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As a graduate student, I
finally had the opportunity to work on a project in
southern Bolivia. Although I had spent previous summers
camping alone while conducting fieldwork in remote areas,
this was to be my first journey overseas, to a country
known variously for coca growing, revolution, and the
final resting place of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
La Paz is nestled in a
series of steep valleys that are eroded in a jagged,
blasted moonscape of sun-baked volcanic rock. One of the
city parks is called "Valle de la Lunas" or
Valley of the Moon. The city has sprawled up the valley
slopes onto the Altiplano, or high desert. As my taxi
drove from the airport over the lip of the high desert,
the city was spread out below, partially obscured through
a haze of heavy smog. After finding the company office, a
driver took me to a hotel in the old part of the city,
popular with young, dominantly British and Spanish
backpackers. Left to my own devices for several days, I
taught myself the phrases and words to order breakfast and
dinner, and wandered through the open-air market to
practice my nascent Spanish skills on vendors of
flashlights, jeans, and trilobite fossils. I found
Bolivians to be the friendliest of people, who seemed to
delight in talking to a Norteamericano. At first, I felt
no ill effects from climbing the steep streets in what has
been described as the World’s highest-altitude capitol
city. After several days, altitude sickness left me with a
feeling of exhaustion and constant headache in spite of
six weeks of hiking in the Colorado Rockies.
At last I was to depart for
the exploration camp in southern Bolivia, as the pickup
laden with fuel drums and survey stakes arrived to collect
me. My driver, Nicco, guided the pickup through the
bustling, chaotic streets of La Paz and we rolled south on
a two-lane, newly paved highway toward Oruro, a hot,
dusty, windblown town that represents the end of pavement.
There, the sun-baked main street was covered in a one-inch
layer of dust that was excited into whirling vortexes as
lines of Volvo flatbed trucks trundled through. Gray,
windblown silt covered the cobblestone street, sidewalks,
building facades, and withered decorative trees to produce
a desolate dreamscape devoid of color. We rolled through a
featureless landscape beneath an endless expanse of blue
sky and mercilessly bright sun. As the daylight began to
wane, the highway degenerated into a pair of deep ruts
across the featureless desert, passing desolate adobe
towns. We forded streams of frigid meltwater from the
Cordillera Oriental, often breaking a thin film of ice.
Night fell and still we rolled south, now across the Salar
de Uyuni salt flat. Despite the heater in the Mazda 4x4,
the cold crept in, and in the ghostly play of the
headlights, the shimmering white deposits of salt might
have been snow drifts. Time dragged, with only the
constant rumble of the tires on hardpan marking a cadence
in the darkness that surrounded the small, heated
compartment of the pickup. At last we reached a town, a
sign of human habitation in what seemed increasingly like
a harsh wilderness. Not a single light bulb was evident as
we thumped slowly over the cobbled streets. Dark shapes
shuffled along the sidewalks, and the shadows of adobe
buildings rose and fell, capering in the glare of the
headlights. Stars, bright and brilliant as diamonds, but
equally as cold, seemed to provide the only other light.
Amidst this scene of harsh desolation, the corpses of dogs
littered the streets, frozen stiff where they had
ultimately succumbed to the uncaring elements.
After another three hours
of crawling through the frigid darkness, the road seemed
nothing more than a gully, with sagebrush whipping the
sides of the truck. Almost imperceptibly, we left the
desert and a sheer rock wall suddenly loomed out of the
darkness. The truck climbed the rapidly rising road, which
clung to the side of the cliff, and the engine whined in
protest at the exertion caused by the steep grade and thin
air. In the days to come, my own heart and lungs would
register a similar wheezing protest. We passed through a
looming cleft in the rock wall, beneath towering ramparts
massed in the impenetrable gloom. Suddenly, the truck
stopped and we had arrived. Arrived where? In the dim
light, I could barely discern an adobe wall. There were no
lights, no sound of people or animals, and no hum of
machines that we have come to expect virtually everywhere
in North America. In the dead quiet, pitch black
surroundings, I might have been standing in a cavern
instead of in front of the quadrille where I would live
for the next four months. I had arrived in Bolivia.
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About
The Author
I
am a geologist, and have visited several
countries in Latin America and Europe, and
have worked on various civil engineering
and mining related issues throughout the
U.S. and other places. I have written
journal articles from a scientific
viewpoint, but thought it would be fun to
write about some of my travel experiences
on a more informal level. I have other
photos and geology related items at http://sedward.home.netcom.com/petrography.html
sedward@ix.netcom.com |
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