4/5/06
LA PAZ, BOLIVIA

In my $1.25 room in Copacabana on Lake Titicaca, I woke up to drumming. March 23rd is El Día Del Mar, when Bolivians mourn the day, in 1884, that Chile made them a landlocked nation. Along the lakefront was a brassy parade with Uzi-toting sailors. Looking out over hundreds of bowler hats, the speaker began, Yet another year, with a pained heart...

Copacabana has the air of a beach town. Bob Marley plays out of waterfront cafes, and the sky is a piercing mix of blue and white; an impossible sky anywhere else. On the streets sit country women with fish and vegetables laid out on plastic. The cathedral is tiled and Moorish-looking, with a big courtyard and a waxy vault of candles. Out front on Sunday was the Blessing of the Automobiles. Cars lined the plaza decked in flowers; a monk prayed through them splashing holy water into the open hoods while another man swung a pungent brazier. Car owners laughingly christened their vehicles with liter bottles of soda (one local brand: "Sfru").

A hike and a motorboat away from Copa is Isla Del Sol, the Inca's humpbacked birthplace of the sun. It had some good walking, gorgeous views, and pesky kid-guides. It was too pretty an afternoon to do much, so I lounged outside with backpackers-- one Canadian, one British, one Pole, one German, one Swiss, one American, and me-- eating plates of trout and rice. Eventually a couple of us slopped down through the terraced fields to swim in the lake, which was, of course, shriekingly cold.

A couple days later from a rainy crossroads near Copa, the Brit and I crammed onto a bus that threw us back and forth crawling up a lumpy wet road. Sorata is a foggy village nestled between mountains-- good hiking. We stayed in a rambling, high-ceilinged, gone-to-seed mansion with Escher-like stairways around gardens with parrots. Dusty magazines from the '60s sat in the parlors.

Afterwards, we traveled south and up to La Paz. La Paz is the highest capital in the world. Approaching it through the slums that rim the valley, the roads are just gutted dirt. Buses sometimes have to back up and search for another way down, like when they're stopped by rock-throwing blockades of van drivers. La Paz proper covers the valley floor. It's a hive of modern capitalism mixed with campesino life, where women twist spiked heels on cobbled streets. Around the alley from our hostel, there are racks of dried llama fetuses and other traditional Aymara medicine, but a few minutes away is Burger King. It's probably one of the few cities in the world where, from the relative glitz at its center, you look up (way up, in this case) to see the poor neighborhoods.

Cheap meals are salteñas (hot stuffed pastries) sold from food carts where you can stand spooning on different sauces as you eat. Shoeshiners wear ski masks and low-pulled ball caps-- they look like robbers. If you're taking a hot shower in La Paz, you're under an electric crockpot/showerhead contraption with taped wires coming out of it (best not to worry about this). One night from the roof I watched the most amazing thunderstorm I've ever seen-- cloud-to-cloud bolts cracking the sky every three or four seconds. La Paz, so far, is my favorite South American capital.

The Brit and I day-tripped to Tiwanaku, a badly-managed monumental site on the southwestern shores of Lake Titicaca. It's hugely important-- the Incas derived a lot from this culture-- but I walked away sick at the money-grubbing guards and the haphazard reconstructions. What can you do. Back to La Paz, where we ate burgers at a restaurant wall-to-wall with young Israelis.

Travel can make you feel so giddy and bulletproof that you jump into something that you have no business doing, like attempting the summit on a 20,000-foot mountain.* Huayna Potosí stands over La Paz in the jagged Cordillera Real. We bumped by Land Rover up to its shoulders-- four nice Swiss people, three guides, and I. On a steep glacier we practiced with crampons and ice axes, then tried to eat hot soup in a cold cabin decorated with climbing stickers and antlers. Sleet blew outside.

At that altitude, you're like one of those deep-sea fish that slowly explodes when brought to the surface. Your head hurts, your eyes redden, your throat is parched, you wake up with panicked lungs, your stomach doesn't work. You can force food down and be sick, or not eat and be weak. On the mountain my body kept crashing, and I kept trying to eat chocolate-covered peanuts that my mouth didn't recognize as food. It was an act of will just to chew them.

It takes two days to get up the mountain, not including that preliminary day of training and (attempted) acclimatization. The next day was hard enough, a head-spinning plod up rocks and more rocks. I couldn't eat dinner afterwards and formed grave doubts about summiting. We sardined in a drippy tin hut and tried to get some sleep before midnight. At 11:30pm Lorenzo and Luís and Choco were already boiling water for coca tea. Time to go. We got our gear together, crashing about in the sweeping flashes of headlamps, and made outside and started up the snow.

