News Bulletins
The Final Chapter - Where's Manchester
19/11/08
A moment of piece in Manchester
“There are no buses here. Its just to keep the sun off us when its hot.” Ivan was polite enough to omit the word ‘stupid’ from the end of his reply, but it was there in his voice. Liz sniggered.
In for a penny, in for a pound I thought and boldly went on with my questions. “So what’s the turnstile for then?”
“Keep the cows out.” Even though I was looking at the back of his head I could still see his eyes look to the sky for strength. Another snigger from Liz. Retribution was swift though, as she caught the strap of her rucksack on a nail and we had to come back to the turnstile to free her. In less than three minutes we’d both managed to convince Ivan that we were two bumbling idiot Gringos who should be dead in the forest. This wasn’t what we’d had in mind. So much for arriving in the guise of intrepid explorers.
Ivan led us a short twenty metres past a couple of palm trees and an ugly chicken to Don Mario’s house. Don Mario was Ivan’s father-in-law and his house served as the reception area for guests and visitors. It also served as the administrative centre and polling station. President Evo Morales was holding a referendum on the reallocation of Bolivian wealth to the Indigenous people. It was an issue that was dividing the country with an unhealthy mix of passion and death. Eleven people had been killed in riots in Cojiba in the three days that we were there. Bolivian politics is a national pastime that’s inescapable, even down a remote Amazonian river. Don Mario’s house looked like a listing decayed hut. In fact, it was just a hut, made up of the main room and a kitchen at the back. However, even in today’s economic climate it would have been worth a fortune for the tropical hardwoods it was made from. As we scaled the three steps up into the house Ivan’s wife emerged with a plastic jug of grapefruit juice and three jam jars that served well enough as glasses. She put the drinks down on an unsteady bench table next to the pigs feet jar and shook our hands with a beaming smile. It was the kind of smile that proud grandparents reserve only for their grandchildren. It was a deep genuine smile from the heart.
“Mucho gusto, estoy Chris. Ella es me esposa, Liz.” I said trying to regain some dignity after my stupid questions. Mariela wiped her palms down the front of her T-shirt before shaking my hand. It was a strangely kind and repulsive gesture that made me wonder where her hands had been prior to clasping mine in a hearty grasp. She hugged Liz like a sister and I watched Liz melt in the suffocating affection of a stranger.
“Please, drink.” she said, perhaps sensing that Liz was about to pass out.
Ivan had disappeared but soon emerged from the kitchen sporting three chairs made from bent metal and a complicated weave of plastic washing line. We sank into them gratefully. These were the first chairs we’d sat on for two months. Even though our bums bounced on the floorboards as the sprung metal only just supported us, we relished the comfort. Mariela gave one last smile and scuttled off to attend to her and Ivan’ 18 month old baby girl. Mariela was twenty-two but had a face that was many years older and a body that was older still. On the outside it sagged and listed in places that only a hard life can reach but underneath was a frame of muscle and strength. Ivan wasn’t much different. He wasn’t the lithe jungle warrior I suspected we could have been greeted by once we reached this place. The buttons of his shirt strained to contain his round belly and he looked like someone who ate far more than he should. He was a tanned version of myself before I’d taken on the jungle with a canoe and machete. However, like his wife, there was a quiet strength underneath the layer of puppy fat and, as I was to see first hand a few days later, he could be fast too.
We sat there sagging into our washing line chairs trying not to swig our grapefruit juice quite as quickly as we’d have liked to and began to take in our surroundings. It was a basic four walls made of vertical planks between which shafts of light lit up the air born dust like fairies. There was a rusting chest freezer in one corner and a small TV with a rug thrown over it. The wall that formed the partition between this room and the kitchen was covered with torn and yellowed sheets of old newspaper. Mainly small ads for electronic items and loans interspersed with topless girls whom I doubted were Bolivian. Four doorways led off in different directions. The first was to where we’d initially come in. A second went off to the right and outside again, while a third led away to a short open walkway to the next hut. The fourth was to the kitchen. There was a small high window with torn netting beside the front door. Mosquitoes could come and go as they pleased through the gaps between the planks that made up the walls but the netting was there for bigger stuff. The flying insects and moths, as big as your hand that searched for the light after dusk. The roof rustled miles above us as the breeze caught the palm thatch and disturbed sleeping arboreal mice and the occasional snake that search them out. It was a basic hut but it was all that was needed. And although bigger, it was just like all the others, as we later saw. I could see three cookers in the kitchen. Two were gas cookers that stood unconnected and useless while the third was stoke with wood and had a kettle simmering away.
