by John Higham
As soon as we hit the ground in La Paz we visited several travel agents to explore our options for crossing over the Andes into Chile and to the southern part of the continent before the southern winter set in. We planned to circle back to Bolivia and Peru after going south.
Patrick was recommended by Arthy, the owner of our guest house. Patrick ran a small tour agency in La Paz, and claimed to be a transplant from Switzerland. His passport might say Switzerland, but I had him pegged for an Italian in three syllables. After talking with him for a few minutes, I discovered he was a former banker from Lugano, the capital of Italian-speaking Switzerland. He came to Bolivia on vacation ten years ago, met a beautiful Bolivian woman, married her, and took her home to Switzerland. A few months before I arrived in his La Paz office, he had given up his predictable life of advising wealthy Italian clients as vice president of a Swiss banking firm to start a travel business in Bolivia.
Patrick’s infectious enthusiasm for his adopted home caught me off-guard. We just wanted to get to Tierra del Fuego.
“No, no, no,” said Patrick. “That just won’t do! Right now is the very best time to visit the Salar de Uyuni. From Uyuni then go overland to Chile, and south from there as you wish. You must not miss the Salar at its most beautiful time.”
I hadn’t heard of this “Salar” thing. The Salar de Uyuni, Patrick explained, is a giant salt flat. (Of course, you already knew it was the highest in the world.) I have driven from San Francisco to Salt Lake City many times, crossing the salt flats in western Utah in the process. Too many times—I was willing to pay extra to drive around the Salar.
But Patrick’s Italian gesticulating and enthusiastic superlatives started to break though my outer defenses. “The Salar is now covered with just a few inches of water!” exclaimed Patrick. “In a few weeks the salt flats will be dry.”
I found myself thinking, “… and why do I care?” I recalled the floods of the Salt Lake Valley in the mid-1980s. Utah taxpayers had paid millions to create “Bangerter’s Bog,” the ill-fated project named after the governor of the time to defer flooding by pumping water onto the salt flats. It had been twenty years, but I still had to stifle a snicker at the thought of visiting a flooded salt flat.
I tuned Patrick out while recalling my experience with salt flats, so I wasn’t quite catching everything he was trying to say. His Italianness meant that he spoke way too fast when he got excited, and in his animated, over-excited state, Patrick tended to gloss over details like driving through salt water.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “are you proposing we drive through the salt water? Isn’t it a long way? Won’t it ruin your car?”
“Yes.”
“Yes? Which yes? Yes it’ll ruin your car?” I asked a few more questions and as the picture came into focus, I was utterly flabbergasted. No sane person would drive 60 miles across highly concentrated salt water, would they? I mean, salt on the roads during the winter is bad enough. I shuddered to think what that salt water would do to a car if you drove through it.
But Patrick isn’t sane, in a loveable sort of way.
Not only was he proposing that we drive through the Salar de Uyuni from north to south through salt water, he was proposing a five-day overland trek on dirt roads, much of it over uninhabited terrain, right over the Andes dropping into San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, which garners its fame from never having received measurable precipitation.
Patrick was so enthusiastic about describing all the fabulous things we would see along the way that he was unable to calmly discuss such pedestrian details like where we would eat and sleep. Whenever I pressed him for such information, the conversation invariably turned back to what stunning scenery we were going to see.
Patrick had that charismatic quality that made you instantly like him. He also gave me an oddly uneasy feeling—something like a close relative you admire in spite of his quirks that surface at inappropriate times.
After meeting with Patrick I felt absolutely confident we wouldn’t be taken out on the Altiplano (high plains), robbed, and left for buzzard food. This was a real concern: We learned from various sources that many overland tour operators in the area are primarily engaged in the business of smuggling cocaine over the border into Chile, using hapless tourists as cover. As I didn’t want to test-drive any of the “Trouble With Police” phrases from the Latin America Phrase Book, I booked the trip with Patrick.
Back at our guest house, I informed September we were going on a five-day adventure over some of the remotest country in the world with Patrick as our guide. As I explained our itinerary, I could sense her anxiety quotient increase.
