I took a sleeping pill to try and beat this awareness. I could feel the water being stolen from my skin. I elected to fumble around in the dark and drink someone else’s water bottle. It was a better fate to have your water bottle be stolen than to listen to your camp mate dry heaving all night long. I figured I would just give which ever sorry soul who’s bottle I nabbed mine the next day.
I pulled out all the stops. Sleeping pill, and audio book on my ipod. If this didn’t send me to dream land, nothing would. I did end up getting to sleep eventually, though it only lasted for 2 hours until one of the other people in the room tossed a pillow at my snoring face. I sprung to attention (unaware of the pillow of course). It was only 3 in the morning and I would not sleep for one more moment that night. I was too hot and too cold as I cycled through all the permutations of heavy synthetic down jacket, 3 layers of wool blankets, smart wool socks, and imitation ugg boots. This was the first time I would use my “insurance policy” as I would call it. A synthetic down jacket that was both super light and super thin. It had been sitting at the bottom of my backpack for the past 10 months waiting for an occasion like this. I cramed it into a space bag, squeezing out all the air until it’s size was a completely manageable mass. The next day we were back in the Land Cruiser.
We stopped at a lake that was full of flamingos. What in the hell were they eating at this altitude? We were so far away from everything. It was the same as the llamas and llama like creatures that we kept driving by on the road. How were they surviving at this desolate altitude. And then we would pass over another mountain ridge that bore tons of Icelandic type shrubbery. They looked like the hair from a treasure troll. But then those fields contained no life at all. This is where I could imagine something living, but it seemed that the Bolivian creatures prefered a challenge. And then we would pass another ridge and see hundreds of flamingos. Like god was playing a game with us. Seeing if we would eventually find out that we were just passing through a series of dioramas that he had made for a school project.
We were slowly lowering in altitude until we would be at 15000 feet for the next night’s sleep. We made it to the edge of the salt flats by sun set. The next morning we were to edge out onto something that could be seen from space. Something that was the biggest of its kind on the planet. Something so foreign that one could easily believe they were in a dream. I am talking about the Bolivian salt flats. But first we would spend the night in a salt hotel. It was literally completely made of bricks that had been carved out of the ground. You could lick the walls if you wished.
We ate dinner that night and oddly enough it was quite bland. Perhaps they did this on purpose so that we would get a greater experience out of the hotel. One of the people from our group had the initiative to grab a spoon and carve a piece out of the wall to season the meal with. It worked like one would have imagined. It was wild.
The next morning we got up at the 4:30am time that our driver told us to. We were all packed up by 5am and waiting by the car, with no driver. We felt like a bunch of idiots. “That shit! Why are we up so early if he isn’t even going to get up?” 5:30 came and the twilight was quite strong. We didn’t want to miss the sunrise so we found out driver’s room, knocked on the door, and received a repeat Spanish message of what he had advised us the day before.” Rule number one of international travel: Always check to see if there is a time difference. As it turns out, we were up at 3:30am and Bolivia was an hour different from Chile.
We got in the car and drove out to the flats. “How big exactly where these things anyway?” We were all thinking. We drove swiftly for thirty minutes in one direction and didn’t see a thing other than white.
The sun began to reach the boarder of the horizon as the salt took shape and color. I jumped out of the vehicle and my boots made a noise close to the sound of boots smashing into ice. The crunch, crunch, crunch livened me as I took astronaut like strides across this foreign land. I felt like I could have been upside down. My senses confused. The rest of the people in the car were slow to exit. This lack of enthusiasm shocked me. Not since I dove the great barrier reef had I been so disappointed in my companions appreciation for their surroundings. This is what we traveled three hard days to get to. This is the big draw. Maybe they were beat. Maybe they were not really built for this. They were, after all, just students on holiday. They had been living in one place for the past 3 months, they hadn’t been living on buses and boats and out of a backpack. This was not the time to pout. This was a once in a lifetime occasion. Enthusiasm should find its way to the front of your being. This is not a rehearsal, [Life] this is the real thing 
They eventually all made their way out of the vehicle but two would soon be returning to the tightly packed bench seat. The driver was repetitively quick to order us back into the car to go to the next spot. I wanted to spend the day there. I wanted to run experiments on how things reacted in this wild land. So clear and flat. The white took different shades and personalities with every moving second and the sun made it’s dominance known. Then the sun broke over the land and shadows shot in silly slender strands for what seemed like miles. I imagine this would happen everywhere if everywhere were so shamelessly flat.
I had to do it so I just did. I lay flat on the surface and licked to test my hypothesis. Salt it was, and damn good salt at that. This portion had cracks that formed scales the size of double beds. It was the wet season, but they were in the middle of a drought. In a few short months this place would incur a half inch of water on the surface, forcing it into the worlds largest mirror. With every moment, the Sun gave it reason to grow brighter and brighter. Soon it would blind us in it’s glory.
A silent howl hung over the horizon as out driver demanded we get into the car to see the next spot. We drove for another 20 minutes until we hit an island in the middle of the alabaster lake. It was covered in 1000 year old cactus. Some of which stretching twenty feet high. What an odd and random edifice? We had breakfast here as an ostrich made it’s way around the island. We chased it and fed it bits of our corn bread to the tune of “Ragaton” which blasted from our car.
This island gave the vastness prospective. As the sun grew progressively high in the sky we set out to employ our creativity in the limitless prospective shots that the walls of white evoked. Since everything was a flat color, one could fool the camera into appearing that you had a tiny person in your hand, or that you were surfing a pringles bottle. We had been brainstorming the day before for hours on how amazing our shots were going to be, but once we were there, the others were too tired to follow through with much of anything. This coupled with the sun being too low in the sky to really confuse the perspective into a magical state. Before I knew it, the driver was calling us back into the car and the others were actually willing to go. I was the single one who was seeking to savor this sacred situation.
We rolled on to the next three stops which were opportunities to buy things. It was disappointed to say the least. Later that day, I started my journey back to Chile. There was one other girl making her way back the same way who had just had the tour from the more expensive. Lonely Planet endorsed, company. After chating with her I realized that my suspicion was correct. It was the exact same tour. The only difference was the price.
The next day it was was back on a 24 hour bus to Santiago and then another 10 hour bus to Pucon, the Lake District of Chile. I felt invincible. I could just live on buses. I was immune. This I would soon learn was not true. My mental faculties would soon break down in a most memorable way.
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