We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  Many of the storefronts in our neighborhood were advertising a concert that evening at the convention center. The orchestra would be playing music from Star Wars. The fact that we were reading flyers in store windows speaks to our improving Spanish and our connectedness to the neighborhood. The concert seemed like a fun thing to do. Tickets were not available online, so Leah and CJ volunteered to find the ticket office. (The pot brownie incident happened near the end of this otherwise successful walk.)

  That night we made our way to the convention center. The concert hall was large and modern; the orchestra was warming up as we found our seats. For the first time in South America, we felt mildly out of place—not because we were four gringos at a concert in Bolivia, but because none of us was dressed as a Star Wars character. The hall was packed with families, many of whom had small children in costume. The orchestra played various pieces from the John Williams score while scenes from the Star Wars films were projected on side panels. Adults dressed as various Star Wars characters paraded around the stage. After the show, young kids lined up to have their photos taken with cast members. “Let’s go take your picture with Jar Jar Binks,” I urged CJ.

  “Dad, I’m like three times as old as those kids.”

  “You love Star Wars.” (True.)

  I prevailed. CJ waited in line with the small children, many of whom stared up at the tall blond kid in their midst. “Don’t tell them you’re a marijuana user,” I whispered to CJ. “They’ll be very disappointed.”

  Scoop was working on another story. La Paz has installed cable cars as a form of public transit; the cars, which look like ski gondolas, transport people by carrying them over the city. Cable cars are faster than buses because they can glide over traffic; they are cheaper to build than train lines because there is no need to lay tracks through densely developed neighborhoods. From a transit standpoint, the cable cars are like a bus or a train: one buys a ticket, waits in line, and then gets on the gondola when it swings through the station. Near the end of our stay in La Paz, we walked up a steep hill—steep even compared to all the other steep hills—to a cable car station. Scoop interviewed some passengers in line about how the cable cars serve neighborhoods that had that previously been cut off from the economic heart of the city. Medellín, Colombia, had also recently installed a cable car for the same purpose: connecting poor neighborhoods isolated by the mountains to parts of the city with more jobs and opportunity. Scoop loved the irony: a technology that had served wealthy skiers at mountain resorts for decades was now a poverty-fighting tool.

  And then we climbed on board. The gondola gave us a bird’s-eye view of La Paz as we glided over schoolyards and playgrounds and bustling streets. Our aerial tour felt almost voyeuristic as we watched people hanging laundry on rooftops or lounging in courtyards shielded from the street by high walls. From above, we could appreciate the activity, complexity, and interconnectedness of a modern city, as if we were observing the human equivalent of an ant farm.

  Our travel goal at this point was the Bolivian salt flats. The city of Sucre was the next stop as we headed south and west across the country. Once again, we opted for an overnight bus, but this time Bolivia threw us a curveball. The bathrooms on Bolivian buses are always locked. The drivers are responsible for cleaning the bathrooms on their buses. Predictably—I write nonfiction books about the power of incentives—the drivers minimize their work by keeping the bathrooms locked, even on a ten- or twelve-hour trip. There is no need to clean a bathroom that no one has used. Instead, passengers who need to relieve themselves must ask the driver to pull the bus over to the side of the road. Leah, Katrina, and I felt self-conscious about stopping the bus to accommodate our bladders; a cranky driver might ignore the request. We chose to squirm uncomfortably in our seats until we discovered our secret weapon: CJ, the raging gringo extrovert. His Spanish was the worst among us, but he was the most eager to put it to use.

  “Please tell the driver to stop,” Katrina asked CJ. She does not like speaking to strangers, in English or Spanish, and was still finding that she had to work up her courage to do her Valley News interviews. Asking a bus driver to stop the bus so she could pee on the side of the road was beyond the pale.

  “So now you’re happy to be on the bus with me?” CJ replied.

  “The pot brownies have made you much easier to be around,” she said.

