The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure

by Rachel Friedman

  Our predawn excursion to Tilcara’s bus station turns out to be the most excitement of the day. In La Quiaca we pay a taxi driver three pesos each to take us to the border, a fee he seems to pull out of thin air after appraising us. The Bolivian border agent has a unibrow and treats us like unwanted vagabonds who have arrived to use up all his hot water and toilet paper, two things there are never enough of in Bolivia. He wields his passport stamp like a gavel and announces, “Treinta dias” like a prison sentence. We leave Argentina and shuffle over an uninspiring concrete walkway into Villazón, a bustling border town of rickety stalls that looks patched together by people who live, or wish to live, somewhere else.

  Bolivia has the most indigenous population in South America. Over half of the people here claim pure Amerindian blood. Quechua and Aymara speakers form the biggest bloc. Unlike Tilcara, which has a mix of physical appearances, everyone in Villazón has the darker skin and hair and shorter stature of the indigenous people. The women wear thick, elaborate skirts, layers upon layers expanding outward from an invisible waist. Two braids of abundant black hair meet at their backs, the ends held together with a piece of string. Their feet are protected by chunky clogs. The young girls have tiny waists and luminous skin, while the older women’s cheeks are chafed from years in the harsh Andean cold, and their bodies have expanded significantly in womanhood; or it may just be the skirts that give the illusion of endless hips. The women all carry black bundles on their backs packed with clothes, food, or a small child who is never crying, just sleeping peacefully or calmly watching the world go by. The Bolivian women walk purposefully past me on the streets, short and strong, slightly bent forward. The men stroll along at a more leisurely pace, exchanging extended greetings; they never seem to be lugging anything or going anywhere in particular.

  Cassie, Hans, and I find a tiny restaurant selling beef and chicken empanadas and settle in at one of three rickety tables. We take turns in the bathroom, which has no seat cover or toilet paper. I hover precariously over the hole, gripping the roll of toilet paper I bought in town with one hand and holding the broken latch closed with the other, all while trying not to make any noise, since our table is directly on the other side of the door. It’s clear I’m going to have to let go of some hangups pretty fast in Bolivia.

  Our bus to Tupiza doesn’t leave for two hours, so after lunch we walk over to the park to kill some time. A young boy is dragging around a large scale, the kind you might see at a carnival where people let a stranger guess their weight. I wonder if he is earning money predicting people’s measurements or simply charging them to step on the scale and see how much they weigh, obligingly subtracting twenty pounds for the women’s skirts, I hope.

  Although we’re the only foreigners, we are blissfully ignored. I was expecting the usual stares and comments—most of them thankfully indecipherable—that have increased in frequency since I left Buenos Aires. I don’t realize until I head off alone to an Internet café that it is Hans’s presence that has thus far allowed me to stride unimpeded through the streets of Bolivia. Without a man at my side, I am once again subjected to a splattering of lascivious whispers and whistles. The abrupt shift is jarring, as if I’m suddenly walking around in someone else’s body. I can see how a man and woman might come away with entirely different impressions of South America. I wonder what it’s like to travel in a man’s relatively inviolate body, to claim enough power that people ignore you and let you go about your traveler business. As a white woman backpacker here, I’m an automatic spectacle.

  Our bus to Tupiza looks old but not nearly as tragic as the dinosaur beside it. (While men load and tie luggage to the top of our neighbor, several rusty parts fall from underneath and clang against the ground.) The eager crowd surges onto the bus to illustrate a phrase that must have originated in Bolivia—“hurry up and wait”—since even after everyone is loaded, we remain at the terminal another half hour for no apparent reason. When all of the seats are filled, more passengers squeeze down the aisle, sucking up any remaining precious oxygen. They stand body to body for the entire ride.

  The windows don’t open, and the searing sun feels like it’s burning a hole in my chest. My soaked tank top is swimming beneath my purple sweatshirt. My own sour scent mixes with the others perfuming the sweaty air. We climb higher and higher into the mountains, and I hear the concrete turn to gravel below our wheels. I survey all the people tucked into every crevice of the bus and try not to imagine collisions and toppling, crunched bodies.

