I sit now in picturesque Coyhaique, in
the 11th region of Chile—very nearly the bottom of the continent.
For the past month, I’ve been living with a family here, helping them with
building their homes and lives. I’m surrounded by mountains and (mostly) clean
air. The people are kind, hard-working, and enjoy the simple things. Life is
good. Although
Coyhaique is the largest city along the Carretera
Austral, an in-the-works highway that connects nearly the entire southern
half of the country, it still measures in with a population of less than 50,000
citizens living in modest homes. I can see the entire stretch of the town from
the window of the house I where I live and volunteer.
I
found the position through WWOOF, the World-Wide Organization of Organic
Farming, and things here are definitely organic. I live with Magdalena, a cello
teacher at the local middle school (or Chilean equivalent), and her niece
Daniela in a house she and her late husband built together from scratch years
ago, and work with her son, Martín, who is currently building his own house
just up the road in the same manner and living in the half-finished work with
his girlfriend, Paz, and their two-year-old daughter. The homes are located in
a field on a hill just above the tiny town co-owned by Magda, Martín, and some of the neighbors. Everyone here built their home from the ground up, but while Magdalena’s is a complete
work with two stories, kitchen, living room, guest rooms, and huge wall-sized
windows showing off the views of the mountains in the background, Martín’s
one-room home has a grass roof and clay walls inset all over with recycled
bottles. In the area around the house they grow medicinal herbs, fruit trees and bushes such as blueberry, root vegetables such as carrots and potatoes, and
raise chickens chickens. They also co-own a horse and her foal with the neighbors. The trees that grow on the
surrounding hills were all planted within the past thirty years by the people
still here now. They plan to use the space to build a school when they have the
resources.
My
work with them is generally helping with things around the property. The first
week we spent building a new chicken coop, and since then I’ve worked with
Martín on various projects around the house including finishing some of the
woodwork and laying a cement floor on his porch. I’ve spent a lot of time
planting, moving, and maintaining plants. The shovel is my main tool. There’s a
saying here in Patagonia: “he who hurries
wastes time,” and it definitely
sets the pace of the work. Things take as long as they take, and because of the
lifestyle waiting is a big part of the work. We moved the chickens, for
example, because they were being used to root up and clear the land where they
were previously. Though I’m not sure their main source of income, as Martín is
a mountain guide on the side and Paz makes and sells homemade soaps, it is
definitely a form of subsistence farming: producing enough for yourself, just
to keep the bills down, and expanding when you accumulate the space and
resources. Right now they’re trying to develop a campsite for tourists, but
it’s still in the works.
Coyhaique is a quirky town, full of
quirky people, but from the moment I got here everyone was welcoming, and even
though at this point I feel fully assimilated and acclimated, their demeanor
hasn’t changed. We eat lunch together nearly every day; sometimes the neighbors
come to share. Everyone does their part, whether it be cooking, cleaning, or
the work outside, and there’s no shortage of conversation and mate. People are not strangers to the
concept of a volunteer, it seems, and are more than inviting. Martín’s mountain
guide friends are polite and silly, and we’ve shared our fair share of nights
drinking cheap beer and having asados.
Last week they took me snowshoeing. It was beautiful. Magdalena does more than
her fair share to make me feel at home. Between her job as a music teacher and
her work doing historical research, she’s very involved in the cultural upkeep
of the community, and is always willing to impart wisdom. Last week she took me
to a University orchestral concert, and she loves listening to new music and is
interested in hearing about different artistic pursuits. We have a lot of fun.
The neighbors, too, are friendly and engaging, eager to share knowledge and
cultural experiences.
Suffice
it to say I’m doing just fine here. Working so close to the ground is
refreshing and eye-opening. It’s going to be hard to leave it. I still have
another month or so here, and will be sure to report on its happenings. And
although I have to apologize for not having a camera, I’ll be sure to borrow
one and get some pictures before I go. In the meantime, since my last writing I
have taken a trip that defied my expectations and changed my worldview. I wrote
a long and detailed account in the weeks immediately after the trip. It awaits
below.
* * *
If
ever you’ve found yourself wondering, as Paul, Alex, and I did, whether time
moves faster when you’re doing more or when you’re doing less, the surprising
answer we found was definitively more. Directly after my last entry, I got in a
cab, went to the airport, two flights and 12 hours later I was landing in
Lima, and it wasn’t long after that I met up with Paul and Alex. From that
moment onward we were three, and as nice as it was to sink back into the old
family inside jokes, I think at that moment we were all lost inside our own
heads, thinking about how unique this trip would be as an experience in our
lives, both individually and in terms of our relationships with one another.
