Bump Bump Bump Down the Funny Road

[Cue theme music (to the tune of "I Shot The Sheriff"): I shot the morning, but I did not shoot the afternoon, oh no, no!.....(fade out)].

As we complete three years of living in South America, I am reminded of my first foray into this part of the world, exactly forty years ago. After finishing my undergraduate degree, I spent a year in Mexico, also under an academic umbrella. It was a hilarious, mind-expanding year, in which I also achieved a modicum of Spanish language proficiency. My reasoning went something like... If Mexico is this fabulous & surprising and it's only the first country I've been to outside the U.S., what must the rest of Latin America (and the world) be like? So I decided to hit the trail and find out.

In those days of the late 1960s, the Vietnam War was on and every 18-year-old male had to register for the draft. You were also supposed to inform your draft board if you planned to leave the country. But believe it or not, boys and girls, the country was not computerized in those days and you could actually just skip out without anyone noticing. So I just skipped out.

My passport photo showed a bearded, bespectacled young man with long hair, dressed in a Guatemalan vest over a cotton plaid work shirt, ready for Experience, though short of the ready. I left the United States in the winter of 1968-69 with five hundred dollars, an absurdly small amount even then, but unthinkable today for what I had in mind, which was... well, actually, my goal was fairly vague. The idea was to see how far I could get, I guess. Never once did it occur to me to ask, And then what? And I had a college degree.

Mexico was somewhat familiar territory to me, since I had spent the year I was based in Mexico City seeing as much of the surrounding country as possible. I mostly rode busses there. But once in southern Mexico, I began to try my luck hitchhiking, though hardly anyone was doing it.

Today when my travels cross tourist destinations in Bolivia and elsewhere I see lots of young backpackers - and some old ones - and the many hostels, inns and cheap hotels and restaurants that cater to their trade. Pizza joints in Uyuni!! No one was catering to me, as a young traveler on the cheap in those days. Lonely Planet did not exist. I found a wonderful old-fashioned hardback British guide, designed for businessmen, which focussed mainly on the larger cities but had enough maps and tips to at least mitigate my complete disorientation. I just got down to southern Mexico and stuck out my thumb.

I got one great ride with three guys taking three jeeps from Guatemala City through El Salvador and into Honduras. In Costa Rica I was forced by Panamanian border unrest to fly to the Colombian resort island of San Andreas, and then on to the Colombian mainland. In my blissful ignorance, I had no idea how dangerous it was to hitchhike in Colombia. Truck drivers who picked me up insisted that I put my backpack inside the cab of the truck. As one driver explained it, on the long slow climbs up the steep mountain slopes, theives sometimes jumped down on the back of the truck as it moved. As one robber pointed his gun at the driver, to keep him driving, his accomplices would cut off and toss the cargo, dropping in on the road for their other pals. So I might lose my pack if it happened to be back there. But no truck I rode in Colombia was ever robbed. Nor was I ever accosted, though I slept often along the highway in my sleeping bag or else in the cheapest possible hotels. I did not carry any sort of weapon, not wanting to attract any sort of violence. Idiotic? Visionary? I considered myself the Fearless Voyager until one night in a bus station in Cali I ran into a young European woman traveling just as I was. When I expressed my awe and asked if she weren't ever afraid, she said that when anyone started coming on either violently or sexually, she told them tearfully of attacks by others and they turned instantly paternal and protective. But I still thought she had a lot of balls to be traveling that way.

There were some strange moments along the road. The first African village I ever saw was in Ecuador. Almost like a hallucination. I had been dropped off by a truck at the outskirts of a village along the PanAmerican Highway. My thought was simply to walk throug the village and stick out my thumb on the other side. But as I strode on through, I noticed the conical thatched roof mud huts I had seen nowhere else in Latin America, but often in movies about Africa. And everyone in the village was coal black. Villagers smiled and waved and I smiled and waved and suddenly a group of young women charged out of a hut where music was playing. "Venga, venga," they said to me. Come, come. They took my arms. "Baile, baile. Fiesta!" Their sexy smiles appealed to me and I allowed myself to be led inside the hot, crowded hut where music played at top volume and everyone was swaying to the beat. Not a single latino was there. Suddenly I was drinking shots of some potent alcohol and shouting "Viva Ecuador!" as they all shouted "Viva Los Estados Unidos!" and I danced and flirted with one young woman in particular. I shared my cigarettes and candy with everyone, having little else of interest and the party went on and on, until as if on some sort of secret signal (secret to me, at least) the whole group walked outside. At that point I realized how completely drunk I was, blind staggering drunk, apparently only held upright by the tight black crowd I was in, all of whom were shorter than I was. I did not have the wit or the focus to contemplate where I was or what it meant.

Next thing I knew a horn was honking and two young Ecuadorian guys were stuffing me into their jeep and off we went. They said it was strange to see a glassy-eyed gringo towering over the black villagers. The two young men decided I needed rescuing, so they did it. We drove up the winding mountains out of the African valley. We spoke a little in English and Spanish. At least one of the guys had been to university in the U.S. I began to feel very ill. I had the guys stop so I could get out of the car to throw up. We were on the edge of a steep drop. I was trying to aim over the side of the drop, but I was unsteady, weaving. One of the guys was trying to dance in and keep me upright without having me puke on him. Finally I threw up and passed out. Next thing I knew we were coming into a town. They could have taken everything I had (which wasn't all that much, but still...), but instead they checked me into a cheap hotel, though I remember nothing of that process. I came to with a terrible thirst and hangover in the middle of the dead silent night and wandered like a zombie in search of coca cola.

