Following a latenight strategy session, we think we´ve hit on a plan for our last week together. It goes a little something like this:
We are indeed stranded in the purgatorio of Tupiza for another day, but at 7:00 tomorrow morning we´ll climb aboard a 4×4 for a private guided tour of half the southwest circuit. And because we´re creating our own itinerary (for a small premium), we´ll have hours and hours to hike and explore in the places we´re stopping, as opposed to the standard 15 minutes that most tour companies offer. The genius of the plan is that midway through the circuit, at the sourthernmost point, we´ll actually exit Bolivia for Chile. That´s right, we´re punching out. So we´ll miss the Salar de Uyuni, that enormous, mesmerizing, pure white salt flat, as well as the rainforest visit we´d already booked in the north. Not to mention La Paz, Lake Titicaca (seriously, that´s its name), etc.
What we´ve realized is that because Bolivia is dirt cheap and has this mystique of rugged adventure-seeking, all of the routes we´ve found ourselves looking into are choked with young European backpackers who fancy themselves latter-day Edmund Hillarys. The great irony, of course, is that they all have the exact same itinerary, all talk about the same spots ¨you just have to visit,¨ just follow each other around like bipedal sheep with pounds and euros jangling in their pockets, checking the country´s sites off their lists as one would check off picking up the dry cleaning or ordering new checks at the bank. I don´t mean to underestimate the sheer joy the common backpacker-animal must experience in his or her wanderings, but wherever there are backpackers there are jaded locals, bad hotels/hostels, expensive and inflexible package tours, and the list goes on. We think back to Argentina, to our time hiking in the high desert above Barreal where the silence is absolute, the solitude immense, and we simply cannot abide the idea of following millions of human footprints for the next week.
If we had but world enough and time, I have no doubt that we would discover a Bolivia that would rival Argentina and Brazil in sheer wonder and beauty, but that discovery will simply have to wait. Perhaps in a decade or so Bolivia will no longer be fashionable. Maybe the new adventure fad will be exploring the post-apocalyptic ruins of Afghanistan or Iraq. Until then, however, these glorious but overpopulated routes are best forsaken for others less trodden.
So for four days we will see the less visited wonders of the southwest of Bolivia. We will witness lakes red and green and white, bathe in thermal springs, hike volcanoes and walk among giant boulders that mysteriously dot an arid, sandy plain. And then on Wednesday we will arrive in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, where we will drive or bus through the Atacama desert to Iquique, Chile´s sparkling coastal-desert city. So Allison will end her trip having traversed the South American continent latitudinally, swimming in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
What more poetic way to draw our adventure to a close, to bring things full circle?
