Picture Perfect/Rugged Reality

It's hard to write today... Probably for a lot of reasons. 

One of them is that an hour after I watched the documentary 13th on Netflix (we had discussed the US Civil War and its continuing repercussions in one of my classes on Thursday and I brought up the film for students to watch, and wanted to review it myself), I checked the news and saw what had happened in Charlottesville. It's not shocking or unexpected but it still hurts and it's exhausting and I can't even imagine how it feels to be a person of color in the States right now... the rampant racism (also sexism and transsexism and homophobia and classism and hatred of all kinds) both in the US and in the world makes me feel sick and frustrated by how little I can do/am doing to change things.

• (Side Note: For those who haven't already read it, I highly recommend Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I read it about a week ago and will probably bring up quotes from it at some point because it was amazingly written and the way that Coates phrased some things honestly reshaped the way that I understand the world. You can also check out this document for more recommendations related to racism in America, including the documentary 13th that I mentioned, which is on Netflix)

Another reason that I am having trouble writing today is that-- well, obviously, I am back in Córdoba again, and I have a lot of mixed feelings about that over the last few days. I think I am still trying to process the emotional whiplash of Córdoba--Rio--Córdoba--Bolivia--Buenos Aires--Northern Idaho--Córdoba (18-- yes, eighteen-- different plane rides) in the past 4 weeks.

And another reason is that having not written a blog post in a month, I've kinda lost the groove and it's hard to figure out where to start again. So much has happened-- I used to have trouble picking something from the past week to talk about, and now I have a whole month to cover!

I didn't mean to take a whole month break from blog posts, but I had a month break from school and during my travels I had very little access to wifi and 0 access to my computer, so that's what happened.

Since I'm not fully adjusted to being back, and I don't feel capable of writing anything more meaningful or eloquent than has already been written about what is happening in the States, I'm going to spend this post backtracking a bit and focusing on my trip to Bolivia, which was the bulk of my travel.

We're gonna do this in two sections, because that's kind of how this trip felt.


Section One: Picture Perfect

Let's start with a game: Guess which of these picture-perfect panos shows snow/ice, which is salt, and which is borax?

(Click on images to view full size)

Pano #1

Pano #2

Pano #3

Okay, made your guesses?



Pano #1 is the Lagunda Colorada, the Colored Lagoon, one of our last stops. The reddish color that gives it its name comes from algae and some pigmented rock, and those white islands in the middle that look like ice are actually borax. Yeah, the stuff used in some cleaning detergents. Apparently it creates the perfect environment for flamingo's favorite snacks.

Pano #2 you probably guessed: it shows the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flats and the main attraction during our trip. Giant prehistoric lakes evaporated long ago, and left behind 10,000 square kilometers of salt up to several meters thick. It's one of the flattest places in the world-- Bon Iver's song Holocene felt quite appropriate here:
"And at once I knew that I was not magnificent... and I could see for miles, miles, miles"

Pano #3 shows the natural geysers in the mountains of Potosi, Bolivia, at an altitude of around 5,000m (over 16,000 feet). As it is winter, those icy spikes sticking our of the ground are indeed snow. I was curious as to why the snow melted in such a way that it made those slanted spikes-- my guess was that it had something to do with the angle of the sun on the mountainside at the warmer points in the day... apparently these little snow-ice spikeys are called penitentes (an appropriately spikey word) and their formation has to do with the high altitude, dry air, and sublimation.

The panos really don't do justice, though, to the incredible sights we saw.

We originally flew into Cochabamba, Bolivia-- unfortunately I didn't take many pictures in Cochabamba, but it was beautiful and completely different from Argentina. Bolivia has much more surviving indigenous culture than Argentina, and also much higher poverty. In Argentina, I more or less match the average skin tone and hair color. In Bolivia, it was very clear that I was a white tourist. In my jeans and tank tops, I stood out from much of the population that wore traditional clothing, including the colorful cloth used as a sort of backpack-- you can get an idea from this wall art on the left of this picture:

Why are there so few indigenous people in Argentina in comparison to Bolivia, you ask? They were actively wiped out throughout Argentine history, and ongoing policies continue to contribute to the erasure of their voices and culture.

After staying in Cochabamba, we traveled down to Uyuni where we began a tour traversing over 900 kilometers in three days, from the town of Uyuni all the way down toward the southern border between Bolivia and Chile and back up to Uyuni.

It was an incredible, breathtakingly beautiful experience, and here are some of the pictures to prove it...

We went to the "Train Cemetery," where abandoned trains sit like an adult playground...