  CJ shook his head with disapproval. Like a clerk in the bowels of a bureaucracy who suddenly finds himself in possession of an important document, a petty despot was born. “We’ll be in Sucre in six hours,” CJ said with faux-sympathy.

  “Come on, CJ, please,” Katrina pleaded.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” CJ said. He walked to the front of the bus and asked confidently in Spanish, “Make urine on the road together?” The driver cackled at his execrable Spanish and dutifully pulled over, at which point the rest of us followed him off to “make urine.”

  In Sucre, for fourteen dollars a night (more good budget news) we rented two little rooms that had formerly been a doctor’s office. Our tiny rooms were attached to a home, where our host lived. Sucre reminded us that spring was unfolding in the southern hemisphere, even as the days became shorter and colder back home. On our first afternoon, Katrina and I ended up separated from the others. The weather was perfect, so we decided to walk the two miles from the center of the city back to our little doctor’s-office apartment. The jacaranda trees were in full bloom, creating explosions of purple all along our route. Other flowers were in bloom, too, making everything more attractive. Even the high brick walls topped with broken glass, a common security feature in South American cities, looked beautiful with red and yellow flowers spilling over them.

  Perhaps Katrina and I were hungry, or maybe we were just fascinated by the impressive baked goods on display along our route. In any event, we made it our personal challenge to buy every kind of attractive street food we encountered: an enormous chocolate donut, then fresh-made potato chips, then popcorn—walk, eat, walk, eat—like two schoolkids who found ten dollars on the playground and decided to spend it all on the walk home. We laughed at our devilry when we weren’t chewing. The food was so cheap that we only fibbed modestly when we reported our expenses to Leah.

  I dropped off laundry at a storefront shop that would wash, dry, and fold our clothes for about a dollar per kilogram. At that price, we could afford to launder just about everything we were carrying. The proprietress told me to pick up our kilos of clothing the following afternoon. But when I showed up at the designated time, the place was shuttered. It was the middle of business hours, yet no one responded when I banged on the locked door. I lingered for fifteen minutes. There was still no sign of activity. We were leaving on a bus early the following morning. A high proportion of our wardrobe was locked inside, and this was the rare time when our itinerary did not have any slack built in.

  The options were not good: we could leave Sucre without most of our clothes, or we could stay an extra day and miss the departure for a tour we had booked in the Bolivian salt flats. Leah began doing an accounting of which would be more expensive, buying a new wardrobe or losing the deposit on the tour. Our Airbnb hostess was a friendly woman who had stopped by to introduce herself when we arrived. I knocked on her door in the hope that she could offer up a more attractive option. “All of our clothes are at the laundry and it’s closed,” I explained, pointing to my watch to suggest that businesses should not be closed in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. “We’re leaving in the morning—”

  “The game,” she said with a laugh that suggested a naïveté in my question. I stared blankly at her, as if she had said “the wizard” or “the force.” She explained that Bolivia was playing Ecuador in the qualifier for the World Cup. We turned on the television in our room and watched as Bolivia gave up a goal in the eighty-eighth minute for a tie. Sure enough, I returned to the laundry place a few minutes after the game ended and the owner was opening up again. She happily returned my l
aundry while complaining that Bolivia had let victory slip away.

  Our tour of the Bolivian salt flats left from Uyuni, a cold, windswept city that feels like the Bolivian Wild West. Uyuni exists mostly as a tourist launching point for the salt flats.

  The streets are unpaved and comically wide. Fierce winds blow dust and dirt everywhere, even blotting out the sun at times. There is little vegetation; most of the buildings are drab cement structures. The whole place looked like it had been painted a color Benjamin Moore might euphemistically call “Wet Sand.” I became persuaded that I could taste the dirt in my food.

  We stayed in a room in a hostel that felt like a white-collar prison: four beds lined up in a room with a linoleum floor and undecorated plaster walls. There was an overpowering chemical smell—some combination of smoke and cheap cleaning products. “That can’t be healthy,” Leah said as she inhaled through her nose. Katrina opened the window.

