So this time, instead of Matteo Del Norte, it should be Matteo Del Bus...or Del Train, or Del 4x4 Jeep. It has been a little longer than usual between entries and there are a number of factors involved in this. Here are the main two. 1.) I have been really freaking busy! 2.) I have not sit down in a still environment in days. 3.) I am in Bolivia, where very few things actually work. Computers, being a sort of developed world type of thing, suffer badly here. You could click on something and then read a chapter or two out of some heavy-duty novel, and then start to see the page you had been trying to get to. Read some more or watch an episode of something dubbed into spanish and then there would be your page! Hooray! Or, it would tell you after a long wait that your page could not be retrieved. You get spoiled on a fast connection back home. And now I sound like a whiny little whiner. Disculpe.
So when we last left off, I was chillin' in La Paz, where there isn't currently a whole lotta paz. (Peace. Ja ja!) I did like it there though. They have this sorta twisted 'Witches Market' where they sell all these crazy llama fetuses and shriveled and dried alpaca babies and other wierd stuff too. I am not sure what a bruja would do with these items but if they were used for curses, I hope to never piss one off. I might grow some sort of funny appendage or llama-like gizzard. Llamas kinda trip me out. I visited a couple museums the last day I was there and then got all my shite into a pile to head down south to Uyuni. I took an overnight bus that started out great, and ended up sounding like it was driving in the chamber of a very loud submachine gun. Unfortunately, as the road out of La Paz is paved, the road into Uyuni is the most washed-out, washboardy road you ever did see. So that meant that while we watched the abominably pitiful 'Wild Hogs', it was a nice smooth ride and then after everyone had settled down into a slumber we started hitting these teeth-rattling patches of carretera that would jolt you right off your seat. Needless to say, by the time the beautiful high elevation sunlight cracked through the blinds, Matteo Del Bus was already wide awake, staring dazed off into the distance with a line of drying drool running down his whiskered chin. I went to this Spartan (I love the way the word describes lodgings...)hotel and got a room. The lady that ran it was the first full-on beeotch that I have come across so far on this journey. You could just tell she hated her life. Yeah, I am sure that the constant presence of gringos can get a bit oppressive over the years, but you make a goddam fortune and if you don't like it, do something else. She was a nickel and dimer. She would charge you for everything. For example, there is no toilet paper in the bathrooms, of which I was sharing with an entire hall. If you didn't have your own, which I happily do, then she'd charge you for a few squares. If you didn't have a towel, and I don't so she got me on this one, she would charge you to dry yourself. While I was on my excursion to the wilds I left my pack there and she charged me, when I came back to get it I needed to use the bathroom...she charged me for that too!! I said, "Money, money, always money..." and that really ticked her off. She started telling me how I had to pay for the water I was using and all that jazz. I tried to give her a tip, just cause I figured if the water was that damn expensive, the least I could do was tip the toilet, and then she got really mad and told me that she didn't want my money "Señor!". Damn, I thought, in that case, give me back the money I paid for the damn towel that hotels are supposed to give you anyway. I didn't actually say this. I did say this, "Muchas gracias señora, entiendo que la vida es caro y que todos necesitan el dinero...espero que un dia le gusta su vida en realidad..." then I bowed like they do in Asia and left. She was speechless. Hopefully she doesn't have any friends that are witches who experiment with shriveled alpaca-baby mummies.
But in all seriousness, I do have a good sense of the third world aspect of Bolivia. People here have very hard lives and are often driven to do things that are very difficult or illegal to survive. You have to respect that. You can't get mad about the facilities or the toilets or the lack of this amenity or that, because they are doing their best to be hospitable. On the whole, I found the people of Bolivia to be proud and very kind. They do not really like Americans here, there is a prevailing media trend against our kind right now, and that I understand too. I always joke with the people that I meet about that. They ask where I am from and then I make a comment about not being so popular here and they agree and then we both seem to laugh it off. People generally want to like each other, and when they are aware of the differences between citizens and governments, I find that things go along just fine, no matter where the people are from. Not always, but often. I had an experience that typified this right off the bat in Uyuni. I had gotten there a day early in order to plan a few things for after the Salt Flat excursion. I wanted to get a train ticket to the border town of Villazòn because the train is the only real viable way to get down there, and it fills up ahead of time. So I walked to the train station across the hot, dry, and almost empty streets of midday Uyuni. It reminded me of a scene out of an old western movie. When I got there there was a lady sitting out front on the curb. I said hello and passed into the cool darkness of the ticket office. The lights were on, though dim, inside and there was a desk with a computer running, but there was no one there. I waited for a couple minutes and then walked back outside to join the woman I had passed. She was a local and said that she had been waiting there for a half an hour. Some other would-be costumers had come and gone, but no one around knew where the guy had gone. We went through the Americans-are-not-popular conversation, and then talked for a bit about the current politcal trouble in Bolivia and then we agreed that people are cool and that governments suck. We were getting along well when she asked what I did for a living and I said that I was a cook. She grinned from ear to ear and at that point we became as good as family: she too was a chef. We talked about food for the next bit and finally the ticket seller peddled up on a bike with a plastic bag under his arm...he had been off buying a sweater for his sister. (Feliz Navidad) We followed the guy back inside and he got