Into the Void, But Hopefully Not

The buses in La Paz that go to the west, over the hills to Lake Titicaca and beyond, leave from the Cemetery District - or, perhaps more accurately, from the various streets directly next to the cemetery, which is never a good place to begin a journey - end, maybe, but never begin.

The cemetery is on the outskirts of town (which in La Paz is more "up" than "out") and in the dark the taxi ride was just a blur of light and dust, half-caught cries from peddlers, pavement and not. I was with three Americans, the first I'd seen since Buenos Aires: Maggie, very sweet, very tough but a six foot blond - a visual liability; Corey, the boy from Mendocino County, whose mysterious time "in the mountains" of North California has funded seven months of travel; and Eleanor, the professor's daughter with the British accent, baby-faced at 29, a professional traveler. We didn't know each other and we didn't know where we were going; strangers, at altitude, heading higher.

We piled in a van, a combi, probably because someone thought it would be more authentic to be cramped in a rattling deathtrap through Bolivia. The first half of the ride was more uncomfortable than dangerous, as we slowly weaved out of La Paz and then, in great sweeping turns, climbed from the valley. There were few towns. The driver seemed to be in a hurry.

At a certain point, though seemingly at random, we got on a ferry. Well, to be accurate, the combi simply turned off the road and onto a wooden boat, barely twenty feet long - like an overgrown dory or an open-ended barge. A man punted us slowly from shore until the motor kicked in. On a moonlit night, on a moonlit lake, we pulled towards Copacabana. It was beautiful and serene, the quiet night.

And then I was forced to remember we were in Bolivia. The cobrador poked his head into the van and asked for a boliviano fifty from each of us to cover the ferry. This is the thing about South America: no one seems to grasp the idea of "price" as something all-inclusive, as the complete cost of getting from point A to point B to the traveler. For our cobrador, as is often the case, the price of the journey was reflexive only to himself - that is, his cut - and everything else was someone else's problem. (When we protested, he made a big show of charging all the Bolivians the same B\ 1.50) It all makes little sense to me: if he just made the price seventeen to start, kept fifteen, and paid the "toll" himself, he wouldn't have to deal with a bunch of irate tourists and surly Bolivians. Another mysterious piece of commerce in South America.

Eventually we got off the boat, up the concrete embankment, up the long semi-paved road to the west. Maybe we climbed for awhile; no, we must have.

I don't think about death very much, maybe more than the average person, but it never is a possibility, just an abstraction, a conversation starter; "What if I got hit by this bus?" You simply can't live your life preoccupied with the thought of death - it's like flipping through a book to get to the end; there simply isn't any joy in it.

Well, we climbed for awhile, the driver, the Americans, the Bolivians, the Peruvian honeymooners necking in the front seat, and I. And then we started to go down, down the narrow road of broken pavement, down with mechanical acceleration.

Really, we were flying down this mountain road, and if the driver had any reason to hurry, he took it. The first few minutes I was simply in disbelief that anyone would drive so recklessly; "He's a professional," I thought, "and he knows what he's doing. This little stretch will flatten out just around the bend - He'll break if he needs to. "

But the road never stops, just twists and turns across the mountains, and the drive never ends - hairpins taken wide, riding on the wrong side of the road - and as we go I see the first cliff, because we're on cliffs over the lake, thousands of feet above the lake, and with each new set of switchbacks the cliffs go from my left to my right and back.

There is no guardrail. There are no signs. And the driver never takes his foot off the accelerator.

I was sitting in the jump seat, by the door, and I instinctively reached down with my right hand and gripped the edge of the seat, locking my elbow and bracing my shoulder. Maggie screamed out - in English - but the driver refused to yield. He was too busy explaining the history of the lake to the Peruvians, using his right hand to point out into the darkness, just as natural as can be. He looked at them when he made a point, to emphasize the point. I hated that couple. I focused every fiber of my being onto that couple, and with my elbow locked I wanted to throw them from the van, off the cliff, those beautiful Peruvians making sloppy kisses, holding hands, but now, no now, looking and nodding and asking the driver who, what, when as we screamed around the mountain.

And then, as we swerved around a boulder in the road, a feeling came over me, one of those feelings of complete and total sadness. I sat up as my back tensed, and I could see the van flying off the road, or rolling down the cliff, and there was nothing I could do about it; it was an inevitability. The faster we went, the quieter I grew.

Being in a situation like that, you just can't prepare yourself mentally for it, you can't rationally explain why you're in the situation and how it could possibly be anything but dangerous. On a rollercoaster, getting the cheap and ersatz thrill of death, you always know you will pull into the station safe - it's the return you're paying for, the vuelta.

Well, sadness passed through me and off the cliff and I was at peace. The world flattened a bit, and my eye divided the background out the windows and the interior of the van into separate spheres. It scanned the inside, the faded seats, the looks on people's faces, the calm hand movements of the driver, the little hugs of the couple, the way the Virgin prayer card swung from the rearview. That's all that was left in my life, but maybe that's all there was to life to begin with; just a van filled with strangers - some in love, some gripped with fear, some asleep, a van driven by a madman who won't slow down, can't slow down, hurtling through the unmarked darkness, caught between life and death.

I lived, I lived, but it wasn't a cheap thrill. I had mentally prepared myself for my own death, and that's something I don't want to repeat.

The shower in our hostel didn't work. Now that's Hell.