What is Misahuallí? Where is Misahuallí? Why were we leaving it?
Oh. And how to pronounce Misahuallí? It’s pronounced miss-ah-wah-YEE.
This story starts in medias res, or “in the middle” for non-speakers of dead languages. We had spent four days on the Napo river in the Ecuadorian Amazon jungle, the Oriente. This was only one part of our adventure vacation, where within one country we would straddle the equator, hike a volcanic mountain to touch snow, go boating on a lake in a volcanic caldera over 10,000 feet in altitude, explore the Amazon, and be humbled by nature in the Galapagos Islands (still technically Ecuador!).
..and also where we would have a couple of near-death experiences. Sort of.
With me was my fiancée, a.k.a. future ex-wife as this adventure was in the early ’80s. Also with us most of the time were another dozen classmates of hers from university, and another half-dozen local family of one of the classmates. We were a big hungry caravan most of the time, which given the currency exchange rate did not cost much at all to feed.
Anyway, I’m starting this story from when it was time to leave the Amazon. Misahuallí is a common and convenient point-of-departure (and return) for canoe’s launching on the Napo river and going deep into the jungle. I don’t know what the town is like today, 36+ years later, but back then it was a cliché out of every Hollywood film. You know the look, where the outpost town is scary as shi… can be. Our parking area was a mud-pit. The main street was dirt. A dead dog with buzzing flies lay in the middle of one street. The town drunk (or murderer of tourists???) hung both his arms out of his jail cell overlooking what I assumed was the main intersection.
I’ve only seen Misahuallí referenced once in literature, in a short fiction story by Malcolm Bosse. Here’s how he described Misahuallí.
…then hired a chauffeured car and headed for Oriente, a remote area of vast rain forests. When they reached their destination, a dirty river town called Misahuallí, their driver Jose unloaded their bags in front of a cement-block building with hotel in faded blue primed over its doorless entrance. He offered to arrange for a guide and supplies,
“No,” said Sheldon, “that’s my job,”
“Be careful,” warned Jose. “Many of these people are thieves and worse.”
“What do you mean, worse?”
So, yeah, that was the vibe in Misahuallí.
Only the hardiest of our entourage had gone into the jungle, so we were using just two Jeeps. Leaving Misahuallí at the same time were a couple of Germans in their Jeep. Fun fact – one out of ten vehicles in Ecuador is a Jeep. I think in Quito it’s one in five. When Pope Francis visited in 2015, yes, he was driven in a Jeep.
You will understand the obsession with Jeeps momentarily.
We were able to drive our Jeeps out of the mud-pit, but the Germans were stuck. Not the Jeep’s fault, they simply didn’t know how to drive like the locals. One of our drivers, cousin Antonino maybe, hooked-up a cable from our Jeep to the sunken Jeep. Then, like in the scene from Jurassic Park II where they are trying to save the mobile lab from going over the cliff, he used five different gears, rocked, spun rubber and spit mud until the German’s were freed. Hooray.
We didn’t know the toll that the struggle had taken on our own Jeep.
The second Jeep in our caravan had driven ahead while we played tow-truck rescue. By the time we were on the road, they were out of walkie-talkie range. This was pre-1985, so no commercial cell phones were being sold and there were certainly no towers in the jungle, probably still aren’t.
We were tearing down the road at a pretty good clip trying to make up for lost time. The roads in and out of the Oriente are also dirt. Uneven. Stony. Rocky. Bumpy. The Jeep dealt with the conditions as good as could be expected, but were definitely bounced around a lot. And then it happened. Maybe it was the strain of towing the other Jeep out of the mud. Maybe it was the beating the Jeep had been taking for ten days all over Ecuador.
The Jeep went silent. No engine noise. We drifted to a stop.
Everyone got out and the men popped the hood. I was still a teenager (nineteen or barely twenty) so I didn’t really qualify as one of the men. I knew nothing about cars so I was just a bystander. The gas tank was not empty. The engine temperature was fine. There was no snapping or cracking noise before the engine went dead. They even removed the distributor cap and cleaned it — I actually did know that trick. There were no fluids leaking out from underneath the Jeep.
The driver turned the engine but the engine would not turn.
This, to say the least, was not good. We had probably driven 40 or 50 miles. There was no traffic passing by us. The next speck of civilization was even farther down the road ahead of us. By the time the rest of our party reached home and then waited several hours for us not to arrive, it would be dark and too dangerous to come back until the next day.
OK, not that scary you say? Anyone should be able to survive 24 hours stranded on the side of the road. But you try to stay calm when you have no food or water (hey, we were headed back home, provisions were gone), it’s 90 degrees, you’re in a foreign country, and basically still in the jungle.
Finally they found the problem. A wire had broken. No electricity could flow to the spark plugs. No spark plugs, no combustion. Now, if the wire had broken on the contact at one end or the other then that would not have been too hard to fix. Strip the insulating coating over the wire and re-wrap it around the contact. But this break was in the middle of the wire. Hanging in space.
We could strip the wire clumsily with our camping knives. And we could kinda sorta half-braid, half-wrap the bare wires together, but that would not hold. We were still stuck. Then, as if by a supernatural power, a MacGyver happened.
Chewing Gum and a foil wrapper. I swear on a stack of On the Origins of Species. Someone was a big gum chewer, and apparently we had plenty of that left. So to bridge the gap between the wires, insulate it, and make it hold for the journey ahead, they used wads of chewing gum and wrappers.
We got back on our way, it was so unbelievable it was hard not to laugh. The gum solution lasted the whole way home, but there was another slightly exaggerated near-death experience waiting for us in the mountains that stood between us and home.
Read the exciting conclusion coming soon in Leaving Misahuallí Part II, or How not to be Thrown Over a Cliff or be Chopped-Up by Machetes.
The B.E.A.T. 