None of us had ever done anything like this, and the only times we had ever
really hung out together were at family gatherings. In a month and a half we covered more distance—and
perhaps did more activities—than I did in an entire year and a half living
abroad, and even so it feels that the same amount of time passed during our
trip as it did during my life in Santiago. By day two it already felt like a month had passed, and of course, it kept going: in our
travels we visited ten cities in three countries and traveled a distance of
over 5,000 kilometers. And now I bend to the impossible task of describing it
all.
Our first stop was Lima. We had a full day until we had to be moving on, and we spent it exploring. It turns out Lima is charming. It’s a coastal city, so the air is thick and smells like salt and fish. The people keep to their own business and move at their own pace but are very friendly. The food was something else. We ate at two restaurants: for lunch we ate at a small spot in the market district, which served us hot soup and a heaping plate of amazing chicken and fresh juice for I think less than $3 USD. Then for dinner we went to the fanciest restaurant in town (“it’s our first night, fuck it”) and had mango-glazed ceviche and a bottle of fine Peruvian wine. It was still less than $30USD per person. This was a good sign of what was to come for all things food-related. From Lima, we had six days to arrive in Cusco for our tour of Machu Picchu, so instead of figuring it all out ourselves we decided to pay a travel company to do it for us. They took us along the southern coast of Peru and then up to Cusco.
Our
first stop was Paracas, a small coastal town where we took a boat tour to an
island national reserve. We saw penguins and seals and starfish and many other
seabirds. And guano. I’d done a similar tour before, in La Serena in Chile, but
it was still neat-o. Then, not even stopping a night, we drove to Huacachina, a
small town built around a literal desert oasis. Picture a desert, sandy and
hilly with dunes, with nothing in sight but fine sand and blue sky. Now picture
an oasis, a small source of water with palm trees and grass growing around it.
If you’re afraid it’s too classic an image, good. That’s what we found at
Huacachina. In the afternoon we took a buggy ride across the dunes that felt
like a rollercoaster, tossed the Frisbee across the arid expanse, and shredded
sand with sandboards. At night the hostel had a barbeque and party and we
stayed up all night doing all sorts of cousinly bonding.
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| Desert Oasis |
The
next day we were already off to our next (and final) destination of Cuzco, in a
hellish bus ride that would take 27 hours. We stopped at some locales and
tourist spots, first of which were the famous Nazca lines, but we spent just a
quick sunset there. They had an observation tower from which you could see a
couple of the figures etched into the ground. The area was surreal, a roadside
stop with one of the most famous ancient pieces of art in the world. From Nazca
we stopped in at a gas station for more dinner, lomo saltado, the best gas station food that any of us had ever
had. At this point I was thinking about our first day’s culinary prophecy.
If
you’ve never spent 27 hours on a tour bus, let me tell you that after a while,
you begin to get a little bored and stiff, and eventually your sanity ebbs from
your conscious mind. We tried to read and watch the bad movies they played for
us and slept a lot in the somewhat comfortable bus seats. We made friends with
the other passengers—most of which we never say again but some of which we
crossed paths with much later in our trip—by joking about the quality of the
seats and in-drive movies. And we looked out the window, which in a country as
diverse and as mountainous as Peru, is endlessly entertaining. I would stomach
a 72 hour bus ride in the back of a chicken truck just to look out at the
passing landscapes. We drove through farming villages nestled in valleys and through
the streets where children played soccer in the dirt and women in traditional
dress carried heavy bags of produce on their backs. We wound up roads that
clung to the sides of mountains and looked down on the sprawling plains of the
Andean highlands. We passed through Arequipa in the south, a beautiful little
town built at the base of a volcano, which loomed in the distance, and bought
empanadas. We spent two hours broken down, high up in the snowy plains of the
upper Andes, and mostly slept through that. And finally, we arrived in Cusco.
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| Cusco |
One
of the things that I realize as I try to describe our trip is that for most of
it, every location was significantly stranger and more unique than the last.
