Articles > Fashion in the Bolivian Jungle

Colonel Percy Fawcett was an explorer of the old school, never happier than when eating his own boots or when one false step would spell certain death. He disappeared in 1925 searching in vain for a lost Atlantean city in the Matto Grosso of Brazil, but before the first war he successfully completed half a dozen major expeditions to survey the jungle borders of Bolivia.

Most of his early adventures began or ended in Rurrenabaque, one of those immensely romantic place names like Zanzibar or Timbuktu that often look better on the map than they do in real life. In his memoirs (chapter headings include Unsavoury Interlude, Born to Sorrow and Poisoned Hell), he described it as “a dismal heap” on the way into the jungle, “a metropolis on the way out”. Then, it was a rough frontier town of dilapidated wooden shacks, too far from the rubber boom for prosperity. Most of the population were drunk by 11 in the morning. The only foreigners living there were two English rubber traders, two unsuccessful American gold prospectors and a Texan gunman on the run called Harvey. (At first, I wondered if this might have been Harvey Logan of Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall gang — like the Sundance Kid, he used a feathered Smith and Wesson without a trigger — but in Fawcett’s more formal age, Harvey would probably have been his surname, and an alias).

He was one of those travellers who hardly had a day’s illness in their lives, but he did warn about altitude sickness in La Paz, and for once he wasn’t exaggerating. Landing at 4,000 metres at 2am after an 18-hour journey is not a good idea. The next day sitting in a bar in Avenue Sagarnada, I could connect nothing with nothing. A woman was frying beans with a deadpan expression. She wore a dress whose colours were too bright for my eyes, and an absurdly small bowler hat. Opposite, a market stall sold dried llama foetuses. I tried to pour a beer, but it fizzed and overflowed on to the table. My cigarette lighter wouldn’t work: not enough oxygen.

As well as the almost total debility, altitude sickness has all the disadvantages of being drunk with none of the benefits — headache, nausea, disorientation, the horrible feeling that you are about to do something very silly and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

In the morning, I got up too early. I knew I had a taxi booked for 6am, but I had failed to notice that my watch as still on Buenos Aires time. It was impenetrably dark, a total black out, and I couldn’t find any light switches. Somewhere nearby was a railing and a 20ft drop to a courtyard, best avoided. At the reception area, I stumbled over a Bolivian fast asleep under a blanket. He didn’t speak any English. I couldn’t find the car, so I waved down a cab, and somehow ended up at the wrong airport.

There, an ancient military plane was taxiing on the runway ready to depart, and the splendidly laid-back Bolivian officials bundled me on board even though I have the wrong ticket. (Any fool can get on the wrong train, but it takes a special level of incompetence to get on the wrong plane.)

Fortunately, it was also heading for the right destination. An ageing air force officer, long ago passed over for promotion, offered me some cotton wool to put in my ears, and some industrial-strength coffee. No one asked me to fasten my seatbelt, not that it would be much use as the seat was no longer attached to the floor.

We dipped and swerved between the mountains over cold, beautiful valleys where planes like this have a history of finding their final resting place. This was the kind of plane where the next meal sometimes comprises your fellow passengers, and it doesn’t come in a foil-wrapped carton.

An hour later, we landed on a bumpy grass airstrip in the jungle. In Fawcett’s time, the journey overland from La Paz took him at least a fortnight, but arriving there still feels like the start of a big adventure.

The town is immediately recognisable from the photograph in Fawcett’s book. It only has one paved road and a few brick buildings among the old shacks but, far from dismal, it has become quite a jolly place, acquiring a degree of prosperity as a backpacker centre, the gateway to the rainforest and the pampas.

Most of the travellers I met were professionals taking time out, and in a motorised dug-out canoe up the Tuiche river, I sat next to a media planner who lived a mile down the road from me in London. We had probably sat next to each other many times on the 77a bus without noticing.

Twenty years ago, three Israeli backpackers tried to hike without a guide from the north of the park to Rurrenabaque. Only one of them got there, and he was lucky.

In England, the Tuiche would be a major river. In Amazonia, it is tributary of a tributary of a tributary. Fawcett once survived a bad spill over a 20ft waterfall in its upper reaches, but Dr Messinger was not so fortunate. He was the intrepid explorer in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful Of Dust, a character certainly based on Fawcett. A 10ft waterfall did for him, his hat floating very slowly towards the Amazon while the water closed over his bald head.