  Four hours later, we shoot through a series of tunnels and are reborn in Tupiza—a southwestern-looking, dry, mountainous landscape. At the bus station, two small Bolivian boys in Nike sweatshirts slither expertly through the emerging passengers. In an instant, they spot the three “gringos” awkwardly extracting their packs from the aged bus’s grimy underbelly and appear grinning at our sides. Our backpacks are not only dusty, like after the trip to Tilcara, but also wet—so wet that several layers of my clothing are damp and all of my belongings emit a mild mildew aroma. Several other boys (none look older than eleven) have caught up with the first two, and all are passionately delivering their sales pitches.

  “Cheap rooms, lady!” they exclaim in carefully pronounced English. “Hot water, yes?” They unfold colorful pamphlets to illustrate their wares. “This way. This way.” We allow ourselves to be led away by the two who reached us first, following their outstretched arms down the road, a reverse Pied Piper scene.

  A woman stands to greet us when we enter the hostel. Her black hair is pulled back in a ponytail with two thick strands hanging down on either side of her face like open curtains. She drops a few coins into our young guides’ palms, and they sink contentedly into one of the lobby chairs. We hand her our passports as identification and, because it is cheapest and we are all on strict budgets, book one room with two beds for the three of us. It’s eighteen bolivianos a night—under three U.S. dollars.

  “I’m a very light sleeper,” I warn Hans, and am rewarded with a Grinchy grin.

  We leave our wet clothes with the laundry service and are told they’ll be ready in two days. I assume the duration is a courtesy to the employees until I see my underwear hanging from the stairway rails a few hours later. As in Ireland, nothing ever really dries here.

  There is no dormitory-style accommodation in Bolivia; this place is more a hostel/hotel hybrid, with private rooms and a shared kitchen and common areas. Two guys in the TV room are watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Supposedly, the infamous outlaws hid out here shortly before their deaths, and the connection with Tupiza is big tourist fodder. The woman who checked us in encouraged us to watch this video—for a small fee, of course. In the kitchen, I meet a man from San Francisco. He’s bone-thin with greasy shoulder-length blond hair. His sandals are coming apart at the seams. A cigarette hangs lazily out of the corner of his mouth as he stirs soup. He’s been in Tupiza for five months, four of them at this hostel, an unusually permanent fixture in a transient space. “I’m never leaving South America,” he says.

  “How are you supporting yourself?” This question is a pressing one for me, try as I might to reconcile the material goods-lacking bohemian I’m growing into with the future-looking part of me wondering how I’ll make some sort of living.

  “I teach English. Every six months, I leave and find another teaching job when I get somewhere I like.”

  I don’t miss the possessions I’m increasingly discarding. I can’t even remember the stuff I left back home; none of it seems important now, anyway. What I’m attached to instead are people and places and experiences and this new version of myself I’m cultivating on the road. I think it might be my true self—or at least the person I’m determined to be, even after I go home. I can definitely see the appeal in continuing on in a minimalist way like this guy is doing, though I’d probably opt to shower a bit more frequently.

  Tupiza is my introduction to the striking beauty of Bolivia. It’s surrounded by the Cordillera
de Chicas, which stretch around it in a halo of hills, mountains, and canyons. Its dusty vastness is breathtaking. It’s easy to see why Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came here to escape, because it feels like a place that could easily envelop you. Although those bandits are likely the most famous celebrities among Western tourists, the artwork around town reveals the locals’ favorite: Ernesto Che Guevara, the legendary leader of the people, spent time in Bolivia encouraging the working class, like those in Tupiza, to rise up against a government that kept them impoverished. His image is everywhere, usually in his signature red beret and green tunic.

