Into the Belly of Bolivia (cont.)

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Into the Belly of Bolivia (cont.)

We hit the Tuighi late that afternoon like pilgrims to the River Jordan and set about rigging up the two 14-foot rafts, the cataraft, the paddle boat, and three kayaks. By the next morning, we were ready to boat. Well, almost. First, rituals had to be observed. In El Alto, the ramshackle antiplano city above La Paz, a few of us had invested in several large bags of coca leaves. Long a staple of Andean campesino, coca alleviates hunger, fatigue, altitude sickness, and susceptibility to cold and heat—in short, it's the perfect chew for adventure travel.

In Pancho, we had found a coca mentor. Every morning before his first mouthful, he'd offer up three leaves to Pachamama, asking her to keep us safe during our travels. After dropping the leaves one by one onto a blanket, he'd read the for a favorable sign and, satisfied, would give us the thumbs up and we'd all mumble a "Thank you, Pachamama" before stuffing in our morning cud.

The next couple of days of river travel were mostly easy going, the Class II and III rapids providing good paddling practice, getting us soaked and proving that you can indeed freeze your ass off even in the Amazon basin. Keeping up a killer pace of 30 to 40 miles a day, we finally got the knack of interpreting Sergio's assessment of our trip. "Just around the next bend" usually meant a couple of miles; "Just a couple hours more to camp meant we were probably going to be setting up our tents in the dark. Though Pancho may have known the Tuichi better than any man in the forest, the unfortunate truth is that the river changes dramatically every rainy season. We found that a lot of "perfect" camp spots were either underwater or washed away.

The river's edge is like the forest's shopping mall; every creature eventually comes to its banks. Multicolored macaws and lime-green parrots flew across the river from treetop to treetop as we floated underneath, Kingfishers skipped alongside us and herons, startled by our approach, took off in slow-motion climbs. Huge colonies of yellow and white butterflies raised themselves off the sandy banks en masse as if unseen hands were lifting up a rug. And everywhere we sighted capybaras, the world's largest rodents, which look like Labrador retriever-sized hamsters with enormously fat asses. One day when we pulled up to a sandbar for a break, clearly imprinted from the water's edge back to the tree line were the prints of a tapir, the largest mammal of this lowland forest. Directly alongside the tapir prints were those of a large jaguar with a cub. Pancho studied them carefully. "Mue, my fresca," he pronounced.

A whole new crew seemed to get to work in the forest during the night shift. After we'd eaten, downed a little rum around the campfire, and retired to our tents, the voices of the forest jacked up a few dozen decibels into a cacophony of hoots, whistles, and strange groans and screams. Together with the sound of the Tuichi pouring solidly over rocks, it produced an almost narcotic effect: The more I tried to differentiate sounds, the quicker it put me to sleep.

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