Cusco fit this bill perfectly. The streets were tight and busy and the
buildings flat and wide and multiple stories tall. There was bustle of life and
urban-ness, but the city is beautifully composed of a pallet of earthy tones
and gold, and everywhere you looked you could feel tradition and history. And,
as it’s nestled in a valley high up in the Peruvian Andes, look down any street,
any alley, and you’re treated to red and green mountains dotted with smaller
surrounding villages and touched by the sun. We got there a couple days early,
opting out of a night’s stay in Aerquipa (hence the unnatural bus ride), and it
turned out to be the correct choice. As beautiful as Cusco is, it’s also way
the fuck up high, so the air is thin and poor in oxygen. Being oxygen-deprived
feels oddly like being hungover, so our first night we decided to do the
responsible thing and get roaring drunk. The double whammy altitude-hangover headache
the next day was earth-shattering, but even so we shook it off by exploring the
town, walking among the hilly and always-alive streets to see cathedrals and
markets and to heal ourselves with traditional, straight-from-the-vine hot coco
and the by now well-known sweet and savory powers of Peruvian cuisine.
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| Cusco |
One
of the stops in our cusqueña
itinerary was to check in with our Machu Picchu tour. At the tour agency office
we were introduced to our guide and the sole pair of travelers who would be our
companions, a couple of friends from Long Island traveling together during
their annual time off. That night, we five met at the agency’s hotel for a
“briefing” on the next five days’ itinerary: we’d be hiking into the sacred
valley, up and around the Salkantay glacier, and descending through
high-altitude jungle to Aguas Calientes, a town at the base of the peak where
Machu Picchu was discovered and from which we would organize our tour of the
actual ruin. And so, at 7am the next day, we grabbed our things and headed back
to the office where a van waited to take us to the trailhead. The drive there
was gorgeous, passing through more farming villages on winding valley roads,
and out the window children in school uniforms passed by livestock of goats and
sheep and alpaca as we realized that this was a normal winter’s Tuesday
morning in the middle of the school year. Behind them down the road the valley
dropped and was gorgeous and in the distance we could see the sharp peak of the
snowy white, menacing-looking Salkantay glacier.
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| Salkantay, Day One |
Arriving at the trail, we set out the six of us: we three, the two L.I. girls, and our guide, Julio Cesar. That first day of hiking was pretty easy, partly because we didn’t have to walk very far (all things considered, at least: by the end of it we had trekked nearly 50 miles), but mostly because Cesar kept stopping us to give us tasty factoids about our surrounds, the geography, the trek, Incan culture, Andean culture, contemporary Peruvian culture…the guy was a trove of information. And, thankfully, he took good care of us. We started at high altitude, nearly 4000 meters, and for the first two days we climbed uphill, so we were sucking air pretty quickly. He gave us cacao leaves to chew on and had
us sniff a special concentrated alcohol made from fermented flowers to open our
nasal passages. Day one we arrived at our campsite in the early afternoon and
went to see a nearby lagoon. We ate very well that night and every other. Part
of our entourage was a cooking crew—a chef and porters—and a few horses to
carried the tents, food, and a good deal of what would otherwise have been on
our own backs. For every meal, the porters were ahead of us, setting up the
tent and cookfire, and by the time we arrived at each locale the crew was busy
at work, allowing us to sit at the table, chat, and drink cacao tea. It was an
invaluable service and I can’t imagine doing it without them. Well, I can. But
it was way better with their help.
 |
 |
| Mateo, our equestrian hero |
As
I mentioned, the first two days we ascended, Salkantay was still ahead of us.
The first night we slept near a ranch in the valley, the hills surrounding our
campsite dotted with horses, and the next morning we set out at sunrise for the
toughest part of the trek. This was steep vertical until our final height of
4600 meters, and it was hard, but
suddenly and finally we were there at the highest point of the entire trek, and
the glacier was taking up the entire sky at our backs, looming over us. After
an exchange of high-fives, Cesar explained to us that the Incans believed
mountains were sacred, and glaciers especially so; for this reason, Machu
Picchu was surrounded in four compass directions by sacred peaks, all
equidistant from the city. Salkantay was one of these. He led us in an offering
of cacao leaves that we buried beneath a rock sculpture as an offering to
Salkantay and Pachamama, (“Mother
Earth” in Quechua, a term we would get to know well). Then he threw confetti in
our hair, and as soon as we had arrived we were off down the hill and into the
valleys. We passed through more ranches and tiny settlements until slowly but
surely the rocks and thin grass surrounding us began turning to trees and
bushes and lush plants. We had entered the high altitude jungle, and would
remain there for the rest of the trek. As we walked, Cesar pointed out
different types of plants—spider bamboo, passion fruit, strawberries—and told
us to keep an eye out for condors, pumas, and Andean spotted bears.
