Another Night, Another Day

It was just another night. My head goes on a pillow, or something similar, and then my eyes close. But the barely conscious flashbacks had a different theme. I was always near an edge, balancing--always the feeling of the Moment, the exact moment, when one decides to let go of the comfort of solid ground and fly. Jumping over crevices, displacing pebbles on the cliff, watching the cliff pebbles float far away into whatever will catch them. The constant replays in my mind were my last waking thoughts before being nailed into hard sleep; like a bug's final thoughts before being hit by a semi-truck on a highway. The hard sleep--it could very well have been the aftereffects of two straight days of the adrenaline-coated bridge/cliff jumps--the barely conscious replays, for certain, were a product of this perpetual string of cliff moments. A simple lack of sleep would also fill the role of culprit quite nicely--we (my Bolivian friend Odell and I) didn't necessarily plan to arrive back in La Paz at 5 am--but then again, we didn't plan anything really. After the waterfall jumps, we trekked back to the road. The Yungas Road snakes its way through the mountains from rugged La Paz to Caranavi in the Amazon Basin. It has a reputation, even earning the title "Death Road" for one stretch. But it gets the job done--as long as the drivers are experienced and never blink. A single error at any moment, however, has potential to hurl a bus or fully-loaded truck down 2,000-ft of jungle vegetation.

It had just gotten dark, and now we needed to find a ride back to La Paz. We managed a ride to the next village so that we could at least eat food and drink water after a hard day of trekking. It wasn't too long--only two hours--before we found a truck headed to La Paz. The driver was gracious and allowed us to hop on. The truck was loaded with crates of empty beer bottles. I discovered that crates are actually pretty comfortable if you lie on your back and distribute your body weight over several crates. To the right, vertical cliff up; to the left, vertical cliff down; overhead, stars of the night sky. It was one of those moments where I could tell myself "See--life's not that bad." Alive in another beautiful Moment in time.

Odell told me that we should sit on the mid-beam during the "sketch parts" so that we would have the option to jump "just in case." But everything went smoothly. As in, we didn't die. The ride was nothing even close to smooth. The truck driver turned out to be a really cool guy. He let us ride in the cab over the La Cumbre Pass so that we wouldn't freeze to death--as far as packing clothes go, it's kinda inconvenient to travel from jagged, trees-can't-live mountains to the tropical jungle and then back again. Odell and I chewed coca leaves to stay awake through the night hours, but I don't think coca is for me. It worked in the sense that my whole mouth was numb; however, it seemed to have no effect on my melatonin levels--I had to fight for every moment of consciousness. Like I said, the driver was a cool guy and we were able to talk with him the whole way. He drives the Yungas about every other day and chews candy to stay awake because coca has no effect on him either. So yeah, we got back late. La Paz isn't categorized as a safe city, so we still had to make it through La Plaza Villaroel to find civilization, but more importantly, a taxi, so that we could get back to a roof, water, and bananas (while waiting for a ride earlier, both quadriceps cramped up while swimming across a river and I couldn't move--never want to experience that again). Fortunately, none of the Villaroel murderers were out at 5 am that morning--no murderers, nor anyone else for that matter. We made it. We ate bananas, tried to get the coca bits out of our teeth, and crashed into a world of subconsciously re-lived adventures from the jungle. The end of another night, another day.