river, and kept cycling.

I reached Beijing in the evening, after about 10 hours on the road. In a park, old ladies performed the slow, beautiful martial art of Tai Chi.

At the hotel that night, a Swedish guy told me about an anthropologist friend of his who had studied witchdoctors in Benin. This friend had been at a beach ceremony with masked, dancing shamans - apparently, a cow had walked straight into the sea, drowning itself.

So that was the end of my charity cycle in China. I'm back in Ireland now, which is good in a lot of ways. I'm surrounded by my own language. I can see my friends again. I can drink cider, and eat cheese, toast, yoghurt, All Bran, peanut butter, and marmite. I can listen to my music. I don't have to eat camping food anymore, or be constantly tired and dirty. The backache is gone, the boils are fading from my butt, and the numbness in my little finger has vanished. And I'm anonymous again.

But I've left a lot behind. It was great to be so fit. I could eat well for next to nothing: especially in Sichuan, the food could be something else. Along the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, the culture and religion is something really special. I had fun with the hard-drinking Kazakhs of Xinjiang, and won't forget the wonderful hospitality of the Zangzu people of northern Sichuan.

I hope you've enjoyed reading these accounts. I wasn't just doing this cycle for the hell of it. I would really appreciate if you could make a donation towards GOAL's work with street children in the Third World. If you're interested in doing this, please go to www.goal.ie . Thanks very much.

Paddy Carroll