Instructed to bring snacks to keep sated between main meals, she concludes peculiarly that because there are no peanuts in the first tienda we enter, we may as well not buy anything. But since I know how that will anger her later on I pick up a bag of granola and packet of crackers literally moments before squeezing into the back of a white landcruiser. On its roof, secured by rope and an orange tarpaulin, are all six of our backpacks, jerry cans of fuel, two cylinders of gas and portable cooking stove, medical kit, sleeping bags, various other supplies. And as the desert sun gathers heat we roll out of Uyuni on rough roads at ridiculous speed.
Two of our companions are from Australia. Sitting beside me in the back - I am in the middle, she is on my left - is an engineer from Sydney, twenty-eight years old, dressed down, talkative, pretty. She smells of perfume and is quick to recount her travels, from the Bolivian Amazon to the Trans-Siberian Railway. The other Australian is a man of early middle age, red-haired and freckled, teaching university film studies in Perth. Joining us is a pair of unlikely friends; he an eighteen year old Frenchman living in Amsterdam, she Boliviana of the same age, born in Sucre but living and studying in Cochabamba, whose brother he happened to board with at school in Montreal. Both exude energy and spirit; I am glad for the chance to interact with them and observe them. Our driver wears a golfing cap over his slick black hair, and has a penchant for 80's dance music, in English and Spanish, that from the occasional synthesised voice declaiming 'DJ Jorge' over the music is obviously ripped from a podcast.
Lastly, the cook traveling with us has on an apron and blue visor and her pigtails have pompom-like objects braided into the ends.
After a brief sojourn at the so-called 'Train Cemetery', we race into the blinding pallor of the Salar de Uyuni, easily the largest salt flats on earth. Railway tracks extending beyond the distant range of mountains and volcanoes seem to beckon us forward like an arrow, like a once busy bath now untrammelled and lonely. Supposedly doubling as our guide, the driver mutters something in Spanish while keeping his eyes fixed on the windscreen, before the doors are open and we are wandering through a salt-producing township amongst other tour groups and their garrulous, animated guides. In the throng I drift into a house, inconspicuous from the outside, wherein a wood fired conveyor belt processes raw salt and, at the end, an overweight man on a stool uses a blow torch to melt shut the plastic bags once they contain enough of this 14 Boliviano - $2 - a palette commodity. His family, I'm told, have produced salt here since independence. In other words, well after the silver boom had run its course. After a demonstration he extends a cupped hand for money. I give him none. Ladies sell handicrafts and toilet paper from tables next to the cars. I do not buy anything.
Walking back to our landcruiser I feel my footing give way; these flats are covered in water, perhaps half an inch thick but deeper in untrodden areas. And my gaze turns instinctively to the spongy red rocks scattered over the flats. It is coral. Skin goosefleshed, I shiver in the ful heat of the sun. This otherworldly place, at an altitude of more than 4000 meters, was once the bed of some chimerical mountain sea. Delighted to have felt, so early on, my first pangs of awe in the face of our surrounds, I am dizzy with joy until we take to the solid track again, and my hand is on the sticky underside of her knee, my photographs always betraying a faint reflection of her through the window.
Changeless horizon, mountains moving closer and further away simultaneously, orange-striped heads of volcanoes hovering in the rippled beyond; I cannot tell if we exceed 150 kilometers an hour, stand immobile or siphon the earth in front of us away as if it were made of quicksilver. The eyes adjust to such a constant barrage of optical illusions by bowing to them, propitiating them and partaking in their mysteries to the extent that they become commonplace, that any number of impossible phenomena could occur without arousing more than a sense of calm, complicit knowing. But suddenly all is changed. No longer is the ground bare and white and flat. Imperceptibly hillocks of stony sand replace the salt, turn graver and potholed, smattered with furry shrubs and herds of Vicuna.
