Last Days in Bolivia

Not a word is spoken until dinner, when the others and the imperative to converse created by their presence puts me in a mood of intense animation and joy. My sense of humour bounces off the warm walls and I know that my impression is a strong one, a good one. Opposite me, she is bashful but ravenous. Pretty. Exchanging a few words in French with the young boy from Bordeaux seems to upset her; though the conversation continues I see her mood visibly change. Later, before drifting into a heavy sleep, I learn that she was asked what she did back home - work, study, both? Having to answer neither keeps her up all night.

I eat my weight in eggs for breakfast and step into a white-rimmed dark. Full of stars, the sky nevertheless lacks the desert clarity I'd hoped for; the moon is bright and sunrise coming. Still, there is a profundity in the air cold enough to sting, in the half-asleep figures taking thoughtless photographs, in the quietude, in misty breaths, in morning. We get in the landcruiser. At first the seats and metal railings only inflict further cold. Putting seat belts on becomes a toil, as it does in the peak of summer back home. As soon as the front left tire is changed, though, and lunch is made and stowed, and we leave San Pedro with the rising sun at our backs, the cabin is warm and we are as excited as we are drowsy.

The next few hours are unmemorable. A few miradors, including one innocuous stop-off to breathe in the rarefied air of 5,500 meters, are all that justify a break from driving until midday. We then reach the first of a series of sulphuric Lagunas that signal our proximity to the Avaroa Reserve and the Chilean frontier. Shallow, teeming with flamingoes, it appears from behind a maze of mountains like a lost paradise, foul-smelling and bluer than the sky. The road to the shore is engulfed in a cloud of dust kicked up by other tour groups; our driver suggests getting out and taking the view in from afar. In half an hour we will eat.
Walking with the French boy, she speaks her language freely for the first time in over a month. Exhorted by their conversation to pair up with Lucia, with whom he usually walks, I decide my Spanish is too scrappy to engage her and walk alone instead.

A vague malaise comes over me. Faces from home suddenly crowd in upon my mind and the air is glittered; I see stars as, starved of oxygen, I did on those first days in Cusco. What a suffocating feeling it must be, I then think, to be forced to use a language not your own in all circumstances: for some time now I have sensed a resentment on her part, for the dreams she's having in English, for the hard time trying to write because that part of her mind is being stultified by another grammar, another syntax, requiring so much energy and concentration to employ well but repaying the favour only in allowing our communication to happen. Her art it hinders, her politics - for what is she at the moment but an Anglophone! - and therefore her sense of self, obfuscated by this all-consuming language of a million words. These and other worries distract me from the splendour of the water. And the flamingoes barely pique my interest until, when she is beside me again, I remember her saying that she was fed up with the French, mostly because of boys, whereupon it is as if a curtain goes up and I have emerged from a dark room to discover an oasis where my backyard should be.

They ceaselessly drag their beaks though the shallows, back and forth, back and forth, trawling for food. Hence they lack the grace one might have ascribed to them after watching The Lion King. But beautiful, and doubly so in fact, because I cannot seem to keep them near me long enough for a photograph. Their evasive skills keep me busy until lunchtime and, at the three or four similar lagunas we visit, until well into the afternoon.

...


"It's a rock that kind of looks like a tree. Let's all take pictures".
For all her glib jeers I get some good shots of her lying, snow-angel in sand, right next to the 'trunk' of our next sight. Now in arid yellow, closing in on the Atacama, what makes this rock formation more remarkable than perhaps it should be is its location, encircled by volcanoes of staggering size and beauty. The toilet is locked so I piss into burning earth. On my way back to the landcruiser i notice two mountain bikes, loaded with gear - swags, large canisters of water, bread. A pair of German guys my age have apparently shipped them over from home and are biking across the continent. Where do they sleep? How do they know which paths to take? We wave to one another; I sense a mutual envy, in the look of their smiles and the feel of mine. And I touch her arms, soft with shea butter. Think twice about what it means to be adventurous. Decide neither them nor I are typical examples. Get back in the idling jeep.