Um of course I climbed on... also I can tell you I do NOT believe those movies where the heroes are running across the top of a moving train! I was worried about balancing just standing on a completely still train!

We held some salt

Stood on piles of salt

Meditated on salt

Took silly pictures on the salt

Climbed an island of cacti in the middle of the salt

Made a human pyramid on the salt

Eventually left the salt and saw some flamingos

Pretended to be a flamingo... (I know I know, it's tree pose- one foot though!)

Basically got to walk through the Land Before Time 

Climbed this rock because climbing things is fun and totally not dangerous when 400 kilometers from civilization

Also saw this baby ostrich (emu? rhea?)

And some llamas

I had never planned to go to Bolivia. It was only because a few Fulbrighter friends had planned the trip that I decided to go... and it makes me think of how many other amazing places there are that AREN'T on my list that I would love to see.

It's easy to talk about how amazing an experience is, and in the age of Instagram and social media and blogging, it's easy to let the picture perfect moments be the only ones we share. Buuuut this trip was not just natural beauty and so I give you...


Section Two: Rugged Reality

I know rugged reality isn't a thing but I had to think of an alliterated section title okay?

As fun as it was, this trip was really exhausting and the conditions were often not what we were used to.

First of all, that Jeep that you see in some of those pictures? We spent a LOT of hours in that Jeep for three days. Traveling 900km (about 560 miles) in 3 days means an average of 186 miles a day... that's a lot of time, especially when you are traveling on dirt roads (or nonexistent roads, or slushy snow roads) that are extremely bumpy and you have had to go pee for the last three hours.

Most of the bathrooms were typical hole-in-the-ground bathrooms... and you had to pay to use them. There was one that was so gross that a whole group of people left to go pee behind a rock instead. Not all of them were that bad... but I have to say I have never before appreciated how amazing it is to have a clean bathroom available when I need to use it.

It was super cool to get to stay in a salt hotel the first night... in all senses of the word "cool." There was no heating, and it got really chilly. The second night the temperature dropped below -15˚ C (about 5˚ Fahrenheit). Luckily we had rented sleeping bags from our tour company, and those kept us insulated. We slept with all our layers of clothing, inside our sleeping bags, with additional blankets piled on top of us.

And when I say "breathtakingly" beautiful... I mean literally breathtaking. I've never been at altitude before, not really-- I've been to Lake Tahoe, but Lake Tahoe's measly 1,897 m altitude doesn't compare to Cochabamba's 2,558 m, let alone the 5,200 m altitude we reached at the highest points during our journey.

That rock that I climbed? It looks like it barely counts as a small boulder, but I was winded just from the walk up to it. I knew theoretically what being at altitude would be like, but knowing in theory was completely different from the actual experience of feeling like I had to concentrate on each inhale, like walking 10 m was the equivalent of a mile, like my heart wouldn't stop pounding, like an ant was playing a mini drumset in my ears.

Luckily I didn't get altitude sickness too badly-- a little bit of a headache, but that could have been slight dehydration because I didn't want to drink too much water because I was afraid of having to go pee thirty minutes into a 4 hour drive in the middle of a dessert of salt. :/

We made an effort during the trip to document some of the less picturesque moments, so here you go:

That photo of mini-Lauren standing on my hand? Might have taken a few tries and some help from our tour guide to get it right...

There was a lot of packing and unpacking, and you can tell from my face that the constant moving was draining

There was a LOT of sitting in the car... with no seat belts... no wifi... no heat... and did I mention it was cold?

We really had to bundle up...

Especially at 4:30 in the morning as we set out on our last day to catch sunrise at the geysers... and for some reason I thought it was a good idea to attempt to photograph us in the dark without flash

The shower situation was very limited (electric showers available for a limited number of visitors for a charge), and while we weren't able to work up the motivation to completely undress in freezing weather to swim in the hot springs and rinse off, Lauren took the chance to warm up her frozen toes

The meals that our tour guide and hosts prepared were actually really good... but the seats were a little short at this table and made all of us look (and feel) like children trying to sit at the adult table

Walking through the snow was occasionally a bit of a struggle...

As was trying to get all of the sweaters we bought to fit in our suitcase... and then having to open that suitcase at customs and attempt to force it closed again...

By the end, I got a stomach bug, made it through a nauseous 4 hour plane ride back to Argentina, and curled up on the floor of the Buenos Aires Ezezia airport for 5 hours feeling thoroughly dead...

But, as our unshowered, sunburnt, sleep deprived, but still-smiling faces show in our "After" picture, we made it through

And we all agreed, it was worth it.