Asuncion / Going Home
The guide book I picked up at The Strand includes every country in
South America. Naturally, some countries warrant more page space than
others. They have more attractions, say, or are simply bigger.
Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru. Those're all in the 200+
page range. The whole book is well over a thousand.
Paraguay, by contrast, warrants 27 pages. The entire country, in 27
pages! I think the Falkland Islands get more pages than that. Hell,
there're cities in this book that get more pages than that. Lots of
them.
Each country in the book gets an introductory page brimming with gushy
remarks about the soaring peaks, beautiful wildlife, awesome night
life, ancient ruins, exotic cultures, etc. The page for Paraguay is
only half full. The only real positive the authors could drum up is
that the people are "very friendly."
Even though I'd managed to find a little excitement in CDE, it's true,
I think, that the country is pretty sleepy. In Asuncion, I'd walk home
at night and in half an hour, across "downtown," I'd see maybe three
cars or motorcycles, two people. This is true even on a Friday or
Saturday night. Cats sit in the middle of roads, cozy on the warm
asphalt. (Why not? It'll probably be twenty minute before a car comes
by.)
I spent four nights there. I was the only person in the theatre for
Revolutionary Road. I watched the new Terminator movie entirely in
Spanish, without subtitles. I think I followed the basic plot just
fine: Christian Bale's grunts are a universal language. I hit the gym
in the mornings, drawing strange looks for doing 50 pull-ups, 50 dips,
200 squats -- and then collapsing onto the floor, moaning. The
CrossFit sessions were invariably followed by ice cream with dulce de
leche on top.
Friday night, I hit up what is probably Asuncion's only gay and tranny
bar. The place is called TRAUMA and feels so much like the clubs on
the fringe of North Beach and Chinatown in San Francisco in the
mid-90s. (I'm thinking of one in particular, a place called
Palladium.) I think it was the music, mostly, that gave it that feel:
EBTG's "Missing," Ce Ce Peniston's supremely queeny club hit
"Finally," and then blowing up the dance floor with Deee-lite's
"Groove is in the Heart." Probably 20 gay men per 1 t-girl. They were
a fun, ridiculous bunch. Much less drab than most Paraguayans I'd met
previously.
Between the central part of town and my hostal is an area full of
strolls. Clumps of girls and t-girls, and then creepy solitary Johns
casting wayward glances. Every night it was something different. One
night, a cat fight that ended up with someones shirt getting torn off,
revealing pubescent-looking breast buds. (It left me wondering: if you
supplement enough exogenous estrogen, your secondary sex
characteristic development should follow, at least haphazardly, a
normal sort of pubertial course? Tanner staging? Despite the copious
endogenous testosterone naturally present in these adult bio-men?)
Another night, a transwoman grabbing my crotch right on the street
corner, in front of a cop, in a desperate bid to get me to spend an
hour with her in the Sheikh Hotel. (USD$20 for her services,
"completo," plus USD$4 for the room for an hour.) That made me giggle
since I'd walked by that hotel during the day and imagined it a very
dour place with women in hijabs. Hah.
Asuncion IS pretty sleepy, but I still found enough there to keep me
busy for a few days.
I'm now in Sao Paulo -- legally since I'm inside the airport, in
transit -- and on my way home.
I'm quite happy to be coming home.
In the last year and a half, I spent three contiguous months in New
York City. Other than that, I haven't been in one spot longer than six
weeks. I'm feeling a very strong inclination to nest a bit, to stop
living out of a suitcase or backpack. My own stuff, my own messes. I
can hardly wait.
Ciudad del Este / Borders / Black Markets
From Argentina, my next step was to be a border town in Paraguay
called Ciudad del Este. From there I planned to travel back to
Asuncion, the capital, and then catch my flight home.
CDE made the list of places to see because it has popped up in the
news, off and on, as a concern for American law enforcement. The
tri-border area has been a smuggling hub since the mid-1960s with the
opening of the Friendship Bridge, directly connecting the Paraguayan
city of Ciudad del Este with the Brazilian city of Foz do Iguacu.
Supposedly the vast majority of all imports and exports of Paraguay
pass over this bridge. Since 1991, this flow has been augmented by the
MercoSur regional trade agreement between the three countries
mentioned and Uruguay. It is currently the third largest tax-free
commerce zone in the world after Hong Kong and Miami. Half the city is
a shopping mall: junk shops with knock-off electronics, jewelry,
clothes.
