THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505190075
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LISE OLSEN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 252 lines
You quit your job, you leave your life and you drift along in time and space as a traveler. Someone for whom personal history is almost irrelevant. Someone for whom the future is as arbitrary as the scenery flashing across the window of a moving train. And suddenly, you can find yourself, as I did, transported to a bleak and blackened mountaintop, scaling a high mound of ash.
With each step, my feet sink down and slide back, as they would on a sand dune. Finally, I stand there in the dark at the top of the volcano, and see day-glo orange lava ooze from the crater. The ground feels hot under my feet. I smell the rotten-egg scent of sulfur. And see sparking rocks nearly pelt German backpackers who foolishly defy the angry monster. I understand then why primitive tribes sometimes sacrificed men to appease the spirits of smoking mountains.
And you can find yourself hiking deep into a cloud-covered forest. For days, I tramp through the trees and wildflowers, serenaded by unseen birds that sound like bells and violins. I cross rapids on swinging rope bridges. At night, I sleep with a mosquito net pulled across my face, and pray I will not have to use ``the vampire bat paste'' in the emergency first-aid kit. And when my food has run out, and when all of my clothes are thoroughly soaked, I find I do not really want to leave.
The genesis effect. It is a moment, however fleeting, in which you realize that the course of your life is not pre-determined. That you're not really locked into that routine, mortgage, career, relationship.
That when you see the next cliff, you can dive off it into an ocean of discovery below. If you're willing to take the risk.
But first, you have to run away from home.
Ron is never sick. But he had the flu the day we meant to start our adventure, a year-long trek overland through Latin America. We planned to cross 13 countries to reach Ron's grandmother's house in Cordoba, Argentina, then continue to the end of the continent, to the island called Tierra del Fuego - the land of fire.
Ron, my boyfriend, was lying feverish in a sleeping bag in the apartment as I raced around cleaning with a vacuum and ammonia soaked rags. The furniture was already gone - stored in a musty rented vault. And in a few hours, I had erased the last traces of our existence in North America.
The emptiness seemed to make Ron feel worse: His flu symptoms mixed with homesickness. And I started to feel ill, too. We both had to get out of the apartment for a while, so we went for a last walk on the beach. I remember thinking: We'd better leave now, or we might lose our nerve. Even Ron started to wonder if he should fulfill his long-held dream: that of physically crossing all the countries that separated his life from those of his grandparents in Argentina.
He still sniffled and coughed the next day when we hit the interstate, taking most of our money and leaving most of our life's baggage. Just like that, we dropped out. For a year, we would have no paychecks, no rent checks, no junk mail, no routine. We were free. We felt weightless and excited. But speeding away from our home, our friends and our four cats, we wondered if we had lost our minds.
Briefly.
At first your mind deceives you. You think: I am only on vacation. For weeks, sheer excitement over new discoveries warded off homesickness and loneliness. Aside from the chores of finding hotels, catching buses and changing money, our only obligation was to explore.
Still, there were uneasy moments in seedy hotels, or on dark, unfamiliar streets when we realized that we were homeless. We had no fixed address, no income. At times, we would have given anything for cultural touchstones, like park rangers, the paramedics and Triple A. Like the night in July when our bus got stuck in a mud pit in the Amazon Rain Forest.
By the time the bus stopped, it had been running about 16 hours through the jungle. According to the station schedule, this ride would take 18 hours - but we were only halfway. The road was an ugly gash of yellow clay through the trees that resembled a riverbed more than a highway. Still, it was the main artery between two Brazilian cities: Boa Vista, a mining and financial center on the Venezuelan border, and Manaus, a sprawling metropolis of a million.
The hours had passed in a bleary-eyed haze. We had forded several rivers without bridges. We had stopped for quick breaks at ramshackle open-air cafes jammed with gold miners and pool tables. We had quenched our thirst with green shakes made of avocado, and spotted a pair of blue-and-yellow macaws flying above the trees.
Right before sunset, we spotted the curious gray monolith that marks the equator. Then, in the dark, the bus just stopped.
