i’d dreamed about this trip since i was a child. i took a tiny, rickety plane from la paz to rurrenabaque and was lucky to arrive just as the roads had finally been cleared after severe flooding; the roads were still littered with the mummified bodies of cows that had been buried beneath mud slides. from there i boarded a boat into madidi, the bolivian side of the amazon rainforest.
i remember the silhouettes of owl monkeys before the full moon, and the screaming of wild pigs in the night. we caught piranhas for dinner, and i smelled wild vanilla. a tapir raided our sugar stash, and inquisitive pink river dolphins answered our knocks against our boat.
next i traveled to the yungas cloud forest for a stay at an animal sanctuary. the yungas is famous for “el camino de la muerte,” and i thought my cab ride to the refuge would end in freefall and death: upon hopping into the taxi, i realized duct tape bound together everything in the interior including the steering wheel and door handles. the car gasped and jittered its way across narrow ledges and steep inclines as my teeth rattled.
the terror was well worth the experience of hugging a spider monkey and having howler monkeys rouse me from a treehouse every morning.
in the city, altitude sickness wiped me out. i had coca tea and resigned myself to sightseeing by horseback. my one-armed guide navigated us over rocky terrain to dizzying heights. i saw the valley of the moon.
one sleep on a bus later, i arrived at salar de uyuni. a flat, gleaming, pristine, seemingly endless expanse of white — there was a lone island of cactuses and a single alpaca in that strange landscape. even with layers of sunscreen, the sunlight that reflected off the salt plains burned my exposed skin, and the blue of the sky seared into my eyes. yet the salt was cool to the touch. it was the most surreal place i’d ever been.