The three of us sat there; our host and two gringos, sipping juice and nodding in silence as we appreciated the cool liquid washing the grit from our throats. Ivan hadn’t asked us a single question and we knew he wasn’t going to either. We’d learnt from the few people we’d met on the river that people are always interested in everything about you but will never ask. It was considered rude to question a stranger about their business unless the stranger volunteered the information. It was a custom born of a time when it was safer for you not to ask. But we were bursting to tell someone all about us, our reason for being here and where we’d come from.
“We’ve come here from Manchester!” I said, expecting a reaction of wide eyed incredulity.
“Yes, this is Manchester.” Ivan replied.
“Yes, yes, I know, but we have come from Manchester in England.” Ivan gave a slow nod and I suspected he was considering the term ‘idiot’ again. I looked to Liz for support and she smiled. I was on my own. “We’ve come from Manchester in England to, well, to here, Manchester in Bolivia. Manchester to Manchester!” I lent forward and gestured wildly with my hands to emphasise the invisible geography.
“You come from Manchester too?” His eyes flickered as he worked it out in his mind.”
“Yes, the first Manchester. The one in England!”
“No!” He’d got it. And importantly no longer thought I was an idiot, for the moment. “Manchester in England. Shit. Mario, Mariela, they’ve come from the England Manchester. That’s crazy!” he laughed. “You’re crazy people!”
“Show Ivan the post cards.” Liz suggested, delving into her bag. As we left the duty free area of Manchester Airport we’d grabbed half a dozen post cards of famous places around Manchester and tucked them away just for this moment. We tried to convince the girl at the duty free checkout to just give us the postcards as a token of support for the expedition but she wasn’t having any of it. They cost us £1.40 each, which I thought was a bit steep at the time. But now, as Liz passed them to Ivan and we huddled round them they were worth every penny. He ran his fingers over the glossy paper in amazement. His eyes tried to climb into the pictures and take him round the city. He was a five year old again. We named the places for him and he pointed to each in turn. The Lowry, the Manchester Museum, the city centre. Moments later Mariela skipped in with baby on hip and she was also caressing the images like treasure. Nasheli picked one up and began to suck on corner of The Royal Exchange Theatre before Mariela snatched it away from her, mortified and apologising.
“Its ok, they’re for you. They’re gifts, from us.” I said with a broad sweep of my hands in a ‘I come bearing gifts’ kind of way, just stopping short of a theatrical bow.
At that Ivan was off like a shot. “Mario, Jose, Etan!” he called. “See this. Look, look, quickly!” Neither Liz nor I had expected quite the excited stir these four by six inch pieces of paper were now creating. And to think; we’d nearly used them to start a fire on one frustratingly soggy day a few weeks ago.
In came Jose in an emerald green football strip and Wellingtons quickly followed by a laughing Mario, in a red football strip. “Hola, hola amigos they said almost simultaneously, jockeying to shake our hands.
“These are my friends, Senor Chris and Senora Liz.” Ivan sounded almost protective as he said it. “Look what they’ve given us. This is Manchester, in England. They are from Manchester too!”
“Hola, hola” they said together, bending over to inspect the cards. Mario made to pick one up and Mariela slapped his hand away.
“Wash first.” She chastised. Jose and Mario were essentially the village elders but even they obey a screaming woman in Bolivia.
“It is a beautiful place, no. Which is your home?” Mario asked.
“Oh, no, these are very big buildings. They’re offices, theatres, that’s a church and this is a shopping centre. Our home is small, like this.” Pointing to the hut in which we were standing. On it went.
Now that we had offered ourselves the questions came thick and fast, five at a time. Elbows were employed as required to get a better look at a postcard when several hands made a grab all at once. Liz and I looked at each other, knowing exactly how the other was feeling. ‘We’ve made it. Look at these people. This is Manchester. Bolivian Mancunians! Bloody hell!’
