The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [121]
Guess what? I would.
“Hi Mom.”
“Hi honey! We’re so glad you called—we’ve been thinking all about you. Sending positive vibes your way,” she cooed from the other end of the scratchy connection. Scrunched into a tiny telephone booth at an international call center on calle Santa Cruz, I didn’t forget for a moment that we were speaking from opposite edges of the earth.
“We sent you a card! Did you get it?” came an enthusiastic query.
“Um, no.” It took me a second to get used to thinking in English again, “When’d you send it?”
“Must’ve been three weeks ago.”
I pictured the abandoned army bunker the city calls a post office. I thought about the two employees working there: one who sat at the counter stacking envelopes into elaborate structures while avoiding eye contact with anyone resembling a customer, the other marching in and out of the solo empleados door as if the back room would disappear if left unattended for two minutes. I imagined the mail of a million city residents filling that room with giant paper mountains that the staff would swim in on slow days. “Yeah, Mom, I’d give the post office another couple weeks.”
There was a long pause. I struggled between a million stories, tried to grasp something that she could picture: toothless street vendors selling buckets of oranges, mountains of flowers and home-baked cookies at the plaza festivals, boys kicking old soccer balls in abandoned basketball courts at the foot of mountains. I twisted the ivory phone cord around my finger in contemplative silence, listening to the static on the line.
“Are you traveling again?” she asked.
“Yeah, I am. I’m meeting up with Carolyn at Lake Titicaca. We’re going to see some ruins.” God, I sound like a tourist.
“That’s wonderful!” she sounded positively delighted, “How are you getting up there?”
“Um, I’m going to bus into La Paz.” Hmm, hope there aren’t blockades. Or riots.
“Are you going to explore the city?”
“No. Actually…” I shouldn’t tell her.
“Actually?”
Don’t tell her.
“I’m going mountain biking.”
Idiot.
“Mountain biking? Really? You’re not much of a mountain biker.”
“Yeah. Well, this is a guided trail.”
“Oh, what’s the trail?”
“Um, it’s just a trail. It goes to this little town…Coroico,” I muffled.
“What was that sweetie? Wait, let me get my pen…”
“Actually, Mom, don’t worry about it.”
“No, I want to know.”
“It’s O.K. I’ve actually got to go. I’ll talk to you later …”
Click. Idiot!
At the trail-head, our bikes were lined carefully on their sides in the dirt, each rider positioned at a pair of wheels. In the silence, we fidgeted nervously with our black racing gloves. One of our guides, a peppy English-speaking Canadian with red-flamed bike shorts and blonde hair wedged back as if in a wind tunnel, paced ominously before us. It was time for our pep-talk.
“There’s a reason we’ve stopped here,” he said, pausing in his paces, “and it’s because this is the last chance you have to turn back.” He took his shades off to illustrate the ceremonious profundity of the occasion. “There is no shame in getting back on that bus.”
I glanced at the others: they gave him a tense but attentive silence.
“In that case, I want each of you to listen to every word I say. Your lives depend upon it.
You’ll see other tours where people bike along untroubled by the constant threat of death and danger. Groups where people make stupid mistakes because they don’t understand