We
hiked for a day and a half down through the jungle and into the valley. Night
three we ended up near a hot spring and took much-desired showers, and day four
we joined up with the actual Inca trail and hiked back up and over one of the hilly
peaks into the sacred valley. We passed through even more villages, even as
high up as we were, where they grew and brewed coffee straight from the tree.
As we walked we passed livestock: chickens, pigs, horses, and plenty of dogs. We
passed people working, tilling grass and laying out coffee beans by hand in the
sun to dry. After a grueling ascent, a couple stops—at a mountaintop fruit
vendor and a set of ruins from which Machu Picchu was just barely visible—and an
even tougher descent, we finally arrived at, of all places, a train station,
which took us into the freaky tourist town of Aguas Calientes. We slept in beds
and ate restaurant food, and prepared for our tour of the sacred ruins the next
morning.
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| Julio Cesar, layin' down knowledge |
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| Sacred ruins at the top of a hill, Day 4. This doorway apparently lined up with the Temple of Fire in the Citadel at Machu Picchu, but it was too far away to even see. |
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| Aguas Calientes |
At
5am on the fifth day, we woke up and took a bus up the hill into the citadel at
Machu Picchu. The ruins themselves were more crowded than I thought, and
looked…just about as they did in all the pictures, and taking a bus wasn’t
exactly my idea of roughing it, but despite all this the experience was just
about as magical as I had heard. The citadel, whose name was lost centuries
ago, is framed by two mountain peaks: Machu Picchu, “old mountain” in Quechua,
and Huaynapicchu, “young mountain.” Huaynapicchu is tall and thin, has stairs
built into the ascent and a temple on top, and is a huge tourist attraction, We
waited in line to get in and booked it up the stairs—which were almost too
steep to even warrant the name “stairs”—to relax at the top, the entire citadel
nestled cozily below us and the surrounding valley entirely in view, the sun
just peeking through a gap in the adjacent mountaintops, and we watched the
line of shade cross over the ruins as the sun rose. It was easy to tell why the
Incans chose this place. After our descent—which we took on hands and feet,
carefully planning each step, a wall of rock on our left and a sheer drop into the
valley below us on our right—we met back up with Cesar and the girls. Cesar led
us around and explained to us exactly
why the Incans chose this place, and it wasn’t just for the pretty sunrise—in
addition to being surrounded by glaciers, the Incans built temples all
throughout the valley which lined up perfectly with temples within the citadel.
The sun passes through one such temple—the Sun Gate at the peak of Machu
Picchu—crosses the valley, and enters the window of a temple in the citadel,
every year on the summer solstice. The Incans used the Sun Gate to guage when
to begin their harvest, or begin planting, or something like that. Temples like
the one we had visited the day before were apparently scattered throughout the
valley; the principle doorway of the one we passed lined up exactly with another
temple’s window. The place was positively full of features like this, and every
single aspect of its design was a piece of history; as I can’t possibly
describe them all, I’d recommend finding a book on it. The place was
fascinating.
As
fascinating as it was, though, we eventually had to head back, and so that
evening we got back on the train and took it all the way back to Cusco. The
next couple days were spent eating at the restaurants we had missed, exploring
the last hidden corners of Cusco, and, most of all, relaxing—we had just hiked
50 miles. And finally, after booking an overnight bus and exchanging the last
of our cash, we were off for the Bolivian border, done with the Peruvian leg of
our trip.
It took us nearly twelve hours and two
buses to get to Copacabana, but we finally arrived at the lakeside town. As
soon as we crossed the border—even as we approached it—it was
apparent that Bolivia would be different than Peru. I have the following
description of our first day in my travel notes:
First three impressions of Bolivia: 1) Almost getting hustled at the
bus station for needing more documents than we had at the border, but then
getting taken care of by an employee of the bus company; 2) hearing all about
complicated border procedures, but then printing out and handing over a bunch
of useless documents (that we were offered to fake) to the most apathetic
border control officer I’ve ever met; and 3) buying bus tickets and a boat
passage from an incredibly helpful woman in the tourist office, scrambling to
find our boat at the docks, being informed—as we see other boats shipping
off—that it was too dangerous to sail
because of the weather, then having our money refunded at the tourist agency,
at which point they called a cab and took us to a different part of the coast
where we could boat across a much shorter distance. We made it to the island
for what was supposed to be half after the refund but ended up being double.
