The surreal Southwest

At first, crossing from Argentina into the dusty Bolivian border town of Villazon was largely uneventful. There were the usual line crashers and moments of confusion when we can’t read the signs. There was a bit of a stir among the tourist contingent when news spread that Americans, and only Americans, were being charged $135 to enter Bolivia while the rest of the world had free admittance. And as we marched uphill toward the bus station, my breath was shortening and my head began throbbing just slightly from the alititude (3400m).

I took in my new surroundings and considered what a difference a border makes.

Women dressed in the ubiquitous layered dresses and bowler hats were perched behind mounding piles of ¨stuff¨ for sale. In the spirit of Carnival, young boys and girls in alpaca toques and sweaters ran amok armed with spray guns, water balloons and cans of pressurized foam. All were gleefully screaming as they found targets or became them. The bus station had the appearance of an overstuffed storage room in need of a serious cleaning, but we managed to find tickets for a bus leaving in five minutes. Everything in sight seemed to have about an inch of dirt on its surface, which led me to assume that soon I would, too.

For the next three hours, the bus bumped its way to our destination, sometimes sticking to the one-way path worn into the land, and other times going its own way in order to allow other vehicles to pass, to avoid washed-out land bridges, or for other reasons unknown to us silly tourists. We saw mountain ranges of varying size and colour and llamas munchings on tufts of greens sprouting from the cracked earth. We watched the desert turn to lush countryside peppered with red and yellow wildflowers, as the descending sun sparkled over a small river. We took in every new sight, beautiful and unique. As far we could tell, Bolivia was a picture waiting to be taken.

We arrived in Tupiza, a town with no ATM that offered three-course set lunches for under $3. We celebrated our return to the land of the cheap (high five!) and booked a four-day tour of the Southwest. Our trip from Tupiza to Uyuni promised spectacular sights: coloured lagoons, rock trees, flocks of flamingoes, volcanoes, geysers and the world’s largest salt flats. After two days in our hostel, we left.

Believe your eyes.

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