  “It’s forty degrees outside,” I said.

  “Would you rather be cold or die in your sleep?” Katrina asked. We opted to keep the window open, even as dust blew in and the temperature dropped near freezing.

  Leah had sent e-mail queries to several tour providers asking about prices, availability, and other information for a multi-day tour of the salt flats. Only one tour provider responded while we were in Sucre. This outfitter had excellent reviews on TripAdvisor, so we booked the tour. When we got off the overnight bus in Uyuni, Leah picked up an e-mail from a different tour operator saying that he was holding four spots for us. We had never committed to book with this company; in fact, we did not know what their price for the expedition would be. Also, it had taken the company two days to reply to our e-mail inquiry, which is never a good sign in a service business. As a courtesy, we stopped by their office to tell them that we would not be joining their tour. The proprietor became belligerent and insisted that we owed him money.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said, and walked out. There is no legal code on the planet, not even in Bolivia, in which an inquiry about price and availability obligates one to sign up for a tour, especially when there is no reply for two days. But that was when things took a Wild West turn: The proprietor followed us out of the office and down the street, insisting that we go to the tourist police with him. The facts were on our side, but in terms of institutions I had faith in, the Uyuni tourist police did not rank up there with the FBI. The man was short and squat—not physically intimidating—but he was acting unhinged.

  We walked to the end of a street with a series of small shops. He followed us. We turned and walked back on the other side of the street. “Is he still behind us?” I asked Leah. She looked quickly over her shoulder. “Yep.”

  If I were in a place with a top-notch criminal justice system, I would have called the police myself, or even grabbed the guy by the lapels and told him to walk away. Uyuni, Bolivia, is not such a place. We could not go back to our hostel, or he would know where we were staying. We ducked into a mini–grocery store and told the owners that the man standing outside was harassing us. There was not much of a response, probably because our Spanish was not good enough to explain this modestly complicated situation. While we were hiding inside, Leah and I began ogling the well-stocked shelves. Colca Canyon had left us with a famine mentality. As we hid from our Bolivian stalker, we bought as much junk food as we could stuff into our bags: cookies, crackers, potato chips, candy bars. No one would be pleading for extra soup in the salt flats.

  The man was still waiting for us when we walked out. He continued yelling angrily that he was going to take us to the tourist police. In the Hollywood film version of our trip (“inspired by real events”), this situation could go a lot of interesting directions. Maybe I would walk out of the convenience store, apply a karate chop to a thick tree limb, cracking it in half. Then I would growl at the menacing tour operator: “Te sientes afortunado?” (Are you feeling lucky?) Or perhaps I would agree to go to the tourist police, where I would give a compelling explanation of the unanswered e-mail, and then, inspired by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, I would challenge the tour operator, “No puedes manejar la verdad!” (You can’t handle the truth!) What actually happened was more pedestrian—in both senses of the word. We walked around, ducking into various shops, until finally we came out and he was no longer waiting for us.

  The next morning, we climbed into a Land Cruiser with our driver and guide, Marcus. We strapped our junk-food-laden luggage on the roof and drove into a salt desert the size of Belgium. We made our own path across a flat, white expanse, as if we were crossing a huge snowcovered lake. There was a ring of mountains far in the distance, including a volcano. Occasionally we would pass an “island,” an outcropping of rocks and trees that rose up from the salt flat. The salt looked so much like ice that I expected to see ice-fishing huts. My brain kept warning me that our SUV might break through a hole and plunge into the depths below.

  Marcus, who was a photo enthusiast, showed us how the white, endless background made it possible to take bizarre photos. He sat Leah and me on the ground, each of us with one hand stretched out flat to the side, and had Katrina and CJ stand twenty yards behind us. The photo looked as if Katrina and CJ were miniature people standing on our hands. Even the music was good. Marcus played a retro playlist from the seventies and eighties, which gave us a surreal soundtrack as we cruised across the flat white salt desert.