So we had arrived in Bolivia.
Everything we had encountered in Peru was taken to its extreme here: the
infrastructure didn’t always make sense, the people were friendly but not
always successful in their aims to help, problems appeared out of nowhere for
no reason, and everything was dirt cheap.
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| Trying to make sense of it all |
And
everything was absolutely beautiful. From the moment we crossed the border we
were greeted by golden hills upon golden hills. Soon we rolled into Copacabana
on the banks of Lake Titicaca, whose waters glistened constantly. The lake is the highest
navigable lake in the world—a fact which took us a while to wrap our heads
around (“it’s the highest…big lake…no, it’s the biggest highest…body of
water…this seems like a vague set of criteria”)—and the Inca believed it was
the birthplace of the sun, which honestly, having seen it, makes a lot of sense.
In the center is 15 kilometer long Isla
del Sol. The island is an odd community of indigenous people— according to
wikipedia, just 800 families. There are no paved roads or motor vehicles, and
most of the economy is based around agriculture and tourism. We spent three
very chill days hiking around, eating, and relaxing by the bejeweled lake.
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| Showdown! |
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After we’d had our fill of beaches vibes we booked passage back to Copacabana and caught a bus to La Paz. Again,
the Bolivian countryside didn’t disappoint. The looping mountain roads that led
us out of Copacabana brought us up and out of the basin of the lake and across
sun-kissed countryside covered in yellow grass. As we drove the land became
slowly more urban, but when I say slowly, I mean it. At first, we saw maybe one
small, brick building every five minutes, with a family working the land and
sheep and alpaca grazing nearby. After an hour or so, it was more like five
buildings a minute. Soon we were passing through ramshackle towns filled with
two story buildings of cheap bricks (that’s not just a statement; I saw a sign
advertising the reduced price) and tin roofing. The road turned to gravel and
our bus slowed to a crawl. And then, just after we joined up with the new
highway, we mounted a ridge and below us was La Paz, huge and crazy and
beautiful and ugly all at once.
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| La Paz |
La
Paz, like Cusco, is built in a dip in the Andes range, with mountains
surrounding it. But the former—the highest capital city in the world and higher
than it’s Peruvian counterpart—is much bigger, and the bowl it’s built in is
much more dramatic. Houses are etched all the way up to the rim, and in the
background looms a massive volcano. It’s impressive, and incredibly unique. The entire city
is composed of the two-and-a-half story, seemingly half-finished buildings that
we came to know on the drive in. The streets are winding and dirty and the cars
move at a pace only known in South America.
I’d
like to note here two anecdotes on that final point. The first: Julio Cesar
told us a story about a Peruvian man who lived in the U.S. who was in involved
in a massive multi-car pileup an interstate highway. When the car that started
the incident veered across the road, dozens of cars behind were caught up in
the accident, but this man was able to weave through the danger and find a safe
path to the empty stretch of highway beyond. When asked in a radio interview
how he managed to escape, he simply said: “I grew up in Lima.” Well, the roads in La Paz were crazier, and their drivers more skilled. The
second: At the end of our stay in the city, we found ourselves running late to
the bus station (that happened to us a lot) during rush hour. When we finally
hailed a cab and were on our way to the station, I asked the driver whether we
would make it in time. He simply replied, “we’ll find out” kicked his little
taxi into gear, weaved through two cars stopped in an intersection, and powered
his way up a hill. He bobbed and cut people off and honked and threaded his way
through traffic jams. We made it in time. He quickly won our title of “cab
driver of the trip.”
As
hectic as it is, there’s not much to do in La Paz, so we spent most of our time
there secluded in our hostel nursing hangovers, but we did get into some
interesting adventures. The first day we went exploring. Built as it is, to dig
underground train tunnels would probably collapse the entire thing, and so
instead the city opted to fund a gondola system, which seemed to be half
tourist attraction and half public transport: especially during rush hour, most
of the people we shared cars with had their business clothes on and earbuds in.
We took the thing to the end of the line and had lunch in the ritzier part of
town. The second day we made friends with some Australian guests and went to
one of the most bizarre cultural displays I’ve ever seen.