We held hands under the table and just enjoyed watching our new friends as we tried to make sense of the flying questions and answer each in turn. Curious kids stuck a head around the door as word began to travel around the village that Manchester had visitors. They were too shy to come in and as soon as either Liz or I looked at them they were off and another face would fill the space in the doorway. Eventually, I couldn’t wait any longer and had to produce the icing on the cake. “Go on Liz, get it out”. Everyone was so engrossed in the postcards that they didn’t notice Liz delving into her bag and come back to the table.
As the gentlemen that they were Mario and Jose moved aside as Liz reached the table between them and placed the final two presents before them all. There was a stunned silence as eyes tried to take in what they were seeing. Before them was a sparkling new Manchester United football shirt and accompanying silk flag. “These are for you all.” Liz said seeing the look of disbelief on their faces. Mario was also the odd-job-man of the village and galloped off into the sunlight, returning moments later with a hefty stone and a bent nail. A newspaper advert for Russian tractors was torn from the wall and he began to beat the nail into the wall. The time could be counted in seconds before the flag was hanging in pride of place between Caja Cusco and Miss July. With a few corrections to ensure it was straight Mario proudly stepped back and smiled at the new addition to his home décor. Ivan sat quietly stroking the cellophane wrapper of the Manchester United shirt and was clearly moved by the gift. Football runs a very close second only to politics in Bolivia and we knew the shirt would be something very special.
“May I show this to the others?” he asked with a slightly broken voice.
“Of course. It’s for the whole village. Please.” And we didn’t see Ivan and the shirt again until the evening. The others grabbed a couple of postcards each and they were soon away with them to show the other people of the village too. Suddenly we were on our own again. Left to do as we pleased in Mario’s home.
After the months of there being just the two of us it was nice to have a rest bight from the noise and excitement. We felt worn out by it all; but it was amazing. We gathered our strength and reluctantly plodded back down the hill to start bringing our belongings back up to wherever we were going to stay. We hadn’t actually asked for a place to stay or been offered one but it was a safe assumption that they weren’t going to make us sleep on the banks of the lagoon. Six return trips later and we’d emptied that canoe of everything we might need for the next few days and unceremoniously dumped it in the corner of Mario’s hut. Ivan turned up a little later and presented us with more grapefruit juice, the elixir of life for this season. Clocking the gear on his way in he simply asked, “How long will you be staying with us?”
It suddenly occurred to us that it wasn’t something that we’d actually thought about. We’d been so busy trying to find Manchester, fight our way through swamps and jungle that the question of how long we were going to stay here had never been discussed. “Um, well. A few days or so” I ventured trying to be vague but not too vague.
“You can sleep next door.” He said and I made to reach for a few bags, feeling like we’d taken the place over. “I’ll have to clear it out though.” He quickly added. I sat back down just as quickly.
It turned out that ‘next door’ was the meat store. For some time we could hear unknown heavy things being moved around and the odd cloud of dust billow from a distant door. Eventually Ivan and Jose came back in and began to move our stuff into the room. We grabbed a few bags and followed behind. It was a small, dark room with a wooden slatted bunk and very little else. I retched slightly as the rancid smell of cured meat caught in the back of my throat. A meat store in the tropics has an unmistakable, if not unforgettable smell. We were however grateful. We’d been offered unconditional hospitality again and this room was all they had to offer. It would do us. The bunk was under a thick coat of animal fat, which was a little off putting so we elected to string our hammocks from the rafters. Unfortunately the room was only a few metres across and our hammocks needed a good deal more distance than that to get them hanging comfortably. We did our best and could only imagine the discomfort the nights to come were going to have in store for us. Even worse though was the box of six cans of beer that lay forgotten in the corner of the room. Neither of us are beer drinkers per se but our taste buds had been starved of pleasure for a while and those beers looked like heaven. The next few days were going to be a test of our will power as well as the rafters from which our hammocks hung.
We’d been in Manchester for a good portion of the afternoon and we had still only managed to get 20 metres beyond the turnstile. We needed Ivan again.
“Hola, Ivan. Fancy showing us around this town of yours then mate.” Or words to that effect we said once he emerged from the kitchen.