  Tupiza is a quiet spot with few tourists, and for once no men call out to me. It’s afternoon when we arrive, so I spend the last remaining daylight hours exploring the town. I head to the local labyrinthine markets, where open stalls sell hand-knitted sweaters, cheap sandals, and greasy fried bread. As is the custom throughout South America, the siesta is observed for several hours in the afternoon, salespeople simply dozing in and out of consciousness amid their wares. As the sun sets on Plaza Independencia, uniformed schoolchildren stroll hand in hand, revolving in slow circles around the main square. In the gazebo, a small band strums guitars while the church bells chime in the harmony. The road back to my hostel is quiet except for one blaring television, a dozen adults and children gathered around its illuminated screen. I stare out into the shadows to the endless desert, which seems to lead everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  Our two dark-haired guides magically reappear that night when Cassie, Hans, and I leave the hostel in search of dinner. Once again they lead the way to our destination. This time it is a bare-walled room with four folding chairs and tables with a battered sign on the front door to identify it as a restaurant. We are the only customers. When I order a pasta dish from the menu, our waitress looks distressed. When I see her return with groceries, I realize I have chosen a meal they did not have the ingredients to prepare.

  Hans fearlessly munches away on a salad, dismissing any possibility that the lettuce might not have been washed in boiled water. Cassie and I, more cautious, start with a hearty vegetable soup. I still have a dull altitude headache and not much of an appetite, but the cooks have clearly gone to such trouble to prepare my dinner that I make sure to finish everything on my plate. Though the boys decline our offer to order them full meals, we buy them sodas, and they giddily slurp at the table next to us. When we’ve finished, they dutifully escort us back to the hostel and disappear into the night.

  I have one more day in amiable Tupiza before a four-day jeep tour of Bolivia’s famous salt flats that finishes in Uyuni, where I’m meeting Carly. For sixty bolivianos (about eight U.S. dollars), I hire a guide and horse for a three-hour trek through the mountains. An older man who works in the hostel loans me a large cowboy hat and helps me into the saddle. My guide is a soft-spoken nineteen-year-old. He instructs my sedate horse in a secret language, and I follow him through the small town up into the jagged Cordillera de Chicas, passing a straight-backed Bolivian woman in a black bowler hat watching over a herd of cows along the way.

  This is only my second time on a horse other than the depressed, circling ponies at the apple farm my parents used to take me to every autumn when I was a kid. The first horse I mounted that didn’t look suicidal was in Australia. Carly’s family took me to Hidden Valley, the co-op where Carly spent much of her youth riding horses, including her latest, Destiny. I was excited about the idea of riding but a little uneasy about Carly leading the expedition through the woods. I worried because she knew how to ride and I did not, but even more because she lacked the chemical that triggers fear in normal human beings. And I did not. The ride began pleasantly enough. The path was flat and my horse very Zen. I was just getting comfortable when Carly veered off to the right and disappeared down a steep hill.

  “Umm …” I called out.

  “Mate, come on down. The horse knows what it’s doing.”

  The horse slid down the rocky slope practically on her knees, while I clung on, trying not to fall nose over heels into the dirt. At least this is how I exaggerated my triumph to Carly’s parents later that afternoon while she rolled her eyes. “Good on ya, Rach!” Pete declared, clapping me on the back enthusiastically and uncorking another bottle of wine.

  My current guide leads me on a less treacherous route, pausing every few minutes to point out a rock formation and tell me the name. He speaks little English and I try my best to communicate in Spanish, but neither of us fully understands the other. I scan each Spanish sentence through a mental word bank with very little currency. Each glimmer of understanding frustratingly disappears into the murky water of context.

  We stop below a large rock. “Climb up to the water,” he instructs me. He will stay with the horses. “Cuidado”—be careful.

  I scramble up the rocks to a plateau, where little puddles have collected in sunken pockets of stone floor. I thought he said something about a waterfall. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to go higher, but I don’t see anywhere else to climb except a slippery rock face a few feet away. Surely cuidado is not the extent of a warning given before tackling something so steep I’ll have to will my way to the top. We are in the desert, after all, a place where any water is cause for celebration, so I head back down and give him two enthusiastic thumbs up when I reach the bottom.

  When we don’t speak, there is only the plod of horse hoofs on the dry, cracked earth.

  “Why do you come here?” he asks me.

