Moonscapes

As I've said, the Antiplano brings things back. The three Brits (well, two Brits and one crazy bitch Canadian who thinks radio waves are fucking with bees) I met on the bus to Potosi who went their own way were here on my bus to Uyuni, somewhere near the back. Next to me was a professor from Estonia. Despite no contact during the ride, they hooked up upon arrival, and I stayed on my own. And yet, forces conspired to prevent me from staying lone wolf.

I find them on the street the next morning, and a brief chat confirms we've booked our salt flat tours with two separate companies. We separate again, only until evening, when they come into the pizza place I'm eating. They check the prices and walk. Later, when I'm combing town to find a place I can use Skype, I accidentally wander into the pizza place they settled on. Only an hour later, I'm sitting in an internet cafe, and they come in. Turns out they cant burn a CD and leave. Turns out the owner is a douchebag and I leave. I go to a new internet cafe, and they find me 5 minutes later.

Nothing here too surprising, it's a small town after all. What gets me is when I find out the next morning that the company I booked with overbooked, and they booted me to a different company, one of the 60 other operating in town. The owner leads me to a jeep around the corner, and there they are, waiting for me.

First stop is the Cemetary of Trains outside of town, where old gutted locomotives ceremonially were left to rot and rust. Is it a museum? A rememberance of a steam-powered past? No, just a giant free-form tetnusy playground. Kids of all ages jumped and climbed and threatened to break their joints.

Oh, and I found one of the women from my hostel in Quito there, another tourist in the 20+ jeeps flooding the road.

Next was the Salt Museum... again, not a museum. See the world's largest llama!... made of carved salt! Keeping it company in a dingy shack was a salt bird, salt armadillo, and salt man on his hands and knees in a 'sodomize me!' position. This trip was getting surreal before the trippy part even started.

Finally, the salt flats. Miles of hard white crust blinding you for miles in every direction. It sears your eyes, and when you close them, all you can see is vivid green behind your lids. The dried lakebed is so vast, it takes 2 hours to drive across. Some parts are covered in a thin layer of rainwater, just inches thick, unable to soak or permiate the salt beneath. It turns the lake into a giant mirror, reflecting the ring of mountains surrounding the lake and the clouds above.

In the middle of this vast empty is the oddly, possibly ironically named Fish Island. This giant fossilzed coral reef is paradise. Huge ancient cactuses, dopplegangers of saguaros and organ pipes, most dotted with big white flowers, make the island look like a slice of the best of Arizona. From the top, you can soak in the giant mirror in 360 degrees while swallows and dragonflies strafe your head. It's a lush, barren, beautiful place. On the ground, people mingled, goofed around, played with perspective photography, and celebrated existence on the salt. It looked and felt alot like Burning Man, the massive desert festival who's scope still eludes my writing. No fuzzy hats pants here, or buses tricked out to look like pirate ship, or ubiquitous drug use, but the fundamental feeling of youthful exhuberance and simple joy at merely being here to be here was the same. This feeling, combined with the surreal, sharp, serene beauty, makes Fish Island one of my new favorite spots in the world.

Driving on, and off the salt, we found rare wild vicuñas (wild dwarf llamas, looking like a cross between deer and camels) and rheas (like ostrichs) on the way to Galaxy Cavern, a small cavity in the earth made from fossilized algae, leaving a fantastic delicate latticework of rock. Though it was more touristy and lacked the feeling, the glow from before was still with me.

We bunked for the night in a small village in the middle of the desert. Food, as is surprisingly par for all my tours so far in South America, was delicious. No tarantulas that night though, virtually no nightlife at all. The one black spot on an otherwise perfect day.

The second day of a tour typically lacks some of the spark of the first, not to say it wasnt exceptional. Bizarre rock formations, inexplicable monoliths, and and generally martian moonscapes lay sprawled at our feet. If you walk far enough away from the multitude of other jeeps and their loud obnoxious (usually British) tourists, you can still manage to find a niche of peace in the quiet.

Or, blazing through an endless diorama of mountains and deserts, blasting music in your ears, singing in your head (and maybe out loud) with your body leaning halfway out the window into the dry stinging wind, you can find peace there too.

The highlight of the second day was a series of lagoons and their hefty stock of flamingos. These birds continued to wade in their salty conductive water as thunderstorms approached. I was busy stalking vicuñas (with a camera) to notice to notice the coming squall, and found myself in a flat salty open when the lightning came. Sadly familiar territory to me, but I've learned how to not get hit. So far.

After the storm, a big lunch, more mountains and deserts. On, endlessly. Vistas blur. Thoughts drift. How many permutations of seating arrangements can we make? (720) How many words can you make from the letters in the word 'Toyota'? (No fucking clue). Why wont bee opsins permit vision of radio waves? Scenery drifts on. Drifts out. Off. Sleep.

The others wake me up in time to see Laguna Colorada, the last laguna of the day. I'm glad they do. The lake is reddened by blooms of algae and bacteria, ringed by a white borax crust. Combined with the blue of the sky, the yellow of dessicated desert vegetation, and teh brown of the omnipresent dirt, it makes a beautiful rainbow... of sorts.

I saw another rainbow that night, in the sky. Now, I dont believe in UFOs, but for a second, I almost did. Luckily it didnt fly, it just winked at me in every color imaginable simultaneously. It was a massive star, I think/hope. As twilight dimmed, more came out, sparkling absurdly, unnaturally. The alien sense this land sweated from its pores wasn't just in the odd rocks; it was in the ether itself.

Another day brings more Dali-esque fuckscapes. I'm certainly not bored of them, but they're hard to write about. Mercifully, this land gives me novel form of color orgy for your reading pleasure. Oxide red, sulfur yellow, mud brown, and thermophile bacteria yellow are just some in the palette of the geothermal fumeroles. The mud boiled and the smoke bellowed and the water boiled with dangerous heat, and the schmucks on tour fucked around the crumbling edges of the fatal cauldrons like they were just more rusty trains. I'll risk tetanus.

I walked around too, though at a less retarded distance, but once I ventured to peek my head over the lip of a strange cylindrical hole. I could just make out water frothing in the far depths. Suddenly, the hole rumbled. Cylindrical hole leading to angry water that periodically roars? Right, looking eyes-first into a geyser. My feet were making tracks before the computation even finished.

The last stop on the tour was Laguna Verde, a tranquil medatative place resembling a giant Japanese reflection pool, where I had the opportunity to sit and reflect on the trip as a whole. Instead, I spent my time thinking about grad school and the physics of Ninja Turtles. I'm about as deep as the great salt mirrors.

Finally, the closing ritual. A painless, if a bit tedious, crossing into Chile, and the long descent down out of the antiplano and into the barrens of the Atacama Desert, site of the last scene before intermission.