Uyuni to San Pedro

I thought later about the surrealism of long bus rides during the night. Looking out the window, I couldn't tell the stars from city lights, nor could I tell snow from salt, because the hole in my belly had swallowed my weary consciousness, and the hole in my weary consciousness had swallowed my sense of reality.

The salt flats in Bolivia are the biggest salt flats in the world. The surface of the earth is a crust of salt that spreads as far as the eye can see. It's whiteness and dreaminess inspired me to write a little poem:

I found a place

to cast a net

and fish for dreams

of cloud, or lace

and race across

this lovers' land

a wedding dress

of silver frost

Back in the township of Uyuni I took a wander around the streets, taking myself away from the main tourist drag for a little bit. I found myself in a school zone, just as school had ended for the day and the streets were swarming with children in uniform. The older ones wore gloomy or indifferent looks on their faces and dragged their feet, in groups of three or four, clutching their books, the girls twirling their hair and giggling behind girly magazines. The younger girls skipped along the footpath holding the hand of a parent or older sibling, with sparkly pink barbie backpacks, still young enough to have a bounce in her step at the end of the school day. A lot of the kids had cold popsicles. I suddenly had a pang of nostalgia, remembering the times when I'd get home from school in the summer months, very tired, throw my backpack down in the livingroom and head straight to the freezer to see if there were any iceblocks left. Remember those packs of long icypoles in different colours and flavours? There was lime, and strawberry, blackcurrant, lemonade...

How hard and long, and yet in hindsight how incredibly easy, those days of being a young kid were. The last time I had felt this nostalgic for my childhood was not long ago, when I was taking a walk in the Bolivian pampas. I had picked a mushroom and was transported immediately back to the time I truly believed in fairies.

Is that what travelling does? Does it draw into a dark, quiet closet of childhood dreams, packed to the top shelf with fairies and elves, daisy chains, Robin Hood bows and arrows, dark and dangerous forests, dragons, hidden treasures, and all those memories of being small - brushing close to your skin as you crouch in that closest - whispering in your ear things that suspend all belief?

Is it something to do with being small again in a big world? Or being an explorer as you were when you were a child, only the space under the dining table is now Argentina or Chile, the broom closet an entire city, backyard fence now stretched further to become national borders and coastlines?

Or maybe, when you are travelling, you just have a lot more time to think.

To be continued

The night bus to Uyuni

Salar de Uyuni was my next destination, in the southwest Bolivian altiplano. I found the township of Uyuni to be a strange, almost eery place, and extremely quiet. The main street is wide and long, with few people or cars. It felt as though nothing had happened there for hundreds of years; the place had an expectant feeling, an air of anticipation. In the evening, the sun spilled pink all across the sky. The roads and pavement shone white. Everything white and pink like a bag of marshmallows. It was a spectacular scene.

The road from La Paz to Uyuni was long and uncomfortable. I read 'The City of Thieves' by David Benioff until my eyes couldn't stay open. However the road was very rough and the jerkiness of the bus wouldn't allow me the luxury of sleep. I had twelve hours to close my eyes and think.

A few hours earlier at the bus station, Brooke and I had bought an elderly beggar woman a packet of crackers, the main reason being that I didn't particularly want to give any more money. I had bought myself a packet of the same crackers, which I now nibbled on in the bus. I realised they tasted terrible, and subsequently felt extremely guilty for not giving her a couple of bolivianos with which she could have bought a plate of tasty rice or papas rellenas on the street with.

I was thinking about food because I had forgotten to eat dinner before getting on the bus and now my tummy was grumbling . The only food I had with me was that terrible packet of biscuits, which I couldn't bring myself to eat, despite my hunger. So I placed myself in Benioff's novel - wartorn, World War II Russia, closed off and starved by the Germans, and I imagined that I had been eating biscuits made from the saw-dust swept up from the floors of the steelworks, and that I had been eating this way for the last four months, and that this was the first real cracker I had tasted since before the war. Suddenly, it actually tasted quite good, and I ate half the packet.

I found myself drifting in and out of sleep. At one point, I wiped the condensation from the window and saw what I thought was a large town settled on the side of the mountain, its city lights twinkling brightly. After some time of gazing dreamily at this mountainside city, I suddenly realised that it was not in fact a city, but a dark sky full of stars. I must have been dreaming of La Paz. The windows fogged over again and the stars began to look like specks of white chalk on a blackboard sky.

When I next woke, I looked out the window again and thought I could see drifts of snow on the ground. I wasn't entirely sure if it was snow, or salt. It was very cold, and I shivered most of the night, despite wearing a thick woollen poncho, a beanie and two pairs of woollen socks. I slept for a short time I think, and I didn't wake up again until the sky had lightened and we had arrived at Uyuni.