“So what do I call you?” I asked. “Papagayo? Parrot? Mr. Parrot?”

He smiled, revealing a missing left canine. “Vern.”

I stuck out my hand and we shook.

“What’s the plan, Vern?”

“Right now: get to Riberalta.”

I’d done enough reading and stared at a map of Bolivia long enough over the past two days that I had the 424,000 square-mile country (that’s twice the size of Texas) memorized both geographically and topographically. I knew the average temperature for each month, average rainfall, who won the last election and by how much. Heck, I even knew the national bird: the Andean condor.

Bolivia was smack-dab in the middle of South America. It was bordered to the west by Peru and Chile, the north and east by Brazil, and to the south by Paraguay and Argentina.

The Amazon basin covers an area of 2.4 million square miles of South America, 2.1 million of those square miles being dense tropical rainforest. More than half of that is located in Brazil, and the rest is spread out over eight other countries: Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, Ecuador, and French Guiana. Six percent, or 130,000 square miles, of the Amazon rainforest is located in northern Bolivia.

I assumed at some point we would head to Riberalta, which is in the northeastern corner of Bolivia in the Pando Department (Bolivia was separated into seven different “departments”) not far from the Brazilian border.

I asked, “What happens after we get to Riberalta?”

“We can chat on the flight,” he said, nodding toward the mountains to the west. “The sun sets early this close to the equator, and I want to get through the mountains while we still have daylight.”

Gina had mentioned this once. Unlike the United States—where the amount of daylight varies between fifteen hours during the summer and nine in the winter—near the equator, there are twelve hours of daylight nearly all year long.

I glanced over my shoulder. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains and the cloudless sky had already started to dim.

“You ever fly in one of these?” Vern asked, giving the plane’s faded yellow fuselage a few light pats.

“Once.” One of the cops I came up with at the Seattle Police Department had his flying license and he took me up in a little Cessna. He was a prankster, so I wasn’t surprised when halfway into the flight he acted like we had engine failure. Still, when one is plummeting toward the earth at 150 miles per hour, one can never be entirely certain that it’s a prank, and by the time he pulled us out of our dive, yes, I had peed a little. “It was a hoot,” I told Vern.

“Don’t worry, Margarita here is a champ. She should get us there in one piece.”

I nodded at this rock-solid assurance of my safety.

“After you,” he said, waving for me to get in.