You can't see ridges, just ascending sheets of gray in the headlamps. Overhead, perfect stars. I started out feeling okay, then badly, and then each step was a commitment to further suffering. You trudge around gloomy crevasses. Now and then you have to wrench the frozen rope on your axe into a usable shape. When a boot scoops backwards you try to brace yourself, but the axe handle just punctures the snow and puts you on your knuckles. Rests are collapses.

After nearly six hours of this comes the final climb, and it's enormous. You hug the mountain with your axe, lungs crushing your heart with rapid gasps. Between efforts all you can do is sag against the snow; nothing left. A little more, Luís is saying at the top of the rope. Like hell, you think.

Then, hanging with the top in sight, you choke your breathing back and crawl up floundering and somehow stand up, hit with blindingly beautiful views and endorphins and relief and utter surprise. I nearly fell right down the other side. Sit down, Luís advised.

After a day like that, you can deposit yourself on a park bench in La Paz and not want for a thing.

*Huayna Potosí is actually 19,974 feet, but I don't care and I'm rounding up.

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.

4/29/06
MERCEDES, ARGENTINA

Off the train in Villazón, Bolivia, you lug past stalls of oddly priced (smuggled) goods and across a concrete bridge to Argentina, where a sign informs you that the Falkland Islands belong to Argentina. The line for customs slouches along railings and luggage, unmoving. I got waved through.

I bused from the border at La Quiaca down to Tilcara, a red-rock town with pre-Inca ruins overlooking cacti and poplars. Bolivia was definitely behind me. No more pigs grazing in the streets, no more cracking my head on doorjams, no more Aymara grandmothers in bunches of skirts, bleahing a frog-sized cud of coca into a hand to drop in the weeds. Here I gaped at the modernity, at the flamboyant, too-fast-talking Argentines with their European looks. Cafes serve twee pastries on little plates, and it's impossible to eat dinner before 8pm. This drives me nuts; I walk around with my stomach growling.

I spent a couple days in the canyons and went south on a nice-smelling omníbus, watching the desert get greener around each turn. Down in darkly forested hills is Salta, beautiful and with big parks. The next day, lower still, was Resistencia, a drab grid with overrated public sculptures. For dinner I found a packet of cold cuts, two croissants, and a yogurt-- this was the best I could do. I slept in a stained square of a room and couldn't wait to leave. Stupid Argentina. It's like they have some nationally agreed-upon eating disorder.

San Ignacio, the next evening, happened to be having a motorcycle festival. The town screamed like it was being taken apart by chainsaws. I humped my pack all over the place, but there wasn't a bed to be had anywhere. After peering through the gate at the Jesuit ruins (fallen red sandstone half-lit from streetlamps), I sat on the church curb and drank grapefruit soda while bikers did wheelies down the street. I was stuck. Being stuck is perversely gratifying, as you have to put the guidebook away and wring your brain. I can sleep in the park! you think. Wait. No. I caught a late bus back to Posadas.

Posadas has a sunny, palm-treed esplanade along the Río Paraná, great for strolling, people-watching, and drinking banana-with-milks. Across the water stands Encarnación, Paraguay, looking surprisingly attractive. No time, no time.

The biggest attraction in northeastern Argentina-- and in the southern neck of Brazil-- is Iguazú Falls. Tourists come from everywhere. An open-air train scatters puffs of yellow butterflies, making Japanese tour groups sing, "AaaAAAaa!" in appreciation. The park is Disney-like, though if you wake up early you can have the little-trod rainforest path to yourself. Birds titter, mammals jog into the underbrush. A pair of monkeys (a mother with a kid on her back) and I stared at each other for a long time in primate-to-primate curiosity.

The falls-- seen via stairs and catwalks-- nearly push you over with noise. Dozens of falls explode down basalt cliffs and subtropical rainforest, fuming in a huge maelstrom that partially whites out Brazil. Beautiful.

From Iguazú to Corrientes and south, it's gaucho county: grassy plains with cattle and a few clumps of palm trees. Moving fast now, with mornings getting progressively more disorienting-- where is this?

The bus to Colonia Pellegrini was a slow old hulk. The door banged on the end of a rope tied to the driver's seat. The ticket guy sat jostling on the engine housing with a thermos in the crook of his arm, passing a mug of maté between the driver and a couple associated guys (mechanics? backup drivers?), each of whom sucked his cheeks in on the metal strainer-straw in the mulch. This is what people do here: drink maté, the way chain-smokers smoke cigarettes.