“Okay,” she asked, “where will we sleep and what will we eat?”
“Uh, I asked that a couple of times, but he didn’t really answer me. I think it sort of depends. Food is supposed to be included, though.”
“Depends, on… what?”
“Every time I asked that, he ended up explaining what a beautiful country this is. This is his business, though. What could go wrong?”
“I thought you said he was a Swiss investment banker.”
“Yeah, in a previous life.”
“If I need to place a sell order for one thousand shares of Microsoft, I’ll call him. In the meantime, I’m going shopping.”
September wasn’t taking any chances. Since it can be freezing on the Altiplano, even in the summertime, she went out into the streets of La Paz, and for about 30 dollars, bought us all a complete set of warm hats, gloves, socks, and sweaters.
She returned, and dumping a pile of winter clothes onto the bed, announced, “I’m going to get some extra food, too.”
“Oh come on,” I said. “Food is included on this trip. Patrick told me he was going to buy groceries.”
“You said yourself this was some of the most remote terrain in the world. If we break down, I want to be prepared.” And she was out the door again.
Unfortunately for September, while it’s easy to buy, say, a kilogram of lentils from a lady selling sacks of legumes on the street, easy-to-prepare food that you can consume on the road is difficult to come by in La Paz. Peanut butter, for example, is nonexistent; I didn’t know what September was going to come home with if our staple food was not to be found.
An hour later she returned with an enormous sack of Pringles potato chips and peanut M&Ms. “Sorry,” September muttered. “Not much to choose from.”
Pringles has the dubious honor of being the most ubiquitous food item in the world. If you could call it a food item. She also had a few apples and some cheese and crackers. But it was the Pringles and M&M’s that got Jordan’s attention.
“Hey, Dad! Did you know that Mom bought two whole giant bags of M&M’s? Want some?”
Jordan knew that to protect himself, he had to get me to eat them, first. I was immune to Pringles cravings, but the M&M’s were another matter entirely. But I’m not quite that dim. I knew Jordan’s methods.
“You can’t have any,” I replied, trying to conceal my sarcasm. “Mom is saving them for our trip and some end-of-the-world scenario.” That’s how all the extra food and winter clothes became known as our Armageddon supplies.
The day of our overland journey to Chile via the Salar de Uyuni arrived. Patrick picked us up at our guest house in a giant truck called a Unimog, a huge 4x4 army wannabe sort of thing built by Mercedes-Benz. Strapped to the roof were two 20-gallon barrels. I was surprised to learn that there was an extra person on board. Ciprián, a native Bolivian, was to be the driver and chief mechanic, and Patrick the guide.
An on-board mechanic. That’s a good sign, right?
We piled our luggage and Armageddon supplies into the back of the Unimog. Patrick took note of our food supplies. “But meals are included. I went to the grocery store myself.”
Not wanting to reveal that September was skeptical or cynical or both, I simply said, “September wanted to bring a few snacks.”
We had the entire back of the Unimog, about the dimensions of
a good-sized moving van, to ourselves. It was nicely upholstered and we had lots of room to spread out for our long journey. Patrick and Ciprián sat in the cab up front. If we had any need to communicate with them, we stuck our heads out the window and screamed, hoping they heard over the roar of the engine.
After several hours on a wide dirt road, the Unimog started to sputter and groan. September and I gave each other quizzical looks. The kids had months to fine-tune their eavesdropping skills to the point that they could do it even when September and I weren’t actually speaking.
A chorus of “What?! What?! What?!” started up.
Ciprián pulled the Unimog over to the side of the road. Sauntering out of the driver’s seat, he stuck his head under the hood. I hopped out so I could stand around and act concerned.
Jordan got very excited. “Can we have the Pringles now?” Katrina lobbied to dig into the M&M’s, which, for the sole purpose of annoying September, I had since named Armageddon Pills.
September stuck her head out the window and asked, “Do they know what the problem is?”