“Si. No problemo.” He put the United shirt out of sight in one corner of his father-in-law’s living-room-come-polling-station and off we went, towards the town centre. If Manchester were to be viewed from the air its central feature would be the football pitch. The rest of the village almost hugs the touchline and people can step from their homes onto the pitch with the minimum of effort. It is very South American. The rear of Mario’s house is separated from the pitch by a couple of orange trees and beside his house, off to the left is his sleeping hut (as opposed to the living hut) where we had been put up. Beyond there is a line of more square sided huts, each of which is on stilts, four feet or so above ground level. A couple of the huts have been abandoned as a result of fire. I briefly wondered if this may have been as a result of over ambitious cooking experiments with a Jamie Oliver cookbook but I didn’t think so. Parked outside the front of one abandoned hut was an equally abandoned eastern-block truck. It now sported blocks at each corner where the wheels had once been. It lay there as an orange testament to more affluent times. We made our way along a raised walkway that hugged the huts in a precarious fashion. A couple of hammocks hung in the breeze, a mother and baby fast asleep in one of them. The walkway abruptly ended and we jumped down to the ground to round the corner of the end hut, passing between a group of vegetable cloches that were currently being used to dry washing. And there it was, the centrepiece of Manchester. The football pitch.
Laid out with correctly spaced, almost white lines it looked to be compliant with FA regulations to my untrained eye. The only difference was the playful group of piglets that’d laid claim to the 6 yard line. We looked out across the pitch and Manchester was all around us. Directly across from us was a long sagging one-story building with a veranda running along its full length. Six men sat at one end around a steaming pot, laughing with each other. A couple were sowing clothes; a third stirred the pot while the other three just relaxed with eyes fixed on the pot. Ivan told us this was the old school house but it hadn’t been used in decades. Now it was the bunkhouse for the migrant workers that came through to help with the harvest of palm and Brazil nuts. At the front of the building I could make out several desks that had been stacked in a pile and left to warp in the sun. I was surprised by the workmanship of the old school. With its carved doors, lathed banisters, framed glassless windows and wooden roof it’d clearly been quite an impressive place once. “Why isn’t the school used anymore?” Liz asked, a second before I was going to asked the same question.
“We don’t have any teachers here. The last teacher died along time ago, maybe twenty years. More maybe. Puerto Rico has a school and some of the children go there.” Puerto Rico was the small town at the end of the river where it met the Rio Orthon a week away with a boat that had a good engine.
I noticed a wooden sided hut off to the right of the pitch that had written on it in fresh paint ‘Education for Manchester’. “Who’s the sign for?” I asked.
“We heard someone from the Government was going to come once and we need a school so we painted the sign. No one ever came. No one ever does. That’s the runway there so they’d have had to see it. No one’s come yet though” Neither Liz or I had realised that we were also standing on the edge of a kilometre long runway but now that we looked we could see a long scare going off into the jungle. A herd of cows grazed the grass making it look like the worlds longest and narrowest field. From a distance it looked smooth but later on as we walked over to it we could see it was anything but flat and I doubted I’d enjoy landing on it.
As we stood on the touchline there were more huts of different sizes to our left and right. Some used and some abandoned. Some large, some small. Through the open doorways we could see that a number of them had two or three families in them. These larger buildings looked to have been store sheds at one time but had now been taken over as homes. “Why do the people live in the sheds”. I asked.
Ivan shrugged his shoulders and looked at one of the sheds for a long time. “We don’t use the sheds anymore. There aren’t so many people here anymore to work the plantation so we only use a couple down at the lagoon. It’s easier to move into a shed than rebuild a house after a storm. Makes sense I suppose.” He didn’t sound convinced by his own reasoning but it did make sense.
“Have you lived here all your life?”
“No, I’ve only been here a couple of years. I came here from Puerto Rico” He said with a far away look.
“Why, if everyone else is leaving, why did you come here?” It was a nosy question but I had to ask.
“I met Mariela Zotto and she got pregnant. So now I’m here.” He smirked sheepishly using his wife’s maiden name.
