Travel Advisory

GROUP EMAIL- 06/07

My Dear Friends,

I am in Bolivia, in a mining town called Potosi, where supposedly some million slaves died. I'm a little hazy on the details as we only arrived last night at 1:30 in the morning, and have not yet ventured far from Hotel Jerusalem (?). So far I'm the only one awake. Celine Dion is playing on the radio. Boy that woman gets around!
Since I last wrote you I spent several days in a "wacky/nifty" town in Northern Argentina, called Salta. For a fuller description of this see my blog. We left Salta at 6 AM (every one's favourite time of day), and took a 10 hour bus ride to San Pedro, a small Chilean town on the edge of the desert. Incidentally I didn't even realize we were going to Chile, and was rather surprised when we arrived at the border, and waited two hours for some incomprehensible bureaucratic nonsense to take place so that we could enter the country, though we were only there one night.
San Pedro was actually fascinating in a dusty sort of way, not unlike the wild west as seen in movies. I imagine this is how Siem Reap, Cambodia, looked 15 years ago, before the best and worst of tourism got hold of it. But first thing the next morning we were back at the same miserable border crossing, and heading for Bolivia. The driver made some snide remark about the nice paved road between Argentina and Chile, and the dirt trek to the Bolivian office. Things just got better, as when we arrived B. (our guide) said not to let them search our bags because they routinely stole things while searching. The bathroom at the Bolivian border office is behind the truck. The desert, we were soon to learn, is one large communal toilet.

There is only so much I can communicate about the National Reserve, without the use of visuals. The itinerary says this is the driest place on earth (which is certainly how my skin feels), but B., who is so cynical it is almost endearing, says it may just be "up there". Funny how it all begins to run together in your mind: flat sand, sloping sand, blowing sand, red rock, white rock, brown rock, sandy rock, small spiky plants and giant cacti. We spent some time parked by a large dune where there were supposed to be small animals "sort of a cross between a rabbit and a squirrel", I never saw one, possibly because i could not visualize this combination.

Time passes. More time passes. Everything is beautiful and stark and perfect somehow. My eyes are on auto-pilot and there is a lot of time I can't quite account for, though I know I was not asleep. I was freezing, as the wind was really ferocious, and even in the trucks I somehow managed to sit away from the sun regardless what time it was or which direction we were heading.

More than half of us have fighting colds, altitude sickness, or some combination there of. However much you drink you are thirsty, but the more dehydrated you get the less you want to drink. My tongue feels like its burning. I use half a container of Bubble Gum Sugar Plum (I will never get this smell out of my nose) lipsol because every fifteen minutes they are starting to peel again. I have so many nosebleeds I lose count. I take about 200 hundred pictures.

We make a few stops each day (did i mention we did this for three days?), though most of the time we are eager to get back into the truck and away from the wind. We had two trucks, because B. thought we'd be too cramped in one, but the four blond girls (who call themselves the Barbies, and aren't exaggerating) insisted on sticking together, so it is only B., the driver, a very strange cook, and I in the second truck the first day; on the second, my roommate joined us, but she has had real trouble with altitude sickness, and slept most of the way.

The real adventure of all this, however, was our first night in the desert. We were staying in what is delicately called a Desert Lodge, (marketing for if you saw this in a city you would walk swiftly in the other direction). There was no hot water --sorry, there was no water most of the time-- and most of us refused to take our coats off inside, the rooms, it was so cold. By 8 o'clock it was pitch black and there really was nothing to do but go to bed (strange how tired you get just staring out a window).

We were all in one room, and the two pairs had pushed their beds together to conserve heat, as it was supposedly minus 26 C in the room. We were warned it would be difficult to sleep our first night at high altitude, but I managed to get to sleep quite quickly. For about an hour. C. who seems to be running (physically and mentally) have half speed since coming up here woke up and needed to go the bathroom, but couldn't find the door. When I took her to the door she somehow convinced herself we were locked in, and everything went rapidly downhill from there. S. (one of the British barbies) suddenly decided she was afraid of the dark, and her friend J. tried at great length to calm her down, while A., (a Danish Barbie) realized the reason we were locked in was because the people who owned the hostel were smuggling, and didn't want us to see. This seemed extremely unlikely to me, but I hadn't had anything to drink in about 6 hours and was fantasizing about my bottle of coke light across the room, which I was too dizzy to go and get. The bed was icy, and every time you moved you lost whatever bit of heat you had managed to generate. None of us knew what time it was, but it turned out we were not actually locked in, and things seemed to be calming down, when the knocking started.

By now we had been lying there at least five hours, (listening to S. and J. gossip) and everything was a little fuzzy, so I did what most people would do, I did nothing and hoped it sorted itself out. It did not. The knocking got louder and louder and I couldn't tell if the knocking was coming from B.'s room next door, or the front door. Then B. started shouting and swearing in Spanish, and I couldn't ignore it anymore. No one else in the room had spoken or moved, but I found my way to the door, thinking... I don't know what I was thinking, I had the worst headache I have ever had, so powerful I felt the top half of my brain was being beaten with a brick, and all I could think of was someone needed to open that door.

Fortunately when I got there I couldn't find the handle, and the others seemed to have realized I had just left, and started whispering hysterically for me to come back, which I did, and just then the lady who owned the place rushed to the door and let the men in. Back in our room the girls were nearly beside themselves with fear, all shouting out different instructions to me "Turn the light on!" "No, don't turn the light on they'll see us" "Did they see you?" "Go get B.!" "Get back into bed and pretend to be asleep!" As far as they were concerned I had interrupted some high-profile drug operation, and at any minute the bad men would come in and kill us. None of us slept the rest of the night.

B. came in to "wake us" the next morning, and the hysteria re-erupted. I had a nosebleed, and burst into tears (that happens to me when i don't sleep), and then C. (who seemed to have missed most of the excitement) sat up covered in feathers. How, and why she ended up covered in feathers has yet to be explained, as her pillow was intact, and her blanket was alpaca. Things seemed a whole lot funnier in the daytime, and I listened as the story was told over and over again, wondering how easily they dropped most of the fear in the re-telling.

The second night was less eventful.

I must run now, but have been dying to write this since the moment it happened. Tonight we take another night bus to La Paz, where we will be for three days. I hope you are all well and enjoying your summer weather (jealous!), be happy and--

"Don't worry guys-- this is character-building!" J.H

Love,

N.