CDE pops up in the US news because our Southern border is porous and
vulnerable, and because, in a throw-back to the Monroe Doctrine, Latin
America feels like our backyard. There is, you see, a fairly large
Muslim community in CDE. And there is, these days, some speculation
that not only is money being funnelled from CDE to terrorist
organizations, but maybe there are Al Qaeda operatives there and
training camps in the jungles nearby, etc. (And lions and tigers and
bears! Oh my!) I don't recall any of the articles mentioning any proof
of those claims. The most tangible evidence I recall on this topic
comes from a mid-90s bombing of a Jewish center in Argentina. Eighty
four dead, hundreds injured, executed by bombers who entered through
the triple border area, supposedly part of Hezbollah, ergo supposedly
backed by Iran, etc.
Of course, as a consummate outsider all of that would be off-limits
and likely wholly invisible to me. I figured, though, that I could get
some kebabs or a shawarma.
So, off to CDE. Unfortunately, the easiest way to get there from
Puerto Iguazu, in Argentina, is to cut through Brazil and then cross
the aforementioned Friendship Bridge right into downtown CDE. Easy, if
not for the USD$135 visa requirement for Americans.
A note on borders: Borders are a sort of fiction. We draw them on maps
and talk about them as if they're impenetrable walls through which
even ideas and languages might struggle to pass. They're not. They're
an artifice, a fanciful construction given weight and import by people
who believe in them. For people who LIVE on them, they're a part of
daily life, often crossed without a thought.
The Somalis of eastern Ethiopia are separated from the Somalis of
Somalia by a border. A serious, somber border, given the bad blood
between those two countries. That border is a piece of rope, fraying
in the heat, strung between two little posts in a no man's land
stretch of plastic trash and dust. You can hardly even find the
'immigration' offices on each side and there might not be anyone there
once you do.
How many Pashtuns give a shit about the Durand Line? 'Given weight and
import by the people who believe in them.' That the US military stops
pursuit of militants when they reach that border, sensitive to
political concerns with the Pakistani government, has given that line
a power that it hasn't had in years. That's true both for the military
and the militants. But without that, without the rules of engagement
changing when a line on a map is crossed, who even would've noticed?
Anyway, with this sort of garbage rational in mind, and with those
famous last words -- 'What's the worst that could happen?' -- echoing
in my head, I decided to go for it. I took a public bus to the border
and got my Argentina exit stamp. I chatted with some Brazilian guys as
we passed Brazil's immigration control and then, just like that, I was
in Brazil. A few hours later, I strode past Brazil's other immigration
control -- head up, look purposeful, stride, don't stop -- and walked
right into Paraguay.
I crossed the Friendship Bridge alone at night with my small backpack
slung over my shoulder. After all the news articles, I felt like I was
walking straight into a 'wretched hive of scum and villainy.' It
would've been pretty easy for someone, or a pair of people, to toss me
over the edge, 50m down into the river. A few minutes earlier, a fat
Brazilian woman had told me not to cross the bridge at night because
of how dangerous it. She pointed a finger at her temple like it was a
gun. BANG! She hadn't made any sound, but she didn't need to. (I
wonder, in retrospect, what the onomatopoeia for a gunshot is in
Spanish or in Portuguese? I'm delighted that chickens, in different
languages, make sounds from cockadoodledoo, to cucucaru, to pio pio.)
I thought about her warning as I walked. I can hardly believe I
haven't been mugged yet. I take all of these careful precautions.
Strong body language, no pausing, no guide books or maps, backpack
small enough that I can still sprint, minimal showing of
money/affluence, stay near other people, avoid groups of young men,
look just unstable enough to not be worth it, lock taxi doors, get out
with all my stuff before paying, the more suspicious someone seems the
quicker I need to befriend them, share, talk, seem human, empathize.
Blah blah. The list goes on. Still, it's bound to happen eventually.
It feels a little like virginity: 'It probably won't be a big deal
but, c'mon! Get it over with already!' At this point it's the sword of
Damocles. I've walked through all sorts of shitty places alone -- not
just Bed-Stuy at night, Billy Joel. What's the universe waiting for?
The next morning, with the city seeming far less sinister in the
daylight, I walked around the markets for a few hours. I noticed pairs
and groups speaking Arabic but didn't find any kebab shops. I asked a
woman how to say "mosque" in Spanish but the best should could offer
was "church (iglesia) for Muslims."
At one point, my head thick with thoughts of smugglers and black
markets and terrorists, I asked a man selling air rifles if you could
buy real guns in CDE.
