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The centre of South America was, at one point in distant history, a series of enormous salty lakes. Remnants of these now dried-up lakes can be found all over the north of Argentina and Chile and the south of Bolivia, but by far the largest is the Bolivian ´´Salar de Uyuni´´ . When that lake dried up, what was left was a great, white, flat plain of salt, a hallucinogenic place bordered by sulphuric geysers and volcanoes, and lagoons of strange bright chemical colours, bright reds and blues, populated by great flocks of flamingos. The prospect of seeing the salars was one of the main reasons that I came to South America at all, which makes my experiences of them (so far, at any rate), particularly ironic.
My interest in the salars meant that I had been on the continent for no more than a couple of weeks when I started making plans to see them. The opportunity of travelling with ´´other´´ Israelis had taken me down to Patagonia and then up to the city of Cordoba, but once there my enthusiasm got the better of me and I headed off on my own, straight up the centre of Argentina, making a bee-line for the Salar de Uyuni. I stopped for Shabbat in Salta, a city set out neatly on a great flat plain bordered by a circle of green mountains that plunged down to meet it. A cable-car took me to the top of one of these hills, and I looked down at the strange, murky scene. The city is both heavily polluted and very brightly lit by the fierce low sun (Salta is very high up), which makes it impossible to see its vistas properly, either with or without sunglasses on. With sunglasses on, the place looks dank and murky. Without, the bright sun gets in your eyes…
I had chosen Salta because it had once had a thriving Jewish community, and a Chabad family had flown in from Israel to preside over its inevitable death, which meant somewhere to eat over Shabbat. I didn´t envy the chabadnics their task. The rabbi told me that only five or so teenagers ever bothered using the well-equipped club above the lovely little shul. They were such a nice little family too, if a little reserved and business-like. The wife was a frank and outgoing woman, not yet grown detached and weary of her G-d-forsaken outpost, like many chabad wives that I have met. The kids (B``A``H) were the cutest I have ever met, and ridiculously friendly. The little boy, Yankie, would hardly stop giving me hugs. During our conversations at the Shabbat table, I eventually found out the reason for this immense friendliness. The couple had decided, based on some (perhaps misunderstood) injunction of the Rebbe, not to allow their kids any non-frum playmates…i.e, none at all.
I really liked Salta. It was very different from Cordoba, from which I had just come. As you got closer to Bolivia, the people became more Indian, the technology more unreliable and the traffic more insane. The traffic in Salta really was completely insane, which made the immense popularity of cycling all the more surprising. ``It´s almost like Beijing`` I wrote on my first day there. ``Except without the repressive government and the Chinese food.`` I thought for a moment. ``Actually, it´s not a bit like Beijing`` I admitted, ``but there are a hell of a lot of cyclists. I lost count of the number that my taxi driver came close to killing on the way from the bus-station to my hostel.``
It was in Salta that I discovered that my plans for visiting the Salar de Uyuni would have to be delayed. I wanted to be in La Paz (where there was a more substantial Chabad) for Tisha B´´av, and the way I figured it (although I think I might have miscalculated), there was no way of checking out the Salar and heading all the way up there in one week. I was less than chuffed by this realisation, and decided to visit one of the small ``local`` salars which surrounded Salta (hence it´s name, I think). There was a fair bit of hassle working out how to get there cheaply (there were several exorbitant Jeep tours available), but a local girl gave me directions of how to get there by bus, and so I set off.
That was how I discovered Purmamarka. It was through a series of mistakes and circumstances that I ended up staying there at all. I think that the route the local girl suggested was different from the one I ended up taking. The girl had estimated that the journey to the Salar would take three hours. I don´t know how she came up at that figure. It is possible that her route was shorter, of course, but still…At any rate, what with a breakdown en-route, it took something like six, and I arrived in Purmamarka, still only three-quarters of the way to the Salar, well into the evening.
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It was immediately obvious that this was the remotest point that I had yet ventured. Jujuy, halfway house between Salta and the Salar, had been a smaller, duller, more hectic and indigenous version of the former. This place was several steps further in the same direction. It was a small settlement of adobe houses, bathed in a strange golden haze that turned out to actually be immense clouds of dust, lit up by the many Jeeps squeezing through it´s narrow streets. The place was alive. Indians were everywere, lining the streets behind their stalls of bright produce, and playing live folklore (the South American name for folk, although exactly why, I´d also like to know) in just about every pub, bar and restaurant. The sound of music was everywhere, the booming strum of guitars and the high whistle of the pan-pipes. What a place to end up during the nine days.