  We spent the night in a salt lodge—a building literally constructed from salt: salt bricks for walls and salt pebbles on the floor. The white hue and the frigid temperature made it feel like we were in a large snow fort. The food was good and plentiful, rendering all our junk food unnecessary. In the morning, Marcus drove us eastward from the salt flats into a different kind of desert, more like the American Southwest. Occasionally we passed through green fields crisscrossed with streams running out of the mountains; often there were llamas grazing in these grassy areas. As we passed through one field full of llamas, CJ exclaimed, “Can we stop here and walk into the pasture?”

  “It’s going to be wet and full of llama poop,” Marcus answered.

  “That’s okay,” CJ assured him. “I need a selfie with a llama.”

  “If you step in llama shit, you’re not getting back in the jeep,” Katrina warned.

  Five minutes later, CJ came trundling back to the Land Cruiser. “Check it out!” he said, waving the image on his iPod: CJ smiling broadly next to a llama staring bemusedly into the camera. (CJ’s effort to take a selfie with a lion will be discussed in Chapter 15.)

  As we continued along, the vegetation gradually disappeared until there was not even the occasional cactus or scrub brush. CJ exclaimed repeatedly, “This is just like Mars!” It was unclear where CJ’s Mars experience had come from, but we agreed that the terrain was unlike anything we had seen on Earth. There were vast open expanses with strange-colored lakes, curious shades of reds and greens and pinks, as if a young child had decided to color the landscape with the crayons that don’t often get taken out of the box: “green tomato” and “cotton candy” and “pomegranate.” Just when the colors could not get any more incongruous, we came across a large flock of flamingos gathered on a red lake, adding bright pink and watermelon-red to the palette.

  We finished the second day at a bizarre field of geysers, with boiling gray mud and steam shooting out of gaps in the earth, as if we had stepped onto the set of a Star Wars film. CJ posed for a photo in front of a huge cloud of steam spewing from the ground. He bent over and positioned himself so that the photo made it look like the stream of gas was shooting from his rear end. This was my idea.

  We had been steadily gaining altitude. La Paz was at ten thousand feet; Uyuni was at twelve thousand feet. The lodge where we would spend the night was at over fifteen thousand feet—nearly three miles above sea level. We enjoyed a glorious sunset over one of the red-hued lakes, mountains in the background. The lodge had electricity and bathrooms but no heat. After sunset, the temperature began to fall
about ten degrees an hour. Our strategy for the cold was to sleep in our clothes. I took off my shoes, put on a hat, and climbed into a sleeping bag, which I then covered with layers of blankets. Eventually my shivering gave way to sleep, but then the altitude presented a different challenge. I woke up three times to go to the bathroom, stumbling through the dark and cold each time.* On the positive side, I was cured forever of any urge to climb Mount Everest.

  The trek finished with a drive through a tableau that looked like a Salvador Dalí painting: misshapen boulders the size of small houses; curious shadows cast on the sand and rock; more lonely colors from the crayon box. We bade farewell to Marcus and paid our export tax to leave Bolivia—because the $160 visa fee we had paid on arrival was apparently not enough. After walking across the border into Chile, we caught a bus to the small town of San Pedro. The roads were noticeably better in Chile, which was a mixed blessing. I found myself nostalgic for giant potholes—nature’s speed bumps—as our bus barreled at a crazy speed downhill out of the mountains. The driver crossed himself every time he swerved into the opposite lane to overtake a car or another bus.

  In San Pedro, we had a nice meal at a restaurant with good Internet, which we all seized on ravenously. When I checked e-mail, I learned that I had sold the Czech-language rights for one of my books. When a book is published in a foreign language, the foreign publisher typically pays an advance against royalties for the books that will be sold in that language. Czechoslovakia is a small country; the advance the publisher had offered was correspondingly small—but still an unexpected windfall. “I can add this to my fun money,” I declared.