ready to work for a minute. The lady in front of me bought her ticket and then it was my turn. I told the guy what I wanted and he looked at me for a second and said no. It was tuesday and they don't start selling tickets for the friday night train until thursday afternoon. I knew this was a lie, but what could I do? I looked him in the eye and asked if it was the truth, he said it was and there was an itchy moment where we both recognized that this too was a lie. The local lady asked me to come outside and there she confirmed that the man was lying. "He sees where you come from and he only wants to cause you problems." I was not going to be back into town until just before the train was meant to leave so there would be no way to get the ticket on thursday and by friday night it would be sold out. The nice lady offered to buy the ticket for me on thursday, and I could pick it up at the restaurant where she worked on friday night. So here was an interesting situation...should I trust my humanity theory and give a complete stranger from a country that doesn't like me a wad of money? Or should I take my chances with the last minute situation. Like good old Narciso back at the Mandarin in SF, I too, am always up for a good gamble. Especially when it doubles as an experiment in philanthropy. I exchanged the money for directions to her restaurant and that was that. To speed ahead to the end of the story, on the excursion we had numerous car troubles and were delayed by hours in getting back to Uyuni. When I got back I had literally minutes to go from wilderness mode to train mode and I walked quickly across the plaza to her work. As I approached I saw a lady in chef whites waiting at the door. It was not the lady I knew, but she was looking out as if looking for someone and in her hands she held a white slip of paper. As I approached, her face bloomed into a smile and she said my name with a question mark after it. I smiled a big old sunburnt-irish-lookin'-american-guy smile and she gave me the ticket as if I was her long lost son. It was quite something. She invited me in for a quick bit to eat and then I ran for my pack and then I was on that goddamn train, heading off into the night. If she hadn't come through, I wouldn't have gotten on that train. It was packed. But I would have been just fine. I would have been out a little bit of money, but I would have found some other way to go. What I gained from it was just a little bit more reinforcement that humans can certainly be decent and good to each other, even across lines on maps that old and jaded white men put in place a good while back in time. And just in time for good old christmas too...how nice. If only Christmas where dressed in that genuine human kindness, instead of only the guise of it to hide the will of this 'the man' or that 'the man'. Don't worry, no Scroogy-ness will be braided into this entry!! Happy Christmas everybody!
So the next morning I was up with the sun in my little box of a hotel room. I showered and payed for a towel to dry off with and then went off to meet my group for the excursion. It ended up consisting of three Aussies: Lily, Gabe and Bali; two Swiss girls: Anna and Doris, and then me. Our guide, who turned out to be pretty much silent, (and yeah, a nice guy) more of just a driver, was named Santos. We started out by bumping along to an area called the Cemeterio de Trenes, which was just that, an expansive patch of ground full of rusting old train bodies and cars. The tracks came to be to expensive to take care of, so they just stopped doing it and that was the end of the trains. There is not much left but the skeletons. From there we headed out into the Salar, which is a Salt Flat more than 1,200 square kilometers in size. Vast and bright is all I can say. This, like the Inca experience, is one that will be quite impossible to sum up here. We crossed it and outside the window it looked like snow, for as far as you could see, in all directions leading out to the blue mountian horizons in the distance and the billowing white clouds beyond. It was warm out there, and completely blindingly bright. The ride in the jeep was perfectly smooth. There are areas where water wells up through the salt in slow springs and would be geysers. There is a lot of optical illusion opportunity out here. We did our best with the "I'm standing in your hand" photos. Mostly it was just really bright and the camera people had a hard time getting them to do the right thing. Those were the real camera people. I am not even on the grid of real camera people, so most of my photos are hopeless.
We had our lunch that day on an island of huge cactus' that reach out from the salt towards the sky. They come upon you in a manner that seems otherworldy, as though they are beings of some strange origin, looming above you silently. Maybe it's too many movies for this kiddo, but I kept waiting for them to talk to me!! They only did once...just joking. But they would have made good friends, given the opportunity to bond and express who they really are. The lunch was the first of several sketchy meals. Not terrible, just not hardly there. We all lost weight on this outing.
That night we ended up staying at the only legal salt structure near the salar. It is only legal because it is off the salt flat and so it does not contribute to the contamination that is a problem there. The place itself is really cool, it is made from bricks that are made from pure salt! The entire building, including the tables, chairs, beds and door frames, are made out of salt! The beds were quite comfortable and the rooms, despite the chilly nighttime temperatures, are nice and warm. I went out for a walk with the Swiss ladies at dusk. The colors on the great mountians in the distance were terrific. As the sun left us, the sky took on a color show of its own and after we ate, we watched a tremendous electical storm off across the salar. I awoke a few hours later and walked out to watch the storm come in. Lightning crossed the sky without cease and the dark clouds seemed to roil silently eastward above the hills. There was no thunder and it was all quite peaceful in a dark, nightmarish sort of way.
The morning came at about four thirty and we were up and on our way. This day would later be summarized by Gabe's question, "Which breakdown was your favorite?" But I will get to that a little later, in the second part of this adventure. Already it has taken three short sittings to get this much written...and there looks to be at least a fourth...read on...
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