You can't look forever at a red dirt road through grasslands, so I read my book. When the driver cut the engine I looked up to see a herd of cattle parting around the bus, gauchos hooting and waving to us and slapping whips from side to side. Later, some rheas ran off. Capybara trotted by in the headlights. Then a tire blew, and the four guys changed it laughing while the Milky Way came out.

In the Reserva Provincial Esteros del Iberá, Colonia Pellegrini is mosquitos, a few lodges, and a dog sleeping in the middle of the road. The boatman Emilio motored two Slovaks and me into the wetlands, poling the boat through lily pads and startling herons gawkily into the air. I'd made the trip determined to see capybara (world's biggest rodent), and we saw dozens; wet lummoxes browsing on aquatic plants while yellow birds hopped around on their backs. Down low and heating in the sun, black caimans seethed in their armor.

After a head-turning three hours on the water, Milos and Pieter and I walked in the forest under howler monkeys, who drooped and crashed and crawled on bobbing branches. We quickly saw to stay out from underneath the black one. Howler monkeys are really hard to photograph, as opposed to caimans who just lie there hissing at you.

The lodge staff (who incidentally warned us to shut our doors so the poison frogs don't get in) fed us a gaucho breakfast for dinner; a pile of meat and gravy-paste that grew heavier with every forkload. Ugggh. Later we found a bar, of sorts, where we met an actual gaucho, there with his kid son and a hat and the biggest grin in the world. We didn't ask about the food. His donkey kept putting its head inside the window until a kid whopped it on the nose.

In the morning, south. I was the sole passenger on the bus back to Mercedes, a heap that blew two tires, and began my last week in South America.

5/5/06
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

I went to Uruguay. Across cattle country on a double-decker bus I sat next to two accordion players who'd just met and were discussing technique, passing a red Scandali accordion back and forth and pulling out weeping, jaunty music as the cows sailed by.

Crossing the border-- which I had to do by taxi, from Concordia to Salto-- you have to wipe your feet in a solution that kills foot-and-mouth disease. Apparently the virus tanked the economy a few years back.

I had only a few days for Uruguay, not quite long enough to get over the amusement of being there-- Uruguay. What I saw was sleepy and charming-- friendly people carrying maté, wind in the maples by the river, leaves crunching around your feet. For some reason I hadn't thought that this year I'd be getting not only two summers, but two autumns.

Particularly nice was Colonia del Sacramento, a cobbled 17th-century Portuguese port where your only concern might be when the sunlight on the pink stucco will be at its ripest. You can doze off on the pier over lapping brown water, listening to the clunk and flap of a guy painting his sailboat, to gulls, and to the languages of tourists. I borrowed a bike and squeaked it alongside miles of sand and reeds. I ate chivito, thin steak piled with stuff and toothpicked into a hamburger bun. Pretty good.

The ferry across the mouth of the Río Plata goes at night, taking a couple of hours. You travel sealed in a spacious interior that could be a hotel lobby except for the constant thrumming of engines. The lights of Buenos Aires climb higher and higher outside, and the anticipation in the boat heightens as people rally by the doors. For me, it meant closing a loop. Passport stamped, I was off into the city, into eight lanes of zooming traffic, giant advertising, massive plazas, fancy towers raked with spotlights, and snappy dressers with fashion-magazine hair. Buenos Aires looks more extravagant to me today than in November. It's a metropolis for gorging on parrilla (barbecue) at joints howling at the Copa Libertadores game on TV, for shopping, getting lost on herringboned cobbled streets, looking for Evita Peron's grave, and at sunrise watching the foot traffic change over from danced-out clubbers to pigeons and people going to work. I'm not sure when people sleep here.

And today, after all that, it's May 5th. I'm bewildered that it's actually the end of the trip. The calendar doesn't mean a whole lot while traveling-- it seems like years ago that I was in Ushuaia. Now I'll be going back to where I understand can understand the language without squinting.

The backpack has held tight through six months of weather, strained seams, and transport-related roughhousing. I'll be glad to unstuff it without having to restuff it (dirty clothes, swapped paperbacks, sunblock, maps, iPod, camp towel, spoon, battery chargers, boots, heel-crack lotion, camera, hammock, breakable souvenirs, photo CDs, rope, Spanish toothpaste), and I'll store it away probably missing the simplicity.

Tonight I fly to Dulles International, then Denver, then Phoenix. I'll visit Flagstaff for a while and then get back to Portland on May 11th. It'll be great to see people, also to have more than two pairs of pants. Good trip.

Salud,
Mike