“Water in the fuel line,” I said. “Ciprián is flushing it out now.”
She pulled her head back inside and faced the children. “Water in the fuel line does not qualify,” I heard her say.
Ciprián got the Unimog running again and soon we came to the town of Oruro, where we turned off the main dirt road and onto a small dirt track. The narrow road started out innocuously enough. A bounce here, a jiggle there. But before long it seemed that we were strapped on top of a jackhammer. A glance out the window told the story succinctly enough. The “road” was only a road inasmuch as you could tell someone had been along this way before and had taken the trouble to push the tank-stopping boulders aside.
The engine sputtered again. It appeared that we were still suffering from water in the fuel lines. A few moments later Ciprián had flushed the lines and we were again bouncing our way to the horizon.
Breaking down, flushing out the fuel lines, and then starting again became more or less a routine for us until it was way after lunchtime. During one of our stops, I asked Patrick about lunch.
“We have all the makings for a great feast, but we have no way to cook it until we find an inn to bed down for the night.”
And so it was that we started dipping into our emergency food rations. To Jordan’s dismay, however, September declared the Pringles and Armageddon Pills off limits.
As we continued to bounce toward the horizon, steam started to emanate from under the hood of the Unimog. We pulled over once again; a casual glance told me this time it was serious. “Now we we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere!” Jordan gleefully exclaimed.
Steam was pouring out from under the hood and water was spurting from under the engine. Ciprián was a blur of action. He drained the radiator fluid into a bucket, all before I could have figured out what size wrench I needed. Then he pulled off the bottom radiator hose; it was split.
This was it. We were toast. A hundred miles from nowhere.
With Patrick acting as interpreter, Ciprián explained that all the jostling of the rough road had caused a fatigue rupture of the radiator hose.
From his toolbox of magical supplies, Ciprián produced an old bicycle inner tube and started to tightly wrap it around the radiator hose.
I was beside myself with disbelief. A cooling system is pressurized to 15-pounds per square inch; there was no way an old bicycle tire wrapped around a four inch-long split could make the radiator hose watertight with that kind of pressure behind it.
September took one look at the radiator hose and went back into the Unimog and dug through her suitcase, emerging a few moments later with a roll of black electrical tape and dental floss and handed it to Ciprián. Ciprián looked at the electrical tape and dental floss with true love in his eyes. The ruptured radiator hose was expertly repaired with a bicycle inner tube, tied off with dental floss, and sealed with electrical tape, and I was proven to be a doubting Eeyore.
And so the sputter-line flush continued until the sun got low on the horizon and we pulled into the tiny village of Satuario de Quillacas. We had been on the road for eleven hours, and with six to feed, we had gone through a significant portion of our emergency rations. In that time we had seen the landscape change from big city to the barren Altiplano.
John’s Journal, March 4
What a ride. There was no road too bumpy or river too deep for Patrick and the little Unimog that could. We are sooo in the middle of nowhere. All the buildings in the little village are made of adobe and the roofs are thatch, if they have a roof. All windows seem to be bricked over.
There is no phone service here so the inn had no way to know we were coming. During dinner we met a Cuban doctor, a gentleman about fifteen years or so older than I am. He kindly gave up his room so we could have a place to stay and is now sharing a room with others. He was in Bolivia for “pleasure travel” is all I could understand. He is the first “real” Cuban I have ever met. Oh, how I wanted to talk to him! But the language barrier was huge.
We were communicating a little bit, but what I really wanted to know was how Elian Gonzales was doing. He said he didn’t know who Elian Gonzales was, and I said Elian was all over the U.S. news several years ago when he turned up in Florida drifting at sea. Oddly, after this my new Cuban doctor friend couldn’t understand me anymore.
• • •
Jordan’s Journal, March 4
Today we started our trek in the back of something called a Unimog. It was bumpy and I risked my life to get an Armageddon Pill, but mom caught me. It was dangerous to pick your nose also, because it was so bumpy.