The driver hollered out something and our fellow passengers - experienced riders - immediately took out hammocks and began stringing them up inside and outside the bus. Finally, the driver made his way to the back where our party of ``gringos'' sat. In gestures and Portuguese, he explained that we were stopped overnight. Several trucks were stuck up ahead, and we could not get by. Other passengers were already outside; some had built campfires. But the driver said he would not advise getting out, since this was an Indian reservation. Then, he pantomimed shooting arrows with a bow. We would have assumed he was joking, but we had all read the same bizarre warnings about this bus: Primitive tribes sometimes attacked it.
Somehow we managed to sleep, upright in our seats. In the morning, the driver hooked up a chain to one of the stranded trucks and hauled it out backward. He unhitched the truck, and then did something unbelievable to us: He backed up, revved his engine and took off at full speed toward the washed out stretch of road, which resembled a Louisiana farm field after a hurricane. The momentum kept the bus plowing through it, though its tires sunk deeper and deeper. He had to maneuver past another stranded truck and blew another tire - but did not stop. The bus pitched once and nearly turned over sideways. But then he was on the other side, on more solid ground. We all cheered, and clapped. In the Amazon, bus drivers are cowboys.
For a while, we experienced the uncertainty of life as it can be in a developing country: a dusty and dangerous ride to get where you want to go because there is no other way.
More often on our trip alone through the Americas, we remained insulated by our money and opportunities as a privileged class of tourists. Sometimes, we breached the barriers and found friends.
Antigua, Guatemala, a medieval town watched over by sleeping volcanoes, is filled with tourists - gringos like us who study Spanish in one of nearly 100 storefront schools. We picked out the tiny Centro Dinamico, and quickly became entwined in the lives of the activists who taught and studied there.
For a month, I sat across from Mayra, a moon-faced woman with big dark eyes. In her early 30s, my teacher was the last surviving graduate of her class of social workers at the public university. For years in Guatemala, anyone who has tried to help the native people has risked death. Mayra had somehow escaped it.
One of our fellow students, a Frenchwoman named Katherine, was in Antigua working as a volunteer at one of the many orphanages. She had left behind her husband - who'd just been laid off as a London banker - because she felt needed here. We visited Katherine and ``her girls'' many times during our stay. We bought them ice cream cones, and one of their only games. It was a box of Legos tiles. They opened it together and all 14 of them divided and shared the pieces.
Each child had her charm and her story. But I will never forget a girl named Maria Elena. She was a round-faced 4-year-old who always seemed to seek out my hand or my lap. In many ways, she seemed like an ordinary child, though she was often sad. She was the smallest, but she tried hard to keep up with the others. Her smile made me smile.
Not every child there was an orphan: Some had visits from family too poor to keep them. But not Maria Elena. She had been abandoned in a cathedral on Christmas Eve. No one knew who her parents were, and she was too small to know herself. She was homeless in a way I would never be.
Maria Elena's face followed me long after we left Antigua.
The farther we traveled, the more we felt pulled toward Argentina and Ron's awaiting family. We knew we could end our own sense of homelessness by arriving there. But I was afraid our adventure would end then, too. We fought about the pace: Ron kept urging us forward, I kept holding back. The conflict intensified in Bolivia, the last country we would cross before reaching Argentina.
Bolivia is close to God. Its heights are intoxicating. Even locals fight the permanent sensation of dizziness by chewing coca leaves, a practice Ron adopted. Short walks make your head swim, and the other-worldly beauty of its landscape and its people sometimes makes you wonder if you're not hallucinating.
Travel with a partner is always a series of compromises. Until now, we'd always found equilibrium: When one was down, the other joked and laughed; when one was sick, the other found an open pharmacy. But in Bolivia, this balance was upset.
On a hilltop overlooking the highest lake in the world, our disagreement reached a climax. Across the immense blue expanse of Lake Titicaca we could see the sacred islands where the Incas believe the world began. I had long dreamed of visiting them. But Ron, worried about some persistent stomach pains, insisted that we return to La Paz. In this village there was no doctor - no one who could help if he suddenly got worse. We walked and talked for hours. Finally, I agreed to go.
We had traveled five months together. But our alliance suddenly seemed fragile. I knew he was right not to stay in a remote place with a potentially serious illness, but I was too stubborn to admit it. I was intoxicated by travel, and I did not want to give up my prized destination.