The village sprawled around the outskirts of the football pitch and quietly slipped into the surrounding open jungle. The top of the hill that had become Manchester was a high tabletop that looked out over the flood planes of the Manuripi to the north, east and west. To the south the tabletop tracked away into the distance and to the plantation. Now, glistening bodies were emerging from the forest edge along a criss-cross of weaving tracks. The workers were returning and a tired wave of hot exhaustion seemed to come with them. They carried long machetes and Hessian bags slung over hairless bare chests. The sound of laughter carried over to us and we could see beaming white teeth running across faces of silky dust. The bodies drifted past us with polite faces of curiosity offering gentle nods and a quiet hello. They were too tired and thirsty to stop and talk and I didn’t blame them for not stopping
We continued our guided tour of the village with Ivan. Just fifteen minutes later we’d seen everything there was to see, and we’d stretched the tour out to include the fresh water spring on the other side of the hill. We lazily sauntered back to the house for more grapefruit juice.
The next week was a blur of hospitality, new friendships and a thousand shared laughs. It’s easy to walk around a place like Manchester and think that the people have so very little. In terms of positions and prospects it’d be true but life in Manchester is the richest kind of life there is. One where people don’t have to lock their doors at night, and its not because they don’t have anything to steal (or because they sometimes don’t actually have a door) but because they are all neighbours and friends alike. Strangers come to town and the senses are attacked by disarming smiles and open armed welcomes. The closest either of us came to being harmed was unintentional. Death by football match.
Taking a Man-U football shirt to an already passionate race of football lovers was only ever going to end on the pitch and I was to be an honorary centre-forward. There were a couple of issues with this. The biggest issue being that I hadn’t kicked a ball for over 20 years. That compounded with the reality of stupid temperatures that any sane person would only ever consider pastimes like swimming and drinking cold beer in as being appropriate. However, I was informed that kick-off would be at 4:30 and we’d meet on the pitch. As expected, Liz found the whole idea highly amusing and had spent some considerable time ensuring camera batteries were charged and the ‘fast glass’ was on the cameras. Four thirty came and we walked around the end of the huts, past the vegetable plot. Before us were twenty-odd blokes doing stretches. “I think I’m in trouble Liz.” was all I could manage. “Bugger me!”
Liz gave me a supportive pat on the back and then blew it with “This is going to be fun.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure it is”. If the sarcasm in my voice was missed it was there in my eyes. I’d started sweating profusely just putting my boots on. Here I was in the most appropriate clothing I could find, consisting of a cotton T-shirt from Marks & Spencer’s that had stretched down to my knees, a pair of long trousers that sported enough pockets to get most of the contents of our canoe into and a pair of 9 inch jungle boots designed for swamps rather than football pitches. The twenty-odd before me all wore full football strips, shin pads and some even had proper studded football boots on. Oh God please help me, I thought.
I took a deep breath, sucked in the last of my remaining gut, gave Liz a wink and jogged onto the pitch. The roar of the crowd went up and I gave a confident salute to the seven or eight mother and children who looked on. I’d run a good twenty-five metres over to Marco who caught my eye amongst his teammates. I tried not to sweat over him too much and to hide my panting breath from him. “I’m here!” I said, almost inadvertently sounding like I was giving permission to start the game.
“Ok, good man. We wait for the rest of the away-team though.” It was to be a ‘friendly’ between Manchester and the Migrant Workers. It was a match that took place every week and was taken very seriously. From the old school house the rest of the opponents emerged like a scene from Chariots of Fire. In slow motion they descended the steps in a halo of subtle backlighting. Together they paused at the touchline, surveyed the competition, breathed in the deep humid smell of the pitch and stepped into the arena. ‘Oh God please help me’ went through my mind again. I looked to Liz for a reassuring thumbs up or just a smile of solidarity but she was engrossed deep in conversation with a seven-year-old who hugged her arm. I was on my own. The next twenty minutes consisted of a lot of posturing, chest puffing and more stretches. I concentrated on trying to get my fingertips as close as I could to my toes. It took ten minutes to get them midway past my knees and a further three minutes to stand up again. Anything that a South American male does is as much about looking good and attracting a potential mate as it is about actually getting anything done so this warm up session of posturing came as no surprise to me. I just wasn’t very good at it, so as honorary captain I decided to get the show on the road. I jogged up to the centre spot through my stretching team-mates, slapping backs and waving a clenched fist of war shouting, “Lets av’um”. Amazingly they responded and in seconds everyone had taken their positions and the ball was at my feet.