Easter I spent in a gorgeous Peruvian town high in the Andes. The locals spent hours creating murals out of flower petals on the cobbled streets for each station of the cross. This was the first time I observed the beating of the Judas. The re-enactment of the passion and crucifixion was elaborate and painstaking, lasting as least as long as the original. It was moving and astounding in the dramatic setting, with some of the highest snowy peaks in the Andes as backdrop. Before the year was over, back home in the States, I would read that most of the town was wiped out and most of its inhabitants killed in a horrible earthquake and avalanche. Disturbing.

In Lima I ran across three Australian guys who I'd met before a couple of times in other countries. They had come by ship from Oz to Acapulco. Then they worked their way south, getting drunk and laid as much as possible. They claimed they had paid a girl in El Salvador, I think it was, only a quarter for sex. These guys - who liked nothing better than to get tanked up in a bar and start singing "Friggin' in the Riggin'" among other traditional favorites - informed me that they had found the best brothel of all right here in Lima. I figured since they had done the research I would go along with them to check it out. We went to a corner of downtown Lima where cab after cab pulled up and filled up with men and pulled away. No one said a thing or needed to. These cabs were only going to one place, the huge mega-whorehouse called "El Trocadero" in the port of Callao.

Callao is a huge industrial city, filled with warehouses. But El Trocadero, actually three warehouses in a row, had a neon clown's face flashing in laughter to set it apart. Following the lead of my guides, we first went into the left-hand warehouse. We had to buy a ticket at a booth, which supposedly covered the cost of health inspections in those innocent, pre-HIV days. Then you strolled past the doorways, hundreds of them, on two levels. Women stood beside each door, trying to entice customers. Closed doors meant the occupant was occupied. The Aussies had me start on the left because these women were cheaper and less attractive than the women in the other two warehouses. It was an astonishing candy store. Then we went to the middle one, and finally the upscale side, which was full of gorgeous women. Lima is among the beauty spots for Latin women (along with Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela and.... oh, never mind) and some of these whores looked like royalty. There were men, young and old, who just hung out there, at the bar/restaurant adjacent to the halls full of women, getting ready to go again. I could understand their addiction, especially after months of celibate travel.

Sometimes in order to keep down costs I would go to a police station and ask if they would mind if I left my backpack for safety, or even if I could sleep there. One night in the southern Peruvian Andes I had a midnight bus connection to Cuzco. So I left my pack at the cop shop and went to the movies, which only cost a dime. The theater facade was only that. Once you bought the ticket and went through the front door, the actual theater had no roof, just seats before a screen in the chilly mountain night. The film was "El Buen, El Mal y El Feo," (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), which was my first glimpse of spaghetti westerns or Clint Eastwood. Lee Van Cleef was indeed bad, but it was Eli Wallach as the Ugly Mexican who brought down the house. The movie, in English, was subtitled in Spanish, making it hard on illiterate indigenous Peruvian moviegoers. But when Clint Eastwood waited an extra moment to shoot the rope a posse was using to hang Wallach, he screamed at Eastwood: "Hijo de puta!" And the theater erupted.

Cuzco was a magical place. On the train to Machu Pichu I met a few other backpackers and we decided to hike up to the ruins from the train station rather than take the bus. We scrambled up and up over the switchbacked road, finally emerging up on the lawn of a luxury hotel outside the ruins. On the porch sat a familiar guy - who I finally realized I recognized from the Kubrick movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was not Keir Dullea, but the other guy on the spaceship, Gary Lockwood (I had to Google it to remember), who said, upon seeing us, "Wow, you guys are very Hemingway," which struck me as just off the mark. We had already packed food with us, so we went directly into the ruins. One of the buildings had a roof, with hay inside, where we spent the night, a really magical night, walking around the ramparts in the moonlight , getting lucky with a roll in the hay. Hey hey!

Okay, this is getting longish. No need to give the entire blow by blow, but perhaps a few words about my initial impressions of Bolivia. I was traveling by truck from Peru, across the altiplano, with other poor folk, mostly indigenous men and women who were chewing coca to ward off the cold and hunger and fatigue. I did it too and it worked, numbing out your mouth, your throat, your belly and finally your head. It was extremely cold. I took to wearing my sleeping bag for warmth, uncertain how all the others were coping. LaPaz was a dizzy city, quite literally, and I stumbled around there for a couple of days. The president of the country was killed in a helicopter accident while I was there (flew into high tension wires) and crowds took to the streets in a mood of restless uncertainty. Che Guevara had been murdered in Bolivia a couple of years earlier, and now, to my bearded visage, people were muttering "Che! Che!" and it did not make me feel good. So I truncated my visit to Bolivia and took a train to Chile, after less than ten days in the country, figuring I'd never be back. Now I live here....