Before
I detail this part of the story, some cultural context is necessary. In
Bolivia, there is a traditional garb for women, passed down through the
generations from mother to daughter. Known as cholitas, these women with braided hair, multi-layered skirts and
ill-fitting bowler hats walk the streets in abundance selling their
hand-crafted textiles. The event our Aussie friends brought us to is known as
“The Fighting Cholitas,” and it’s not far from what it sounds. We bought
tickets to the event at the hostel and hopped on a bus which took us to what
seemed to be an abandoned warehouse, with stadium-style seating set up on
either side of makeshift wrestling ring. At first it was all men dressed in
classic lucho libre fashion performing incredible flips and tackles, the refs
handing in chairs and holding favored fighters down for a sucker punch, but
eventually two cholitas walked out and began to have at it in the same fashion.
Then two more, then two more…throughout the event, people were throwing popcorn
and fruit, the Bolivians in the stands were going absolutely crazy (I have a
distinct memory of one particularly invested older woman standing and shouting
vulgarities), and one of the Australians tried to get into the ring. He didn’t
succeed but did manage to slap the ref in the face.
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| Additional picture and video available upon request |
Knowing
we couldn’t top that event, but knowing that we had a full week before we had
to be in Uyuni, we spent the next few days hanging about and organizing a side
trip. We ended up running into a couple of friends from our bus ride from hell
who clued us into their plans: a guided tour in the small nearby town of
Rurrenabaque. We decided to join them and booked everything together from the
hostel. It turned out to be a highlight of the trip. Go improvising. The girls
we went with were a couple of British university students vacationing abroad.
They were a lovely pair.
Due
in part to the local geography and probably in larger part to the poor
development of Bolivian road infrastructure, Rurrenabaque is twenty-one hours
from La Paz by bus or fifty minutes by plane, so, once again five, we headed to
the airport and hopped on the smallest airplane I have ever been on for our
flight. Again owing to the geography, this flight took us nearer to the side of
a mountain I have ever been without hiking and, I guess due to fluctuacting air
pressure or something, had turbulence so bad you could feel your stomach drop.
Alex and I had a lot of fun, as did one of the British girls; Paul and the
other girl did not. Soon, though,
we were clear of the mountains and watching La Paz shrink and fade away through
the clouds. 
Months
before this, during the planning phase of our trip when I still had a job in
Chile, I sought advice from many friends who had taken a similar route through
Peru and Bolivia. Not one of them had heard of Rurrenabaque, but as we
descended back below the clouds into the deep green jungle forest, I knew we
had made the right choice. The region is technically high-altitude jungle;
despite its vibrant flora, it’s not quite in the Amazon basin, but rather at
its rim. It would be more accurate to describe it as a river town: from the
plane the most distinct feature was the snaking, brown water of the Beni river,
and the tiny, twenty-square-block town borders one of its wide banks. We landed
and exited through the airport—one dirt runway and a small adjacent building
with a single desk and ten chairs—and headed into the town, which was nutty and
beautiful and a refreshing change of pace. The first thing we noticed was the air,
which was clean and dense and warm and smelled alive, a welcome treat from the
sharp, thin, high-altitude, city-stained atmosphere of La Paz. After checking
in at the tour office, picking up a sixth traveler, and finding a hostel, we set
to exploring the streets, which were buzzing. For every car there were at least thirty motorcycles. We saw multiple families of four crammed onto one vehicle with their
groceries slung over the handlebars. The town was crammed with quirkiness like
this. At one point, we stopped into a small shop to look at clothes and a
monkey popped out of a shirt on display. It climbed on the shopowner’s
daughter’s shoulder and she crossed the street to buy ice cream. Before packing
in for the night, we watched the sunset by the river bank.
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| Rurrenabaque |
The
next morning we were picked up in a jeep by a couple of friendly Bolivians who
brought us on our way, one of which was our tour guide, Rosario. We spent a
couple admittedly boring hours driving along dirt roads, jungle trees flashing
by the windows. At one point we saw a cobra crossing the road, which Rosario
said was good luck. After stopping
for lunch we arrived at the docks, where a jackknife boat that would be all but
our home for the next three days bobbed in wait for us.
The
docks were modest, a couple of posts nailed into the riverbank with no actual
“dock” in sight, but the air was alive with birdcalls and everything was green.
As we shuffled our gear from the van to the boat we noticed another tour group pulling
in, presumably just ending their own tour. This group of maybe eight pale
English youths stripped down in front of us, the sun glinting off their backs,
and hopped right into the murky brown waters. And not a moment later, we saw
the unmistakable plume of blowhole mist erupt from the water. As it submerged
and flapped its tale we noticed two more dolphins breaching in the distance. We
knew these dolphins were a principle highlight of the tour (our company was
called “Dolphin Tours”) but to see them up close and in action was something
else. The British crew splashed and frolicked and yelped as the dolphins
nibbled at their toes. With our mouths thus agape, Rosario beckoned us to climb
into the boat and push of, and not a moment later we disappeared into the
watery brush.