The media planner and I were on our way up quieter waters to Chalalan Ecolodge in the largely unspoilt Madidi National Park, said to be one of the 20 most important conservation areas in the world. Six hours upstream, we stopped at a beach for a half-hour walk through the forest to a small clearing with half a dozen mahogany huts beside a beautiful, still lake. Stumbling feverishly through the jungle, Tony Last, the hero of A Handful Of Dust, came to a clearing like this, the home of the sinister Mr Todd, but his domain was less hospitable.

Chalalan is owned and run by the local Quechua-Tacana tribe, who are not at all like Waugh’s Pie-Wie Indians. Their traditional dress appears to be jeans, T-shirt and trainers, and they look more like Incas than indigenous Amazonians. (Perhaps they first came here as fugitives from the conquistadores.) My guide, one of the few who spoke any English, was called Nelson.

But Chalalan is not a normal hotel. There is no room service or minibar, and you are expected to take your rubbish away with you — plastic water bottles, cigarette ends, even dental floss — when you leave. The rooms are basic, and the jungle is always close at hand through their wire-mesh walls. The lights (rather dim) are solar powered, as, in theory, are the showers. The food is plentiful and surprisingly good, if a little heavy in the intense humidity, international with a slightly odd local accent.

You are asked not to touch the wild animals, not that you’d want to touch many of them. You are advised to bring a torch, not so much to find your way to the loo in the dark, rather to make sure you don’t tread on anything that might retaliate. You are warned not to leave clothes outside to dry as botflies lay eggs in them. The grubs burrow into your skin, and can grow up to two inches long, but this is considered only a minor irritant.

You are encouraged to swim in the lake although the water is too warm to be refreshing and too murky to reveal what might be lurking only a few feet away. The caimans are large and numerous but probably harmless. “Are there any piranhas?” I asked. “Oh yes, many!” said Nelson cheerfully. But piranhas are not as dangerous as they have been made out to be. So long as you don’t swim with an open wound or just downstream of a slaughterhouse (neither of which you are likely to want to do) you would be unlucky to be attacked.

Once when short of food, the Brazilian explorer Colonel Rondon dynamited a stream. One of his men collected more fish than he could carry in his arms and put a stunned piranha head first in his mouth. This is also not recommended.

Another local fish with a bad reputation is the candiru. It looks innocuous, like a miniature eel less than two inches long, but it has the unfortunate habit of inserting itself into the penis of unsuspecting bathers. Because of its backward-slanting barbs, it cannot be pulled out and can only be removed by slitting almost the entire length of the penis and taking it out head first. But this should also not put you off swimming as it will probably leave you alone if you remember not to pee in the water. Perhaps local authorities should put them in English public swimming pools.

Somehow, I never got round to swimming, but I knew that Fawcett and many others would have thought nothing of it.

Beyond the clearing, the forest is intense, noisy, restless and claustrophobic, utterly strange yet oddly familiar, like a sedate English wintergarden seen on mescaline. With the dense canopy and the complete absence of breeze, it doesn’t feel like outdoors. Half-recognised houseplants grow to monstrous size. Far away, the howler monkeys sound like the rumble of a distant motorway. The rainforest smells of wet leafmould, like an indoor garden centre. Occasionally, there is an intense gardenia-like scent from unseen flowers high up in the canopy. Mostly, it smells of deet, which you constantly spray on your clothes and body to keep the insects at bay. The light is green and dim like a drained aquarium.

The Madidi’s 19,000 sq km are home to only a few hundred people but contain more than 700 species of mammals and rodents, over 1,000 species of birds and at least 5,000 species of flowering plants. Some 83% of the world’s total reserves of statistics can be found in this part of the Amazon basin, and it is impossible to go for a walk without treading on at least half a dozen.

But looking for wildlife in the Amazon is not like an African safari, where even on a short trip you can expect to see most if not all of the “big five”. Due to the diversity of food sources and the density of the undergrowth, you are unlikely in three days in the Madidi to see any of the Amazon’s big five — the jaguar, sloth, giant anteater, tapir and armadillo. (Useful piece of information: the Spanish word for armadillo is almost identical to one of the words for homosexual — this could lead to all sorts of misunderstanding, although it’s hard to imagine what.)

