I'd been in Bolivia for about a month, so I still wasn't completely up to speed on all the cultural no-no's of South American life. But truthfully, considering this was my first trip this far south of the Texas border, I thought I was doing pretty well for a greenhorn gringo.
So far, I'd only spent two nights in the local jail, as punishment for the last Norte Americano who skipped town without paying all his bills, and hadn't had a gun pointed in my face but once. Considering this region was still regarded as a lawless frontier territory, and responsible for putting an end to Che' Guevara, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I think I was doing pretty well.
While preparing for my journey as an Amazon adventurer, I poured over every State Department bulletin and commercial travel guide I could get my hands on, and I swear, not one time did I ever see a warning that said, "Caution! Don't Slap The Witch Doctor!"
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Chulumani is a picturesque little mountainside hamlet nestled in the tropical region of Las Yungas, about 125 kilometers from the capitol city of La Paz, Bolivia.
As the crow flies, my guess is you could hit it with a well placed shot from a .22 rifle from downtown, but winding up and through the desolate snow-capped ridges of the Andes Mountains, and then back down to the valley floor below, and then back up and around treacherous switch-back turns along one-lane wide dirt roads, it's actuall about a five hour, sphincter-tightening bus ride from La Paz. More than a handful of busses and trucks go careening off into the gaping maw of the valley every year, claiming dozens of lives, and violently validating the name given to this infamous stretch of road: The Death Road.
I was living and working in a gold mining camp along Rio Solocama, about an hour further down the mountain from Chulumani, and only came into town about once a week to pick up supplies with my crew. Even though I was getting pretty well known as the token gringo in town, and tolerated one or two clicks above that of a casual tourist, I still wasn't completely accepted; that honor wouldn't come until at least six months of living in the area. You know you're accepted when the price of breakfast suddenly drops from two pesos, to fifty centavos...the true sign that you're now considered to be a local.
As I already mentioned, the last operators of the mining camp skipped town without paying their bills to the local suppliers, and after my short stint in the local gray-bar hotel for their financial transgressions, and then settling all their debts, I thought our operation was in pretty good stead. Little did I know that there was still one rather imposing debt yet to be settled.
Whenever I came into town I always stayed at
La Hosteria, which at the time, was the best hotel in Chulumani. Now, you have to understand, in remote South American terms,
best hotel is a classification absolutely relative to how remote the area really is. In some areas, it might mean a place with running water and screens on the windows, and mattresses filled with something other than stiff dried straw. Since Chulumani was somewhere along the regular path of adventurous tourists,
best hotel meant a decent bed and hot water in the shower, even though you had to flip on the electric heating element located in the shower head, while standing in ankle-deep water. What can I say...why aspire to the life of an adventurer if you're not willing to take a little risk...even in the shower.
After a good night's sleep, a hot (electrocution-free) shower, and a hearty breakfast that we didn't have to kill before eating, my crew and I happily strolled out of
La Hosteria and were heading over to the gas wholesaler to secure several fifty-gallon drums of fuel to haul back to camp later that afternoon, along with all the other provisions we'd gathered to last us another week. You have to understand, seeing a drunk stumbling along the sidewalk on a sunny Saturday morning in a Bolivian village isn't all that unusual. In fact, it's more unusual not to see a few. So, when this stumble-bum came teetering off the sidewalk in his soiled wool pants and ripped gray shirt, with his dusty black fedora pulled down over the tops of his ears, and began spitting and sputtering a stream of what I assume were Spanish obscenities, it did very little to get much more than a laugh from me, at first. But then, when his stumbling turned into a deliberate, although somewhat and purposeful stride heading straight toward me, and I saw him draw back a clenched fist and then sling it in my direction, I decided it might be worth paying him a little more attention.
As he threw his misguided punch, I knocked it aside and then backhanded him across the
chops to get his attention, which not only stopped him cold in his tracks, but seemed to sober him up just a little. Since my Spanish was rudimentary at best, one of my crew said the man was ranting and raving about our camp still owing him money for a
ceremony he'd performed for the previous operators. He reared back like he was going to throw another punch, so I decided to end it all in the least aggressive and damaging way I could think of, so I gave him a short right jab to the solar plexus, which resulted in him puking on my shoes, right before he dropped hard to his butt on the cobblestone street.
Having had more than enough of his nonsense, I walked off, leaving the errant reveler to sit in his own mess and continue to scream and rant to nobody but himself.
One of my crew shuffled up beside me and said, "This isn't good...he's putting a curse on you."
I didnt' even know how to begin to react to that, and all I could say was, "What?"
"He's the Witch Doctor, and he performed a ceremony when they built the mining camp, and he said if you don't pay him the $100 he's owed, he'll put a curse on you that will cause serious misfortune if you ever try to build another mining camp."
"Give me a break," I said. "Tell him if he ever walks up on me like that again, I'll pound a curse down his throat." And that was that.
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Several months later we moved our mining exploration to another region far away from Chulumani, along
Rio Yuyo, in the
Larecaja region. It would be an understatement to say that it had been a nightmare from the very beginning working in that area. There were problems getting the camp built. Heavy rains and storms ravaged the area, destroying the only roads and leaving us with no options other than packing in supplies by mule. One worker died from snakebite...one worker drowned after being sucked into a whirlpool...and another member of our crew died an agonizing death after lingering for days after a fall from a steep mountainside when the trail mysteriously crumbled beneath his feet.
After weeks of trying to make it work, I was returning to camp from our dredging site up on a section of river known as Kimbra. It was about an hour walk along the jungle trail that we had to make every day going to and from camp. For some reason, I began to get extremely light-headed and weak, and just as we waded across a shallow section of river and into our main camp, the last thing I remembered was trying to catch myself as I lost consciousness and fell headlong into the side of one of our huts.
Three days later, when I regained consciousness, I found myself laying on a bamboo bed, completely naked, and surrounded by a small crowd of my crew and a few villagers from Yuyo. I was covered from head to toe with a thick, sticky paste that I later found out was a mixture of mashed potatoes, yucca root, coca leaves, and other jungle remedies that they'd concocted and covered me with to control what had been a raging fever that lasted for days. Reuben, one of my most trusted workers, and who had been with me back in Chulumani, leaned over close and whispered so nobody else could hear, "You should have paid the Witch Doctor."
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I'll never admit that I believe that drunken old Witch Doctor actually put a curse on me, or that it had anything to do with all the hardships we had in Yuyo. But several weeks later, after I regained enough strength to get back on my feet and function, the very next package we sent from camp, back to La Paz, included an envelope addressed to that old Witch Doctor in Chulumani, with $100 in cash, and a note that simply said, "Paid in full."
I ultimately recovered from what was diagnosed as a case of hepatitis, and told by doctors in La Paz that considering where I was when I was stricken, and as severe as it was, that I was lucky to have survived.
If nothing else, I added one more rule to my list of standards for operating in the jungles of South America: Don't Slap The Witch Doctor.