We
spent the next three days on that boat, sitting back under the sun as Rosario
jetted us through the thickets with surgical precision, keeping our eyes out
for watery fowl and other wildlife. The first day was surreal. We weren’t sure
what we had gotten ourselves into, and couldn’t help but dip our hands into the
water and stretch out under the sun. Relaxed doesn’t really begin to describe
it: when we asked Rosario, after first shipping off on the first day, how long
we’d be driving around, he just shook his head, smiled, and began whistling.
That entire sleepy afternoon we wandered about the Pampas, stopping to look at
wildlife. It was an entire forest
ecosystem built on a river 10 meters deep in places. We saw birds that walked
on floating plants, toucans, herons, and others I don’t know the name of. We
saw turtles relaxing on logs. Every once in a while, we would see a pair of
dolphins breach and swim away. Rosario would always cut the engine and whistle
a long, haunted tone to try to get them to come back; it almost seemed to work
a few times. At one point we idled to a stop, he began making strange animal
noises and drove us straight into a tree, and we were raided by a group of
yellow-tailed monkeys. They climbed all over our boat (and our bodies) in
search of treats. As Rosario warned us to watch our bags I caught one about to
close his hands around my wallet.
 |
| "Relaxing" |
Just
as I began to think that Rosario had any idea where he was going, we pushed
through a tight hole in the thickets and found what would be our actual home
for the next three days, a cabin built on the water. There was an alligator
relaxing in the shade just outside the showers, and we witnessed another group
of monkeys swing by overhead. We spent our first evening watching the sunset at
another river cabin with a bar and a deck; we relaxed with beers and full
raingear, fearful that the yellow-fever-carrying mosquitoes would compromise
our unvaccinated immune systems. At dusk on our ride back to the cabin we were
passed by countless, huge fruit bats skimming
along the surface of the water and passing our boat by inches. That night after
dinner we headed back out into the water in the pitch black in search of alligators.
Armed with only our headlamps, we cruised along silently looking for the red
dots of their eyes reflecting back our own lights. It was creepy and exciting. |
| Neighbors...roommates? |
The
next day was a bit less eventful, starting with a (thankfully) fruitless wade
through the mud in search of anacondas and ending with an afternoon of piranha
fishing. The piranhas were small, about the size of a human hand, but fierce.
Our gear was rudimentary at best: a hook, piece of twine, and some raw meat
chunks, but every chunk of meat that hit the water was torn up in seconds. The
idea was that we were fishing for our dinner, but between the six of us, we
caught two fish. Rosario caught eleven.
Day
three we set out in search of dolphins. Rosario explained to us that with all
the snakes and alligators in the water, it wasn’t safe to swim in most areas.
The dolphins, however, kept the other nasties at bay, so we headed for their
breeding grounds and hoped to spot some. Sure enough, not long after getting
there did we see a group of three breach and appear to get closer, along with
two more. They’re hard to keep track of because the water is so murky, but
Rosario gave the go-ahead and we plunged in. It’s oddly terrifying, being in
the water with a giant mammal that you cannot see, knowing that they’re getting
closer with every second but only having evidence of the fact every 40 seconds
or so. It turns out that these dolphins are curious but cautious. One moment
you notice them circling you, the next you feel a nibble at your toes, and the
next you feel something rubbery brush up against your leg and see a tailfin
sticking up in front of your face. They’re also fairly timid: soon the other
boats arrived, making a circle around the watery clearing, and the dolphins all
retreated to circle the perimeter, observing the humans but not daring to enter
the fray. So we had a bit more fun splashing around, but eventually it was time
to go. After a leisurely cruise through the pampas we were back at the docks,
loading back up into the jeeps, and after that it was a sleepy ride back to
Rurrenabaque.
 |
| Pool Party |
 |
| Squad |
After
one last night in our hostel we were back at the airport, the mountain filling
the window on our right, descending back into La Paz. The thin air was
devastating, but luckily we didn’t stay long. One last night at our old Irish
hostel and we were were already on a bus, this time to Uyuni. Our bus ride, in
typical Bolivian fashion, was a mess: an overnight affair with a 2am pit stop
to change busses for no apparent reason and a road that made sleep impossible.