I was sorry not to see a sloth, which has always seemed to have a sensible attitude to life, but I did stumble across, almost literally, a large and very indignant coral snake. Its mouth is small and the venomous teeth some way to the back, so you would be unlucky to get bitten, not that I remembered this at the time. All I remembered was that its bite is usually fatal. It was a nasty moment. “Do you have any serum at the lodge?” I asked later. “No, in Rurrenabaque,” said Nelson unconcerned.

Somewhere out there, but even more elusive than the big five, is the blue orchid, Aganisia cyania, which has only been found five times in the wild, the first time in 1801, appropriately enough by Aimé Bonpland and Alexander von Humboldt, the last person who will ever be a master of every branch of science. The diligent Yorkshire schoolmaster Richard Spruce found it twice, in 1851 and 1853, and the Spanish political exile José Cuatrecasas in 1939. Its last discovery was on May 23 1942 by the American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, another hero. He was a Harvard professor, a friend of William Burroughs, and he spent a lifetime researching and sampling hallucinogenic plants. Most plant collectors would be pleased to have a single species names after them; he had hundreds.

He even gave his name to an Amazonian cockroach — he was particularly proud of this and carried a photograph of it around with him in his wallet.) Schultes, too, was a fearless traveller. Once, half-dead of beri-beri, he stopped off in the nearest town only long enough to pick up a hypodermic and some medicine before returning to the jungle.

What you will find are insects (more accurately, they will find you). You cannot escape the “small five” of fire ants, umbrella ants, termites, sandflies and, most of all, mosquitoes. Umbrella ants march in neat, bobbing lines up to 1km long, each carrying an apple-green triangle of foliage many times larger than its body. “Look! A tucandera!” said Nelson, pointing enthusiastically at an enormous black ant, the end of his finger only an inch away from it. “One bite, 24 hours of agony!”

You don’t stand still for long. I took to wearing my trousers tucked in to my socks, which is unlikely to catch on as a fashion statement.

You will also see plenty of monkeys, birds — hummingbirds lay eggs like Tic-Tac sweets — and butterflies. Sitting in a hammock by the lake, I counted 20 different types of butterfly in less than five minutes, some as big as nine inches across.

On a fallen-down tree in the forest, we found some orchids, not in flower and almost certainly not Aganisia cyania. Their thick, fleshy roots clung to a branch like the thing that attached itself to John Hurt’s face in Alien. Perhaps, they were cattleyas, the favourite flowers of Proust’s predatory Odette de Crecy. General Sternwood in The Big Sleep didn’t like them. “They are nasty things,” he said. “Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men and their perfume is the rotten sweetness of the prostitute”. The tree, nearly 50m high, had roots less than 1m deep — all this is built on nothing. It is the richest ecosystem in the world, but once cleared the land is useless for farming, or anything else. Nothing lasts for long. Dead animals, insects and plants rot down fast and are recycled. Creepers encircle the trees until they reach the sunlight, whereupon they strangle their host, which dies and rots away, the creepers taking on the shape of the tree with an empty space inside.

Beside the small clearing, a group of “walking” trees lurked like triffids, eager to take their place in the sun. I had thought that walking trees were a Monty Python invention, but these are a real species of palm with a trunk growing from a cone of aerial roots; the roots on the shady side die back and are replaced by new growth closer to the clearing, enabling them to move at up to 2m a year.

But the rainforest’s most unlikely residents are the numerous hoatzin birds, which have two stomachs like a cow and claws on their wings like an archaeopteryx. They are ugly, scruffy creatures about the size of large chickens and their song is completely tuneless. They fly very badly, rarely managing more than 50ft before flopping to ground, spending their day squabbling, mating and falling over. Their main diet is leaves which ferment in their stomachs — perhaps they are permanently drunk. The only reason they survive at all in such a competitive environment is that the fermentation produces a vile smell that deters all predators, although not other hoatzins.

It was odd to get back to Rurrenabaque where the biggest danger came from the speeding mopeds. The bright lights dazzled. It was happy hour at the Jungle Bar Moskito. People almost outnumbered the insects, they wore their best clothes, and no one had their trouser legs tucked into their socks.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Guardian.

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