"Further down," he said. "In front of the Chinese restaurant."
I went. One contact handed me off to another, who nodded into a crowd
from which two men emerged.
They stood too close to me. "What're you looking for?"
Only pistols, I said. "What calibre? 9mm?"
I haven't seen a single person in South America, police or military or
otherwise, carrying anything larger than 9mm. Often the police here
are armed with .380 revolvers. I decided to push a little and see if
anything larger was available. I asked if they had .45s.
"No problem. What brand? Colt? Come with us. We'll take you to the
black market right now. You can ride on the back of my motorcycle."
Fuck. I felt a brief moment of shock. I hadn't expected things to move
this fast. There was no way I was getting on the back of some shady
guy's motorcycle, him thinking I had money and reason to buy pistols,
and letting him drive me around Ciudad del Este to some unknown
location. That's not just a good way to end up mugged; it might even
be a decent way to end up dead.
Unfortunately, I think my surprise show in my body language. One of
the men immediately offered, instead, to conduct business in a
restaurant. "Very relaxed, safe," he said.
Mentally, I was already back-pedaling. I nodded as sagaciously as I
could manage and told him I understood. I said I had to speak with my
friend (male -- thank you, Spanish, for letting me say that without
saying it) who was waiting for me Right Now. I looked at my watch and
said I'd return in an hour, to this spot, and talk to the guy with the
red hat again.
I walked away.
One of the two men followed me for the first five minutes or so. I
confronted him and told him I'd return in an hour and reminded him
that I had to talk with my friend first, "ALONE." He agreed, again,
and asked if I wanted any cocaine as well? I walked to one of the
Paraguayan military outposts a few hundred meters away and talked with
the highest ranking person I could see outside. I wanted to be seen
talking with him. I spent the next half an hour changing directions,
cutting through buildings, doubling back, going through bottle-neck
areas and then waiting, hidden, to see if anyone followed.
I never went back by the Chinese restaurant.
A few hours later, I grabbed the last seat on a bus on its way out of town.
Argentina and Iguazu
I spent a few days in Salta, Argentina, after I left Chile. I didn't
do much there except relax and try to take better care of myself. More
sleep, some strength training at a nearby gym, better food. I watched
Mark Rippetoe's videos on YouTube about the back squat and tried to
apply what I learned as tweaks on how I've been squatting, on and off,
for the last decade. Rotating my pelvis made an enormous difference
and I was hardly able to walk afterward, despite using less weight
than last week.
Mostly, though, I struggled to fill my days. For different people this
is either a really great thing or a really terrible thing. I don't
like it much. Breakdancers in the park, some movies, ridiculous
amounts of walking. I went to a lovely dance and acrobatic performance
one night and fell in love with one musculed Argentinian girl after
another.
Twenty five hours on a bus put me in a small town called Puerto
Iguazu. It's in the triborder area, where Argentina, Brazil, and
Paraguay touch. The nearby Iguazu falls are visible up close from the
Argentine side and in panorama from the Brazilian side. That a
Brazilian visa for an American costs USD$135 decided that for me.
There'd been rumors swirling about how a drought reduced the flow over
the falls to a meager 900 cubic meters per second. The normal flow is
about 1200 m/s, tenfold in the rainy season. "Under 900 m/s isn't
worth going," I'd been told. I'd seen photos from a month ago and it
looked, truly, like it wasn't worth going at all: little wisps of
water, tumbling over a dry, dirt cliff. In Salta, I googled up a web
site run by the Brazilian government with hourly flow data. 1200 m/s
one day, down in the 900s the next, then the 600s, then back up. The
flow changes so quickly that a photo from a month ago turned out to
mean nothing.
The Argentine park is nicely arranged and clean. On a Wednesday
afternoon, it was nearly deserted. The piece de resistance of the
whole splashy mess is an area called Garganta del Diablo, the Devil's
Throat. I had big plans to take some excellent photos. Foreground
objects to give scale, panoramic expanses, rainbows in the mist from
the water breaking, perhaps some birds in silhouette flying over the
falls to draw the eye.
Nothing went as planned. The catwalks above Garganta del Diablo were
so wet with spray that within seconds the camera was soaked, dripping
water off the bottom of the lense, with me tucking it under my shirt
and running back the other direction to pat it dry before the seals
gave and the whole thing short circuited. I didn't want to eat $1000
for a picture of a waterfall and so that was the end of that. The
whole Iguazu expanse is about 4 km wide, so there were plenty of
other, less spectacular waterfalls to photograph.
