Travesía to Salar de Uyuni

We’re 40,000 feet above the Sahara desert, where it’s probably around three in the afternoon, on our way to the Maldives via Dubai. Alice is enjoying her oversized heap of caviar and giggling to herself while watching “Booksmart, but for millenials” in the suite next door.

Our last week in South America was spent at almost half of the current altitude of our A380, driving a thousand kilometers through the Chilean and Bolivian altiplano. The most important thing I think the two months on this continent gave us is a new sense of scale: the scale of Antarctic cliffs and icebergs, of waterfalls and the vastness of the Andes, but also the scale of people’s lives.

We wandered around Japan for six weeks mostly on our own, but in South America, we spent nearly every day in the company of others: the seventy-something Long Islander whose only remaining life goal is to live long enough to see the Galapagos tortoises he’s been helping to raise lay an egg; the couple who had biked through Rajasthan and Bhutan; the various people who had brought their kids, as young as toddlers, to Mongolia or Uzbekistan or across all seven continents; the ladies from the villages in the Bolivian highlands who cooked us a delicious llama stew.

One of the reasons for this sabbatical was a sort of anxiety of wanting to do all that we wanted to do while we still had almost total freedom to, before kids, or work, or health made it harder. Now, about four months in, I don’t feel much of this anxiety anymore. Partly this is because I’ve already experienced so much of what I would’ve wanted, but more importantly, it’s because we’ve met so many people who have done all the things we’ve done and more in their lives and seen how they made it all happen. The world is a big place, but it turns out people’s lives are pretty expansive too.

Desert sunset

I saw my first desert sunset around the Thanksgiving of 2020 in Joshua Tree, after our first month of living in San Diego, and I’ve loved them ever since. Looking away from the setting sun, to the east, the sky is somewhere between the soft pastels of sunrise and the vivid, harsh colors of the sunset itself. The most magical part happens just after the sun has already disappeared; a band of dark purple, the same shade as the sky overhead, begins to rise from the horizon. I think this must be the shadow of the Earth being cast into the sky.

Getting high

Within two days, we went from around sea level in Santiago to 8,000 feet above in San Pedro de Atacama to 15,000 feet at the Ramaditas lagoon in the Bolivian highlands. Alice spent the first day of the travesia asleep in the car, stubbornly refusing to admit she was getting altitude sickness given how much more athletic she tends to be than me. Too nauseous to eat lunch, she took a hit of oxygen instead. Later that night, over a home-cooked meal at our Ramaditas lodge, we were both feeling grateful we didn’t rely on finding a last-minute tour van in Atacama to take us to Salar de Uyuni; being altitude-sick in a hostel without backup oxygen would have been pretty unpleasant.

Creation myth

We spent four days driving through Bolivia with our guide, Paola. She was immensely curious about our lives, and in turn shared all sorts of things about the music, food, history, traditions, and lifestyle of the people in Bolivia. We were surprised to hear ourselves mostly telling her about Chinese culture; it turns out through some sort of osmosis, we’ve carried on more than we knew ourselves about where we came from despite barely speaking the language and growing up in the West. My favorite legend that I heard was about the grief of a goddess who had lost her newborn baby; her tears mixed with her milk to form the watery, white expanses of Salar de Uyuni.

Cloud cities, infinite ocean

The inadequate ways we try to analogize the experience of being on the Salar de Uyuni after rainfall reveal how otherworldly it really is. Alice said it looked like we were in an anime; I felt like we were floating in some world that seemed like a natural backdrop for a video game rather than real life. We went to see the sunset twice; the second time, we left our cameras in the car. That evening, the clouds sat on the horizon and looked structured and solid, almost like a city floating in an infinite ocean.

Más vida

In a tiny town on the edge of the salt flats, Paola bought three packs of instant noodles after she learned about Chinese tradition of eating long noodles on birthdays. We had those noodles together on our last night in South America, and asked the staff at the lodge if they wanted to have some too. They didn’t speak a lick of English, but Paola helped us tell them that the noodles represented longevity, that they should be eaten whole so life wouldn’t be cut short, and to help themselves to seconds so that they’d always have more in life—más vida. We laughed as one of the older ladies struggled to slurp the noodles, the youngest lady drank all of the soup in one big gulp, and the electrician gruffly refused another portion because he was fine with not living longer. We didn’t know anything about each other and could only communicate with body language and a few words of Spanish, and yet around that table, the night before my 30th birthday and a few hours before we had to drive across a pitch-black salt flat ahead of sunrise to catch our flight, we shared the most genuine moment of human connection of this trip so far.