It was no surprise that the town was popular with folklore fans. There was not a bed to be had in any of its several hostels. But it was a mild night (for winter), and I figured that I could sleep in the fields that bordered the village. This turned out to be less easy than I had thought. What had been a comfortable walking temperature was less comfortable lying down, especially as evening cooled into night. I decided that a couple of Irish coffees might numb me to the cold, and using this as an excuse, I did a tour of the music filled bars.
What a place. The music was brilliant and alive, and so were the people. The place seemed a gathering point for every bohemian in the whole of Jujuy province, and for every pretty girl in the whole of the country. I had been a bit disappointed with the state of Argentine femininity up till then, but the bars were full of flowery dressed beauties, singing tipsily and drawing deeply on their cigarettes. Sitting on the steps of one of the bigger bars, two of them leaned towards me, cheeks flushed with wine.
``Come with us`` they murmured happily.
``Um…perdon?``
``Comme souce?``
``Oh!`` - realisation, (disappointment?,) dawned - ``Africa de Sur``
``Ahhhh!`` they nodded happily, and made way for me to pass.
I had claimed South Africa as my place of residence for obvious reasons. The one time that I had forgotten, admitting to the proprietress of a shop in Buenos that I was from England, she had given me a lecture on how the people of Argentina would make ``a happy fist`` (I quote), the day that Maggie Thatcher kicks the bucket. A few days later, as I was talking to Narkiss on a bus that took us past the military academy, an old man who had somehow intuited my origins, mumbled something about ``a glorious army, a glorious, glorious army`` and stumbled off to stand, embarrassed, at the other end of the bus. It was clear that I could not expect too much assistance from the older generation at least if I admitted to being an Englishman. And assistance was very much what I required that night.
There was literally not a bed available in town. Eventually I sought refuge in the police-station, where the officers reluctantly let me sleep on a bench in the front hall. Fuck, it was cold. My teeth chattered so violently that I could hardly eat the next day. I barely slept a wink. At six in the morning I gave up trying, and went in search of a cup of tea. It was very difficult to find. Already, the people and their dogs (Argentina is immensely overstocked with dogs) were up and about, taking their wares to the market. The tourist shops were opening. But a nice cuppa? Nada. I strode away from the village to try and warm myself up, and as I did so, the sun began to rise. As the colour seeped into the landscape, I realised why it had been so dusty the night before. I was in the middle of a dessert. A strangely fertile dessert, with clumps of green trees breaking out of the rock, but a dessert nonetheless. The village was surrounded by immense masses of rock, mountains almost, each a different colour. It was the strangest place that I had ever been.
I ended up paying a fortune (in northern Argentine terms) to get to the Salar. Around fifteen quid. It was not that necessary, but I needed to get on to La Paz, and it seemed like taking an age for the official tour to get itself together, so I bargained a taxi down and off we went. We wove through the astonishing landscape on a snaking black ribbon of road. After that freezing sleepless night I was stiff and half-asleep. I almost fell asleep on the way there. I did fall asleep on the way back, as the great cloud-filled canyons passed by unseen. That’s why I will always remember Purmamarka more fondly than I remember the relatively small, heavily mined Salar, covered in black tire tracks. I promised myself, as I went back to Salta that afternoon, that I would return to Purmamarka, its music and its girls. And there is still the possibility that I might still do so…
gggggggggggggggggggggg* * *
You might have thought that I would have learned from my earlier experience in the Argentine salar, but for various reasons I didn´t. Once again, I found myself in a salar, this time, a far larger and more pristine version, and once gain, I was half asleep. I had met my travelling companions in La Paz over Shabbat and Tisha B´av. They had told me that, like everyone else (Israelis almost always start in Peru and sweep on down through the Salar to Buenos or Sao Paulo), they were going to the Salar de Uyuni. I didn´t bother dropping any hints until Motzei Tisha B´av, when we were all stuffing ourselves with chicken in the Chabad rabbi´s flat. It was a really great evening, with great food and conversation, singing round the guitar and sheer relief at being able to laugh again. I realised that I really liked this lot, (and whats more, they were frum), so I dropped the appropriate hints, and the next day I boarded the bus with a rowdy crowd of singing mizrachim. The Bolivian passengers (Bolivians are the most sober, silent people I have ever come across) looked round in sheer amazement at this riotous phenomenon. This only put the Israelis in higher spirits. ``Welcome to the party!`` they shouted, and off we went.