I probably only spent a few hours in the park, all told, before I left
for the border.
Reflections On Learning Spanish
I really wish I could flirt in Spanish! Eres como el aire... Flirting
and innuendo are pretty advanced, nuanced parts of language. I suspect
that's all quite a ways off, unfortunately. Si tu cocinas como
caminas, ¡quiero comer las migajas... Hahaha... ¿Carino? ¿Cómo se
llama lo que estamos haciendo? I could learn as I go. I could just cop
lines from Neruda, but it's too flowery (no pun intended): Me traes
madreselvas y tienes hasta los senos perfumados... Maybe not. Eres tan
bonita desnuda. Me pones nervioso! You make me nervous!
I also find it pretty ridiculous that I don't even use foundational
verbs like "hacer" (to do, to make) but I know gaggles of ridiculous,
nearly useless words. I know grio (grasshopper), hormiga (ant), mamut
(mammoth -- they don't even exist anymore!), musselman (Muslim),
suegra (mother-in-law), globos (balloons), poligono de tiro (shooting
range), ombligo (bellybutton), lenceria (lingerie), porta liga (garter
belt). For hula hoop, people just say "hula," or describe it as a un
aro plástico tubular -- a plastic tubular hoop. Travesti is
transvestite, the same as in French.
I know how to say highway (carretera), street (calle), path/trail
(sendero, thanks Sendero Luminoso!), walkway (pasarela), and route
(ruta). I can say idiot, stupid, imbecile, dumb and insipid, when any
one would've sufficed. Philistine is filisteo. I know a word for small
rocks and pebbles (piedra), rocks too big to move by human power
(roca), and gigantic rock faces (penasco). Rocks! Worthless! I know
that I can properly use hoja for a leaf on a tree, a page in a book,
and the corn husks used to wrap tamales. I can say pencil (lapiz) and
pen (lapizero), but I also know pluma -- a word that describes a
fancy, calligraphy-style fountain pen. How useful is that?
I guess this is what happens when you learn things organically. Surely
if I was learning this language with some sort of method, I'd have, in
the name of efficiency, learned a single word for "rock" and then just
used modifiers for scale. I'd have learned "pen" and saved the brain
space that went to pencil and calligraphy pen.
It's pretty funny to sit back and look at this. This is, really, how
children learn language. In that sense, it's a wholly natural and
beautiful process. I happen to pick up "shooting range" where kids
pick up "playground," but the process is the same. I've picked up
"pues" as a hedging, filler word to start sentences as we use
"well..." in English. Tirar, to throw, is used for throwing a ball, but a gun also "throws" a bullet. It's also widely used as "to fuck," as in, "I want to (throw) Shakira." Cojer, to grab, is used for things like "grabbing" a taxi, but, again, is also used for fucking. "Look at him! I'd love to (grab) him." And "menos mal," literally "less bad," which is used as an exclamation like "thank god!" (Nevermind "dios mio!")
In all of this, I've probably picked up loads of things that're dead
wrong. At some point I "learned" that mosquito in Spanish was
"mosquitaro" -- but it's just "mosquito," without the funny Three
Musketeers flourish on the end. I still can't decide if "near here"
should be "cerca aqui" or "cerca de aqui." (If anyone knows, please
tell me! Now's the time to clean it up!) And I'm changing my mind
almost daily on what you can saber vs conocer, and tomar vs sacar. I
thought saber was all general knowledge (places, things) and conocer
was for people only, but now, hearing people use both, both ways, I'm
sensing that maybe saber is surface knowledge, and conocer is a more
familiar or intimate knowing? And tomar, to take, vs sacar, to take
(out of?). Tomar drinks and things off of tables, but sacar things out
of bags, and blood (OUT OF) your vein in the hospital. And sacar
photos, a hold-over, I imagined, from the days of removing a film
slide after each exposure, but now I hear people use tomar as well.
The nuances of things like "ambas" versus "los dos" are lost on me.