Ivan stood beside me and smiled a crocked smile of serious intent. With a nod from me he touched the ball to me and I wellied it for all I was worth. I nearly broke my foot and hobbled off in pursuit of the opponent whom I’d inadvertently kicked it to. Adding insult to injury, I watched him send the ball off towards our goalmouth in a soaring arch in just his bare feet. ‘Help me God!’ The ball leapt up and down the pitch, from end to end in a Dervish of skilful dribbles, volleys and passes. Each time the ball came forward I pursued it like a single-minded hunter going in for the kill. More often than not the ball would be long gone by the time I got there and I’d stand alone at the edge of the 12 yard box trying to recover and find something to breath. I had my moments of glory though.
I’d be the first to the ball, intercepting it with a semblance of grace and as my foot came into contact with the ball time would stand still. I was the captain of the team and master of the ball. I could send it in any direction and do with it want I wanted at will. I was at the top of my game. Then reality would hit me, panic would set in at the sight of 21 men running at me with eyes of fire and I’d silently scream like a girl. I just looked for a face that I recognised and booted the ball in their vague direction before jogging off with my head held high, pretending I’d meant to cock it up again. I think I managed to hide the relief on my face quite well each time the herd turned on its toes away from me.
I began the game on fresh legs as a centre forward. Ten minutes into the game I’d moved back to mid-field and twenty minutes in I decided to play defence. It meant so much less running around in the heat and I didn’t feel it was appropriate for the captain to take all the glory up front. Instead, I waited for the action to come to me and spent my time shouting words of encouragement and objection. “Man on!” “Av’ im!” and “Refereeeeee!” were the three main soccer lines I could remember at the time.
I did inadvertently have another moment up front though when the teams changed ends at half time and no one told me. Ivan eventually came over and told me I was offside. Greeted with my confused look he then told me I was at the wrong end. I was about to reply but he sprinted away and delivered a death defying sliding tackle on someone who I thought was his side. He could really move and that slightly large exterior he carried hid an athlete.
By the third quarter I was still jogging around the pitch and offering challenges on the ball but the world was closing in. My legs were dead, my lungs had come up to my throat to see if there was any air up there instead and my entire body was superheated. I bent forward, hands on knees, mouth agape, taking a moment to recover. Once my heartbeat was no longer out pacing a racing car engine I stood up and set off again but I was looking down a dark tunnel with dancing stars at the end. The stars were getting bigger and closer. And closer. I stumbled but kept on my feet and a voice somewhere said ‘PLEASE GOD, HELP ME’. For someone who’s still waiting for proof of Him I’d done quite a bit of talking to Him since getting onto the pitch but it seemed to pay off. I closed my eyes, breathed deep and kept on breathing deep until the urge to fall over and die in Manchester had passed. Not a moment too soon it was all over and I was informed that I had to buy the victors the coke. I had just managed to get to the end of the game still conscious.
I never learnt who won or what the score was. I never even got to drink the coke but for me it was the greatest match that Manchester has ever played. I retired with a sympathetic Liz who told me that I didn’t look as bad as I felt on the pitch and had done Britain proud. I’d have held my head high if I’d had the strength.
Now, I write this and that Manchester is nine and a half thousand miles away. People are in the plantation, children are helping their mothers in the huts and life goes on. When Anthony Webster-James founded the village in the late 1800’s I wonder if he ever considered what he was starting. Today, Manchester is little more than a collection of twenty or so huts in various states of repair around a football pitch. Less than thirty families live there but they live there happily, deep in a jungle in the middle of nowhere. And now they’re our friends and we miss them.
The history of the Bolivian Manchester and the other fifty or more known Manchesters around the world can be found in the fascinating book ‘A World Of Manchesters’ by Roy Cookson. ISBN 0 9542404 0 5
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Our thanks go to Roy for his passion, research and assistance. Our thanks also go to the following people and companies for their support :–
- Gill Lack of Peli UK Ltd for the supply of their bombproof cases which were tested to the full and never let us down.
- Stewart Anderson of Snugpak for keeping us warm at night with their first class sleeping bags and expedition equipment.
- Dave Glanfield of Cameras Underwater for the supply of the Ewa-Marine underwater camera housings. They proved to be invaluable on many an occasion.
- Peter Brogden of Just Limited for the DiCAPac underwater case that served us very well in difficult environments.
- Tim Bridge of Agropharm for the supply of a case load of PreVent and all the mosquito bites we didn’t get as a result.
- And to Hygiene Direct for their support.