But as the afternoon turned into evening, the party atmosphere dissipated. Fuck, it was cold. There was ice on the windows. I knew what to expect, having taken the bus up from the border to La Paz, but the Israelis were shocked into silence. The bus rattled and crashed and threatened to fall apart, just as it had done on the way up, but this time things were even worse. I had been relatively healthy on the way up, but I had spent the following weekend in the pollution and thin air of La Paz, and had developed a weak but constant cough. On the way up, I had managed to fall asleep in between the more shocking stretches, only to be woken up as I crashed back into my chair, having been thrown halfway up to the ceiling. Not a pleasant way to wake up, let me tell you. Nasty on the elbows. But this time, there was no sleep. The cold froze our bones to the marrow. Christ, it was miserable. What is more, the aisle was full of poor Bolivians who could not afford a seat. One mother had plonked her children next to me (I was to discover in time that I attracted Bolivians in the same way that I attract mosquitos) and I could not move my aisle-side leg without waking them up and setting them off moaning. (Bolivian children, in keeping with their silent elders, never cry – just moan.) Christ.
We arrived in the town of Uyuni utterly exhausted. For some reason, the fact that I was heading out dog-tired onto the Salar, once again, did not fill me with the apprehension that it should have. Even the fact that I was doing so with a lot of Israelis who I hardly knew didn´t bother me so much. But that was because I had never travelled with such a crowd before. There were fifteen of us. In Buenos, Bariloche, Cordoba and Salta I had done my touring with single Israelis who I met at the hostels or Bet Chabad. So I can be forgiven my undue confidence. I had no idea how hard it is to travel with a crowd of people whose language you do not speak very well. You find yourself butting into conversations which you had assumed, due to longish pauses, were over. And as they speak your language no better (in fact, worse), than you speak theirs, you get the uncomfortable impression of being ignored when you say something, simply because they don´t understand.
Things were made immensely more difficult by the fact that, apparently, the lady in charge of the agency lied to us. She had told us that we could go five to a Jeep. After a couple of hours of waiting, she modified this agreement to include two Ivrit speaking Americans (presumably Jews, unless they were theology students) who had turned up after us. When we finally got into the Jeeps an hour or so later, we discovered that it was in fact seven Israelis in one Jeep, seven in the second, and myself, my Lobbo roommate Shlomo, an Israeli girl whose name I simply could not remember, and four ``Tzarfatim`` in the third. I sat in the front with the complete tipesh of a monolingual driver, (``These guides speak near perfect English!`` proclaimed a sign in the agency´s office. My arse.), and in the middle seats sat the Tzarfatim, forming a barrier between myself and the back seat, occupied by Shlomo and the girl (who actually spoke perfect French, learned from her mother, whose nationality apparently did not make her any fonder of the ``shalmanim``, as she called them.)
I did not quite share her Xenophobia, but I had by that time well realised how hard it was to intergrate into such a large crowd of fast-speaking Israelis, and knew that having the French always with us could not do any good, especially if they were to separate me from my new friends in the way that they were doing now. Secure in this unspoken fraternity, I fell asleep in the front seat, yet again, as we rolled out onto the salt.
The feeling of mutual suffering was broken thoroughly the next morning when the French/Israeli girl (she really had the most unmemorable name), told me that the tzarfatim were calling me to join their Jeep. My Ivrit was good enough to gather that I was wanted in the car, but not quite good enough to figure out who it was who wanted it. I left with the impression that it was Miss X who had decided on my place in the foreigners Jeep (she and Shlomo squeezed in with the Israelis), and this misconception was reflected in the public argument that I had with her at lunch the next day. It was an argument motivated more by the urgent need to publicly air my concern about the whole matzav, in as un-``I say chaps, I´m really terribly concerned``-like way as possible. And I was genuinely concerned. It would have been different if I could have eaten with the French and talked with them. But a couple of them did not speak English, and what with the need to keep kosher, I found myself being shuttled between one group and another as meals alternated with driving. And after all, one reason I was with this group was to learn Hebrew, at the end of the day.