At the crack of dawn Ciprián had the gas tank off the Unimog. He had drained it in hopes of getting all the water out, and was now in the process of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
We took the opportunity to walk about the village. The landscape was dry and desolate, and it seemed that the townsfolk live on the very edge of existence. As we walked around the village, we were ushered over to the local church and given an impromptu personal tour. By the end of the tour several of the townspeople were making a fuss over us, all immensely proud of their community and wanting to show it off.
Eventually the day unfolded like it had the day before. We bumped along a primitive road, stopping once or twice an hour to flush the lines. For lunch, we dipped into, yet again, our emergency food supplies because there were no facilities to cook the food that was “included” on the tour.
Around midafternoon we rounded a mountain, and what lay in front of us was astounding. As far as we could see stretched a white horizon of salt, covered in shallow water. The Unimog plunged purposefully into the water. September looked out the window, concerned. “With all the water in the fuel and the trouble we seem to be having, are you sure this is a good idea?” She seemed to be talking to the thin air as much as asking a real question.
“I think these guys know what they’re doing.”
“Can you give me an example?” September asked pointedly. “They’re adventurous, yes, but that isn’t the same thing.”
We drove several miles into the Salar de Uyuni and stopped. I had crossed salt flats before, and had been skeptical of this excursion, but now that I was here, I had to admit it was beautiful in an other-worldly sort of way. From horizon to horizon the surface of the water was perfectly flat, and gave a mirrored refection of the sky above.
The result was that it looked like we were standing in the clouds, and out toward the horizon, you couldn’t tell where the earth ended and the sky began. The horizon was utterly lost in the reflection, yielding a disorienting surreal effect. Patrick’s enthusiasm for the place came into focus.
We waited for the sunset, as the colors promised a spectacular show.
Spectacular it was. Over the next 30 or so minutes the sky turned from red to orange then to yellow, green, blue, and finally purple. We climbed out of the Unimog and waded in the water, marveling at the ref
lected colors as the sky grew darker. I don’t think I have snapped so many pictures in one place in my life.
As dusk gave way to dark, I wondered where we would bed down for the night. “There is a small village, Jirira, on the northern edge of the Salar,” Patrick said. “It’s about an hour away. In Jirira there is a small inn run by a woman named Doña Lupe.”
“Is she expecting us?” I asked naïvely.
“No, they have no telephones in Jirira.”
We turned our backs on the now-black sky and splashed our way back into the Unimog, to start our last push to Jirira.
But the Unimog wouldn’t start. Patrick and Ciprián climbed back down into the ankle-deep water and cajoled and coaxed the beast for a very long time in the dark, peering into the bowels of the engine. September peered into the bowels of her suitcase and pulled out a flashlight. But even with the aid of September’s flashlight, no amount of fuel line flushing and coercion from Ciprián would make the truck go. Patrick and Ciprián were looking more and more grim as time passed.
It was now very dark, we were in the middle of a freaking lake, we had eaten the last of our emergency rations, excepting one item, and best of all, no one knew we were here. The wind picked up and the night grew colder. September passed around our new winter clothes.
As September handed out the scarves and hats, I turned to Jordan and said, “Would you please pass the Armageddon Pills?”
With a huge grin and a cheer, Jordan dutifully retrieved the M&Ms.
23.
Armageddon Pills—Don’t Leave Home Without Them
March 6–March 12
Bolivia/Chile
Panic hadn’t quite set in yet, but we had already made a fair dent in our M&M supply when Patrick and Ciprián emerged, anything but victorious, from under the hood of the Unimog. They were speaking earnestly in Spanish, but I motioned for them to come have a treat. Ciprián quickly wiped his hands and cupped them, and I poured out several peanut M&M’s for him. He looked as though he had never seen a peanut M&M before and he bit into one. Ciprián’s face brightened and he nibbled the chocolate away from a peanut. He and Patrick then started speaking in Spanish. Ciprián’s native language is Quecheua and I could tell he was struggling to make Patrick understand something as he was making a sucking sound with his lips while holding the peanut. Ciprián ducked under the hood again.