  “To see Bolivia. To see how Bolivians live.”

  “But why?” he asks again, as though there must be an underlying purpose of greater importance.

  Because I can, I guess is the honest answer—because I am able to buy a plane ticket and because Bolivia is cheap and exotic and because it is exciting to come all this way and talk with you.

  “I have lived here all my life,” he says, and then the path narrows and he pulls in front of me to lead the way.

  When we descend out of the mountains and reach the long stretch of wide, open road leading back to the hostel, he asks if I want to go faster. He picks up speed to illustrate his question, then circles back around to my side. I nod, not quite sure I do, then grip the horse’s reins with both hands. The guide makes a clicking noise, and off we gallop into town. I bounce roughly in my seat, hair whipping in the breeze.

  Hans and Cassie have booked the salt flats jeep tour with me, but I’m happy to see another couple waiting at the pickup spot, too. I have been the third wheel with these two long enough, and it’s getting uncomfortable watching Cassie engage with her fantasy Hans—the one who will give up his life of travel to settle down with her—as opposed to the real Hans, who gives her not the slightest encouragement to this effect. Danny and Hermine are from Belgium. They have recently quit their corporate jobs to travel for nine months in Latin America, though their bosses have promised to rehire them upon their return if there are open positions, a piece of luck that seems unheard of in the U.S.

  Danny and Hermine are married and emanate the relaxed energy of a pair who have spent many happy years together. Somewhere in my suburban childhood, I developed the idea that I better get all of my “living” out of the way before settling into marriage, at which point a switch would flip and I would cease to be an interesting person and instead be someone captivated by things like paint swatches and casual Fridays. I saw marriage as a type of prison sentence in which both people felt they had sacrificed something vital in order to be with the other person and so must eventually grow to resent them. But Hermine and Danny seem like a well-functioning partnership. They have traveled all over the world together and have plans to see more, not less, of it in the days to come. As with Pete and Muriel before them, I’m collecting these examples of happy lives wherever I go, hoping I can somehow pick and choose the best parts to apply to my own existence.

  Our silver jeep fits the five of us plus our driver, Simón, and our guide/cook, Loli. The gear is strapped up top beneath a beat-u
p tarp. The exterior of the jeep is shiny and spotless. It’s the newest-looking vehicle I’ve seen in Bolivia, giving no indication of the treacherous trip to come.

  We drive seven hours the first day. The scenery is breathtaking—snowcapped mountains in the distance with greener, rockier terrain on either side of us, populated by the occasional shaggy llama. We top 4,300 meters (14,000 feet), then descend back down to 3,000 to sleep that night. By the end it’s difficult to enjoy because I’m nauseated from the altitude and the painful indigestion that knots my stomach. After forcing down Loli’s painstakingly prepared dinner of vegetable soup, chicken, rice, and fried potatoes, I head straight to bed. Clutching my stomach, I hear only the pounding rain and the throbbing blood between my temples.

  We’re staying on someone’s property. It’s not any sort of hostel or hotel but just a big, bare room with ten beds. We arrived here after dark, and the whole town was black. No one but us seems to have electricity, and we’ve got only a few bare bulbs dangling from the ceiling. The one toilet is a few feet off to the right. Instead of the automatic flushing mechanism, there is a large barrel filled with water and several plastic pitchers so the user can dump liquid down into the dark water to flush. There is no light in the bathroom. I have never seen this level of poverty, and we have the best accommodation in town.

  Around two A.M. I’m roused by my riotous insides. No matter how hard I try to ignore them and fall back asleep, I cannot will away the pain. I find my flashlight but then remember I gave my toilet paper to Hans before we went to bed. I take a dirty pair of pants with me in order to have something to place between me and the foreign toilet seat and pray that someone has left paper inside the stall. They haven’t—not that I can relax enough to go anyway. The hiss of my urine is the sole soundtrack filling the night air, and I’m too self-conscious to hazard emitting any other bodily noises, so I stumble back to my bed doubled over in agony. I swallow an ibuprofen and drift off for another hour or two.