My anger slowly subsided over the next few days; and Ron got well again. In the village of Uyuni, we took a trip that healed our spirits.
We joined a small group of offbeat tourists and set out to explore a wilderness with an Incan guide and a '76 jeep - one of the tour company's most modern vehicles. We crossed an enormous salt flat that glistened white as far as we could see. We saw scarlet lakes with feeding flamingos and took our only bath in a hot spring surrounded by ice.
In those four days, we felt as if we had left the planet, or journeyed back so far in time that this world did not yet know human beings.
In our group of eight travelers were two Israelis also bound for Cordoba. Like us, they had traveled thousands of miles to reunite with family. As Ron and our new friends talked excitedly about reaching Cordoba, I found myself sharing their enthusiasm. Finally, I was ready for grandmother's house.
We hurried ahead. And 10 days out of Uyuni, we finally boarded a bus marked ``Cordoba.''
After 400 hours of travel in buses, trains and boats, and six months of unfamiliar sights, Ron started to recognize the passing landscape. He had visited his grandmother before the easy way, by plane. The bus took a road that passed two blocks from her home, and Ron asked the driver to drop us off. We loaded our packs on our backs once more and arrived at the door just as Ron's aunt stepped out to look for her dog. Instead, she found us. She threw her arms around Ron, and I snapped a blurry picture.
Thoughts of this moment had kept him going for a very, very long time.
The genesis effect. The realization that you can make something happen if you want it badly enough - and if you are willing to take the risk.
I thought Cordoba would be the end of our journey. But it was only a different phase. Ron really didn't know his family or Argentina well - I knew them hardly at all.
At first, I spent long hours on his grandmother's sunny rooftop patio, thinking and writing. I felt disconnected from my old life. In the discomforts of the journey, in the open hearts of the people, in the breathtaking landscape, I had lost myself and found something else.
Ron felt happy and content here. In the embrace of his family he found a new source of confidence and strength. But my mind was a confusion. I no longer knew whether I wanted to stay in Argentina - to continue our journey by emigrating - or go home.
We grew to feel at home in Cordoba. But we remained committed to our original plan: We would continue to Tierra del Fuego. So after three months, we said goodbye to family and new friends and headed south again.
We crossed the lake region of Chile, hiked through glacier-covered mountains in Patagonia and finally arrived at the southern tip of the mainland of the Americas. We continued across the Strait of Magellan in a ferry, which pitched as waves struck it from all directions. Finally, we reached Tierra del Fuego - the end of the earth we know. And there, in a lonely town surrounded by endless hills of grass, I was reminded of the plains of Nebraska, the state where I grew up.
We had come to the end of our long land journey. There was no farther to go, so we turned around and started home.
My job was waiting when I returned. I slipped back into the role of journalist as if nothing had changed. As if I still cared about deadlines. It was frighteningly easy to do. After all, I had to pay the bills. I had to get insurance, register my car, get a city sticker. Ron and I rented a house together - still hesitating after all those long months about whether to make a stronger commitment.
Gradually, the trip has been reduced to an eccentric line on our resumes, and a stack of photo albums.
Sometimes, I feel as though I have allowed part of myself to die.
But a strange sense of power has lingered. Fundamentally, I've learned something about myself. That deep down, I know what is most important. And that I still have a choice to do the same thing again. To reinvent my life, or to live it differently. The genesis effect. ILLUSTRATION: LISE OLSEN AND FON ULFOHN/Color photos
The endless horizons and empty roads of southwestern Bolivia hide
flamingos, sleeping volcanoes and scarlet lakes.
Ron Ulfohn and Lise Olsen with a friend in the jungle in Belize.
Our overland journey to South America took us up mountains and
across deserts and into a cave sacred to the Maya. After 3,000 miles
and 13 countries, the trip ended as we drifted up an Argentinian
street in dusty clothes and Ron fell into the arms of his Aunt
Liliana, above.
Photos
LISE OLSEN
This was one of the most luxurious accommodations during our six-day
trek in Patagonia.
RON ULFOHN
I cross a suspension bridge in a Costa Rican cloud forest.
LISE OLSEN
Near the end of our journey, we came to a place that seemed to have
more penguins than people.
by CNB