We arrived at 7am to the cold wind and dusty streets of Uyuni. It was a ghost
town. Dogs and trash meandered the street and not a soul was in sight (to be fair, it was 7am). We found an open hostel and slept
for the morning, checked in to our next tour, and prepared for our final leg of
the trip.
Our
tour of the Salt Flats of Uyuni started with a trip to a train cemetery,
something 10 year old me would have lost his mind over and that 24 year old me
still had a heavy appreciation for. Big hunks of rotting steel sat motionless,
their wheels sunken under the sand, pieces and parts strewn about. We got to
climb around, take pictures, and pretend we were pirates, or something. Soon
after we headed out to the actual salt flat, and as ashamed as I am to admit
it, it was saltier and flatter than I could have ever anticipated. Stretching
120 square kilometers, this ruin of an ancient salt lake was uniform white in
every direction. It was hard to tell our jeep was moving, and as most of the
tours leave at the same time, harder still to tell the jeeps in the distance
were doing the same. We had lunch in a restaurant made of salt and slept in a
salt hostel: walls, floor, tables, benches, everything but (thankfully) beds
were made of giant bricks of salt.
 |
| Things quickly became silly |
I’ve
mentioned the principle that the further into our trip we got, the stranger
everything became. Day two we headed further into the desert, and things became downright alien. We set out at 7am into sandy expanses
filled with ancient fossilized coral and sulfur-spewing volcanoes in the distance.
We passed green, purple, and orange lagoons that froze every night and thawed
every day, with flamingoes bobbing happily in the distant center of each, and
huge, wind-carved rock structures. We saw foxes and rabbits hiding in the rocky
framework. Day three we woke up before sunrise and began our ascent to the
highest point of the already-lofty desert to see the geysers. As we drove along
the bumpy sand road and climbed to our destination, volcanoes dotting the
horizon, the full moon lighting our way and slowly fading as the sky behind us
turned from a sheet of black to one of deep red and coloring the pock-marked
landscape before us, all I could think was that our jeep was a moon buggy. When
we reached the summit we saw the cratered earth spewing sulfuric vapor and
staining the landscape yellow. As we got out to peer into the bubbling grey
muck the sun came up at our backs, turning the red mountains sandy orange.
Afterwards we drove another ten minutes to a hot spring, where people
previously wearing three layers of winter clothes stripped down to their
breeches to soak in the Martian water. The tiny pool was built on a ledge, and
below the drop-off sat a wide lagoon. We relaxed and watched as the flamingoes
did their thing. Soon after it was time to head out; from there we drove to the
most remote border office I have ever seen and hopped on a bus that would take
us to Chile.
We
were in San Pedro for five days, including the afternoon after our morning
geyser tour. Day two we rented bikes and rode into the heart of the Valley of
the Moon, another alien world found on Earth. This one was unique for its picturesque salt deposits, which color the sand and jagged rocks with frosty white tips. After a month of junk food and bus ride, the ride was grueling, but so insanely worth it. We struggled uphill, coasted down into the heart of the valley, had lunch, and coasted back down into the town with the setting sun at our backs, the Andes painted red ahead of us. Day three we ran into our bus friends (again!) and visited one of those lagoons that has a higher salt content than usual so you can float without effort, like the Dead Sea in Israel. That was about as strange as it got. We spent a day relaxing after some of our half-hearted plans fell through, reading at the hostel and drinking coconut cocktails, and took a star tour--which, despite the full moon, was fascinating--at night. We grilled nearly every night, enjoying the fruits of cheap Chilean wine.
 |
| Valle de la Luna |
When it came time to head to the airport, we had a hard time coming to terms. The Atacama desert is breathtaking from the sky. It looks like a marble cake with all its different swirling mineral deposits. We got to Santiago and Alex and Paul already felt like home. Perhaps the culmination of our time-weirdness principle, we spent the last week watching movies, speaking English, eating Americanized food, and hanging out at, of all places, the Costanera Mall, an absurd change of pace for us but a welcome one.
As I mentioned in the beginning, the more you do, the longer it feels to take, but of course the inverse is just as true: doing less will make time pass more quickly. Hardly had we arrived in Santiago before it was time to say goodbye. It was strange. After being three for so long, within the span of a closing cab door I was once again one. I can only hope that in the future we'll be three once more, traipsing around some wilderness without a clue or care in the world. Here's to the squad, fellas. Thanks for an amazing trip.
