The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [123]
Then there was the first corner. I realized right away that the guide was right: I couldn’t trust my own body. As the corner approached, my gut told me to brake. My rational brain stepped aside a second, took a good look at my gut and said, Look, pal, we can’t brake on this corner, because we’ll lose traction. At which point my gut looked from the brakes to the cliff, then back at my brain, and erupted in a laugh of incredulous betrayal. This complicated things. As we (my brain and gut and everything else attached to them) approached the first curve, I started to chant aloud, so that all my organs were clear about what we needed to do:
“Don’t brake, don’t brake, don’t brake…”
My fingers released their Tonga death grip and my tires flattened into the dirt, the jolts replaced by quick (but relatively smooth) undulations. Immediately I picked up speed, and as I began to fly towards the corner, my chant rose in pitch:
“Don’t brake! Don’t brake! Don’t brake!”
In a moment of curious insanity I felt the urge to close my eyes. I battled this unexpected compulsion by willing myself towards an invisible point on the other side of the turn, which I approached like a shrieking banshee:
“DON’TBRAKEDON’TBRAKEDON’TBRAKEDON’TBRAKE!”
And I didn’t.
A middle-aged Bolivian man was driving up to La Paz on El Camino de las Yungas, minutes from the end of a long journey. He’d passed dozens of cars and bikers without scratching a smidge of paint off his car, quite an accomplishment. He daydreamed of a cold beer and wondered if the watchmen at the drug check-points were on strike today. He approached the last turn, and that’s when he heard it: a crazed scream in some unidentifiable language. Before he could wonder at its cause, a tall blonde woman in racing gear hurtled around the corner in a jumble of screeching metal and exclamations. She flew past his car, skirting the edge of the cliff, her face a mess of emotional fireworks. As he craned around to gaze at her shrinking figure, he shook his head in weary puzzlement. It’s been a long day.
We stopped at a crescent-shaped lip of gravel, waiting for Cesar, the last of the guides, to bring up the end of the line. I rested my right foot on the gloriously solid ground, and peeled my reluctant fingers from their desperate handlebar clench. My eyes wandered off the jutted edge, and a wave of beauty pummeled my unprepared eyes. We stood at the edge of a ring of mountains, circling the valley like giant green countesses sitting for tea. They were blanketed with lush forests of a dozen green hues, lined with ridges sculpted into deep gullies. I peered up at the crown of my mountain, where rocks the color of rain-clouds drizzled my eyes with mist, and I saw that from the billowing mists rose a spectacular peak, a pinnacle of bare rock piercing the cloudless sky. When I lowered my eyes, I was met by the cavernous expanse of open air which sat eerily before us, curved in the belly of the circlet of mountains. It was a crystal ball of cloudless nothing, world-sized and distant. We peered into its center, mere dots along the mountain’s cracked roots of rock, like ants standing at the shoelaces of a giant. Aware of my swift breathing, of my timidly positioned feet, of every standing hair on my arms, which flexed as I grasped my bike handles again, I took one last look at the towering mountains and then took off down the road.
It became easier to breathe as we met invigoratingly warm air from the canyons below. At the next stop I shed my jacket and welcomed the rush of sultry air, warm blood and coursing adrenaline. My arms flushed red, my goggles fogged with patchy breaths, and my skin buzzed with shivering excitement. Again I greeted the road, sinking into the bike frame and trusting my tires, which hadn’t yet spun me into the abyss. I carved myself into the side of the mountain at each curve, then soared out of hairpins like a pinball