I'm loving it even though it feels like a slow process and even though
I think I'd benefit ENORMOUSLY from a formal Spanish class at some
point. There're big gaps. Big ones that I'm aware of, which suggests
that there're probably even bigger ones that I'm not yet aware of. I
haven't pinned down "this" and "that." I already admitted that I don't
use "hacer" even though, if pushed, I can spout off the
barely-irregular present tense verb forms. I presently ignore the past
tense (ha) except for "hace (un mes)," and "fue." I get pretty easily
thrown by different accents and regional variations: The Argentinians
substitute "vos" for "tu," seem to use "vo" like "de" (of/from) (?),
pronounce their double l's like "sh" instead of "yuh," say aca instead
of aqui (are these truly the same?), drop the "s" off the end of
almost everything, and sometimes drop the entire second half of words.
It took me days to sort it out and get back up to normal speed with my
comprehension.
Whew. That said, I am speaking more Spanish than when I started this
trip and that was one of the goals. I'm now at, let me think: Seven or
eight years ago, I went to Ecuador with Sadie speaking, essentially,
not a word of Spanish. After two weeks, she wrote down a handful of
pre-conjugated verbs for me on a piece of notebook paper and I struck
off on my own, traveling around the country for another two weeks. One
month. Over Christmas last year, I spent four weeks in Central
America. And then this trip, now, of five weeks total. So I'm at just
a hair over three months of immersion, zero classes, and spread out
over multiple years.
The good news is that I don't feel like I backslide at all. I pick up
right where I left off, every time, with zero loss in vocabulary or
grammar. Maybe in forty or fifty more years of occasional, short trips
in Latin America, I'll actually be fluent.
Tidbits 3
1) As I headed east through Peru, the elevation went up and the air
became both colder and more dry. My cuticles were taking a beating, a
few minor hangnails developing into painful crevasses of torn skin. In
a desperate bid to have any skin left on my fingers by the end of this
trip, I bought a small tin of lotion in La Paz and have been applying
it to all my fingers, from the PIP joints down, 2-5x per day.
It's worked even better than expected. Not only has the skin healed,
but the nails themselves seem healthier. The vertical ridges -- which
people had ascribed to everything from mineral deficiencies to
imbalanced chi to "some people are just like that" -- are
disappearing.
2) A few weeks ago, I went to a "botica" in La Paz to buy some
shampoo. The lady pointed to a shelf but all of the bottles were too
big to carry except for a little pink-capped, clear bottle of baby
shampoo. I grunted "gimme that one" and tossed it in my bag. I didn't
get a chance to use it until a week later, in Chile, after four days
without a shower while in the deserts of southwestern Bolivia.
I was so excited about that shower! I stepped into the hot water with
the bottle in hand and just stood there, sighing, enjoying the hot
water for a few minutes before I started washing my hair. The first
dollop of shampoo didn't lather well. My hair felt greasy after four
days without a shower. I added more. The baby shampoo, weakened, I
presumed, so it didn't sting the eyes, wasn't really up to the task.
The bottle was cheap, though, and I really wanted a great shower, so I
didn't care if I used half the bottle to get clean.
I sprayed from the bottle directly onto my head, wondering if this
worthless, latherless garbage was really even shampoo. At that point,
one of my hands brushed my shoulder. It felt oily.
I realized, instantly, my mistake. Looking down at the bottle and
READING IT for the first time ever, it said "Baby Aceite." Aceite: I'd
seen that word before and remembered. Baby oil. The bottle was now
half empty. In the end, I was barefoot, hobbling down a dirt road in a
Chilean village, after dark, covered in baby oil, looking for the
nearest store where I could buy some soap. So unimaginably dumb! I
couldn't stop laughing at how absurd the whole situation was.
3) I sat next to an English girl on a long bus ride who had a blister
pack of pills sitting on her lap. She told me she'd gone into a
pharmacy, told them she had a bit of a sore throat, and received a
pack of twelve 80/400 Bactrim tabs! Everything that's not a
"controlled" (scheduled) substance here is available over the counter.
Just ask. I asked her, a bit facetiously, if they mentioned how often
she'd have to take them, or for how long. Nobody had told her a thing
and she hadn't asked.
Salt Flats and the Bolivian Desert
I hopped on to a three-day tour of the "Salar de Uyuni" salt flats and
other sights in the deserts of southwestern Bolivia.
The entire first day of the tour was spent driving on the salt flats.
Cutting across, first this way and then that, in an old Toyota Land
Cruiser. There seems to be some effort to have "roads," with most
vehicles following the same paths. This helps with navigation, on a
landscape with little or no way markers, and with preserving the look
of the place so you can continue to draw tourists. There seems to be
little else in this entire corner of Bolivia, save these bits of
natural beauty.
