4/17/06
TUPIZA, BOLIVIA

Mountain biking from La Cumbre (above La Paz) to Coroico (10,000 feet below) is practically mandatory for backpackers in Bolivia. It's done along an eye-popping, cliff-hugging dirt road that reportedly drops several buses a year. You get to wear an orange vest. A support van tags along with water and to catch the layers you end up shucking. At the bottom, in muggy ferns and Yungas forest, you can unhook your rattled hands from the brakes and go have a late lunch. Coroico is a getaway garden for rich people from La Paz. I spent the afternoon at the hotel pool and sauna, paying a decadent $13 for a big room with a private bath. This was easily rationalized; I forget how.

Bolivia is the poorest country in South America. Kids playing in rubble and dust will scamper up to beg for candy. Oruro, south of La Paz, is a mining city with a typically brutal backstory. It has some interesting statues of El Tío, the miner god/devil. With an infrastructure built for industry, I could finally take a train somewhere.

The altiplano gets flatter and colder further south, rails clicking away. I got off in Uyuni, which looks like nowhere. On the widest street, backpackers spread jam on bread at plastic tables, everyone a bit unsettled by the nothingness. I got to talking with an Aussie couple (Ricky and Lisa) and a Frenchwoman (Eugenie), and together we booked the salt flats tour. This is what you do in Uyuni: book the salt flats tour. Beforehand you can flip through comment books in the tourist office, comparing agencies and taking heed of complaints like "carbon monoxide poisoning," "driver asleep at wheel," and "glass in food."

A Portuguese couple joined us at the jeep the next morning, and we met our driver Valerio, his wife the cook, and the toddler Abel, who would spend the trip staring at us with enormous dark eyes while trying to fit both his hands in his mouth. With our gear tied on top we rode towards the Salar de Uyuni, the biggest salt flat in the world.

The salar at first looks like a vast white frozen lake. Then water starts spraying from the tires. With an inch of water on top, the salar is an endless mirror. It looks as if you're standing on sky. Distant blue mountains sit on perfect reflections, apparently bisecting a void.

After hours crossing the salar, we plowed up tire tracks in red dust. "Jeez it's desolate out here," said one of the Western Australians. We saw rock weathered into shapes like giant bones. We saw volcanoes and a sub-zero sunrise over steaming fumaroles, then we soaked in muddy hot springs. We saw lakes red with algae and with edges white-caked with sulphur, dotted pink with flamingos. The houses we slept in couldn't keep out the cold despite cardboard in the windows. One night I slept wearing my thermals, two pairs of wool socks, a fleece cap, a chamois shirt, jeans, a fleece top, a sleeping bag, and two blankets.

Numb-butted from three days in the jeep (and with inane cumbia music looping in our heads), we got back to Uyuni and the next morning loaded on a bus south and watched cacti pass by. At times the road was just a stony riverbed over which the bus lumbered and paused and lurched like a pack animal.

Tupiza is surrounded by multicolored canyons. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died near here. You can walk in pretty much any direction and find a good trail, or you can go on horseback. It's a landscape that improves with the clopping of hooves. My horse was afraid of steep parts, but I had better luck than an Israeli guy who turned out to be afraid of horses.

On Good Friday after dusk, the streets of Tupiza were full of a thousand-plus people, many campesinos from the sticks, shuffling behind a somber marching band and a shoulder-borne glass coffin carrying (I couldn't see, but it could only be) a statue of the dead Christ. A thousand-plus voices said the Lord's Prayer in a creepy, coming-from-everywhere murmur. In a living diorama to the side, two men dressed as Romans stood frozen in the act of pulling up a fallen man dressed as Jesus (drawn-on beard), all of them trembling to keep still. Soldiers brought up the rear of the procession, ominously pointing their rifles at everyone in front of them.

I went back to the Hotel Mitru and watched dubbed cartoons while starving something out of my stomach.