Anyhow, my ruse walked, and I ended up, for the remainder of the tour, in the one Jeep that never had any Tzarfati members. I am not sure what they thought of the young Englishman who did not say a word all morning, but disappeared off to lunch with his Israeli friends, who afterwards came along without him and demanded that the whole French contingent split up. As luck would have it, me and Shlomo bumped into the two English-speaking ones on the tourist (we had grown wise through bitter experience) bus back to La Paz. They seemed to bear no rancour.
But I was still unsatisfied. The first day of the Jeep tour had been spent half-asleep and in isolation. On the second, we left the salar and headed out on to the lagunas. We hadn´t seen a grain of salt since. In the run up to my trip, I had daydreamed about the salar, inspired by all the photos that I had seen. The world divided by the horizon into bright white below and bright blue above, and myself, sitting cross-legged in the middle. It was the physical image of the simplicity that I was so into mentally, a material equivalent of what I was trying to achieve in the mornings, cross-legged on my hostel bed, learning (or trying to learn) to meditate.
After the Ortal episode, when I was making plans for Brazil, I realised the risk I was taking in leaving so quickly. I might never have another chance to see the salar, to see it the way I wanted to see it. I decided to try again. I was on my way out of the country, of course, but would take a couple of days out in Uyuni on the way. And this time I would do it properly. I would have a good nights sleep before I set out. And once there, I would not be shuttled around in a jeep. I would rent a bycicle, or possibly even a motorbike. I had learned to ride one in Rurre, were every man, woman and child rides a motorbike, and had caused only minor damage to myself and the enormously powerful bike in the process. And Salta was only a couple of days away. I would spend as long as I needed, and then head down for another Shabbat with those lovely chabadnics. Perhaps I would pop into Purmamarca too. Yes, definitely.
But things were not that easy. I learned by email that the chabadnics had chosen just that week to head off on their well-deserved chofesh. Not good. I would have to make my stay in Uyuni sharpish, before heading through to Brazil via Santa Cruz. Groan. Here we go again. And here we went again. The tourist bus-ride to Uyuni was an uncomfortable affair, if not the sheer torture of the bog-standard busses that I had experienced before. We broke down on the way there, and the driver requested us all to pass our water-bottles forward to help cool the engine. It may have been a tourist-bus, but we were still in Bolivia.
I arrived in Uyuni late, tired and without any information about motorcycle rental. But it couldn´t be too hard, could it? There must be an immense market for that sort of thing, surely? But apparently not. There was not a motorcycle rental, not a Jeep rental, not a car rental anywhere. Even the bicycles could only be rented for riding round the town. It was already noon before I realised something else. It would take at the very least four buses to get to Sao Paulo, and today was already Monday. If I wanted to get there before Shabbat, I would have to hurry, especially as Bolivian buses only travel at night. So I booked myself a ticket to Sucre for that evening, and then jumped into a cab and gave the address of a small village which I had been told, during my desperate search for information, was very near to the Salar. Perhaps they had bike rental there. If not, I would have to walk.
They did not have bike rental. They did not have nada. It was a tiny Indian settlement occupied by the hard core peasantry, a salt-processing station, and not much else. Still, it was near to the salar. I could see the earie glistening mirror of it, warping and waving in the heat. I set out towards it. I appeared to be walking on a great bed of rusting metal. I had never seen rocks like these before. They clinked just like pieces of iron. And there was a lot of them. They stretched out in all directions. I kept on walking. After an hour, I put down my bag and considered my options. This was bizarre. Where was the salar? The glimmering white horizon seemed unchanged from an hour ago. I kept walking. Half an hour later, I looked at my watch. The straps on my bag were cutting into my shoulders. Any more of this, and I would have to go back before I had even arrived. I kept walking. Two hours had passed. And still the horizon mocked me. If I had not seen the salar with my own eyes, I would have been convinced that it was a malicious lie fabricated by the guide books. I kept walking.
I never did get to the salar. Eventually I decided that if I wanted to get back in time to catch the bus to Sucre, I would have to turn around. I managed to hitch a lift with an upper-class Bolivian in a much dilapidated land-rover, that creaked and crashed on the dirt-track back to Uyuni, throwing me against the ceiling and very nearly breaking my neck. I left Uyuni without a backward glance. I had given up even trying, and had no plans to ever return. But sometimes, when I see pictures like the one below, I wonder if I was right to give up so easily...and the possibility of finding a bike for rent in La Paz and driving it down floats through my mind…Watch this space.