The salt flats themselves are stunning and absolutely worth the money
and effort. They're the largest salt flats in the world, the result of
a gigantic lake draining some 40,000 years ago. There's hardly
anything to take photos of, as every direction is a burning expanse of
white leading to a fuzzy horizon. Of course, the lack of depth cues in
the landscape and an indistinct horizon line lend themselves nicely to
photos that taunt our depth perception. I tossed a few in the gallery.
In one spot, there's a hotel and restaurant where everything, from the
walls to the furniture, is made of blocks of salt cut out of the
earth. The result looks like adobe, only whiter. It's not, though,
anything like a "crystal palace." The architecture is still just a
series of shabby rectangles, slapped together, and the bricks, while
whiter than adobe, have a sort of dirty grayish tone.
There's also an island, ostensibly shaped like a fish to give it the
name "Isla del Pescado," which is covered in cactus from edge to edge.
From a distance, the salt formations at the edge of the "island" give
the effect of water lapping against its shores.
The second and third days were spent off the salt flats, further
south. Lagoons of different colors, some volcanoes, mountains colored
by mineral deposits, geysers of gurgling mud spewing their sulfuric
stench into the air, a few species of flamingos. Some of the other
tourists in my group were quite taken by these things, but I felt
somewhat underwhelmed. Of the twenty or so geyser pits, only one
releases steam in a concentrated jet -- and it's fake, created
artificially for photo ops. Further, the vividness of the colors of
the lakes changes by season, maybe by week or by day. If there's no
wind, the water is placid and its glassy surface reflects nearby
mountains beautifully (I'm told). If it's windy, as it was for us,
this effect is lost and you're left with a lagoon, surrounded by a
white shore of borax deposits, that just has a bit of a tint to it.
Pretty, but not stunning. The waters of Band-e-Amir, in the Hindu
Kush, are tenfold more visually striking.
A note on temperature: The Bolivian altiplano is cold. Every Bolivian
I talked to mentioned how cold it was, as did all the other tourists,
the guide books, the tour agencies, etc. I'd heard rumors that it
often dropped below zero, centigrade. One guy reported that he woke at
3am a few weeks earlier to find the thermometer was pegged in its
lowest position: -25 C. During the day, I wore a normal pair of socks,
a knee-high pair of knit socks over them, long thermal underwear under
my pants, a skin-tight long-sleeve base layer on top, two t-shirts, a
loose air-trapping long-sleeve layer, a third long-sleeve layer with a
faux turtle neck, my TNF waterproof shell, Marmot gloves, and a knit
hat with a polar fleece liner. At night, I went to sleep wearing all
of that, plus a fleece neck warmer, in a sleeping bag that I rented,
which was itself underneath the three or more heavy blankets provided
by the hostals we stayed in. I was warm enough, but only by a small
margin.
On the last day, we ended up at a small hot springs just below 5000m
elevation. It was intensely cold, of course, but the promise of the
steam rising off the water was too much. Smarter people had changed
into their swimsuits the night before; I stripped naked in the dirt,
put on the pair of underwear that most resembled shorts, and hopped
in. The feeling was glorious. I probably spent half an hour in there,
soaking, alternating between enjoying the heat and loathing what it'd
feel like to eventually get out.
When I finally did, I was pleasantly surprised. My body temperature
had increased enough while in the water that I felt like I had some
reserve heat. I took my time drying off, put my clothes back on layer
by layer, and found I was, in the end, far warmer than before I got in
the water. I was reminded, then, of being at a family reunion in
British Columbia, in a back yard hot tub, and jumping out of the tub,
racing up the snowy hill barefoot, rolling down it, and then jumping
back in the tub. If you're quick, you hardly feel it.
On whole, the area is awfully pretty and was a welcome respite after
spending a few days in La Paz, choking on exhaust fumes. If I had it
to do over again, I think I'd have done a one-day tour of the salt
flats alone, preferably on a cloudy day with a stunning sunrise and
sunset. There're hot air balloon "tours," or ascensions, available on
windless days, though I didn't realize this until later. That would be
a pretty stunning way to view the scenery there.
Since I was already within a few kilometers of the Chilean border, at
that point, I crossed over into Chile. This was supposed to be a
shortcut, avoiding a nine hour drive back north to Uyuni, where I'd
catch a bus south to Salta, Argentina. This almost ended up being a
disaster as the town in Chile, San Pedro de Atacama, was ridiculously
expensive and only had bus service out three times a week. Luckily, I
managed one of the last seats on a bus leaving a day later for Salta.