We brace for rough terrain by holding the seats in front of us; I am careful to avoid Lucia's neck, her bare arms, her thick black Aymara hair. Meanwhile the sun falls lower in the sky. Half the party is asleep until San Pedro appears on the fringe of another mountain range. Not to be confused with the eponymous city in Chile's Atacama Desert, it is a minuscule oasis town sustained by its touristic convenience and its Alpaca wool. Arriving before dusk, we lodge in a long concrete camphouse. Its rooms are threadbare but warm; latent heat in the cement should see us through the freezing desert night. And on the bedclothes - she and I are given the only matrimonial room - are embossed lions, tigers and other great animals of Africa.
Exploring the town center takes minutes. Dog packs with mangy stragglers chase sunning cats through the streets unpaved, unpeopled. True to the composition of even the smallest village the Plaza is the nucleus, the wellspring from which all living energy seems to emanate. Here I see market stalls perhaps shut at five (or whenever trading stopped), a local or two, trees shading some wooden benches fenced off with white lattice. The Plaza is also the dominion of God. Always, always a cathedral is standing in these Plazas, amidst squalor which bears utterly no relation to how beautiful are its gables, how white its walls, how high its steeple.
Days ago I read of the Cathedral in Arica, Chile. Commissioned while the city was still part of Peru, a small army of men was required to unload it from the nearby port and transport it to its present site. Those men were necessary because the building was designed and built in France by the studio of Gustave Eiffel, whose notable work is not hard to guess. The article included a picture which I studied eagerly, even admired. But something seemed amiss, amiss in light of the other places of worship I'd seen since arriving. Eiffel's cathedral was quintessentially French. In other words it looked incongruous, alien when compared to the continent's crumbling triumphs, such as the one we now took pictures of in San Pedro. The stone cairns on Incahuasi, that island of giant cacti we had visited earlier in the day, or on needle-thin mountain passes, innumerable white Christs blessing every city from above, and reverent street art passed by buses bearing images of the Saviour aglow next to girls in G-strings, but above all the churches built by the townspeople for the townspeople, no matter its fame or grace, Arica's Cathedral lacked everything that spoke to me of South American piety, that faith with all its whirpooling currents.
From the Plaza we walk uphill along a cobblestone road, rising steeply with the base of the mountains. Curious Alpacas poke their heads over fences, only to be spooked by the din of cameras aimed at them. The smell of our dinner seems to follow us on a wind colder now than five minutes before. At the highest rise a second chapel, or its steeple and back-end, stands, crowning a collection of ruined buildings closed off to the outside world by stone wall. The only gate is padlocked and we are too awestruck by the sight greeting us in the distance to bother with thoughts of vandalism. Pinkish sunset has swept over the desert, the plain we traversed in its entirety to get here, the one brimming with optical illusions, the one we now see laid out before us in colours impossible to replicate with a brush. With shaky footing I clamber up a boulder. It is warm to the touch like our lodge and warms me inside as well. Breaking a rule set this morning, that I would experience nature only as it intended, including audibly, I take out my I-pod. Put on ambient electronica reserved for revery and lullaby. My tattered cardigan keeps none of the frigid wind out. Some way off I see her, photographing a shepherdess and herd of Alpaca who happen to have crossed her path. Presently the music grips me; it is the sort of final element needed to bring on that magnificent oneness, magnificent as well as tragic, I often feel in nature and have seen my dad feel too. His feelings I have seen manifested in tears and though unable to see my own I know they have burst forth, I feel them gush through the threshold of not crying, the threshold we keep so watertight in our daily lives, and I laugh like an idiot as they flow, my shivers eventually heralding the arrival of unbearable cold, and dark. It lasted twenty-seven minutes; usually my 'moments' are shorter. When I remove the earphones a silence such as I have barely known resounds, amplifies my breathing. Getting down from the boulder is not easy because my legs have turned to butter. But hunger and the dim sight of her leaning on a fence spur me on. Politely I am loath to disturb her. A few steps later she catches me up; can I walk with you? Yes.
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